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Pastırma in Kayseri Pastırma is made from special cuts of meat of the buffalo or beef. The meet is rinsed and salted pressed and dried, during which the fet melts and forms the white layer. Then the dried and pressed meat is covered with a wet spice paste called çemen (ground fenugreek seeds and chili powder) and left to dry slightly. Mantı in Kayseri Mantı is small cut dough filled with spiced ground meat and onions. The dumplings are most commonly topped with a sauce consisting of yogurt and garlic. Kayseri is famous for its mantı. Etli Ekmek in Konya Etli Ekmek (meat bread) is a delicious and famous meal that looks like a very long pizza. Ground meat, onion, fresh tomato and pepper are mixed thoroughly and spread on the dough that has opened lengthwise and baked in the bread oven. Etli Ekmek is usually consumed with ayran, and it is especially served to guests at weddings and ceremonies. It is a dish that must be tasted by visitors to Konya. Testi Kebab in Cappadocia, Nevşehir Testi Kebabı, also called Çömlek Kebabı is made from onion, garlic, tomato, and lamb meat sometimes with a topping of potato or pastry. It is cooked in a sealed clay pot and the pot is not broken until the waiter brings it to your table. This dramatic presentation, as the pot is cracked open in front of your eyes, is as enjoyable as its taste. Cappadocia is famous for its pottery and ceramics and this special dish is cooked in a sealed pot. Pottery is used for much of the local tableware, you’ll be drinking from clay goblets poured from ewers made of pottery too! Besmec and Tandır Sac Böreği in Kırşehir Besmeç is a type of local meatballs (köfte) that are consumed with relish, especially in Kaman district of Kırşehir. Minced meat and bulgur are its main ingredients. It is cooked on saç (metal sheet) or on a stove. Tandır Saç Böreği is a type of pancake (gözleme) prepared with hand rolled dough and cooked in a tandoori oven in Kırşehir with varieties such as minced meat, tomato, egg, eggplant, mushroom. Çibörek in Eskişehir ÇiBörek (deep-fried turnovers filled with mincemeat) is a pastry identified with Eskişehir. It is eaten in many places in Eskişehir and in Türkiye, but the taste of ÇiBörek is not easy to find elsewhere. ÇiBörek, which is the work of the Crimean Tatar culture that first settled in Eskişehir, is a traditional pastry made by putting a mixture of minced meat, onion, and spices in rolled thin dough and frying it in oil. Usually, it is in the shape of a half moon. Varieties are also available with mushrooms, cheese, potatoes etc. However, it is traditionally made with ground beef. It is a unique taste with cold and foamy ayran. It takes its name from the combination of the words “çi”, which means delicious in the Old Kipchak dialect, and pastry (börek). Peskütan Soup and Sivas Meatballs in Sivas Peskütan is a kind of yoghurt prepared with fresh milk in spring to be consumed during winter in Sivas. This flavor from Sivas has made a name for itself throughout Türkiye thanks to its long shelf life. It is a regional flavor with high nutritional value, which is prepared by the addition of onion sauce called soharıç after cooking the cracked wheat and green lentil boiled with pescutan, which is then whipped to give it thickness. Sivas Meatball, which is a special bazaar food unique to Sivas, is a brand product of the city. One of the main features that make Sivas meatballs really special is that the ingredients are only minced meat and salt, and the other special feature is that the kneaded mince is kept in the fridge for a day and then ground again. Cimcik Dough Soup and Tatar Dough Soup in Çankırı Cimcik Dough Soup is prepared by blending dough pieces called Cimcik, whit yogurt, butter, and spices. It is one of the delicious local soups of Çankırı. Tatar Dough Soup is made of lentils, noodles, tomato paste, butter, and many other ingredients, is an interesting flavour, served with garlic yogurt after cooking. Local Wines in Cappadocia, Nevşehir In Cappadocia, it wouldn’t be fair if you’d come all this way and return without trying the delicious Cappadocian wines. This region holding the well-established winemaking tradition for thousands of years, owes its famous vineyards to the tuff formed by the volcanic activities. Anatolian grapes such as Öküzgözü, Kalecik Karası, Boğazkere, Narince and Emir grow graciously thanks to the rich tuff soil. It gets better! Cappadocia wineries are open for visitation all year long, making your trip possible at any given moment.

Tinea Pedis (TP) or Athletes Foot is used to describe a fungal infection of the… A neuroma is the thickening of an area of a nerve, through the formation of scar tissue in response to compression, tension or trauma to a part of the affected nerve. Neuromas can cause severe neurological pain, such as a burning or shooting pain, which occurs at the site of the neuroma or distal to the neuroma. In the foot, the nerves that run between the metatarsal heads (ball of the foot) are commonly affected which is known as a Morton’s neuroma. Excessive movement of the bones surrounding a nerve due to excessive pronation and poor foot biomechanics may cause trauma to a nerve in the foot. Poor footwear such as high heel shoes, places pressure on the forefoot which can lead to compression of a nerve. Hyper-mobile joints may contribute to the formation of a neuroma due to excessive movement of metatarsal joints surrounding a nerve. Being overweight may place excess pressure on the forefoot which can result in the formation of a neuroma. - Feeling of numbness, tingling, burning or sharp pain in the forefoot, web spaces or toes when wearing tight footwear. - Pain on the bottom of the forefoot during physical activity, walking or standing. - A feeling that there is something, such as a pebble, under the ball of the foot when standing. Diagnosis of a neuroma can be made by your health practitioner and is based on the following: - Assessment of the type and location of pain that you are experiencing. - Clinical assessment involving visual and biomechanical assessment. - Physical palpation and compression of the forefoot will be undertaken to assess which nerve may be affected. - Neurological testing of the foot and toes to assess for loss of sensation. - Imaging such as an ultrasound or MRI scan can be used to identify a neuroma. Orthotics: Interpod orthotics may be used to reduce the painful symptoms of a neuroma. The orthotics do this by re-aligning and supporting the foot; therefore reducing any excessive movement of the joints in the forefoot when walking. Interpod orthotics may improve your biomechanics and prevent the neuroma from progressing further. Sometimes an addition to the orthotic – like a metatarsal bar is required. These are best added by the practitioner. Footwear: A flat, supportive and cushioned shoe can reduce painful symptoms from a neuroma. Pain medication: As advised by your practitioner, pain medication such as NSAIDs can be used for temporary pain relief. Padding: Padding of the forefoot can be used to prevent excessive movement of the metatarsals. Corticosteroid Injection: injection of a corticosteroid into the neuroma by your practitioner can reduce inflammation and painful symptoms. Surgical excision: If all other treatments have failed, then the neuroma can be surgically removed. Orthotics: Continue to wear your Interpod orthotics for work and exercise to provide stability and maintain function of your feet. Footwear: Continue to wear a flat, supportive shoe to maximise the function of your Interpod orthotic and prevent excessive movement of the joints in your feet. BMI: Maintain a healthy body weight to reduce excess pressure on your feet.

She is a grand ole dame. The Princess Theatre has been a north Alabama landmark for more than a century. She began as a livery stable in 1887. Yep -- a place to park your horse. As you may see in the photograph on the left, the structure was quite different than it is today. The photo below shows her looking a little more like she looks today after she was transformed into a silent film and vaudeville playhouse in 1919, presenting high class roadshows, pictures and Keith (of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, or RKO) Vaudeville. On opening night, December 30, 1919, the play "Tea for Three" was staged with music provided by local orchestras. The next day, the film "The Wolf" was shown, with prices at 20 and 30 cents. Ah, the good ole days. After a facelift in 1941, the Princess emerged with the art deco style that remains today (see photo below on the right) and features a brilliantly lit neon marquee that is an icon for the region. Local architect Albert Frahn decorated the auditorium burgundy and gray walls with murals that glow under blacklight. If you visit us today, you can still see these features. Some find them stunning; others notice the slightly “creepy” quality. Either way, children who come to the venue remain particularly fascinated by them. The glow of fluorescent carpeting guided theatergoers down the aisle - a brilliant solution to aisle safety. The lobby featured a terrazzo floor with a map of Alabama, marking the Tennessee River and Decatur, imported veneer walls and art deco stair rails. Those features can still be seen as well. The classic art deco facade displayed a geometric design, lit glass bricks, yellow and black vitrolite glass and a two story marquee with more than 3,000 feet of neon tubing. The Princess reopened on August 7, 1941 as a classic art deco theatre with the film "Tom, Dick and Harry" starring Ginger Rogers. In 1978, when the movie house closed, the City of Decatur purchased the Princess Theatre. After a $750,000.00 renovation, the Princess once again reopened and this time as the city's performing arts center. The 677-seat Theatre began serving as a stage home for local performing arts groups, providing a multipurpose rental facility for the community, serving as an arts education resource for schools and annually presenting a variety of touring artists in music, theatre and dance. A Professional Series featured national touring arts events from Broadway musicals to major concert artists and family events. For more than twenty years, the Princess Theatre presented an array of outstanding cultural events, including such artists as Tony Randall and Ray Charles, the national tours of Broadway musicals such as "Evita" and "Big River," and concerts by the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Dan Seals. Local performing groups make their home on the Princess stage, presenting children's theater, choral concerts, musicals, dance and theatre. More than 60,000 people attend events at the Princess. As north Alabama's largest classroom, the Princess annually serves more than 20,000 students and teachers, including Young Audience Professional Series performances, school matinees, master classes and teacher workshops. Visiting artists serve residencies in the community with workshops and performances for schools and the community. Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the Princess completed the first phase of a new Master Plan during 2000-2001. At a cost of $6 million, the renovation and expansion project restored the beautiful facade and marquee, rebuilt a new stage house including flyspace and a fly-rail, deepening the stage space, upgraded the infrastructure and equipment and expanded into an adjacent building with a new lobby and dressing rooms. A group of volunteers continued work on the new lobby during the summer of 2003. In April 2009 the Sexton Lobby in the Baker Annex was renovated to include a suite of men’s and women’s restrooms, a catering pantry and new finishes to the lobby. In 2016, the Sexton Lobby received a new facelift including the addition of a Coffee Bar. In 2017, the City of Decatur-funded upgrades include state-of-the-art digital cinema, new house audio system and Dolby Surround sound for cinema. Future phases will include additional dressing rooms, a new teaching studio and small performance venue, administrative offices and restoration of the historic lobby and of the Shelton auditorium. The Theatre now operates a larger and more technically equipped facility for the community while preserving one of the city's most historic landmarks. The theatre structure still serves as a reminder of pre-civil rights practices. The old “colored entrance” still exists on the south side of the building. People of color were required to enter from the alley into a side door to a 3-flight staircase that led directly to the top of the balcony to what was once “colored seating.” Though no longer in use since shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these features of this historic landmark serve as a reminder of the darker aspects of our past and as a symbol of progress made and yet to come. Award-winning artists perform on stage including Tony Randall, Cloris Leachman, Loretta Swit, Count Basie Orchestra, Glenn Miller Orchestra, Chris Botti, Arlo Guthrie, Del McCoury Band, J.D. Crowe, Dick Van Patten, Frank Gorshin, Dixie Carter, Sally Struthers, Jamie Farr, Dianne Reeves, Nnenna Freelon, Dan Seals, Rodney Crowell, Jesse Harris, Rosanne Cash, The Capitol Steps, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Chris Thile, Diavolo, Momix, Pilobolus, St. Paul and the Broken Bones

Relationships are not easy today. Relationships were never easy unless people were ready to adjust. Relationships are a mixed bag of ups and downs. Modern relationships are not easy, and there is no doubt about that. Today, lifestyles have changed, and so have our relationships. Our lifestyles have drastically changed, and these changes are reflected in every aspect of our living. A direct impact of these lifestyle changes is on our relationships. Being a life coach, many clients come to me with relationship problems. Modern relationships are messy and very difficult to cultivate. Modern relationships don’t last and easily fall apart. People prefer giving up on relationships to resolving conflicts. Relationships are a roller-coaster ride. You’re not always up, but also not always down. People do not have the patience to go through the downs of relationships. There are rosy spells in relationships, but there are rough patches also. However, people today prefer breaking up instead of putting in the effort to mend the relationships. I have come across many clients and witnessed many relationship problems throughout my career. If you’ll know what are the most common relationship problems, you can brace yourself for weathering the storms, big and small. It helps your relationship to survive the tumultuous times without taking a major hit. No duration of a relationship declares it to be permanent. I have seen couples coming for counseling even after 20 years of marriage. I remember once a couple came to me for marital counseling. They had been married for 18 years and had two children, 13 and 16 years old. The husband was working in a renowned firm and worked hard to provide his family with all comforts. He had dedicated himself in his career to provide a lavish life to his wife and children. His wife worked initially but had to give up her job to look after the kids. She had been a dedicated wife and mother and was absolutely proud of looking after her family. However, she always felt that something was missing in her life. She often felt disconnected from her husband. Over the years, she felt their intimacy, love, and relationship have suffered a slow and steady death. Initially, she would excuse herself by telling her that her husband was working hard for his family and to be a good husband and father. When she used to tell her husband about how she feels their relationship is stagnating, he would hardly respond. She was open about how she needs more attention, affection, and some couple-time. Her husband would change for a few days but would stick to his routine in a few weeks. He would often get angry about how his wife did not appreciate how hard he worked for his family. She would keep quiet and settle for it. However, after 18 years of marriage, she couldn’t take it anymore. She started feeling resentful and suffocated in that relationship and decided to get a divorce. However, they were asked to try relationship counselling before taking such an extreme step. They started counseling and decided to give one more chance to their relationship. It’s been a fulfilling journey for them as all their conflicts were resolved. This year, they celebrated their silver jubilee and feel the same love for each other that they did at the beginning of the relationship. What are the most common relationship problems? Problems in relationships are inevitable. There are so many things going on in one’s life that a lot of problems arise in day-to-day relationships. Work pressure may take a toll on intimacy, or the spark might fizz out. From in-laws getting on your nerves to kids wreaking havoc on your love life, anything and everything can be a trigger to relationships. Life throws all different types of problems, twists, and turns at you. But, when you’re together, there’s nothing you cannot sort. With time, such complications might start impacting your relationship dynamics. Let us have a look at the most common modern relationship problems. Lack of Time One of the most common modern relationship problems is lack of time for either of the partners. Today’s busy lifestyle and hectic schedule have made everyone overwhelmed with work. People somehow find it hard to manage their personal and professional life well. It creates a time shortage for relationships. Every relationship needs time to grow and build, but when you don’t give enough time to relationships, they start withering. Most clients that come to me often say that their partner has no time for them. When both partners start feeling this way, they start getting distant from one another. For a relationship to sustain, you need to give enough time to your partner. Lack of healthy communication I have counseled many couples in my journey of being a life coach. If there is one problem that every couple has always complained about is lack of communication. In fact, most relationship problems begin with a lack of communication. When you stop talking to your partner, or you stop discussing your concerns and problems with them, a distance is created between you guys. This distance keeps on increasing when neither of you makes the effort of communicating. Today, everyone is independent and arrogant. People avoid talking and making things right. They would rather give up on each other than talk and resolve conflicts. Well, one thing that is followed by many young people is forming fake relationships. People commit to a relationship with no will of loving or keeping their partner. Such relationships are built based on lies and fakeness. People would often use their partners for their personal desires. These may be sexual, financial, or physical needs. Many times people indulge in fake relationships because of peer pressure or social status. Many people make a boyfriend or girlfriend just to avoid feeling left out. Such relationships can have a disastrous effect on the partner who was truly committed. Many times, one of the two partners is completely in love, while the other is just passing time. It is the most common modern relationship problem. Taking Your Partner For Granted Another very common modern relationship problem is taking your partner for granted. Many times, when relationships get old, people tend to think that their partner won’t leave them, no matter how they behave. You might start taking the special efforts and actions of your partner for granted. When you have a lot on your plate, you easily fall into the trap of taking each other for granted. For instance, your partner might cook you your favorite meal every day. You’d appreciate it for some time, but soon it’ll become a routine. You’ll start taking the effort for granted without appreciating your partner. It forms a ground for top relationship problems and makes partners drift away from one another. Today, couples are financially independent. They do not depend on one another for their money requirements. However, when it comes to spending on common house expenses, conflicts start arising. Everyone wants a partner who is good at spending and saving. You and your partner need to do sound financial planning right at the beginning of your relationship. If you fail to do so, these money issues can become one of the challenges of a relationship. You might suffer from a money shortage or might not agree on the spending styles of each other. In any case, money issues can escalate quickly and pose a problem for your relationship. Money is a crucial aspect of everyone’s life. When you’re a young couple, it might not be a cause of concern. But, when you’re married or plan kids, money matters start creating many problems. You should set short-term and long-term budgets and discuss your savings. It is one such problem that can be resolved easily with some genuine discussions. Trust Issues in a Relationship Trust issues in a relationship are the biggest problems. If even once your trust is broken, you might find it hard to build the same trust again. Most couples that come for relationship counselling have trust issues with their partners. Trust is a big thing, especially in today’s time. If someone puts in their trust in you, then you shouldn’t break that trust. As a couple, not being able to trust each other is one of the fatal modern relationship problems. Lack of trust is not always about cheating or infidelity. It can be a simple incident that you cannot take out of your head. For instance, your partner might have lied to you in the past, and now you find it hard to take their word at face value. When trust starts vanishing from a relationship, it becomes a breeding ground for several problems. If you want to avoid any problems in your bond then you need to be transparent and trustworthy. It might sound like a small issue to be discussed in relationship problems, but it is a big one in today’s time. Today, both the partners are working, and both give an equal contribution to work and home. It is not the time when women used to handle the home, and husbands would work outside. However, now both partners go to the office and return together after a tiring 9-5 job. You cannot expect one partner to single-handedly manage the entire household chores. It is very essential to divide duties and manage chores in a balanced manner. A war over chores and disagreements are among the most common long-term relationship problems. Just like money issues, agreeing to the distribution of household responsibilities is a simple way to take constant bickering out of the relationship. It should be done from the beginning of a relationship so that it never poses a problem in the future. We live in a time where the coming generations are very concerned about their careers. Today, everyone’s priority is to build a life and a personality of their own. In fact, many people do not involve themselves in any relationship to ensure they build a strong career. Moreover, sometimes our life experiences change us. We may have gone through a trauma or a situation you could never get out of. For instance, suppose you both were ambitious and driven when you were young. However, as you started growing as a couple in a relationship, one of you had to take the step of prioritizing personal life. Most women have to leave their work after pregnancy because they have no one to look after their children. It may seem the right decision at that moment, but it somehow creates a sore feeling in my heart. When as a couple you’re not on the same page about life goals, they can drift apart quickly. You should always tell your partner what you’re going through and how your priorities are changing. When you’ll make them see through your perspective, they’ll understand. Lack of appreciation As I said, humans cannot appreciate the same thing for a very long time. However, when it comes to relationships, both partners must appreciate and acknowledge each other’s efforts. One of the biggest problems is comparisons. One partner would often compare their share of efforts with the other partner. They would often say that they are doing more for the relationship. This disagreement forms many problems for the couple. People do not appreciate or compliment their partner for the things that they do daily. Lack of appreciation is among the most normal relationship issues among couples. Well, it is also the easiest to end. You can start taking each other’s good qualities and appreciate them. Instead of mentioning your partner’s weaknesses every time, an appreciative gesture can keep your relationship full of freshness. Mismatched sex lives Sex is an integral part of relationships. If you do not have a happy sex life, then it is really hard to have a happy relationship. Mismatched sex drives are commonplace for modern relationships. It affects both the partners equally. Your sex life might be full of spark and fire initially, but it dulls down with time. As your body goes through myriad changes, it directly affects the sex drive of a person. Many changes occur with all the stress, hormonal imbalances, aging, and other problems. Soon sexual compatibility becomes an issue for couples. There is no doubt that lack of intimacy can make couples distant and disconnected. No matter how old your relationship is, make an effort to carve out time to get intimate with your partner. You may even seek medical help instead of just giving up on the relationship. Just like trust issues, jealousy is also like a termite. It might not be visible initially, but it slowly eats your relationship from the inside. Modern relationship problems revolve around emotions like jealousy. A fleeting pang of jealousy if your partner gives a little attention to someone or even if your partner gets some attention from another person is felt. However, if the real emotion of jealousy establishes a grip, it can make any relationship toxic. You’ll start feeling jealous about anyone and everyone around your partner. I have seen people who constantly check their partner’s phone, stalk their social media, follow their location, and pick fights on every small issue. Jealousy affects both partners equally. While the jealous one disrupts their regular life, the other partner’s mental health is affected directly. So, if you feel even a bit jealous, you should talk and sort things out before they turn really critical. Over possessive partner There is nothing worse than dating an over-possessive partner. When you begin a relationship, a little bit of care and possessiveness seems cute. However, when this possessiveness gets too much, you start feeling suffocated. A partner who’s so possessive that they somehow start controlling you is very astonishing. I remember I had a client once who was dealing with such a partner. His husband was very possessive and would always keep a check on her. He would not allow her to talk to male employees, go out with friends, connect with male friends over social media, and whatnot. It started affecting the wife’s mental health badly. He even asked her to leave her job because he caught him having lunch with a group of friends who also had male employees. She had to take counselling to get over the trauma and toxicity of the relationship. Relationships are built over trust. If you cannot trust your partner in any way, then the problem lies in you and not them. Everyone deserves freedom and independence. As a couple, you should value each other’s personal space and respect each other’s feelings. One very modern relationship problem that most couples face is parenthood. While one partner is ready to start a family and has kids, the other partner always seems confused. Many times the views about parenthood do not match. Every couple dreams of raising children together but never feels prepared enough to do so. It causes a lot of problems and fights among couples. Moreover being parents is a big decision. When you have children, they take up a lot of space in your life. Many young couples are just not ready to compromise on their dreams and goals so quickly. You can discuss with your families and each other. One should always be sure before taking such decisions. If you force your partner to become a parent when they don’t feel like doing so, you’ll get blamed for the rest of your life. It is better if you mutually take a decision and go ahead. Most modern relationships break because of unrealistic expectations of either of the partners. Today, people watch movies and serials and believe that love is a fairy tale when in reality it is not. You might expect your partner to bring stars for you, but they won’t. If you’re in a relationship, it is natural to expect certain things from your partner. However, sometimes people set the bar of their expectations unrealistically high. Relationships become a challenge for you where you want to stand perfect and win always. Even if you expect something from your partner, you should express your expectations explicitly. Expecting your partner to guess and deliver your desires will only break your heart. When relationships live longer, people often start feeling bored with their partner. Committed monogamous relationships are harder to sustain than people think. It is one of the prime reasons why people fall out of marriages. You might feel you’ll find ‘the one’ and live happily ever after with them. Well, it won’t happen. In real life, romantic partners often start getting attracted to other people. If your relationship is monotonous, then the chances are even high. However, you should always be open about your feelings to your partner. When you talk and discuss such issues, your partner will understand. However, keeping them a secret will end the relationship.

If you want more control over your money and estate after you pass, then you need to make a will. Most people put off writing their wills because they don’t want to think about death. In fact, according to a 2020 survey by Caring.com nearly 70% of Americans don’t have an up-to-date will. However, the truth is that everyone should have a will — even if you’re young and healthy. It’s better to prepare for the unexpected than to put your loved ones through the stress of figuring out your estate after you’re gone. Plus, in today’s world, it’s incredibly easy to make a legally valid will online with free self-help will-writing tools, such as FreeWill. Why should you make a will? When you die without a will, state laws decide who gets your assets, such as your bank accounts, real estate, and other personal property. This might not always follow your wishes. For example, if you want your house to go to your unmarried partner, it could end up going to your children instead. In your will, though, you can choose whether your spouse gets your bank and retirement accounts, if you want your son to get your car, or if your record collection goes to your sister. Deciding all of these things in advance will save your loved ones time and stress, prevent family disputes, and make your wishes clear. It will also streamline the probate process for your estate — the legal process of distributing your assets after your death. 5 important things you can include in your will Many people don’t think they have enough property or assets to make a will. However, choosing who gets your assets isn’t the only thing you can use your will for. You can also: - Name an executor: This is the person who will carry out your wishes as you’ve written them in your will. Choose someone you trust to distribute your assets properly. - Take care of your minor children or pets: In your will, you can nominate guardians for your minor children and name beneficiaries for your pets, so you know that someone you trust will be taking care of them. - Write funeral wishes: Leaving instructions for how you want your funeral to go can lessen the burden on your loved ones and give them guidance during a difficult time. - Support your favorite causes: You can leave money or property to charities in your will, so that you will have a positive impact on the world long after you’re gone. - Leave instructions for digital assets: Prefer that your Facebook account gets shut down after you’re gone? You can ensure that with your will by leaving instructions for how your executor should handle your digital assets. These can include email and social accounts, digital photos and videos, or even domain names you own. DID YOU KNOW? It’s easy to make a will online There’s a lot to plan for around retirement, from Social Security to Medicare to estate planning. But online tools are making these traditionally thorny issues easier than ever. Social Security calculators allow you to calculate your benefits by answering just a few questions. And many online sites now allow you to make a will in just a few minutes. As long as your estate is pretty straightforward, self-help will sites are a great option. While most of these sites charge for their tools, we recommend FreeWill, which is entirely free to use. On FreeWill, you can create a legally valid will by filling out their simple online questionnaire, downloading your finished will forms, and following your state-specific instructions for witnessing and signing your will.

Cinematic Women, From Objecthood to Heroism: Essays on Female Gender Representation on Western Screens and in TV Productions by Lisa V Mazey (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) This book is of major interest and high novelty in that it analyses the impact of the “male gaze” – an “old way of seeing” the editor Lisa Mazey says - on the representation of women in cinema and on TV. Our vision of gender roles in films has long been influenced by a male-dominated academic gaze and an industry that totally negated the work of women in the first decades following the birth of this artistic genre. In a post-“#me-too” period, this compilation of cultural essays dealing with the inequalities of treatment imposed for centuries on women in cinema and with the rise of a new female “post-pop culture” voice, is essential. It examines through an intersectional angle – including the presentation of the major role of lesbian actresses and directors - a highly invigorating study of the inertia of a massively static industry – cinema, which actually reproduces all the sexist norms and canons of western phallocratic societies. The book develops the idea that the 2010s have allowed an awakening and a growing awareness of the impact of women on cinematic arts with the arrival of non-Western cinema and the rise of West African directors, online streaming platforms, and the new tastes of young audiences. The emergence of more flexible production methods has also enabled the recognition of a young generation of female movie makers, producers, writers, and more committed actresses, who have brought with them a more progressive outlook to the film and television industries Organized into three thematic parts (Effects and Consequences of the Male Gaze – an Old Way of Seeing; Stirring Female Roles –a Current Way of Seeing; Imagined and Future Females –a Possible Way to See ) the books presents the different steps of the evolution of the dominant male-gaze on “cinematic women” through eight “chapters” – each being a well-developed essay –, focusing more deeply on “future females” and the mind-opening process at work among the new generations. What the volume underlines, too, is the recent opening of the academic world and scholars to this changing gaze. The book’s original stance is to decompartmentalize research in human sciences by making gender and sexuality theories overlap and by proposing a complete reshaping of gender representations on screen. To that extent, this study aptly answers the current questioning of younger generations regarding the subaltern social position of women in western societies. It offers in its final part a positive perspective of the power of art and education over all forms of sexism and obscurantism. Professor in Cultural studies, University Clermont Auvergne, France The essays in “Cinematic Women” reveal the continued importance of feminist film theory as they examine a wide variety of films and tv programs. These scholars uncover the positive (the young protagonists of Debra Granik’s “Winter’s Bones” and “Leave No Trace”; Chanwook Park’s “The Handmaiden”; key female characters in the Fox series “Sleepy Hollow”: Charlize Theron’s Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road”), the negative (Captain Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager”: ), and the simply intriguing (Kim Novak’s Madeline/Judy in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; the negation of women’s physicality in a trio of philosophical narratives; female drone warriors in “Good Kill” and “Eye in the Sky”) that are present not only in the media but also in our world. Through enlightened examinations of women in media, both onscreen and behind it, such as these, we can recognize the triumphs and struggles of women of all ages and ethnicities throughout the world in the face of continued patriarchal and economic oppression. In addition, Claire Menard and Anne-Caroline Sieffert’s “Introduction” provides a valuable and relevant history of women in film. Lisa Masey shows immense energy in gathering these works from a single academic conference, which illustrates the great diversity and vitality in current feminist scholarship. This collection will provide a strong basis for film studies classes for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Prof. Dr. Thomas Slater Indiana University of Pennsylvania This is an ambitious if uneven collection of essay. One of its strengths is not in fact reflected in its title, which is its willingness to look beyond Western cinema and discuss non-Western productions, specifically, Chanwook Park’s The Handmaiden. Its range is impressive – from classic film, to contemporary TV, from arthouse to mainstream. Overall, the writing is ambitious and seeks to go beyond the canon of textbook approaches to this topic. Dr. Ruth Barton Head of School of Creative Arts Samuel Beckett Centre Trinity College Dublin Women have fulfilled film roles that exhibit their historically subservient or sexualised positions in society, among others. Over the decades, the gender identity of women has fluctuated to include powerful women, emotionally strong women, lesbian women, and even neurologically atypical women. These identities reflect the change in societal norms and what is now acknowledged as more likely and more mainstream. The essays offer a unique vantage of the changing culture and conversations that allowed, encouraged, and praised an evolution of women’s roles. They strive to represent the issues faced by women, from the early heyday of Hollywood through to films as recent as 2007; examining depictions of the masculine gaze, mental and physical oppression, the mother figure, as well as how these roles may develop in the future. The book contains valuable material for film students at an undergraduate or post-graduate level, as well as scholars from a range of disciplines including cultural studies, media studies, film studies and women’s and gender studies.

Rio Conventions Pavilion (RCP) at CBD COP 11 The Rio Conventions Pavilion (RCP) continued on Friday, 12 October, convening for Livelihoods Day. The event consisted of five panels, including: raising awareness on linkages between biodiversity and livelihoods; interactive breakout session with project developers and international experts; interactive breakout session on key learning and challenges with regard to transversal issues covering a whole landscape approach; walking the talk from forests to coastlines - implementation of gender sensitive policies in programmes and projects; and the Biodiversity for Development Initiative. RAISING AWARENESS ON LINKAGES BETWEEN BIODIVERSITY AND LIVELIHOODS Moderator Jane Smart, IUCN, welcomed participants to Livelihoods Day. CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias underscored biodiversity is crucial for poverty reduction and stressed that “now is the time for implementation and half measures will not be enough.” Executive Secretary Dias emphasized that meeting the needs of present and future generations requires incorporation of biodiversity into economic and social policies. He highlighted that the poor depend on biodiversity for: food; medicine; water; fuel; and building materials and shelter. Bernard Giraud, President, Livelihood Venture, presented the business model of the Livelihoods Venture, noting the fund currently has five large-scale projects. He noted the novelty of this fund is the creation of a “field organization network” responsible for sharing experiences, including with companies. Biswajit Roy Chowdhury, Nature Environment and Wildlife Society, underscored that ecosystem vulnerability is a matter of human rights. He discussed a Livelihoods’ sponsored project in the Sundarban area, India, where 20,000 villagers are involved in ecosystem preservation, being paid, for example, for collecting seeds. Manoj Kumar, Naandi Foundation, presented the Valley Araku project, India, which sponsors farmer enrollment in the Coffee Board’s Price Stabilization Fund, guaranteeing stable incomes in times of instability. He noted the project also expects to plant at least six million fruit trees. He highlighted the collection and dissemination of knowledge from previous generations, allowing a connection with future generations. Ramsar Convention Deputy Secretary General Nick Davidson called for an improved knowledge base on the value and loss of wetlands. He stressed the value of natural ecosystems, highlighting the forthcoming “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” Study for water and wetlands. Noting that conversion of wetlands significantly reduces provision of ecosystem services, he underscored the rapid decline in wetlands and called for focusing on conservation, due to the high costs and partial success of wetlands restoration. Julien Calas, Fonds Français pour l’Environnement Mondial (FFEM), emphasized linking biodiversity with income generation and discussed a Guatemalan project. He highlighted the project links livelihoods with protected areas (PAs), indigenous communities and access to ecosystem services. Meine Van Noordwijk, World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), noted that land classification, such as the distinction between forests and agroforestry, has significant impacts on types of governance, recognition and “ownership” rights. He said implementation challenges stem mostly from governance conflicts and lack of recognition, rather than limited financial capacity. He stressed the application of the concept of “co-investment,” which shares financial responsibility and benefits among various stakeholders, rather than “commodification” of nature and “compensation.” During discussions, Giraud said “awareness comes with action” and also emphasized the importance of women to guarantee livelihoods, affirming that they are a “matter of social force.” INTERACTIVE BREAKOUT SESSION WITH PROJECT DEVELOPERS AND INTERNATIONAL EXPERTS Moderator Jean-Pierre Rennaud, Livelihoods Venture, introduced the panel. Rosa Vidal, Pronatura Sur, Mexico, highlighted a Mangrove plantation project in Chiapas, which is expected to scale up to 600 hectares. She noted difficulties stemming from distinct social and ecosystem conditions, and in allocating resources. Habiba Ali, Sosai, Nigeria, discussed a tree-planting project in a highly deforested area in northern Nigeria. She described mobilizing the community to sell stoves, with two trees, preferably fruit bearing, being planted per sale. On community empowerment, she highlighted the active engagement of women in the projects and estimated at least 10,000 stoves will be distributed by the end of 2013. Ismaila Sall, Oceanium, Senegal, underscored the progress of the Oceanium Initiative, saying the goal was to change the mindset of locals to recognize environmental values. He said movie broadcasting and result-oriented approaches are two examples of engagement techniques, which increased trust between locals and project managers. Salifou Ouegdraogo, SOS Sahel, Burkina Faso, discussed a pilot project addressing the low survival rate of planted trees with large-scale tree planting. He explained a “contractual reforestation” approach, using incentives for planters if trees survive past two years. The success of this scheme increased the survival rate of trees to 70%. As keys to success, Ouegdraogo stressed organizing communities and highlighting economic and social benefits of the environment to stakeholders. Olivier Langoisseux, Bina, Indonesia, used the example of Central Java noting the problems of monocultures, water scarcity and youth unemployment. He said a cooperative is identifying “local champions” among farmers and developing agro-services in order to facilitate collective market access. Gabriel Sarasin, Réseau Africain des foréts modernes, Democratic Republic of the Congo, discussed the Model Forest, which was first presented at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. He said the model originated in Canada, where forest issues were characterized by conflicts between the forest industry and communities. He attributed the success of the conflict resolution model on a long-term process, providing platforms for representation of diverse stakeholders, including industry, government and civil society. He reported this model has been applied 60 times throughout the world, sharing knowledge through a common network. INTERACTIVE BREAKOUT SESSION ON KEY LEARNING AND CHALLENGES WITH REGARD TO TRANSVERSAL ISSUES COVERING A WHOLE LANDSCAPE APPROACH Moderator Giraud introduced the panel. Beria Leimona, ICRAF, presented a movie on and spoke about shared-benefits agreement-based community and industry collaboration experiences in Indonesia. She noted one incentive for community engagement in watershed area conservation, in their project, is access to electricity provided by the collaborating hydroelectric power company. She said electrification increases the productivity of the community, for example by illuminating the village at night. Bambang Suprayogi, Yagasu, Indonesia, reported on experiences in Indonesia, which aim to provide short-term returns to local communities in terms of food security. He stressed engaging people by providing tangible benefits. Amos Wekeza, ICRAF, provided information about a Kenyan project, which organizes local farmers to address agro-forestry issues. He said the project encourages adoption of sustainable development and sustainable forest management practices, with farmers benefiting from increased productivity and regenerated land. Timm Tennigkeit, Camide Unique, Germany, observed that monitoring is difficult in many parts of the world, explaining that while long-term monitoring is necessary to target interventions, often monitoring is not scientifically robust. Reflecting on the project described by Wekeza, he said this project illustrates that villagers are interested in engaging in monitoring. He stressed that this model is applicable to biodiversity, and called for exploring synergies between monitoring by scientists, governments and communities. Alou Keita, CAMIDE, Mali, reported on microfinance projects mobilizing resources from emigrants to France, which has now evolved to 19 funds. Created in 1998, he said the key to success was “community base management,” which includes locals in the process. Ini Damien, Alinea, Burkina Faso, discussed her experiences empowering women in Burkina Faso through a project that mobilized 6,000 women and promoted land ownership. Noting the challenge of high illiteracy rates, she said four dimensions were prioritized: cultural; environmental; economic; and social. Assefa Tofu, World Vision, Ethiopia, noted the Humbo Ethiopia Assisted Natural Regeneration project, which encompasses 2,728 hectares, was the first African project to be issued carbon credits by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Clean Development Mechanism. WALKING THE TALK FROM FORESTS TO COASTLINES: IMPLEMENTATION OF GENDER SENSITIVE POLICIES IN PROGRAMMES AND PROJECTS Moderator Natasha McQuaid, CBD Secretariat, introduced the panel, emphasizing gender sensitive policies to successfully achieve the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Vivienne Solis, Coope Solidar, underscored the role of women in small scale fishing communities, such as in marine PAs. She emphasized that small-scale fishing communities recognize fishing as a way of life, strongly integrated into culture and identity, and noted the vulnerability of fisheries. She said access to land and marine resources are important to women, whose knowledge and experience should be recognized. She stressed empowerment enables them to address issues that matter to them, such as: health and social security; education; land rights; and childcare. Andrea Quesada, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), described the current status of gender in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, the role conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+). Building on the experience of the REDD+ Social and Environmental Standards initiative, she emphasized capacity building as fundamental to incorporating gender and social standards capable of responding to country-specific requirements. Kanti Risal, Nepal Stakeholder Forest Management Platform, presented a study evaluating impacts of community forestry on households and livelihoods across Nepal. She explained the conceptual focus of the impact assessment included: improving access to livelihood assets for women; increasing the voice of women; supporting changing “rules of the game” that have favored elites and males; and developing evidence-based interventions. She suggested that community forest management has positive impacts on all aspects of tree management, increasing tree diversity, tree productivity and biodiversity. Archana Godbole, Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF), presented participatory conservation experiences in India. She focused on energy and biodiversity emphasizing AERF’s “ground approach” to capacity building. She encouraged the expansion of experiences such as management of oil-seed collection women to help build their entrepreneurial capacity. During discussions, McQuaid asked the audience to share their experiences with gender mainstreaming and what facilitated or hindered that process. One participant noted that having a female president helps the recognition of women. Another shared observations from his involvement with biodiversity projects, including positive engagement of women harvesting seedlings for pharmaceutical companies in Nepal, and cultural barriers discouraging engagement in activities believed to negatively impact women’s reproductive ability. From the audience, Sergio Zelaya, UNCCD Secretariat, noted the importance of recognizing women’s role in natural resource management and livelihoods provisions. Responding to his question about recommendations for a more coherent policy approach, Quesada recommended bringing NGO and grassroots voices into discussions. BIODIVERSITY FOR DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE Moderator Didier Babin, CBD Secretariat, introduced the panel and highlighted the development of a common website with different partners, focusing on biodiversity and human well-being, and biodiversity for poverty eradication and development. Sameer Punde, AERF, India, and Suneetha Subramanian, UNU-IAS, presented the draft study “Development of Poverty-Biodiversity Indicators and Their Eventual Application,” noting the challenge of capturing complexity with a limited set of indicators. Saying the study uses the “drivers, pressures, state, impact, and responses” framework, Punde defined poverty-biodiversity indicators as measures that demonstrate the direct contribution of biodiversity trends to changes in peoples’ livelihoods. He highlighted that the study assesses existing initiatives and indicators for poverty and biodiversity in 11 existing indicator frameworks, using criteria such as: sensitivity; scale; relevance; and scientific validity. He said the review found that only one organization, the World Bank, has proposed, but not yet developed, poverty-biodiversity indicators. Subramanian said the report then outlines a strategy developing poverty-biodiversity indicator parameters, including: diversity of resources; functioning of ecosystem services; livelihood activities dependent on biological resources and ecosystems; cultural diversity; equity; and cross-sectoral linkages. She highlighted desired qualities of poverty-biodiversity indicators: SMART targets; mix of stand-alone and composite indicators relevant to poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation; interlinked indicators; amendable for implementation and scaling; and be cost effective, such as by building on existing socioeconomic and biophysical datasets. Subramanian outlined recommendations for developing poverty-biodiversity indicators, including the need to consider scale, simplify linkages by focusing on key questions to be answered, develop a conceptual framework based on local circumstances, and collaborate with stakeholders. Jérôme Petit, European Commission, discussed the EU 2020 Biodiversity Strategy, focusing on EU contributions to averting global biodiversity loss by: reducing harmful subsidies and impacts of European consumption patterns; increasing funding for biodiversity assistance; and seeking biodiversity cooperation, including ratifying and implementing the Nagoya Protocol. He highlighted Europe Aid’s activities, including: investing in saving habitats and productive landscapes; mainstreaming biodiversity in all cooperation sectors; and facilitating biodiversity policy development at the local, national and international levels. Bernard Giraud, Livelihoods Venture, closed the session affirming that to reach scale, simplicity is needed. He stressed the importance of trust-building, balancing short- and long-term benefits, community ownership and capacity building of project developers as key to guaranteeing successful biodiversity and development projects.

We are ecstatic to announce the launch of Global CyberTech Exchange, a global effort to address the worldwide technology gaps and facilitate knowledge exchange between and among communities. Our approach is multi-faceted in that we believe that given the opportunity to study and learn, an individual (whether a student, teacher, or community member)is not only able to excel and recognize their full potential but create a brighter future for themselves, their families, and their communities. Each person educated or trained through this project will be paving the way to innovative solutions to global challenges. We seek to go beyond merely training individuals to improve their security posture but giving a leg-up to historically marginalized populations via international knowledge exchange and social support. Due to globalization and the ever-increasing reliance on technology, the world faces a drastic talent gap that if addressed correctly has the potential to solve many of the issues that society faces. As of this year, there will be over 3.5 million cybersecurity job openings worldwide and cybercrimes will cost over $6 trillion annually. The need for cyber skills and training are ever-more evident in marginalized communities and developing countries. By training students, professionals, and communities in cyber space, we are in turn addressing this shortage and supporting individuals to enter into a field with a 0% unemployment rate. Our effort will serve as a compass to marginalized communities and developing countries as they navigate the ever-growing cyber landscape. Although in the early stages, we foresee that this project has the potential to bridge the digital divide, create a much needed global technology recruitment pipeline, instill sufficient skills for technology careers, and build strong international cyber collaborations. Beyond that we realize we have an opportunity to support an train individuals to be the cyber professionals of tomorrow, improving their livelihoods and socioeconomic states. Our project and community support systems have the potential to protect individuals from a life on the streets, reduce human slavery, or address the increasing crime rate. This project will also serve as a mechanism to address many of the UN Sustainable Development goals including poverty reduction, quality education, gender equity, inclusive and sustainable economic growth and employment, more resilient infrastructure and innovation, reduction of inequalities, and stronger global partnerships. We recognize that cross-cultural learning and knowledge exchange can be transformative by breaking down barriers that limit human progress and growth revealing commonalities. Our goal is to conduct transboundary technology and cyber exchanges to break down digital barriers that communities and countries face and fill the digital gap around the world. Currently our knowledge exchange is focused on sharing information and conducting training among and between the USA, Ghana, and Canada, although our plan is to continually expand our endeavors to other countries and communities.

Most companies report their dividends on a cash flow affirmation, in a break account compendious in their regular disclosures to investors, or in a stand-alone press release, but that ‘s not always the case. If not, you can calculate dividends using a balance tabloid and an income statement. You ‘ll find these in a company ‘s 10-K annual report . here is the convention for calculating dividends : annual net income subtraction final change in retain earnings = dividends paid . Using net income and retained earnings to calculate dividends paid To figure out dividends when they ‘re not explicitly stated, you have to look at two things. First, the balance sail — a record of a company ‘s assets and liabilities — will reveal how much a company has kept on its books in retained earnings. Retained earnings are the total earnings a company has earned in its history that has n’t been returned to shareholders through dividends . second, the income instruction in the annual reputation — which measures a company ‘s fiscal operation over a sealed period of clock — will show you how much in net earnings a company has brought in during a given class. That name helps to establish what the change in retain earnings would have been if the company had chosen not to pay any dividends during a given year . How to calculate dividends from the balance sheet and income statement To calculate dividends for a given year, do the follow : - Take the retained earnings at the beginning of the year and subtract it from the the end-of-year number. That will tell you the net change in retained earnings for the year. - Next, take the net change in retained earnings, and subtract it from the net earnings for the year. If retained earnings has gone up, then the result will be less than the year’s net earnings. If retained earnings have fallen, then the result will be greater than the net earnings for the year. The answer represents the total measure of dividends paid . For example, say a company earned $ 100 million in a given class. It started with $ 50 million in retained earnings and ended the year with $ 70 million. The increase in retain earnings was $ 70 million minus $ 50 million, or $ 20 million . Here’s the math: $ 100 million net income- $ 20 million change in retain earnings = $ 80 million paid in dividends . Calculating the dividend payout ratio One of the most utilitarian reasons to calculate a company ‘s total dividend is to then determine the dividend payout proportion, or DPR. This measures the percentage of a caller ‘s final income that is paid out in dividends. Take sum dividends divided by net income and you will get DPR . This is utilitarian in measuring a ship’s company ‘s ability to keep paying or tied increasing a dividend. The higher the payout proportion, the harder it may be to maintain it ; the lower, the better . Calculating dividends per share once you have the total dividends, converting that to per-share is a matter of dividing it by shares outstanding, besides found in the annual reputation . here is the formula for dividends per share : sum dividends ÷ shares outstanding = dividends per share . Using this method to calculate dividends per share may not be 100 % accurate, because a ship’s company may increase or lower its dividends ( they ‘re normally paid quarterly ) over the course of the year, and may besides issue or repurchase shares, changing the contribution count. These changes can impact the accuracy of this calculation. The best way to find accurate dividend-per-share information is to read the most late wardrobe acquittance or SEC file when a company announces its adjacent dividend, or seek help from a good on-line broker, which will show the per-share sum of the last dividend a company paid, or announced it will pay soon .

How many languages are Recognised by the Constitution besides Hindi? Besides Hindi, there are 21 other languages, which are recognised as Scheduled Languages by the constitution. What is language policy class 12? Language policy is a safeguard to the languages. It is one of the important aspects of our Constitution. Under this policy besides Hindi, 21 other languages are recognized as Scheduled Languages by the Constitution. What is national and official language? A national language is a language with a political, cultural, and social unit connected with it. An official language is a language used by the government of a country. However, both of these terms are used for politic means in many countries. Which country has 37 language? According to the 2005 Census of Colombia, the country has 37 major languages. More than 99.5% of Colombians speak Spanish. English has official status in the San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina Islands. In addition to Spanish, there are several other languages spoken in Colombia. Which are the 22 languages Recognised by the Constitution of India? The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution consists of the following 22 languages: (1) Assamese, (2) Bengali, (3) Gujarati, (4) Hindi, (5) Kannada, (6) Kashmiri, (7) Konkani, (8) Malayalam, (9) Manipuri, (10) Marathi, (11) Nepali, (12) Oriya, (13) Punjabi, (14) Sanskrit, (15) Sindhi, (16) Tamil, (17) Telugu, (18) Urdu (19 … Which are the 22 languages Recognised by the Constitution of India write with the name of state? The 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. What is meant by national language? A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. There is little consistency in the use of this term. … “Central language” (politolect) used by government and perhaps having a symbolic value.

In June, Sphera hosted a roundtable discussion in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on Integrated Risk Management. The panelists were Bill Timbers, a Professional Engineer specializing in Process Safety and Operational Risk Management; Jim Cormack, an environmental management, regulation and risk consultant with Internex; and Tyler Tarnoczi, Senior Advisor, Air & GHG Emissions at Cenovus Energy. Mike Easley, Sphera’s group vice president of sales, moderated the discussion. As research firm Gartner explains, Integrated Risk Management is “a set of practices and processes supported by a risk-aware culture and enabling technologies that improves decision-making and performance through an integrated view of how well an organization manages its unique set of risks.” Mike Easley: As we were preparing for the roundtable, we discussed that the concept of risk management is not new, but it’s constantly changing. You mentioned some of the tools and services that you have, and those probably evolve over time as well. Can you share with us some of the trends that you see today? Bill Timbers: Basically, I find right now with some of my key clients that they’re confused, they’re not quite sure how to respond, and sometimes their goals are counterproductive to reality. As a consultant, that’s of course good for me because then they need people like myself to lead them through it. We’re really operating between two ends of the spectrum in the major hazard industries. We’re operating between what I call the ‘capture and release of black swans,’ which are catastrophic incidents that occur at a very low frequency or a ‘check the box’ attitude with some companies just wanting to do risk assessments and risk analyses. When I work with a client, we always have a process safety moment at the beginning of every meeting, a safety moment just to talk. Easley: We’re seeing a lot of focus now in the market on safeguards: safeguard efficacy, improving safeguards, focusing on safeguards. How has that evolved or how have you seen your customers addressing that lately? Timbers: I think ultimately it comes down to every organization. You need to have leadership at all levels, but you can’t have leadership at all levels unless it’s really supported from the top of the leadership all the way down. Where they really want to know and to understand what the risk is and how it can change on a continual basis, and a lot of times, especially with engineers, and I’m not criticizing engineers because I am an engineer, but a lot of engineers see hazardous conditions or risk, and we need more safeguards. There’s some really good tools out there, Layers of Protection Analysis [LOPA] that came out in 2001 and is supported by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. And basically, one of the fundamental reasons you want to use Layers of Protection Analysis is, when you have a worst-credible consequence, you want to fully understand the consequence and chain of events for the worst-credible consequence to Tyler Tarnoczi a final outcome that could result in a catastrophic event. And you want to have the right amount of safeguards. Throwing more safeguards onto a system results in more complexity and results in more items that people aren’t going to be looking at. Or, it’ll result in people saying, ‘Yeah, we have a pressure-relieving device. No problem. We’re good to go.’ People need to understand there’s a whole portfolio of safeguards, and instead of adding more safeguards, you have to really understand what your safeguards are and what are you really asking them to do. To go forward from there, and I think quite a few of my clients don’t quite understand because, of course, they’re engineers and they want to add more and more. Easley: Jim, one of the areas of risk that companies are actively dealing with is the uncertainty regarding regulations and compliance, including greenhouse gas emissions. Can you share the trends you’re seeing with your customers and how you’re helping them address them? Jim Cormack: At a high level, adapting to a new regulatory environment and adapting to the reality of politics as well as how stakeholder issues intermingle with historically typical business decisions that might have been in-house in the past. And that’s a trend that many businesses, especially in the energy industry, have been grappling with for a long time now. But even though they’ve been grappling with it for a long time now, it’s still evolving and maturing. There’s a reality that many organizations, especially larger ones, end up with organizational silos that all businesses are aware of, but it does not help the matter when trying to make decisions that require inputs or have variables outside of the silo. So that makes things more difficult as well. And then, of course, people in industry norms get stuck in what I might call ‘generically cognitive biased mode’ as well. So those types of things that we see in a complex world make things difficult. Easley: Can you comment on the regulatory uncertainty in Alberta? Are there moving parts there that are making this landscape a little bit more difficult for customers, and how is that impacting business and how are your customers dealing with that? Cormack: If I just use greenhouse gas specifically, some of the questions they need to consider are: Which greenhouse gas is going to be covered by regulation in the future? There’s an uncertainty about which specific sectors are going to be regulated. Are the targets going to be absolute? Are they going to be intensity-based or performance-based? Or what is the future government going to think about those different options for how to set targets on greenhouse gases, and are governments going to reward early action? That’s a big question because there’s a lot of companies that did a lot of work on technology development that would probably like to make a decision about implementing new technology, but they sometimes hesitate because of how they’re going to be rewarded for early action. Easley: Tyler, keying off this concept of risk and the uncertainty around greenhouse gas emissions and our pending carbon-constraint world, and you having to live this day in and day out, can you share with us what does this mean to you and how is Cenovus reacting to it? Tyler Tarnoczi: When we look at the emerging policy and regulatory environment, we have seen a great deal of change on that front, both in the greenhouse gas regulatory world through provincial and federal regulation but also in the broader air pollutant sphere. And I would even extend that further to environmental risk in general. This is something that we are engaged in both working with regulators to inform good policy that provides positive environmental outcomes in a cost-effective way as well as incorporating those environmental regulations or, in the case of greenhouse gases, a price of carbon into our future development plans. Easley: Can you share some specifics? Tarnoczi: I’ll speak to the greenhouse gas side of things. We are certainly engaged with our corporate development and corporate strategy teams on incorporating a price on carbon into the planning phase when we look at future capital allocation. So to the degree our projects have a greenhouse gas emission impact, and those greenhouse gas emissions are priced, cash flow impact will make its way into the project economics. It will also be evaluated as part of the capital allocation process that we have corporately. If we’re looking at a project that has an emissions-reductions benefit, it will ultimately show up as a positive cash flow to the project and will help to bolster project economics. On the flip side, if projects have a greenhouse gas emissions impact that results in an operating cost that will ultimately be priced and evaluated as part of the project economics and as part of the broader corporate capital allocation process that we have. Easley: It would seem that there are many factors that our customer-operators use to evaluate projects. Especially when political environments can change, do you see a lot of consensus, or are there a lot of conversations that you need to have to get the key planners and stakeholders on board with certain decisions? What does that mean for our projects? What does that mean for our price on carbon? How does that influence our decision-making? And that’s a scenario that we will consider. We will also look at scenarios that we would consider to have a more probabilistic outcome, and that might be something similar to the International Energy Agency’s New Policies Scenario to address greenhouse gas admissions and climate change.

Native mode generally refers to one of two things relating to computer software or hardware. When software runs natively, it runs on the computer’s actual hardware rather than through emulation or through the intervention of another program. This state is common for most normal computer programs running on a system. The other usage means that a piece of hardware or software is specifically designed to run in a certain environment. In many ways, this is a more general version of the first usage, but it involves other situations such as compatibility mode. The biggest factor in the first usage is emulation. An emulator may mimic a specific set of hardware, which will allow non-native programs to run in an environment in which they are comfortable. Other forms of emulations are possible, but hardware emulation has the biggest impact on native mode. The other factor that influences this part of native mode is software support systems. These programs support another program; this is different from true emulation because the running software functions on the existing hardware, but the program won’t function without the other program running. This situation is much less common than emulation, but it does happen in a few places, such as web browsers. Essentially, programs will run inside a browser but not outside. The other aspect of native mode centers on compatibility mode. This is a method used by operating systems to extend their functionality back into older programs. As systems and hardware advance, the calls made by older systems fall out of favor or are used for other reasons. Compatibility mode allows a modern system to transfer the information back and forth with older technology. Compatibility mode may seem the same as an emulator, but it is actually quite different. Emulators create an artificial environment that allows non-native programs to run. Compatibility mode acts more like a translator, taking information from one system and converting it into the language used by the other. All of these systems create non-native situations. Native mode is defined as a system that doesn’t use any of these additional compatibility processes. As long as a program is designed to work on a specific platform and doesn’t require any software support or translation, it is native. As soon as a program falls outside of these requirements, it is non-native. The fact that a program runs in native mode in one situation doesn’t mean that it is always a native program. Should the same program run on two different operating systems, it may run natively on one but require emulation on the other. In addition, as a program ages, it will eventually require compatibility mode just to function correctly.

Ginseng (Panax ginseng) 50 grs. Only the roots of the ginseng plant is used. Ginseng is also called 'panax', which means 'cure all'. In China this herb is traditionally used to protect against the effects of ageing. It increases vitality and resistance of the body and provides energy when feeling low or tired. The herb increases resistance when you are feeling weak. It stimulates the body and supports the adrenal glands, which take care of recovery and growth, and make one more stress-resistant. According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ginseng is very suitable against shock, when energy levels are strongly reduced. Ginseng is a remedy against exhaustion resulting from extraordinary physical and mental exertion. It strengthens the memory, concentration and increases the reaction speed. Dissolve a teaspoon in a drink once a day, this will give a general strengthening, body cleansing and endurance increasing effect. To make tea, boil 3 grams of Ginseng powder in water for 5 to 10 minutes. Sift before drinking. You can also chew on it or make liquor out of it. Ginseng may be combined with Fo ti tien (Gotu Kola), to bring mind and body back into balance. For concentration and clearer thinking Ginseng can be combined with Ginkgo biloba or Guarana. Excessive use can lead to a headache. Use no more than 6 grams a day, as the literature mentions only doses between 1 - 6 grams. An overdose of ginseng can lead to sleeplessness, tensed muscles and retained fluids.

Home Loans From Financially-Fit Relatives Make (Dollars and) Sense Homebuyers searching for sources of down payment funds and home loans don't always have to borrow from financial institutions. You have other options, including Mom and Pop, the grandparents, a rich aunt, or other financially-fit family members. Let's weigh those familial loan options here. Since I’m not a credentialed financial advisor, the answers (observations) I give are strictly my opinion. Traditional mortgage lenders typically require a down payment of 20% of the home’s value though there are other loan types that require as little as 3-5%. If you are able to clear that significant hurdle in the mortgage approval process, a commercial lender will next plug in income numbers to determine how much of an individual's - or couple’s - paychecks will go to paying down the loan. This often results in a rude awakening for many loan applicants. Some won't meet the monthly payment requirements, while others don't want to shell out that much in monthly payments. It's a big financial responsibility to bear. So, why not feel out a family loan? I know...family loans typically involve proper parental selection at birth (I kid), but kinfolks will sometimes surprise you with what they can or might be willing to do with their excess funds. A family loan might just might be mutually beneficial. First-time homebuyers often pay a lower interest rate to family members than they would with a commercial loan. And in today’s low interest rate environment, family lenders often receive a higher rate of interest on intrapersonal loans than they would from bank savings or money market accounts. I’m not suggesting that you ask Mom and Pop for a free ride. Whether the contract is informal and unrecorded or not, it should involve some sort of payout to the elders – who may be in or headed for retirement and could use a liquid source of cash flow. When discussing a loan plan of action within the family, it’s important, particularly for grandparents, to keep in mind their own financial self-interest. Because parents or grandparents are naturally inclined to want to help their offspring, it is possible that if they help out a bit more than they should, they might imperil their own current livelihood or financial future with respect to retirement. For example, money pulled from most retirement plans “too early” comes with tax implications, and of course, those onerous 10% penalties. Uncle Sam's Rules By the way, Uncle Sam’s default rule is that if a loan exceeds $10,000, the lender (parent) has to charge interest in some form or fashion based on the IRS's Applicable Federal Rates (AFRs) for loans among family members. So, it's best to formalize such arrangements with a loan contact and a recorded mortgage that includes the loan amount, rate of interest charged, and term of the loan. Undocumented, unsecured loans can come back to bite one or both parties in case of future disagreements. And, though the IRS doesn’t track family loans, formal or informal, they can certainly make informal loans an issue during one of their wolverine-like audits. In short, the key is structuring the agreement properly to ensure that, in the eyes of the IRS, it is a bona fide loan. Registering the loan as a mortgage at the local courthouse provides even more evidence that it’s a loan, not an “outside the limits” gift. And offspring can claim mortgage interest and property tax deductions if they decide to itemize deductions on their federal tax return. Itemizing deductions is not a slam dunk under today’s IRS rules, but it’s worth considering. The IRS has another reason for publishing its Applicable Federal Rates (AFRs) for loans among family members. It’s Uncle Sam’s way of preventing folks from disguising outlandish gifts to heirs as loans that charge too little or no interest. By the way, even if the lender collects no interest from the borrower on a family loan, the IRS requires the lender to pay income tax on the earned interest income they “should have received” based on the AFR at the time the loan was transacted. AFR rates (which are updated monthly) can be attractive to borrowers when compared to those of commercial lenders. The current rate for a three- to nine-year term is 3.15% and the nine-plus year term is 3.35%. The monthly AFR in effect at the time the loan is made “locks in” for the life of the loan. That beats those 5-6% rates currently circulating in the mortgage world. And, even in today’s rising interest rate environment, Dad or Grandpa will still find it difficult to wring 3% out of a money market or bank savings account. The Fine Print Family lenders can also employ a combination of loans and gifts to help their offspring. Assume for a moment that parents loan a child funds to buy a home, and that they satisfy all of the aforementioned safeguards when setting up the loan. Under the current IRS Tax Code, parents can gift up to $16,000 each to any number of folks, including each of their children. It’s called the annual gift tax exclusion. The catch? (There’s always a catch.) If they exceed that amount to any one recipient, they must then file a gift tax return (IRS Form 709). Any overage above a $16,000 annual gift counts against the individual exclusion from gift or estate tax ($12.06 million for 2022). No tax is due unless gifts exceed that annual limit. The recipient of a gift isn't liable for this tax, but the donor is. Also, the donor is responsible for completing and filing Form 709 if a gift isn’t exempt. Now, let’s say, an offspring can’t make an occasional loan payment on an intrafamily loan down the road. Parents can make additional gifts of cash to errant child, keeping the annual gift under the tax exclusion threshold mentioned above. By the way, parents can forgive a loan. If they do, the loan becomes a gift, subject to those aforementioned overage rules, counting against the individual exclusion from gift or estate tax. So be warned, if gifting is not carefully documented so as to remain within the annual limits, the IRS can reclassify the loan as a gift, which could trigger a gift or estate tax bill. Family members help each other with good intentions. But it’s always wise to anticipate a worst case scenario. Should a well-documented intrapersonal loan go belly-up, the IRS generally classifies intrapersonal loan losses as short-term capital losses. But that’s not all bad. They can be useful to offset a lender’s short-term capital gains. And remaining losses can be used to offset long-term capital gains. After that, any remaining short-term losses can be used to offset up to $3,000 of ordinary income. And additional losses beyond that can be carried forward to future years. Without proper documentation or no documentation at all, a questionable intrapersonal loan will, in an IRS audit, likely be characterized as a gift and the lender will not be able to claim the loss as a non-business bad debt deduction (ill-advised debts are not deductible losses). Alternatively, as earlier mentioned, the lender can simply forgive the bad loan and treat it as a gift. With today’s unified federal gift and estate exemption of $12.06 million (for 2022), turning a bad loan into a gift is unlikely to cause most parents or grandparents much tax indigestion. If audited, the lender will want to show evidence to support the characterization of the bad loan transaction as an outright gift. So, with good documentation, a pig’s ear can be turned into a silk purse of sorts (tax wise). So, looking on the bright side, when compared to commercial lending rates, an offspring usually benefits from a much lower interest rate associated with an intrafamily loan. And typically, there are no pesky loan costs, appraisals and credit checks required to get the loan. Parents or other kin often benefit from a higher rate of interest than on funds gathering cobwebs in a bank savings account. So, for those who can afford it, today’s hyper-expensive residential housing market offers a good time and place to assist home-hunting relatives. But do it correctly so that everyone benefits from the exercise financially and no one suffers the ire of the IRS.

The initial developments of NLP that happened in the 1970’s was followed by another wave spearheaded by Steve and Connirae Andreas in the form of a publication released by the Real People Press. The two were the first to edit Bandler and Grinder’s books entitled ‘Frogs into Princes’ and ‘Reframing and Transformations’. Not long after, Steve and Connirae Andreas published Core Transformations, Heart of the Mind, and several other titles that are all original contributions. Their works, up to now, remain a source of ingenuity within the field. Leslie Cameron, Robert Dilts, and David Gordon played key roles in the development of the first NLP Training Protocol, which is known as The Practitioner and Master Practitioner Trainings. Cameron was the first to specify the meta-programs of NLP, and with the help of David Gordon and Michael Lebeau they developed the Emprint Method. Robert Dilts took the responsibility of expounding the NLP approach into strategies. It was David Gordon who endeavoured in writing the use of metaphors in NLP, his work is considered a classic in the field. Lucas Derks (Private Communications 2013) explained that clinical experimentations followed afterwards and new NLP methodologies emerged. New models were formed out of the original patterns that the first developers discovered. The second wave opened the way for the full development of the new patterns. Sub-modalities, root patterns, and time lines are some of the important things that came into being and have since been part of the foundational elements of every NLP curriculum. The new models derived from clinical experimentations had great impact on the application of NLP to the area of health by Tim Hallbom, Todd Epstein, Suzi Smith and Robert Dilts. The NLP application to creativity and patterns of genius were explained further by Epstein and Dilts. More modelling projects happened and the work of therapists like Martin Orne, Ivan Nagy, Bert Hellinger, Frank Farrelly, Moshe Feldenkrais, Carl Rogers, and many others went through investigative work. The results of that investigative work continued to be a part of the existing body of the practice of NLP although those findings were often unacknowledged. Michael Hall also made important contributions to the basic patterns of NLP when he introduced the Meta States Model. His rebranded Neuro-Semantics has become the focus of a world-wide coaching enterprise. In 1988 Wyatt Woodsmall and Tad James came up with their publication entitled ‘Timeline Therapy and Structure of Personality’. Timelines hold a regular part in many NLP Trainings since the release of that publication. Steve and Connirae Andreas also produced timeline processes and can be read in Change Your Mind and Keep the Change. Tony Robbins, a prominent motivational speaker and trainer in the 1980’s used NLP as his primary skill set. His bestselling book, ‘Unlimited Power’ helped popularize NLP. NLP became a mass market commodity especially to the business community. Many people sought his help and he worked for famous personalities including President Bill Clinton. Despite all efforts to rebrand and combine his work with other motivational teachings, Tony Robbins is acknowledged as the person responsible for popularizing NLP. Other people brought NLP to the fore front. John Seymour and Joseph O’Connor for example introduced NLP to a larger psychological audience through their book called ‘Introducing NLP’. They also helped in developing NLP training materials and how NLP can be applied to an educational setting. In the 1990’s, new models of effective therapies appeared in the scene. Penny Tompkins and James Lawley modelled the therapist David Grove. Their work, Symbolic Modeling, is considered as an extension of classic NLP. The Social Panorama Model by Lucas Derks is another significant model that appeared. This is about the extension of sub-modalities to interpersonal relations. This model used the strategies of mainline Social Psychology to evaluate patterns in problematic and normal social thinking. Multiple people were interviewed by Derks in order for him to discover a general pattern. His procedure was different from the customary model of intensive ideographic analysis. This investigative method used by Lucas Derks has been used to validate and extend NLP meta-programs in the work of Patrick Merlevede, Shelle Rose Charvet and Rodger Bailey. The model was also considerably extended by the MindSonar program of Jaap Hollander.

Along with the “dizzy” development of information technology, the emergence of the blockchain platform has become a new trend widely applied to industries such as finance and banking, electronics and telecommunications, accounting. audit or retail. So in this article, we will provide blockchain basics for newcomers. What is blockchain and blockchain technology? Blockchain is a database system in the form of a block that allows securely storing and transmitting information linked together by extremely complex cryptographic algorithms. In other words, it is seen as a ledger of the company where all activities related to the company’s currency are closely monitored. In the field of technology, it is a book that stores digital data. Blockchain technology is the concept or protocol behind the operation of the blockchain. This technology makes cryptocurrencies (cryptographically secure digital currencies) like Bitcoin work like the Internet makes email. Types of blockchain The public blockchain system allows anyone to write and read data on the blockchain. Transactions on the public blockchain require validation by thousands of participating nodes. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to attack this system and costs an extremely large amount of money. These public blockchains use proof-of-work or proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms. The 2 common examples of public blockchains are Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) blockchains. For a private system, only the user has the right to read the data, not the written permission because this belongs to an absolutely trusted third party. Since this is private, the transaction confirmation time is extremely fast because only a few devices are required to participate in the transaction validation. For example, Ripple or Hyperledger is a private and licensed blockchain. Hybrid Blockchains or Consortiums Consortiums are a form of private blockchain but add some other special features. A consortium can be called a combination of public and private blockchains. For example, banks or joint venture financial institutions will use their own blockchain or Energy Web Foundation, Dragonchain, and R3. A sidechain is a blockchain running parallel to the main chain. It permits clients to move computerized resources between two distinctive blockchains and makes strides in versatility and proficiency. An illustration of a sidechain is the Fluid Arrange. How does it work When it comes to blockchain, people might immediately think of transactions. Traditionally, transactions are stored in ledgers that are locked and isolated to ensure their accuracy and inviolability. When operating transactions, each agency and unit must maintain its own records to verify information independently. In contrast to this type of communication, it is also a ledger, but the difference is that trust is built-in. In other words, it is a distributed, shared and trusted consensus ledger; it thus forms a highly trusted digital ledger in which transactions are recorded, especially this ledger is maintained within and between network participants. Unlike the traditional method of having many independent and isolated ledgers, in blockchain, a single record is shared with each party participating in the transaction. Each transaction that has occurred or is pending is grouped and stored in a fixed structure called a block. Through the consensus protocol, when each block is confirmed to be correct and trustworthy, the block is linked to the chain (Chain) and sent to copies (Copy) of the distributed ledger and hosted by each network member. Benefits of blockchains With 3 major versions, each version will have a different advanced use. 1.0 technology with applications mainly in currency and payment. The main use of this version is to deal with works related to cryptocurrencies, including currency conversion, remittances and the creation of electronic payment systems. This is also the most familiar area to us. Sometimes quite a lot of people mistakenly believe that Bitcoin and Blockchain are the same. 2.0 technology with financial and market applications. This version is designed for banking and financial processing applications such as the scaling of Blockchain, adoption of financial and market platforms. Assets include shares, checks, debits, title, and any information related to an agreement or contract. 3.0 technology has applications in design and operation monitoring. This version helps Blockchain move beyond finance, and into sectors like education, government, healthcare, and arts. The above article has provided detailed information about the basics of Blockchain so that you can have an overview and easier visualization of this technology platform.

Protein shakes are an effective way to gain weight if you’re unable to do so through your diet alone. As well as gaining weight, adding protein shakes to your daily diet can also increase muscle mass. Will taking protein powder make me gain weight? Protein powder alone isn’t likely to cause weight gain, but the way you’re using it might. For example, if you add protein powder to your diet without changing the rest of your meals to accommodate the extra calories, you may start gaining weight. Should I drink protein shakes everyday to gain weight? The Mayo Clinic warns that drinking protein shakes daily, on top of your regular diet, may lead to the intake of way too many calories, likely causing weight gain. Can whey protein powder help you gain weight? Whey protein can help you gain weight: Adding whey protein into your diet is an easy way to increase your overall calorie intake, thereby assisting with weight gain. How skinny people gain weight fast? Eat five to six smaller meals during the day rather than two or three large meals. Choose nutrient-rich foods. As part of an overall healthy diet, choose whole-grain breads, pastas and cereals; fruits and vegetables; dairy products; lean protein sources; and nuts and seeds. Try smoothies and shakes. 10 quick tips - Avoid drinking water before meals. This can fill your stomach and make it harder to get in enough calories ( 35 ). - Eat more often. … - Drink milk. … - Try weight gainer shakes. … - Use bigger plates. … - Add cream to your coffee. … - Take creatine. … - Get quality sleep. What happens if you take protein without working out? Conclusion. Taking a protein shake without resistance exercise training will not help in building muscle. It can, in fact, cause you to unwanted weight. There really is no reason to take a protein powder if you’re not following an exercise program. Is it OK to drink protein shake without working out? In short, if you drink a protein shake on a rest day, or a day when you’re doing less than you might usually do, there’s no need to worry about any adverse effects. However, if you’re drinking high protein shakes on their own and not to supplement your protein intake when working out, this could cause weight gain. Why won’t I gain any weight? Reasons why you may not be able to gain weight. Genetics play a role in body types and may dictate a naturally lean body type for some people. For others, underlying medical conditions and certain medical treatments may cause weight loss or difficulty gaining weight. How can I gain 5 kg weight in one month? General tips for gaining weight safely - Eat three to five meals a day. Eating at least three meals a day can make it easier to increase calorie intake. … - Weight training. … - Eat enough protein. … - Eat meals with fibrous carbohydrates and healthful fats. … - Drink high-calorie smoothies or shakes. … - Seek help where needed. No matter your weight, you need to be doing aerobic, strength, and flexibility exercises to maintain fitness (which in turn promotes health by decreasing the risk of health problems like heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, and early death). “Your body was meant to move,” says Pilkington. Can you gain muscle without exercise? Weight Gainer Shakes (10 flavors!)5,0 How many protein shakes should I drink a day to gain weight? Gaining Weight with Shakes Increase your caloric intake by 3,500 calories per week, or 500 calories per day. To incorporate protein shakes into this formula, add two shakes per day, for a total of 524 calories, in excess of your regular diet. How many protein shakes should I drink a day to gain muscle? If you’re of average build and go to the gym regularly, two protein shakes a day is enough to maintain your body mass. But if you’re seriously involved in athletic sports, fitness practices and strength exercises, you may need to drink three to four protein shakes daily to sustain your physique and performance.

EHR Implementers - eICR Creation, Validation, & Standards What is an eICR document? What does it include? The electronic initial case report (eICR) is a consensus-based Health Level Seven International (HL7) standard. It was developed for use in electronic case reporting (eCR). It was constructed in the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) almost entirely from Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) templates that are certified to already be used by electronic health records (EHRs) for other purposes. There is also a complete HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) eICR specification and an updated CDA eICR standard (R3.0) that are in the process of being published. The data in the eICR were identified by a Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) task force as the “minimum necessary” data needed for public health case reporting. The CDA eICR R1.1 Implementation Guide was initially published in January 2017. There is also a complete HL7 FHIR eICR specification and an updated CDA eICR (will be R3.0) that are in the process of being published. - The eICR Data Needs workbook (file download) is intended for use by EHR Implementers and healthcare teams to facilitate electronic case reporting (eCR) onboarding. It does not take the place of any HL7 implementation guides relevant to the eCR use case but is a useful companion artifact. How and when should an eICR document be created? When specific patient encounter data match one of the trigger codes in the Electronic Reporting and Surveillance Distribution (eRSD) Reportable Condition Trigger Codes (RCTC) and the encounter timing is as specified in the eRSD, an eICR should be created and sent. An eICR can also be manually initiated by a clinician if they suspect the presence of a reportable condition. If manually initiated, the clinician should record the reason for sending the eICR for public health awareness. While an eICR can be created and sent directly from an EHR system, it can also be created in an EHR and sent through a designee of clinical care, such as a Health Information Network (HIN) or Exchange (HIE). eICRS are securely received and processed on behalf of the provider organizations from which they originate. Using rules authored by each state and local public health agency’s head epidemiologist or their representative, the eICRs are then transmitted to appropriate public health agencies. eICRs are only maintained by the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) Informatics Messaging Services (AIMS) long enough to complete routing to the public health agencies and address any errors in delivery. eICRs are not retained by APHL AIMS. eICRs are not sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but state public health agencies may use some of the eICR data to send anonymized notifications of confirmed case reports to the CDC for nationwide statistics. How to validate an eICR document? Validation during eICR development It is important while developing the eICR document to ensure it follows both Schema and Schematron validation specifications. APHL has implemented a specific online validation tool for this purpose. Users can upload eICR files without PHI to test validation with the AIMS Validator (external link). This validation tool is specific to the eICR and the eICR’s underlying CDA Schema. The tool produces very specific information to refine the creation of the eICR document. Validation is also performed on all incoming eICRs in production. Some of the validation information will also be placed in the Reportability Response (RR) that is returned to the submitting organization when production reports have issues that need to be addressed. Additional XML support files (such as example files, stylesheets and the Schematron validation files) can be downloaded by clicking the green code button at this GitHub link (external link). There are also some test eICRs that are available on the EHR Implementers - Test Packages page. Validation in production on the AIMS platform Within the production eCR workflow, validation also occurs on the eCR platform before the eICR is passed to the decision support service. This validation step allows for more detailed error and warning information in specific circumstances to be conveyed in the RR. RR “warnings” indicate that the eICR was received and processed, but that there is an issue to be addressed by an EHR administrator. Warnings may include that the EHR is using an outdated version of the eRSD and trigger codes, or that a minor issue exists in the relevant eICR. RR “errors” indicate that the relevant eICR was not successfully processed, that the EHR administrator needs to determine what caused the issue (the validation error details are available in the RR to help diagnose the problem), and that the provider of care may need to be notified that required reporting has not been done. Creation and management of eCR standards The eICR and RR were developed through the HL7 consensus-based standard development process. Participation included stakeholders from across the industry (clinical care, public health, EHR vendors). We encourage participation in the HL7 process for these standards in the HL7 Public Health Workgroup (external link). Other standards for eCR While the CDA eICR STU 1.1 and RR STU 1.0 documents are currently the only eCR standards in use in production, there are new CDA versions and HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) versions that have been balloted and will soon be published. The eCR Now FHIR App uses the HL7 FHIR R4 to connect to EHRs. The app then produces the same CDA eICR STU 1.1 and receives the RR STU 1.0 documents that are in operations with “native” EHR implementations.

It is almost impossible for those convicted of a sexual offense in California to rebuild their lives. California penal code 290 requires persons convicted of sexually motivated crimes to register with the state’s sex offender registry. The registry limits where you can live, work, and in some cases, where you can visit. Removal from the offender registry is a viable option for some people who wish to put their past behind them and move forward as productive members of society. Find out how to terminate sex offender registration in California and how working with California criminal defense attorney Mariya Melkonyan can help. According to the PC 290 registration requirement, those convicted of certain sex offenses must register for a set period. On January 2, 2021, Senate Bill (SB) 384 went into effect. The bill changed registration requirements for a multitude of registrants by enacting a three-tier registry system and offering registrants a way to petition for sex offender registration requirement termination if they meet specific qualifications. Find out how to terminate sex offender registration in California by contacting our firm today. Among the changes enacted by SB 384 are registration requirements. Rather than mandatory life registration, those convicted of sex offenses can now register under a tiered timeline structure. Tier one offenses require a 10 year registry period. Tier two offenses require 20 years on the sex offender registry. Tier three, which encompasses the most significant violent sex offenses, still requires a lifetime registry. For juveniles adjudicated for sex crimes in California, the registry period is 5-10 years. Some tier three offenders may be allowed a 20-year registration with an approved risk assessment. California’s three-tiered registry system refers to the newly instated categories for registrants. Before SB 384, the laws were much more stringent for those convicted of sex offenses. Most offenses required a lifetime registry with no possibility of removal. To be able to terminate sex offender registration in California, you need to understand the following: The new three-tier system classifies sex offenders into separate categories based on the severity of the crime. Examples of crimes in each tier include: Under the new SB 384, registrants on tiers one and two may petition for removal if they meet the required criteria. If you meet the requirements outlined in SB 384, you can move to petition for removal on or after your birthday as of July 1, 2021. Seeking removal from the offender registry in California is not always a straightforward process. The consequences of going through this yourself and failing can limit your future. Without termination of your registration requirements, you won’t have the freedom to work or live where you choose. To terminate sex offender registration in California, it’s highly advised that you work with a criminal defense attorney adept at navigating sex offender registry cases. Mariya Melkonyan is a former Deputy District Attorney who knows her way around the California criminal legal system. She is passionate about helping those convicted of sexually motivated offenses rebuild their lives by petitioning for removal from the registry once they have served their registration period. Depending on the type of offense committed, removing your information from the sex offender registry may be possible. Sex offender registration requirement termination is a complicated process. You first must complete your rehabilitation before starting the termination process. This includes filing paperwork with the court and may require a court hearing. Making mistakes on your paperwork or not understanding the process could result in a negative outcome. If your termination fails, you will remain on the sex offender registry. This is why it’s important to work with our firm. California Senate Bill 384 significantly changed sex offender registration requirements. It replaced lifetime sex offender registration with a three-tiered system based on the severity of the sexual offense. This bill establishes the criteria used to determine the tier of a sexual offense. It also allows offenders to petition for their removal from the sex offender list. Sex offender registrants can file a petition to terminate sex offender registration requirements after 10 years for tier-one offenses and 20 years for tier-two offenses. The most severe offenses under tier three designation require lifetime registration and can’t be petitioned for termination. Since removal from the sex offender registry is crucial for moving forward in your life, hiring an experienced criminal defense attorney is your best choice when petitioning the court. It’s difficult to attempt this process on your own and you can’t afford to have your petition denied. Find out how to terminate sex offender registration in California by contacting our firm today, and speaking with Mariya directly. The timeframe for registration begins when the offender is released from confinement for the offense. If the offender returns to confinement for any reason, their registration period is paused until their release. Once the minimum registration requirement is met, the offender can petition the court for termination. Working with our firm ensures you’ll meet this requirement before submitting your petition and won’t make the mistake of filing too early. Sex offender registrants will submit their petition to the superior court and serve it to the county district attorney’s office and the law enforcement agency where they’re registered. The district attorney may request a hearing to determine if continued registration is necessary for community safety. The prosecutor and registrant may both present supporting evidence for their claims. A criminal defense attorney will help you gather evidence and present it in court on your behalf. If you’re not sure how to terminate sex offender registration in California, our defense attorneys are ready to help you today. If a hearing isn’t requested, the court will decide if the petition will be granted based on the requirements for termination. Another option is to petition for a certificate of rehabilitation (COR), an official finding from the court that a former criminal is rehabilitated. Once a registrant obtains a COR, they will no longer have to register as a sex offender. This option is available for misdemeanor sex offenders that resulted in an expunged conviction. Due to the complex nature of the process, sex offenders interested in this termination option should contact our firm immediately so our team can begin helping you with your case. Our criminal defense experience gives you the best chance of having your COR petition granted. The offender must have lived in California before their offense and maintain a rehabilitation period for several years to qualify for a COR. Sexual offenses that don’t qualify for a COR include sexual exploitation of a child, some child porn offenses, indecent exposure, and obscene conduct. All other sex offenses that require registration are eligible for a COR after a rehabilitation period. This petition involves applying for the certificate and a court hearing. Sex offender registrants will have their information forwarded from their local law enforcement agency to the California Department of Justice, per California PC 240.46. This department maintains a sex offender tracking program. Personal information about the offender is made public through the Megan’s Law website. Usually, the offender’s name, photo, and other physical identifying information are available. The website also includes offenses committed that required registration. An offender’s address may appear online depending on the severity of the sex crime committed. Registered offenders must submit several forms to the California DOJ, which determines if the offender meets the requirements for exclusion. Offenders granted exclusions from the Megan’s Law website must continue to follow other registration requirements. Our legal team can help you through the exclusion application process and determine your remaining registration responsibilities so you don’t get into legal trouble. Juvenile sex offenders are treated differently than adult offenders. Juveniles have shorter registration durations than adults. Tier one juvenile sex offenders face a 5-year registration period, while tier two juveniles face 10 years. To terminate their registration, juveniles must file a petition with the juvenile court in the county where they are registered. There are a few laws in California that are related to failure to register a sex offender. They are: Habitual sexual offender is a felon and punishable by a 25 years to life imprisonment. Use of a firearm or if the crime was committed against a minor, the punishment becomes even more serious. If you have served your registration requirement for a sex offense in California, let our team of legal experts help you pursue removal from the offender registry.

Despite the growing of pharmacological options for the treatment of diabetes, epidemiological studies suggest that a substantial proportion of patients does not achieve glycemic goals and so suffers from the risk of chronic complications. This review explores the inhibition of renal glucose reabsorption as a novel approach to treat hyperglycemia. Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2), a low-affinity high-capacity transporter located in the brush-border membrane of the early segment (S1) of the proximal renal tubule, accounts for about 90% of the reabsorption of glucose from tubular fluid. Competitive inhibitors of SGLT2 that are responsible for renal excretion of glucose provide a unique mechanism to potentially lower the elevated blood glucose levels in patients with diabetes. They act independently of insulin secretion, thereby minimizing the risk of hypoglycemia and weight gain, to control energy balance in a negative direction, a distinctive advantage of this class of drugs over existing oral hypoglycemic agents. Although this group of medications is still under investigation, it appears to be safe and generally well tolerated and it would be expected to improve the treatment of type 2 diabetes as monotherapy or in combination with other oral or parenteral agents. Dapagliflozin is the first agent within this class, which induces clinically meaningful reductions in FPG, PPG, HbA1c, and body weight in type 2 diabetes. - Antidiabetic drugs - SGLT2 inhibitors - Sodium-glucose cotransporters - Type 2 diabetes.

Save The Wolves! In a decision dated December 19, 2014, U.S. District Judge Howell ruled that federal threatened status be restored to wolves in Minnesota and endangered status to wolves in Michigan,null Wisconsin and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The court ruled that the US Fish & Wildlife Service cannot designate the Great Lakes wolves as a Distinct Population, for the purpose of de-listing them. Wolves in the Great Lakes Region were de-listed January 2012 giving the states the authority to oversee wolf management. Since that time, more than 1,500 Great Lakes wolves have been killed through recreational hunting and trapping resulting in a substantial reduction in wolf populations. This added human caused mortality constitutes a threat to the species. Scientific research shows that wolf populations self-regulate and hunting is not necessary to manage wolves.

With inflation in the United States at a forty year high, Americans are spending more and more money each day as prices rise. We sat down with Stace Jensen, financial literacy expert, as she talked us through ten ways to save money during this period. Jensen’s first tip is to get quotes from a few companies for expenses such as car and homeowner insurance, and cell phone providers. She also recommends avoiding any unplanned purchases. When scrolling through social media platforms and watching TV, ignore the urge to click on these ads. By doing this you are avoiding the spontaneous behavior that we all suffer from when shopping online. Utah is a beautiful state with many outdoor activities and many ways to get your body moving. Jensen recommends making use of the nature around us and putting your gym membership on hold during the warm months to save on those monthly expenses. Also, look at your subscriptions and monthly statements to pinpoint where you are spending. Sometimes, we may even be paying for subscriptions that we didn’t even know we had. Or, you may notice you are spending too much money going out for your daily coffee and have to cut back on the six dollar latte everyday. In addition, having a set menu and grocery list before going to the store to avoid unnecessary items. Jensen also states that incorporating more produce into your diet can be beneficial as the prices for meats and dairy have increased more drastically. A large part of the inflation has been the increase in gas prices. A tip that Jensen shares to combat this is to sign up for the rewards program most gas stations offer. Other advice includes selling items around your house you do not need. All of these thoughts develop a more conscious mindset around spending and developing habits to spend our money in a smart way. One thing that Jensen wants to emphasize is that this inflation is not permanent. We went through this forty years ago. Don’t panic, just think critically and be aware of your financial habits as we push through these unfortunate circumstances.

Sureyyya Evren, a Turkish post-anarchist, argues that post-anarchism (which non-english post-anarchists refer to as quite simply the "new anarchism", as opposed to the post-structuralist inclined English post-anarchists) emerged around the time of Seattle. This means that there was a loosening of what Richard Day has called the "hegemony of hegemony" toward a more network-based "affinity" logic that motivated the "social movements" of the time. Within new- or post-anarchism a few key differences are apparent. I'll try to think up a few of them and post them here, knowing very well that I am missing many important points. First, the "place of power" has shifted from centralized locations to "tactical" areas of concern. Anarchists today are less concerned with the State or Class Warfare than they ever were, instead there are many different irreducible struggles that differ depending on the social actors. Eastern Canadian anarchists have entirely different struggles than Western Bay Area anarchists. Second, the "operation of power" has changed. Anarchists are now more aware than ever that power does not only oppress people but it also constitutes them, creates them in resisting subjects. The more radical sects (anti-civ, nihilist, post-left, etc) seem to be more aware of this than any other of the branches in anarchist thought. Third, power is now understood, as a result of the last point, to be moving in more than one direction. So, whereas the tradition understanding was that power came from one single location, only repressed movements, and moved unidirectionally to do so, today, subjects are thought to actually have power and this point is dramatized. This is why there is a strong emphasis on Stirner in the post-anarchism literature. Who believed to have more power than him? But these are the points that mostly English speaking anarchists address. And it would be inaccurate--wrong I would say--to say that post-anarchism = post-structuralism plus anarchism. Non-english post-anarchists including Anton Fernandez de Rota, Daniel Colson, Sureyyya Evren, and others, have argued that post-anarchism is represented by the following equation: "post-anarchism plus something other". They have went even further and suggested that if one is anarchist *today* then one is also a *post-anarchist*. This makes sense to me, there is a real movement today by anti-post-anarchists toward cultural studies approaches. Jesse Cohn, for example, argues that the cultural studies has always been the *anarchist* approach. This is a post-anarchist type of thing to say. post-anarchist networks are quite simply anarchist networks today. The affinity group still appears to be central to this understanding. New ways of conceiving solidarity, especially among the EGS crowd and in central to western Canada fall in line with this understanding. Computerized resistance and hacktivism falls in line with this understanding, as well as the resurgence of insurrectionary anarchism in greece and elsewhere. Michael Truscello and I once had a brief conversation about whether or not post-anarchism is anti-organizationalist and, by virtue of this fact, insurrectionist. I believe that it is, and it would be very difficult to suggest otherwise. The platformist and workerist groups that still exist today cling on to dead dreams and they are irrelevant to the anarchism of today. This means, of course, that anarchism today (post-anarchism) is as impotent as traditional anarchism ever was. So it does not get us anywhere by itself. Post-anarchist networks, as I am arguing in an upcoming publication, remain committed to a curious anarchist ethics and therefore rejuvenates the anarchist tradition by forcing it to reflect on what has always made it distinct from other political traditions. Facebook is not in of itself a post-anarchist form of network and post-anarchists are not so much interested in describing new forms of social network as they are in finding ways to cope and resist in a world of networks while remaining committed to that latent ethical agenda that we call anarchism.

Door sensors (sometimes known as photoelectric or infrared beam, electric safety door edges, door detector, electric proximity edges, or electric doorman) is an elevator device that detects a passenger or an object on the doorway which prevents the doors from closing (usually installed for accessibility). If a person or an object blocks the doorway and the sensors detects the person or object ... SEN0013 Sharp GP2Y0A02YK IR ranger sensor 150cm SEN0014 Sharp GP2Y0A21 Distance Sensor 10-80cm SEN0085 Sharp GP2Y0A710K Distance Sensor 100-550cm DFR0094 Digital IR Receiver Module DFR0095 DIGITAL IR Transmitter Module SEN0018 Digital Infrared motion sensor DFR0107 IR Kit SEN0264 TS01 IR Thermal Sensor (4-20mA) Feb 02, 2015· An IR sensor consists of an IR LED and an IR Photodiode; together they are called as Photo – Coupler or Opto – Coupler. When the IR transmitter emits radiation, it reaches the object and some of the radiation reflects back to the IR receiver. Based on the intensity of the reception by the IR receiver, the output of the sensor is defined. edit Grove - 80cm Infrared Proximity Sensor. The 80cm Infrared Proximity Sensor is a General Purpose Type Distance Measuring Sensor. This sensor SharpGP2Y0A21YK, boasts a small package and very low current consumption, takes a continuous distance reading and returns a corresponding analog voltage with a range of 10cm (4") to 80cm (30"). May 19, 2020· IR sensor is an electronic device, that emits the light in order to sense some object of the surroundings. An IR sensor can measure the heat of an object as well as detects the motion. Usually, in the infrared spectrum, all the objects radiate some form of thermal radiation. Grove - Infrared Temperature Sensor Array(AMG8833) The Grove - Infrared Temperature Sensor Array (AMG8833) is a high precision infrared array sensor which based on advanced MEMS technology. It can support temperature detection of two-dimensional area: 8 × 8 (64 pixels) and maximum 7 meters detection distance. The KY-026 flame IR sensor is packed with a photo diode that is sensitive to the spectral range of light that is created by an open flame. The flame sensor detects wavelengths ranging from 760nm to 1100nm in the infrared spectrum. After detecting a flame, the digital out (DO) line will become HIGH.. The analog out (AO) will provide a direct measurement of the reading. Advantages and Disadvantages of Infrared sensor. This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Infrared mentions Infrared sensor advantages and Infrared sensor disadvantages. Definition: The Infrared sensor is a device which uses infrared waves to sense characteristics of is used to measure heat emitted by object or human beings. IR Probe. A differential modulated IR height sensor. The sensor detects the target height by looking for the reflected light from two separate LEDs to be equal. The two LEDs are positioned such that they reflect light into the sensor at slightly different heights. This allows the sensor to be used on most bed surfaces. Sep 10, 2019· The IR in “IR blaster” stands for infrared. Most remote controls use infrared to communicate with home entertainment components such as TVs, audio receivers, and DVD players. Some Android models come with a built-in IR blaster, and with the right app, you can use your phone or tablet control your TV and more. May 19, 2020· IR sensor is an electronic device, that emits the light in order to sense some object of the surroundings. An IR sensor can measure the heat of an object as well as detects the motion. Usually, in the infrared spectrum, all the objects radiate some form of thermal radiation. These types of radiations are invisible to our eyes, but infrared ... Grove - Infrared Reflective Sensor is used to detect the presence of an object within a specific range. The sensor consists of an IR LED and a photosensor (phototransistor) pair. The light emitted by the IR LED gets reflected by any object placed in front of the sensor and this reflection is detected by the photosensor (phototransistor). An Infrared Light Sensor that detects both human and paranormal movement.. How It Works. When set off, the Infrared Light Sensor will illuminate the surrounding area with a bright light. In smaller locations, four of these can be placed on each of the walls of the Ghost Room to keep the room fairly well-lit when the Ghost is in the room, allowing for the room to have illumination when the ... The IR emission tube of TCRT5000 sensor constantly emits infrared light. Since the black absorbs light, when the IR emission tube shines on a black surface, the reflected light is less and so less IR rays are received by the receiving tube. It indicates the resistance is large; then the comparator outputs high and the indicator LED goes out. The infrared-receiver Module use the 1838b as the infrared receiving head which receives infrared signals and can independently receive infrared ray and output signals compatible with TTL level. It's similar with a normal plastic-packaged transistor in size and it is suitable for all kinds of infrared remote control and infrared transmission. If you have more than one webcam and/or IR sensor using a /dev/videoX may be somewhat unstable overtime, as it may be prone to change paths if certain devices are unplugged and replugged back in. In this can consider using a more consistent path name supplied by Video 4 Linux wikipedia:Video4Linux in the /dev/v4l/by-id/ path. Feb 05, 2019· 1 Infrared (IR) Remote. IR-REMOTE LIBRARY:; More IR examples and projects on the IRemote wiki HERE:; TYPES OF IR REMOTE CONTROLS; IRrecvDemo SKETCH:Read codes from almost any IR Remote; EXAMPLE: The IR Infrared Remote Control Kit 2; OTHER IR Remote Kit Test Sketches (IR_Remote_Kit_Numeric):; Blinks Pin 13 number of … Nov 03, 2020· An IR sensor is an electronic device that detects IR radiation falling on it. Proximity sensors (used in touchscreen phones and edge avoiding robots), contrast sensors (used in line following robots) and obstruction counters/sensors (used for counting goods and in burglar alarms) are some applications involving IR sensors. IR Sensor Circuit Diagram. An infrared sensor circuit is one of the basic and popular sensor modules in an electronic device. This sensor is analogous to human’s visionary senses, which can be used to detect obstacles and it is one of the common applications in real-time. This circuit comprises the … An infrared sensor is a type of photoelectric beam system used as an electronic alarm. It is designed to alert the user to an intruder's presence by transmitting infrared light beams across an area, where these beams may be obstructed. They are often used in military installations and other facilities of restricted access. 1 Overview 2 Usage San Hieronymo Incident Phantom Pain Incident ...

One of the most iconic symbols in the US is the huge curving expanse of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The 630-foot-high structure is the tallest manmade monument in the Western Hemisphere and dominates the city’s skyline. After passing by it numerous times on our RV travels, we were so glad to finally stop for a visit to our nation’s smallest national park. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, St. Louis became a major center of trade as well as the gateway to westward expansion in the early 19th century. Gateway Arch National Park is actually located near the starting point of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It was designated a national park in 2018 and commemorates Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering spirit and his vision of a transcontinental United States. Here are some tips for visiting this inspiring park. Inside the Visitor Center the Gateway Arch Museum has 6 themed exhibits highlighting 200 years of St. Louis history. The galleries feature an array of artifacts and displays about the Native Americans of the region, the Louisiana Purchase, Louis & Clark Expeditions, and life in St. Louis in the 1700s and 1800s. One area has the very interesting story of how the arch was designed and constructed. The museum is free so make sure to allow time to see these well-done exhibits. Tram Ride to the Top of the Arch Everyone wants to experience the ride to the top of the arch, so it’s best to reserve your tickets online ahead of time. A money saving option is the tram and movie combo ticket. The 20-minute film called Monument to the Dream is a bit dated but has very interesting original footage from when the arch was constructed in 1963-65. The entrance for the tram ride looks like a series of elevator doors. Once the doors open, each group of up to 5 people enters a small pod for the 4-minute trip skyward. The unique tram design is part elevator and part Ferris wheel to allow the pods to remain upright as they ascend the 630-foot-high curved arch. As you step out of the pod you will find yourself on the top of the curved arch. Rectangular windows line each side of the walkway where you can look down to see either St. Louis on the west side or the Mississippi River on the east side. The views are awesome! A knowledgeable park ranger is up there to answer any questions you may have. Walk the Park Grounds Gateway Arch National Park consists of 91 acres of land situated right along the mighty Mississippi River. The grounds are very beautiful and, like the arch, are curve inspired. As you stroll through the park you will see that curves define the landscape and can be seen in the paths, retaining walls, and pond edges. Take advantage of some unique angles for taking pictures as you walk under and around the arch itself. The Old Courthouse is across the greenway from the arch and is the park’s other historic structure. It is most famous as the location where Dred Scott and his wife sued for their freedom from slavery in 1846. The building has a staged courtroom display and a beautiful rotunda with a three-story cast dome that was inspired by St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Arch Fun Facts An architectural competition was held to revive the St. Louis waterfront area in 1947. Eero Saarinen’s innovative and graceful design was chosen from 172 entries. However, it took 32 years of planning to work out the actual design plans because the curve was so complicated to calculate. He and his team had to figure out how to build the two sides separately so that they would meet exactly at the top. Oh, and by the way, the structure was too tall to use standard cranes! The arch is made up of 142 equilateral triangles made of stainless steel. There is concrete inside the arch for the first 300 feet and then the upper half is hollow. The rest of the arch depends on only the pressure between the inner and outer steel sides for support. Built to withstand earthquakes and high winds, the monument was designed to sway up to 18 inches. A Fun Visit Any day we can visit a national park is a great day. Gateway Arch National Park is sure to wow you not only with the structure itself, but also with the amazing skill of the designers and the story of its construction. You will also have a renewed sense of St. Louis’ importance and Thomas Jefferson’s role in opening the west and expanding our nation. This small park is an easy one day stop. Don’t forget to get your national park passport stamped before you leave!

Action Report: August/September 2008 How National Wildlife Federation is making a difference CONNECTING KIDS WITH NATURE NWF calls on caregivers and public leaders to promote outdoor play "Go outside and play" is a familiar phrase to many of us, but the simple truth is that most kids today aren't heeding this call. Studies show that U.S. children spend half as much time in nature as kids did 20 years ago. Outdoor recreation and exploration have been replaced by time spent indoors, tuned to electronic media. "When watching animal shows on TV becomes the closest many of today's kids get to the great outdoors, we risk the health of our children and endanger the prospect of developing future stewards of the natural world," says Larry Schweiger, NWF president and CEO. "That's why NWF will use its resources to encourage parents and caregivers to get kids to go outside and play and to ask policy makers to take action." In May, NWF published Connecting Today's Kids with Nature: A Policy Action Plan. The report offers information on so-called "nature deficit" and what causes it, as well as a list of solutions. Some of these include connecting kids to nature through environmental education, promoting outdoor play through public health systems and encouraging parents to build in regular time outdoors. NWF's Green Hour® website offers ideas for family fun. To further address nature deficit, NWF is partnering with Maryland, Colorado and other states to help draft policy reforms that encourage more effective environmental education. It's also part of a national coalition working to ensure that such education is included in the reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind law. To learn more, see Be Out There. ANNUAL MEETING: A TIME FOR ACTION Protecting public lands, connecting people with nature and helping wildlife survive global warming were the key issues discussed by representatives of NWF and its affiliate organizations at the Federation's 72nd annual meeting in May. These concerns were also reflected in the actions taken at the Keystone, Colorado, gathering. More than 200 attendees engaged in hands-on habitat restoration work. Volunteers planted hundreds of trees and removed a fence that blocked a key corridor for wildlife migration. The carbon emissions generated by participants' involvement in the meeting were also offset by sponsor NativeEnergy, a company that helps build renewable energy projects. Six new members were elected to the NWF board of directors: Shelley Cohen, senior project developer at Ameresco; John Grant, chief executive officer of 100 Black Men of Atlanta; Lois Quam, senior executive at Piper Jaffray; Jess Sixkiller, chairman of Native First Capital Markets Group; Gregory Smith, director of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wetlands Research Center; and Mark Winland, science educator and former Wyoming Wildlife Federation president. The board also welcomed NWF's newest affiliate, the Earth Conservation Corps of Washington, D.C., which offers environmental education and community service programs to people of all ages. For the past several years, NWF has been placing bear-proof dumpsters into western Montana's Selway-Bitterroot region and the corridors that link it to neighboring ecosystems. A goal of this project, which receives funding from the National Forest Foundation, is to reduce habituation of black bears to garbage, leading to a decrease in bear mortality and an increase in the number of bears that eat natural foods and display wild behaviors instead of human-habituated ones. NWF wildlife biologist Sterling Miller says the initiative will also benefit the eventual colonization of the Selway-Bitterroot area by grizzly bears dispersing naturally from adjacent areas where they already exist, regardless of whether the federal plan to reintroduce the carnivores, stalled for seven years, is adopted by the next administration. Grizzlies were eliminated from the Selway-Bitterroot roughly 75 years ago, but because huge swaths of acceptable habitat remain there, it is designated a recovery area. "Providing safe passage between the Bitterroot and other ecosystems is important for reasons beyond re-establishing extinct populations," says Miller. "Connectivity is also vital to avoiding genetic and other problems associated with isolation and small population size." Narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, The Great Warming is a dramatic film that uses footage from around the world to reveal how climate change is affecting the lives of ordinary people. A special NWF version of the film includes additional content produced by the Federation about global warming's impact on wildlife. See www.thegreatwarming.com. CHANGING THE FACE OF AMERICA'S ECOSYSTEMS New studies analyze the latest science to detail global warming's likely impacts As part of ongoing efforts to present the latest research about the impacts of global warming, NWF and its affiliates recently released three new reports: Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Habitats of the Chesapeake Bay maps the effects of projected sea-level rise on the nation's largest estuary, which sustains fisheries worth billions of dollars annually and thousands of species of plants and animals, including great blue herons. "We face the prospect of losing much of what we treasure about the bay--its beaches, wildlife and prized fishing--unless we prepare for sea-level rise by making it a major consideration in the region's coastal management and ecological restoration plans," says Patty Glick, NWF senior global warming specialist and lead author of the NWF study. See our Chesapeake section. Spring-run chinook salmon in the Golden State's Central Valley, already occupying less than 5 percent of their former range, could disappear entirely if waters used for spawning and rearing grow increasingly warm, says a report from NWF and the Planning and Conservation League Foundation, sister organization of NWF's California affiliate. On The Edge: Protecting California's Fish and Waterfowl from Global Warming presents a detailed analysis of peer-reviewed scientific data on the current impacts of rising temperatures and other climatic changes on habitat, fish and wildlife; the projected future impacts on the outdoor recreation industry; and the critical steps required to protect at-risk resources and traditions. Great Lakes Restoration and the Threat of Global Warming presents the likely impacts warming temperatures will have on the ecosystem--the world's largest source of surface freshwater--including lower lake levels, more sewage overflows and increased pressure to divert Great Lakes water. The report from the Healing Our Waters–Great Lakes Coalition (which is led by NWF and includes affiliates in the region) also provides recommendations for curbing global warming while at the same time preserving the resilience and adaptive capacity of the aquatic ecosystem. Chief among them is restoring the lakes through full funding and implementation of the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy, a comprehensive plan backed by the region's mayors, governors and congressional delegation. See . FACES OF NWF In the seven decades since it was founded, the National Wildlife Federation could not have achieved so much conservation success without the help of thousands of dedicated volunteers, members, state affiliate leaders and supporters from all across the country--people like those discussed below. To learn about how you can get involved, and to find links to state affiliates, visit . GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND FOR WILDLIFE Federation recognizes individuals for advancing conservation through exceptional service Maine attorney Peter Brann has donated more than 1,000 pro bono hours--his own and his associates'--to represent the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), an NWF affiliate, in an ongoing legal effort to force paper companies to reduce harmful runoff to the state's Androscoggin River. For that extraordinary contribution, Brann was honored as the 2008 Affiliate Volunteer of the Year. "In our 48-year history, NRCM has never had another person volunteer as much pro bono service to the organization," says Brownie Carson, executive director of the affiliate. "Over the past five years, Peter has devoted countless hours of daily work time, weekends, time away from his firm and family, and diligent energy to fight for protection of Maine's environment." Even now, after the paper companies were ordered by government authorities to release fewer pollutants into the river, Brann is not satisfied. "It was a good start, but it doesn't get us all the way down the line," he says. Habitat Stewards Dale and Pat Bulla of Austin, Texas, were named Community Volunteers of the Year. The retired educators urged the city to register as the state's first Community Wildlife Habitat. Their own yard boasts more than 220 plant species, 95 percent of which are native to the region. The Bullas "continue to acquire expertise in those areas that they are committed to, whether it be propagating native plants or promoting responsible development in their watershed," says Lacey McCormick, NWF communications manager for the Gulf States office. Since 2003, when Toni Stahl and Marc Apfelstadt first certified their Dublin, Ohio, yard as an NWF Backyard Wildlife Habitat™ site, the couple has regularly hosted public tours of their garden. They also make presentations in the community on a host of subjects, including the impacts of global warming on wildlife and habitat. In addition, Stahl posts region-specific wildlife habitat materials on the couple's website, . The two were named NWF Volunteers of the Year. "I have heard them described as super-activists, superstars of volunteering and just generally wonderful people," says NWF Great Lakes education program manager Rebecca Nielson.

- We can’t see learning, because it's a process. To know whether or not learning has happened, we look to the products and /or performances that learners construct (aka direct evidence of learning). - Gather data that: yield valid evidence of learning; align to focal questions; and inform decision-making. How will you know that students learned? Gather evidence of student learning Gather data that enable you to make "better or different decisions than what you might make without it" (Hubbard, 2014, as cited in Suskie, 2018, p. 150). Effective outcomes assessment efforts include multiple lines of evidence that faculty can act upon to improve academic programs, provide equitable opportunities for all students to learn, and improve student learning. When considering sources of evidence, keep the following suggestions in mind: - More evidence is not necessarily better. Think quality rather than quantity. - Collect evidence that aligns to the PLO(s) being assessed during the current cycle. Would you use a ruler to measure someone's weight? Most likely not. Similarly, it's important that the assessment data you collect provides valid evidence of student learning. Content validity refers to the degree to which an assessment instrument measures what it purports to measure. Just as a ruler yields invalid measures of weight, a test of basic vocabulary knowledge is not a valid measure of higher-order thinking skills. Consider the focus for this cycle of inquiry. What are you hoping to learn? Use the program assessment plan and curriculum matrix to identify potential sources of evidence. If the guiding question pertains to students' ability to remember or understand basic facts or concepts, draw data from courses in which PLOs are Introduced. For evidence of developing capacity to apply or analyze, look to courses in which PLOs are Reinforced. For evidence of students' ability to evaluate or create, look for courses in which the PLOs are Mastered. There is no one perfect assessment of learning. Therefore, "we must instead simply strive to make assessments sufficiently truthful that we will have reasonable confidence in the resulting evidence and can use it with confidence to make decisions about learning goals, curricula, and teaching strategies" (Suskie, 2018, p. 28)

In the first part of this series, Bits & Pieces took a closer look at LIN, or Local Interconnect Network for vehicles. The LIN bus standard, found within the latest automotive network architectures, is a low-cost, single-wire serial communication system for distributed electronics in cars and trucks. Essentially, LIN is highly suited for various body control applications, including power windows, mirrors, smart wipers, door locks, seat/roof/lighting control, lamps and indicators, dashboard instruments, steering wheels, climate and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems, motors, switch panels and sensors. As we discussed in part one of this series, Atmel offers a next-generation ATA6641/42 System Basis Chip (SBC) with an 8-channel high-voltage switch interface, a LIN2.1 and SAEJ2602-2-compliant LIN transceiver and lowdrop voltage regulator. In addition, the ATA6641/42 boasts an adjustable window watchdog, facilitating the development of inexpensive, low-end, but also powerful slave and master nodes for LIN bus systems meeting the latest OEM requirements. Two versions are available: the ATA6641 with a 3.3V voltage regulator and the ATA6642 with a 5V voltage regulator. Most features can be configured via the SPI – a 16-bit SPI interface that simplifies and accelerates configuration of the slave/master LIN node for any given application. As you can see below, Figure 3 shows a typical application using the ATA6641/42. “The ATA6641/41’s switch interface unit consists of 8 high-side current sources. They deliver a constant current level derived from a reference value measured at the IREF pin. This pin is voltage stabilized (VIREF = 1.23V typ.) so the reference current is directly dependent on an externally applied resistor connected between IREF pin and ground,” an Atmel engineering rep told Bits & Pieces. “The resulting current at the CSx pins is (1.23V/ RIref) x rICS. For example, with a 12K resistor between IREF and GND the value of the current at the CSx pins is 10mA (assumed IMUL = `0´ => rICS_H = 100). Fail-safe measures are able to detect both a missing as well as a short-circuited resistor. If a resistor is short-circuited, an internally generated reference current IIREFfs is used to maintain a basic level of functionality.” Each switch input boasts a high-voltage comparator, a statechange-detection register for wake-up, interrupt request generation and a voltage divider with a low-voltage output that can be fed through to the measurement pin VDIV. In terms of switch control, 8 high-voltage I/O ports form the heart of the ATA6641/42, making it exceptionally well suited for switch control applications with higher ESD requirements. These I/O ports allow highly flexible control of up to 8 single switches or a switch matrix or any combinations of both, as shown in figure 5, supplied by an internal current source of 5mA to 25mA. Three I/O ports can be configured either as current sources (e.g., for switches toward ground) or as current sinks (e.g., for switches toward battery); the other five pins have current sourcing capability only. The device’s flexible switch monitoring is controlled by the application’s microcontroller (MCU). The implemented state-change detection circuitry allows configuration of each input so that it triggers an interrupt upon state change even during low-power mode. Therefore the respective current source needs to be configured so that it is controlled via the CSPWM pin. A rising edge on this pin enables the current source and delivers a stable switch read-back signal at the CS pin; a falling edge updates the switch state. A change of state generates an interrupt request. If no wake-up should occur on a given switch—either because there is no application demand for this, or due to a failure, e.g., a hanging switch or a shorted connection line—wake-up can be prevented by disabling the current source in the SPI configuration register. If switches are placed outside and connected via a wiring harness to the ECU, complete diagnosis of short-circuits or cable breaks can be performed. Ports that are not used for switch detection can be switched off. The device also features a high-precision current source for multi-resistor coding, while the scan current through the switches can be chosen to be sufficiently high so that the current will clean the switches.

What are the 3 stages of the growth of the church? Churches Militant, Penitent, and Triumphant. What are the three stages of discipleship? Dave Early and Rod Dempsey define the three stages of discipleship as declaration, development and deployment. What are the three forms of oral tradition in the New Testament times? The the Apostles oral preaching took three forms. Kerygma: Preaching to unbelievers. Those who had no first hand knowledge of Jesus. Didache: Teaching. What was Jesus life? Although born in Bethlehem, according to Matthew and Luke, Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth, a village near Sepphoris, one of the two major cities of Galilee (Tiberias was the other). He was born to Joseph and Mary sometime between 6 bce and shortly before the death of Herod the Great (Matthew 2; Luke 1:5) in 4 bce. What are the three stages of Christianity? The development of the Gospels consisted of three stages: the first stage being the period of Jesus’ life, the second stage being the period of Oral Tradition and the third stage being the period of the Evangelists (16). What are the three stages of spiritual growth? Spiritual Growth and Progression This gradual growth generally involves three stages of development: the purgative stage, the illuminative stage, and the unitive stage. While these stages are not perfectly linear, they tend to mirror the stages of our human development: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. What are the 5 stages of Jesus life? The five major milestones in the New Testament narrative of the life of Jesus are his Baptism, Transfiguration, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension. How many steps are there of being a disciple of Jesus? The 5 Stages of Discipleship. Discipleship stages are stepping stones in process of furthering one’s walk with God. As people are discipled, they grow in their maturity and relationship with God. What is the beginning disciple? Disciple’s Path: The Beginning is an intentional Bible study for new disciples of Christ that can be used in multiple group sizes ranging from one-on-one to larger groups. What are the four stages of the Bible? Terms in this set (4) - stage one. actual historical events having to do with jesus. - stage 2. the period of oral tradition, the stories about jesus were passed down by word of mouth. - stage three. the period of written sourses. - stage 4. the writing of the gospels themselves. How many divisions are there in the Bible? The Bible is divided into two major divisions: The Old Testament and the New Testament. Who Wrote the Bible? According to both Jewish and Christian Dogma, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (the first five books of the Bible and the entirety of the Torah) were all written by Moses in about 1,300 B.C. There are a few issues with this, however, such as the lack of evidence that Moses ever existed … Did Jesus have a wife? “Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” King said in a press release. What was Jesus’s full name? Though his name may actually be Joshua, the name “Jesus” wasn’t born out of creativity but also translation. When Yeshua is translated into Greek, which the New Testament is derived from, it becomes Iēsous, which in English spelling is “Jesus.” What did Jesus do the last week of his life? Lent culminates in the last week of Jesus’s life, termed “Holy Week.” … After the Passover Supper, an occasion that came to be known by Christians as “the Last Supper,” Jesus went with his close disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, where he was arrested and then later tried and condemned to death.

Civil unrest incidents such as protests and riots are challenging terrorism as the main political risk exposure for companies. Recently, events such as the French “yellow vest” protests (insured losses around $90 million), as well as unrest in Chile (around $2 billion), Hong Kong ($77 million), Bolivia ($170 million) and Ecuador ($821 million) have highlighted the volatility of businesses to the impact of political risks and violence, causing both physical damage but also preventing many businesses from opening their doors. Almost 50 countries witnessed a surge in civil unrest in 2019, according to the Verisk Maplecroft Political Risk Outlook 2020. Notably, in 2020, racially charged riots in the wake of the death of George Floyd have challenged authorities to control crowds and protect property. Losses to businesses in at least 40 cities in 20 U.S. states may come close to being the most costly civil disorder in U.S. history. (The 1994 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles caused $1.42 billion in damages–in 2020 dollars, according to the Insurance Information Institute.) There will be numerous insurance claims from the recent protests–the vast majority of them property exposures with strikes, riots and civil commotion (SRCC) and looting insurance coverages. If one store is looted, there’s not a problem to get new windows, shelves and stock, but if many places are involved, it can take months for impacted businesses to resume trading. An individual business doesn’t have to be a direct victim of civil unrest or terrorism to suffer a loss. Businesses near such incidents can suffer lost revenues whether or not they incur physical damage, during the time the area is cordoned off or until the infrastructure can be repaired to allow entry of customers, vendors and suppliers. At the same time, companies can also be disrupted by a physical loss of attraction to a property in the vicinity of their premises. If there is a closure of an important landmark, hub or particular place where large numbers of people come together, a reduced number of visitors will result. While local triggers vary, there is one common global trigger: There must be a “spark” in order to mobilize crowds. In Hong Kong, it was the extradition bill; in France, the tax increase on fossil fuels; in Chile, a 4 percent increase in subway tickets; and in the U.S., it was the death of Floyd. Brazil and Ecuador both could see violence triggered by government mismanagement of the coronavirus. Exposures differ locally, also. Hong Kong protesters initially impacted properties connected to the local government or China, but later also high-end shopping malls and luxury brands, etc. (looting was never a problem). In Chile, protesters targeted public transportation as a starting point, but as underlying issues involved poverty and price increases of basic goods, looting of drug stores, pharmacies, small retailers and retail giant Walmart followed. Insured losses totaled as much as $2 billion, according to one estimate from Hiscox. How are political violence risks impacting insurance and claims? Political violence insurance provides coverage for terrorist acts, acts of sabotage, SRCC, malicious damage (MD), insurrection, revolution, rebellion, coup d’état, war, civil war or counter-insurgency. Additionally, common extensions include denial of access (businesses shuttered because authorities have closed the area, whether damaged or not), loss of attraction (if an important landmark near to the business is closed, fewer visitors will result) and other civil disturbances. Standalone SRCC and malicious damage (MD) insurance typically will cover property loss and damage and potential business interruption (BI) due to the actions of the protestors. In comparison, standard property all-risk policies (PAR) typically exclude loss or damage directly or indirectly caused by the actions of the government of a state or its military authority in suppressing, controlling or minimizing the consequences of SRCC or MD events. SRCC coverage has become more prominent in the insurance market since the “yellow vest” protests began in Paris in late 2018 and particularly following the riots in Chile, given the magnitude of the losses. In the wake of the U.S. riots, the trend of the PAR market taking a tougher stance on SRCC exposure will likely accelerate and capacities will likely move from PAR to the specialist political violence insurance markets.

Most people have a view on climate change and most accept the science that says it is an ever-present threat to our world and way of life. When you ask people they will tell you about the threat of deforestation or rising sea levels or concerns about the permanent loss of wildlife habitats. School children will tell you about changes to the Gulf Stream or the loss of living coral in the Great Barrier Reef. People think of food shortages, drought and hurricanes. They have in their minds the plains of central Africa, lone polar bears isolated on shrinking ice floes or the blue seas around the Maldives. What they might not be thinking about is the effect on power stations in the Trent Valley or wind farms in Argyll. But electricity is vital for the economy, for critical services and for the everyday necessities of life. Everyone depends on secure energy supplies that can provide homes and businesses with the power they need, precisely when they need it. So, the UK needs to continue to invest to ensure we prepare for the worst case scenarios. That is part of the motivation behind the Government’s need to understand how well prepared the UK would be in the event of serious changes to our climate and weather patterns – changes which could bring more severe rainfall or higher winds or even colder weather if the protecting Atlantic flows no longer buffer the British Isles. Electricity generators have been working to audit, review and improve their own plant and processes. A great deal of work has gone into making Britain’s energy system as robust as it can be and that work has led to a reduction in risk since the power sector first reported on adaptation to climate change in 2011; you can read more about it here. But, although we can be confident in the ability of our power stations to withstand climate challenges, the industry can never be complacent. Energy UK and its members are continuing to work with other interest groups to make sure we can continue to withstand everything the British weather can throw at us.

We cannot achieve our climate ambition alone. Only about 2% of the borough's emissions are in our direct control. For the rest, we are reliant on the choices and actions of individuals, organisations and businesses. Among other things, we need people to buy and sell sustainable goods and services, to create less waste, to switch to low carbon energy, and to stop using petrol and diesel vehicles by moving towards sustainable modes of transport. The following sections set out some of the key steps you can take to help Merton become a net-zero carbon borough. Step 1 - Get informed There is a wealth of information available about what changes you can make to help combat climate change. As a starting point, you can visit the following pages to find out more about what the action plan says, and what you can do to help: You can find out more about your carbon footprint and what you can do to reduce your emissions by checking out sites like the WWF's calculator. The Carbon Trust has also developed a carbon footprint calculator for small and medium-sized businesses. Follow our Climate Emergency web page for the latest news and sign up here if you would like to receive our climate change updates. Step 2 - Take up the challenge Can you make changes in your home, your work, your travel, your purchases or your connection with others that will help? Small actions make a big difference when everyone is involved. Check out this months Climate Change Pledges for ideas on how you can take action. Step 3 - Join with community action Many local groups are working to make changes for the better in Merton and reduce carbon emissions. - Join Merton's Climate Action Group. - Join a local community group - check out what Sustainable Merton are up to and become one of their Community Champions. You can also find out more about voluntary services in Merton. Step 4 - Help spread the word In order to become a net-zero carbon borough, everyone working or living in Merton is going to need to play their part. You can help spread the word and get your friends, family and co-workers to take action by singing up to the Climate Change Pledges.

WM minister, born at Newton farmhouse, Cuby, near Tregony, Cornwall on 25 November 1771. He was President of the Conference in 1833. Despite a limited education, by dedicated application became an able scholar and took up the role of disputant in an era when the Methodist case often needed arguing. Many of his pamphlets, biographies and theological works continued in print after his death. His published sermons, while orthodox and logical in presentation, were dry and formal - 'entirely lacking in the note of joy' according to a writer in the WM Magazinein 1923. He was an able administrator, becoming the youngest Circuit Superintendent in Cornwall at the age of 29. Subsequently he rarely held a Superintendency without also being District Chairman. In 1831 he served briefly as Joint House Governor at Woodhouse Grove School, although not with great success. His later appointment as House Governor at Hoxton Theological Institution, 1838, was more suited to his talents, though his health forced him to retire in 1841. Although his (largely unpublished) journal is narrowly Methodist, it is none the less a mirror of the life and affairs of a WM preacher during the period 1802-1809: his preaching, administration of Methodist discipline, his journeying to and from Conference and many aspects of daily life. His disputational skills were honed in Cornwall. After a humbling experience in Helston in 1801 of having to obtain a Dissenter's preaching licence under Anglican pressure, he laid aside his residual sympathy for the Church to engage in vigorous debate when necessary. At the time of the great revival in West Cornwall in 1813-1814, when he was stationed in Penzance, the Rev. C. Val le Grice, Perpetual Curate at St. Mary's chapel, published a sermon attacking the mode of expression common in contemporary WM revivals, and arguing, in particular, that direct inspiration had ceased with the Apostles. In his pamphlet reply Treffry cited Tertullian, Justin Martyr and Cyprian. In 1817, when the Rector of Falmouth published a pamphlet refusing burial to the Methodist-baptized, Treffry's counter-arguments called on legal precedents to show him to be mistaken. Later disputing was directed against the reform movements in Methodism: he was a convinced Wesleyan, but always with a strong pastoral sensitivity. As early as 1803, in the face of Dr. William Boase's reforming schism,. he had acted, though without success, to seek moderation. But his Journal reveals his strong commitment to the WM concept of the Pastoral Office. He embodied it in his Church Member's Catechism, and stood by it especially in Leeds in 1829, where the Protestant Methodists had their stronghold. (His move to Leeds East Circuit was probably deliberate.) At the time of the WMA reforms in 1834, the baton was being taken up by his son, Richard junior. Later in life, his ministerial salary of £40 was raised to £74 p.a. by private income from property. He was married three times. His two sons, Thomas (b.1802) and Richard (see below) were by this marriage. He retired to Maidenhead, his third wife's home, in 1841, died at Cookham on 19 September 1842 and was buried in the forecourt of Wesley's Chapel, London.Camelford on 30 November 1804. He was never a healthy child and ill health forced his retirement from the itinerancy in 1831. Yet during his short ministry he showed great promise as a historian, biographer - including a Memoir of his mother - and theologian. During his enforced retirement at Penzance he became a 'defender of the faith', preparing for instance on the instruction of Conference a defence of the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship of Christ. When the WMA reform agitation arose in 1834, he managed to get to the District Synod and there formulated the agreed District Statement which was a model of balance and WM orthodoxy. At his father's request he wrote a reasoned defence of Ministerial Power in the Excision of Unworthy Members of the Church (1835) which, like his father's journal, reflects and supports the predominant WM view of the pastoral office. He died at Penzance on 20 January 1838. Benjamin Gregory, Autobiographical Recollections (1903) p.102

The relationships that interest me are both biological and aesthetic, ecological in the broadest sense: interactions between living things and the physical environment, which includes rock, water, and ambient light. —Eliot Porter, Eliot Porter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 47. Eliot Porter (1901–90) pioneered contemporary color nature photography. Prior to making photography his professional focus, Porter earned undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard, then worked in microbiology, biochemistry, bacteriology, and biophysics as a researcher and teacher, while doing camera work on the side. After encouragement and a show at An American Place (photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s last gallery in New York City), and backed by his family, he left medicine to devote his artistic life to photography. Porter’s childhood summers spent exploring Great Spruce Head Island and other nearby islands in Maine’s Penobscot Bay first inspired him to seek out other unspoiled places as an adult. “Our lives there, my brothers’ and sister’s and mine, were from the first determined by the sea. High tide was the time to swim, and low tide the time to explore the shore,” he wrote. The Island was, as his son Stephen emphasizes, “one of the great influences of his life.” In scenes of the woodlands on his Maine island, Eliot Porter’s photographs imply permanence, but these places have been altered over time. As a naturalist and artist, as a technician and biologist, he knew the underlying forces that created what he was looking at. He understood cellular and crystalline networks, surface tensions, chemical, mechanical and evolutionary changes causing structural and optical nuances. His photography emphasized the beauty of the complex and abstract pattern resulting from these larger forces. Many of his photos prompt a looking at detail and pattern that emerge from his depictions of close-ups of small worlds that we might trod upon on a casual woodland stroll. While his career is linked to artistry, and he is a guide to noticing details of sometimes hidden realms, and to relationships between features within a microcosm, his work has led us to consider broader concepts of interconnections between regional, continental, global environments—their effects upon one another and humankind’s impacts overall. Many of us know his color photographs by way of large-format books, first published by the Sierra Club in the 1960s, and over the decades by several other publishers. He described places he explored on every continent, including Antarctica, through thirty books of unforgettable prose and imagery. A broader perspective emerges through these essays and photos built of impressions of beauty. In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, his first collaboration with the Sierra Club, was closely associated with the mid-twentieth-century conservation movement, published soon after Rachel Carson’s revelations of the harm wrought by dependence upon pesticides in her book, Silent Spring. In the preface to In Wildness, Porter wrote that through his photographs paired with passages from writing by Henry David Thoreau, “I hoped to be able to complement in feeling and spirit Thoreau’s thinking one hundred years ago, and to show the peril we face even more today by our ever faster destruction of life not our own.” During the 1950s plans were made to harness water from the upper Colorado River for irrigation projects for ranchers in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming; and for dams to provide water storage and release downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada. While some dam projects were dropped due to political pressure from conservation groups, Glen Canyon Dam, which began construction in 1957, was not. The damming of the Colorado created Lake Powell, which began filling on March 13, 1963 and completed filling on June 22, 1980 to 26 million acre-feet of water at storage capacity. When, in collaboration with a second book with the Sierra Club, Porter compiled his photographs along the Colorado River through Glen Canyon as The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado, copies of the book were sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and every member of Congress, with a plea not to implement the Glen Canyon Dam and thereby inundate the canyon. The project associated with the book intensified Porter’s advocacy for the legacy of the wilderness. Working with a 2 ¼-inch camera while rafting and a 4 x 5-inch camera on land, Porter portrayed the canyon’s rock faces, water, and plants in one thousand images captured during his eleven trips to the area. His photographs suggest traces of molten, liquid beginnings of a geological past, exceeding their documentary value in revealing to the public the canyon’s forms and surfaces of abstract patterns of water, rock, and light—through an array of detail, the intrinsic beauty that was lost. In a CBS Sunday Morning interview in 1988 Porter stated that he never would have been a good photographer had he gone out to photograph for the sake of a cause. Rather, his images are reflections of curiosity and delight in the beauty of places where he found himself. They are photographic records of discovery—of splendor amid complexity—and they continue to resonate, some with a certain poignancy, as they suggest what should be treasured, what must be preserved, that which could be, or has been lost. In February this year we learned of several instances of record temperatures in various areas of Antarctica, brought to the fore by compelling Landsat 8 photos centering on Eagle Island, part of the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that stretches toward South America. The NASA satellite took dramatic images of disappearing ice cover that revealed underlying rock faces in a span of only nine days, between February 4th and 13th. Two days after the first photo was taken, the area hit 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit—matching that day’s temperature in Los Angeles. NASA noted that increasingly frequent warm spells during Antarctica’s summers have caused widespread and more common glacial melting not typical until this twenty-first century. Forty-five years after Porter took a series of breathtakingly majestic photographs of an icy blue continent, we are told that its northwest tip is among the fastest warming regions of the planet. Last fall, I visited Great Spruce Head Island where members of the Porter family continue to summer. Soon after that visit, I learned that the journal Science had published the findings of a fifty-year study of 529 bird species by seven international institutions; a later analysis of that investigation concluded that on the North American continent alone the bird population has diminished by an unprecedented scale of nearly three billion in half a century. Though he would likely be horrified to know of the scale of their decline, as he was making groundbreaking photographs of nesting songbirds, Eliot Porter was becoming aware of their disappearing numbers even in his lifetime, even in Maine.

Support for Special Education – An Essay Since the 1960s parents and professionals have been working to find appropriate wording for individuals that struggle more than others in school. At first they were referred to as minimally brain injured but that did not fit because they did not have an actual brain injury. Then they tried exploring the possibility of defining them as a slow learner but often times the individual only struggled in one area in school and not another. They tried out Dyslexia to cover all learning disorders but that really only refers to a reading problem. They finally concluded with the term Learning Disabilities. From this came the “Association for Children with Learning Disabilities”. This association was solely parent based until a few years after it was created was it recognized by teachers and the federal government. In 1975 was when the federal government first defined Learning Disabilities, revising it in 1997, and then reauthorizing it again in 2004 with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The federal definition of Learning Disabilities states that “The term “specific learning disability” means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or do mathematical calculations” (p.117 Exceptional Learners and introduction to Special Education). This term includes “perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia” (p.117 Exceptional Learners and introduction to Special Education). The definition does not include disorders that are a result from something else like vision, hearing, motor skills impairment, diagnosis of mental retardation or an emotional disturbance, or those suffering from disadvantages environmentally, economically, or culturally. In other words, the federal government defines learning disabilities as that the individual struggles in one or more areas such as comprehension verbally or written, expressing one’s self verbally, or mathematical equations. It does not take into consideration those already diagnosed with a disability, it only includes perceptual disabilities, those whose brains are functioning on a low level, have an injury to the brain, struggle with dyslexia or developmental aphasia.

A new initiative to encourage more young people to take up IT and science courses has been launched at the Central Foundation Girls School (CFGS) in Tower Hamlets. The scheme, led by e-skills UK in partnership with IBM, Cisco, RIM (manufacturers of Blackberry), Facebook and the Metropolitan Police Service, was unveiled by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science. The aim of the programme, called ‘Behind the Screen’, is to establish a new academic curriculum, where GCSEs and A Levels cover computational principles, systemic thinking, software development and logic. Karen Price, CEO of e-skills UK, said: “Young people are digital natives yet experience shows that they are being turned off IT study and IT careers in the classroom. For example, applicants to computer-related degrees have declined by 44 per cent since 2001. Our goal is to place IT at the spearhead for a new model of academia/industry partnership in schools, and create a new generation of technologists who invent, innovate, and become the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.” Stephen Leonard, chief executive of IBM UK & Ireland and an e-Skills UK board member, added: “We are long overdue a completely new approach to teaching IT as a subject. With our work, we will make IT inspiring to young people and put the UK on the world stage in educating the technologists of the future. We are putting the weight of industry behind a transformation in education, working with schools and universities to create courses of academic substance and industry relevance.” CFGS is also leading the drive to get more schools in the area linked with the tech giants and improve results in science and maths. Speaking to the East London Advertiser, Mr Willetts said: “It is crucial for young people to have the skills to bid for decent tech jobs. Technology and digital companies will play a central role in securing our economic future.” However, the scheme has come under criticism. Mark Taylor, chief executive of Sirius IT, an open-source company, said the scheme favoured proprietary technologies and promoted the marketing aims of North American technology giants. In an interview with ZDNet UK, he said: “Of course we should encourage young people in the UK to choose technology as a career path, but we should be training them using principles, not products, with full access to actual workings through open source, not black boxes with proprietary (software). “If the government were serious about the UK having its own tech industry, it would promote open and home-grown, not train yet another generation to use products built elsewhere.” Social networking site Facebook has already launched a course at CFGS in collaboration with Apps for Good, an organisation that aims to encourage young people to use technology to tackle problems for social good. Mohima Ahmed, 16, is one of the girls in the first group of 14-17 year olds currently using Apps for Good. She said: “Our app is an English-to-Bengali translator, which is aimed at helping with parent-to-teacher conferences. It’s quite basic at the moment, carrying a stock range of phrases, but we are hoping to expand on it. “We are really pleased with it as the brief was to design an app with a community benefit. Living in Tower Hamlets as the children of first-generation Bengali immigrants many who don’t have good English, there is a real need for it and it addresses a real problem. Making the apps has also been really good for helping our confidence.” A spokesman for Apps for Good said: “Initiatives like the Facebook Apps for Good course are good for young people as it allows them to gain skills which can be used in the technology sector, while solving problems. Apps for Good believes that young people need to be given a chance, learning how to create Facebook applications will have a positive impact on their chosen careers.” A pilot scheme that will help test a new GCSE concept will be run from November this year through to June 2012 involving 20 schools, 100 students and a group of teachers who have volunteered to take part in the trial.

Newswise — Yes, it’s not common. Breast cancer among women under 40 is rare. No matter the age, a cancer diagnosis causes anxiety and fear. In addition, women in their 20s and 30s face some unique challenges and daunting decisions. Deciding what type of surgery to have is one of them. Depending on the type of cancer, the options range from removing the tumor within the breast (lumpectomy) to removing one or both breasts (mastectomy or double mastectomy). Although age does not greatly affect breast cancer treatment, it may play a role in the choice of treatment options. A recent study shows that women under 40 often choose aggressive surgery options out of fear the cancer will come back or appear in the other breast. When deciding between a lumpectomy or a mastectomy, young women with early stage breast cancer often choose to have the breast with cancer, as well as the healthy breast, removed to prevent new cancer from developing in the healthy breast. But studies show that removing the healthy breast doesn’t improve survival rates because the majority of breast cancer survivors will not develop a new breast cancer in the other breast. (Exceptions could include women with a known genetic predisposition to breast cancer.) “It’s understandable why women would want to remove the healthy breast—out of concern that a second breast cancer might develop in that breast,” said Ted James, MD, Chief of Breast Surgery and Co-Director of the BreastCare Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). “However, studies have found that some women who have chosen a mastectomy or contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (removal of the other healthy, non-cancerous breast) have lower rates of satisfaction with the appearance of their breast, their sex lives and their psychosocial well-being.” James recommends that patients have an open discussion with their physicians so that patients can make an informed decision. “Every woman with breast cancer will experience changes to her body and to her appearance,” James said. “Many of these changes are necessary to treat the cancer. We want to ensure, though, that patients are making a decision regarding surgery that will benefit both their physical and emotional health. We pay special attention to this at the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Program at BIDMC.” When it comes to breast surgery, newer techniques—those that don’t visibly show a scar—can help to improve a woman’s psychological and emotional recovery and quality of life after surgery. “Hidden scar” surgery, for example, allows a surgeon to make an incision under the breast, along the border of the areola or along a crease in the armpit so that when the incision has healed, the scar is not visible. “It is truly a win-win,” says James, who is highly skilled in the hidden scar technique. “Not having an incision that is a visible daily reminder of the experience you went through has tremendous benefit in terms of getting back to your normal routine.” According to James, women undergoing the hidden scar approach do not have a higher risk of the cancer recurring than patients who undergo other types of surgeries. While research has revealed that reconstruction immediately after mastectomy improves a woman’s psychological well-being and quality of life, some women can still go through a grieving period after surgery because of what the breast represented to them. “At the Young Women’s Cancer Program at BIDMC, our staff, including social workers, is dedicated to supporting women during these challenging times,” said James. “But ultimately, breast reconstruction is not a requirement--it’s a personal decision. We support our patients no matter what their choice, and give them all of the necessary information so they can make a decision that’s right for them.”

What is fibromyalgia? Fibromyalgia is a long-lasting disorder that causes pain and tenderness throughout the body. It also can cause you to feel overly tired (fatigue) and have trouble sleeping. Doctors do not fully understand what causes fibromyalgia, but people with the disorder are more sensitive to pain. What is reactive arthritis? Reactive arthritis happens when an infection causes joint pain and swelling. A bacterial infection in the digestive or urinary tract or the genitals usually triggers the condition, but arthritis symptoms typically do not start until a few weeks after you have recovered from the infection. The most common features of reactive arthritis are inflammation of the joints (especially the knees and ankles), eyes, and urinary tract, but not everyone gets all three, or they might not happen at the same time. What is epidermolysis bullosa? Epidermolysis bullosa is a group of rare diseases that cause fragile skin that leads to blisters and tearing. Tears, sores, and blisters in the skin happen when something rubs or bumps the skin. They can appear anywhere on the body. In severe cases, blisters may also develop inside the body. The symptoms of the disease usually begin at birth or during infancy and range from mild to severe. What is Marfan syndrome? Marfan syndrome is a genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to make healthy connective tissue, which supports the bones, muscles, organs, and tissues in your body. The condition can affect different areas of the body, including: Bones, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage. Organs, such as the heart and lungs. Skin. What is psoriatic arthritis? Psoriatic arthritis is a condition that causes swelling and pain in joints and the places where tendons and ligaments attach to bones. Most people who develop psoriatic arthritis already have psoriasis (a skin disease), but a small number have joint pain before the skin rash. What are autoinflammatory diseases? Autoinflammatory diseases refer to problems with the immune system, which usually fights off viruses, bacteria, and infection. The problem causes your immune cells to attack your body by mistake. This can cause swelling that produces fever, rash, joint swelling, or serious buildup of a blood protein in your organs.

Statistics show rise in industrial profits Profit growth by China's industrial firms picked up significantly in the first nine months of this year, a clear indication that the country's fixed asset investment and raw materials prices might further rebound. The National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday that the country's industrial companies earned 808.8 billion yuan (US$97.4 billion) in profits in the first nine months of this year, a year-on-year increase of 39.8 per cent. The growth rate was 1.3 percentage points higher than that for the first eight months of the year. Zhang Xueying, a senior economist with the State Information Centre, said the recovery in industrial firms' profit growth was mainly because of the rebound in fixed asset investment and raw materials prices. Fixed asset investment grew a year-on-year 18.3 per cent in May, due to the central government's measures to cool down the economy. But it has started to rebound since then, to more than 30 per cent in July. The statistics bureau did not release monthly fixed asset investment figures for August and September. Zhu Jianfang, an economist at the Beijing-based China Securities, said the rebound in fixed asset investment was a result of the government's recent policy changes. "While continuing to curb investment in red-hot sectors such as cement and steel, the government has increased investment in bottle-neck sectors such as energy and transportation," he said. China's fixed asset investment grew rapidly since the second half of last year. It rose to 53 per cent during the first two months. The government is concerned that excessive growth in some sectors and areas could have a serious impact on the economy. As a result, the government has taken a raft of measures to try to cool the economy. "The government should be alert of a further rebound in fixed asset investment," Zhang said. Niu Li, another economist at the State Information Centre, said the government should also be alert to further price rises, because the price pressure was already very big. "While food prices remain at a higher level, the international oil prices rise rapidly," he said. The international oil prices rose to more than US$55 per barrel during the past several days. "There are also signs that the raw material prices may be rebounded," he said. The price rise would have a certain negative impact on ordinary people's lives, Niu said. Chinese people have already suffered a negative interest rate. "The negative interest rate would result in people's lower expectations for the future," said economist Qi Jingmei from the information centre. The negative interest rate also leads to a decline in bank deposits, she said. "This will make their purchasing power drop." "Some low-income families have even begun to worry whether their incomes are able to meet the basic needs for food and clothing," Qi said. "Their health could also be at risk, because they will buy the cheapest products and not pay much attention to the quality of food." Qi added that the impact of the price rise was greater in rural areas. Although farmers' per capita cash income rose 11.4 per cent year-on-year during the first three quarters of 2004, retail sales in rural areas grew only 9.9 per cent. The growth rate was 4.7 percentage points lower than in urban areas.

The observatory is principally dedicated to imaging the planets, including the Moon, but some work on comets and minor planets and some deep-sky imaging is also done. The light-polluted location means that imaging of faint objects is difficult, particularly in broad wavelength bands, but not impossible. Observing meetings of the West of London Astronomical Society are held at the Stag Lane Observatory regularly. Results are shared mainly through the observing sections of the British Astronomical Association, the principal organistion for amateur astronomy in the UK, and the websites of the Japanese Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers and the Oriental Astronomical Society Mars Section. Images of Jupiter are used in the international Jupiter feature-measuring programme JUPOS, through which the long term behaviour of Jupiter’s atmospheric features are tracked. Images have featured in The Sky at Night TV programme, Astronomy Now, Practical Astronomer and The Sky at Night magazines, as well as the Journal of the BAA.

Did You Know? A twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU), a container, a box - no matter what you call it, it is the most efficient way to move cargo overseas. As Marc Levinson notes in his book The Box, it has “made the world smaller and the world economy bigger,” allowing cargo to flow freely and economies to become international players. The standard TEU is 20 feet long by eight feet high, made of heavy duty, weather and corrosion-resistant steel running vertically, with two doors on its side. When empty, it can weigh 2.24 metric tons and loaded up to 26 metric tons. Port Houston is continuing to focus on improving infrastructure at its terminals. As the largest port in the Gulf and the sixth largest container port in the U.S., Port Houston knows the importance of keeping ahead of demand to meet the changing needs of vessels, businesses, and the overall supply chain. It takes a lot of hands to move cargo across Port Houston’s docks, including the maintenance staff, who support Port Houston’s equipment and assets. One of the essential Port employees working on the front lines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is Quintin Reynolds, a maintenance foreman at the Barbours Cut Container Terminal, who recently received recognition for 45 years of service at Port Houston.

Do you have ankle pain? This video demonstrates the anatomy of the ankle and briefly explains how the ankle works, how the ankle can get injured and what physiotherapy can do to help your ankle move and feel better. Hi, this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy. And today I want to talk to you about the ankle. Now, many of us have had ankle sprains or injuries with growing up sometimes and maybe a little ankle fracture that healed quickly, but the ankle itself is actually quite complex joint. So I have the bones in front of me here to kind of show you what they look like. So we can look a little bit about the anatomy of the ankle joint. Because we kind of think it’s straight, simple, and it just bends back and forth. However, there’s multiple joints that make that complex up. So as you can see, this is like the femur and the thighbone. We have the ankle underneath it. And there’s a joint at the bottom of these two lower leg bones, the tibia and fibula right here, that sort of forms the groove of the ankle joint. And this was called the Inferior tibia-fibular, til fib joint and it joins into the main part of the ankle joint called the talo-crural joint. And this is often where we can get trauma, some arthritic change, injury when we sprain our ankle. So if you end up having a sprain, you can sometimes butt up the joint a little bit and get an injury to the cartilage.

LIFE OF WILLIAM WILKIE, BY MR. CHALMERS. WILLIAM WILKIE was born in the parish of Dalmeny, in the county of West Lothian, on the 5th of October, 1721. His father, although a small farmer, and poor and unfortunate, endeavoured to give him a liberal education, which he appears to have improved by diligence. In the ninth volume of Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland, are some verses said to have been written by him in his tenth year. Dr. Gleig, who has inserted a very candid life of Wilkie in the Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica, doubts the probability of this report, as the verses contain more knowledge of electricity than had then been acquired either by boys or men. A very few of these verses will, however, convince the reader, that Wilkie is not to be ranked among les enfars celebres. What penetrating mind can rightly form faint idea of a raging storm? Yet I'll begin, to show I want not will, &c. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to the university of Edinburgh, where he was soon distinguished for originality of thought, and rapid progress in learning. Among his associates here, we have the names of Robertson, Home (the dramatic poet), Hume, Ferguson, and Adam Smith. With these he continued in habits of friendship and correspondence for many years; but I know not whether it will be accounted a proof of his judgment, that he considered Adam Smith as excelling Hume and Robertson in the powers of invention. Before he completed his education, his father died, leaving him no other inherit. ance than his small farm, and the care of three sisters. Necessity thus turned his attention to the study of agriculture, which he cultivated with so much success, although upon a confined scale, that he acquired a solid reputation as a practical farmer, and was enabled to provide for himself and his sisters. He still, however, prosecuted his studies, and at the accustomed period was admitted a preacher in the church of Scotland. For some years this made no alteration in his mode of life. Being admitted a preacher not implying, as in England, the cure of souls, he had only to exercise his ministerial office occasionally for the clergymen in his neighbourhood, and could "employ the principal part of his time on his farm and his studies. He appears to have been early ambitious of the character of a poet, and having read Homer, as Don Quixote read romances, he determined to sally forth as his rival, or continuator; and this enthusiasm produced the Epigoniad, published in 1753. On this poem he is said to have employed fourteen years, which ill agrees with what his biographers tell us of his propensity to poetry, and the original vigour of his mind, for it appeared with all the imperfections of a rough sketch. It is more probable that he wrote by snatches as he found time and inclination, and had perhaps long finished the work before he ventured to publish it. Its reception by the English public was not very flattering, but in his own country the Epigoniad succeeded so well, that a second edition was called for in 1759, to which he added a dream in the manner of Spenser. A few years before this, he was ordained minister of Ratho, in consequence of a presentation from the late earl of Lauderdale, who knew his worth, and admired his genius. By an assiduous attention to the public and private duties of his sacred function, we are told, he became popular and useful. Yet it is difficult to conceive how a clergyman could preserve the reverence due to his character or office, « who generally preached with his hat ou his head, and often forgot to pronounce the blessing after public service: and who has been seen to dispense the sacrament without consecrating the elements.” Such indecent negligence cannot surely be excused on the plea of absence of mind, allowable enough in the common intercourse of life, 'but which in the present case implies a careless abstraction of mind from that which ought to have occupied it entirely. In 1759, he was chosen professor of natural philosophy in the university of St. Andrews, a proof that he had acquired a character for higher attainments than are discoverable in the Epigoniad. When he removed to St. Andrews, his whole for. tune did not exceed two hundred pounds, with which he purchased a few acres of land in the neighbourhood of the city, and cultivated them with his usual judgment, still continuing to maintain his sisters, whom he brought from Ratho to reside with him. As a teacher, he is said to have displayed great knowledge of science, with an easy and familiar mode of demonstration which fixed the regard as well as the attention of his scholars'. In 1766, the university conferred upon him the degree of Doctor in Divinity. Travels in Scotland, by the Rev. James Hall, vol. i. p. 131, et seq.-C. thoughts, if not always original, are yet sprightly and just. After a lingering ill. ness, he died Oct. 10, 1772. The character of Dr. Wilkie appears to have been distinguished for those sin. gularities which are sometimes found in men of genius, either from early indulgence or affectation. His biographers have multiplied instances of his disgusting manners, which it would have been more prudent to bury in oblivion, as the rea. der of such tales is too apt to imagine that what was only occasional must have been uniform. He is said to have died worth £3000, accumulated by penurious living; but those who knew him more intimately have vindicated his character in this respect. Much of his life was spent in poverty, and a strong sense of the value of independ. ence induced him to become saving, as soon as he could spare any thing from his. immediate wants and the necessity of his sisters, for whom he appears to have pro. vided with all the affectionate concern of a parent. By avoiding the expenses of hospitality, in a hospitable country, he incurred the suspicion of avarice; but he was known to be liberal to the poor, and ought not to be blamed if he preferred the silent dictates of his heart to the ostentatious fashion of society. His learning, according to every account, was extensive, and much of it acquired at a very early age. His conversation was enriched by original sentiments, deliver. ed in a bold, and sometimes coarse manner: and there were few good judges who did not leave his company impressed with a high opinion of his talents. He must have been indeed an extraordinary man, who could preserve the respect of his contemporaries and of his scholars, notwithstanding such indelicate and disgusting habits, as we read of in the life of no other man. Some men have been slovenly from negligence, but Wilkie, where he had a choice, is said to have given a decided preference to what was dirty. When the Epigoniad made its appearance, it was attacked by the Monthly and Critical Reviewers with apparent severity ; but the extracts and specimens by which they confirmed their opinions, satisfied the public that they had examined the poem with impartiality, and decided with justice. It would, therefore, have probably sunk into oblivion, had not the sale in Scotland exhausted the first edition, and encouraged the author to publish a second, in which he made a few alterations, chiefly in the versification. Yet as the principal objections remained in full force, this would have contributed little to extend our author's fame; and the new edition was but slowly called for, when an extraordinary appeal from the general opinion was preferred by the celebrated Mr. Hume, who wrote a very long encomium on the Epigoniad, addressed to the editor of the Critical Review, and published in the seventh volume of that journal. As I have nothing to oppose to the neglect with which Wilkie's poems have been treated, I hope I shall be pardoned for inserting Mr. Hume's very elaborate criticism, whatever effect it may produce. The analysis hegives of the fable may at least assist the readers of the Epigoniad. As to the very high praise he bestows, those who knew Mr. Hume's taste, friendship, or sincerity, will be best enabled to determine whether he is serious. pcnetration, are sensible of its merit. We take up the book with prepossession, pe. ruse it carelessly, are feebly affected by its beauties, and lay it down with neglect, perhaps with disapprobation. 6. The public has done so much justice to the gentlemen engaged in the Critical Review, as to acknowledge that no literary journal was ever carried on in this country with equal spirit and impartiality: yet, I must confess that an article pube lished in your Review of 1757, gav me great surprise, and not a little uneasiness. It regarded a book called the Epigoniad, a poem of the epic kind, which was at that time published with great applause at Edinburgh, and of which a few copies had been sent up to London. The author of that article had surely been lying un. der strong prepossessions, when he spoke so negligently of a work which abounds in such sublime beauties, and could endeavour to discredit a poem, consisting of near six thousand lines, on account of a few mistakes in expression and prosody, proceeding entirely from the author's being a Scotchman, who had never been out of his own country. As there is a new edition published of this poem, wherein all or most of these trivial mistakes are corrected, I flatter myself that you will gladly lay hold of this opportunity of retracting your oversight, and doing justice to a performance, which may, perhaps, be regarded as one of the ornaments of our language. I appeal from your sentence, as an old woman did from a sentence pronounced by Philip of Macedon :- I appeal from Philip, ill.connselled and in a hurry, to Philip, well-advised, and judging with deliberation. The authority which you possess with the public makes your censure fall with weight: and I question not but you will be the more ready, on that account, to redress any injury into which either negligence, prejudice, or mistake, may have betrayed yon. As I profess myself to be an admirer of this performance, it will afford me pleasure to give you a short analysis of it, and to collect a few specimens of these great beau. ties in which it abounds. 66 The author, who appears throughout his whole work to be a great admirer and imitator of Homer, drew the subject of this poem from the fourth Iliad, where

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI / KIDK) – The Idaho Falls school district began registering for a new D91 online academy on Monday. With the support of the district and nationally recognized online educators, the program partners with the Florida Virtual School for K-6 students. Students in Grades 7 to 12 can partner with the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance, which has been teaching Idaho students for over 20 years. Students must enroll in the D91 Online Academy for the entire term. It is designed as a one-year program, but is offered with some flexibility so that students can transfer to a traditional school at the start or end of each term. The school district provided the following information on each program: D91 Online Academy for Kindergarten to Grade 6: - D91 teachers will provide support and instruction using the Florida Virtual School curriculum and learning management system. - The D91 Online Academy offers innovative elementary courses in Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. Florida Virtual School courses aligned with Idaho standards. - Classes include a mix of computer-based learning and hands-on activities with clear learning objectives and real-world scenarios and challenges. - Students will need access to reliable internet service to participate in the D91 Online Academy. D91 will provide students with a Chromebook if needed. - Parent / adult support is a key success factor, so parents should expect to spend time supporting their child throughout their learning. D91 Online Academy for Grades 7 to 12: - IDLA teachers will use the IDLA learning management system and curriculum. - The D91 Online Academy offers “personalized” courses in core content areas such as language arts, math, science, social studies, and some elective courses aligned with the D91 schedule. - Custom sessions require a minimum of 12 students. They will be capped at 30 students. - If demand exceeds the capacity of custom classes, students may be enrolled in other IDLA classes which may include students from other school districts. - If there is not enough interest in a class to host a custom session, students can register for that class with IDLA, but it may not be aligned with the D91 school calendar. - Online courses are difficult, so D91 recommends that students in Grades 7 to 12 take no more than four courses per term and take core courses in the first and second quarters, and electives in the third term. . - If students wish to take more than four courses per term, D91 Online Academy may enroll them in other IDLA offerings, but those courses may not be aligned with the D91 academic calendar. Additional courses would cost $ 15 per term. - If students want to take advanced courses or other courses that are not part of the D91 Custom Sessions, D91 Online Academy may enroll students in these courses, but they may not be aligned with the D91 academic calendar. (Students would not need to pay the $ 15 fee if this class is one of the four classes that are a full-time load for D91 Online Academy students.) - Students will need access to reliable internet service to participate in the D91 Online Academy. - Parent / adult support is a key success factor, so parents should expect to spend time supporting their child throughout their learning. Students should expect to spend at least four hours a day working online.

If you’ve been strapped for cash lately, you may have paid closer attention to loan commercials. Specifically, you might have noticed them promote mortgage refinance more frequently. Many of them promise a “no-cost” way to quickly acquire funds. Sadly, most people are struggling financially, they haphazardly take out a mortgage refinance. On the other hand, wiser folks like you check blogs like ours for more information. With that said, here’s what everyone should know about refinancing. What is a Cash-Out Refinance? Refinancing your mortgage simply means paying off your existing home loan using a larger one. The difference between their loan amounts provides much-needed funds. However, you’re only allowed to borrow roughly 80-90% of your home’s equity. Your home’s equity is determined by your house’s appraised value minus your current mortgage balance. For example, if your home is now worth $150,000 and you still have $50,000 on your existing mortgage, you have equity worth $100,000. Because you only borrow around 80%-90% of that equity, you could take out $80,000-$90,000. In reality, that limit highly depends on your lender’s discretion, as well as your corresponding repayment plan. Play your cards right, and cash-out refinancing could help your personal finances. What Does Refinancing a Loan Do? A cash-out refi lets you replace your old mortgage with a pricier one, so you can borrow their difference. You might get a lower interest rate as well because of your new loan’s heftier price. A mortgage refi could modify other terms and conditions of your home loan. For example, your lender could give you a longer loan term, so you might just repay the mortgage faster. If you carelessly perform cash-out refinancing, you might actually pay more every month instead. Depending on the borrower, refinancing can either be beneficial or detrimental to personal finance. What Loans Can you Refinance? Aside from your home loan, there are other credit options you could refinance. If you have an auto loan, you could refinance for better loan terms. Though, you should check for other fees, such as closing costs. Then, take these into account when considering cash-out refinancing for the car loan. Carefully analyze how much you’ll save using your mortgage refinance, or you might actually end up paying more. For example, lower monthly payments could mean you’ll have an easier time repaying every month. However, it could also mean you’ll have a higher interest rate, so your total repayment might cost even more. Meanwhile, you could also refinance your private student loans for better repayment plans. As with refinancing mortgages and auto loans, you should have a plan behind cash-out refinancing. It could also backfire on your personal finances, and you might lose eligibility for certain government programs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the US federal government issued the CARES Act to help people’s finances. It has mandated forbearance for all federal student loans, but it doesn’t cover private counterparts. However, the coronavirus outbreak caused interest rates to drop, so private student loan holders could get lower interest rates using cash-out refinancing. If you have a federal student loan, you don’t have refi options. Alternatively, you could check other debt reduction strategies such as student debt consolidation. Refinancing Pros and Cons Cash-out refinancing poses benefits and risks, so you should understand them before applying. A mortgage refi could improve your current mortgage terms and grant urgently needed funds. On the other hand, refinancing could have unfortunate consequences such as increasing your overall repayment amount. Pros of Cash-Out Refinancing As we’ve mentioned, you could refi your home loans, so you pay less every month. The larger loan may come with a lower interest rate that also reduces your monthly mortgage payments. What’s more, refinancing for a home renovation project could also decrease your monthly dues. If your home improvement project raises your property value, then it might reduce mortgage interest from taxes. More importantly, cash from refi could fund your important expenditures. For example, this could help you shoulder your child’s college tuition. Cons of Cash-Out Refinancing Some people could actually get higher interest rates from mortgage refi. Moreover, you might receive private mortgage insurance (PMI), so it could add to your monthly repayment. Cash-out refinancing could also extend the life of the loan, meaning you’ll spend more time in debt. This tempts some people into adopting horrible spending habits. Some use cash-out refi in order to prolong their mortgage payments or to purchase a brand new vehicle. Worse, people could lose their homes if they aren’t careful with refinancing. Some couldn’t repay their mortgages afterward, so their homes eventually get foreclosed. When Should You NOT Refinance? In order to avoid potential risks, you should be aware of the worst reasons for refinancing. As we’ve mentioned, you should refi your mortgage if you just want that new smartphone. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be used to delay paying this month’s mortgage due. Worse, you shouldn’t be too eager to hop onto the bandwagon. For example, some people fall for the common notion that adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM) are superior to fixed-rate alternatives. In response, they immediately get cash-out refinancing to get fixed rates instead. While it’s true that ARMs fluctuate depending on market conditions, fixed interest rates aren’t always better. Under good economic conditions, ARMs could drop lower than fixed rates. In their hurry to get fixed interest monthly, some folks hastily accept other mortgage terms worst than their current ones. Avoid listening to financial hearsay and learn about your refi options from reliable sources. Does Refinancing Hurt Your Credit? Much like credit cards, cash-out refi could hurt your credit rating. Some lenders may conduct a hard credit inquiry on borrowers, lowering their credit scores. Also, refinancing gives you a new home loan, meaning you’ll get a new account. This lowers the average age of your credit accounts which is a crucial factor in credit ratings. Although, you could still recover your credit score in the long run. Repay your mortgage diligently, and you may undo the short-term deduction to your credit. Is it Worth it to Refinance your Loan? Are you now spooked by the risks of cash-out refinancing? Well, refinancing is worth it as long as you meticulously plan first. Make sure to read about your available refi options extensively. Understand how their terms and conditions work, and verify if they would fit your financial situation. Lenders usually have their own websites that may provide a refinance calculator. Use it to get a better understanding of the refi options available. Even better, why not ask a credit counseling agency for assistance? These are companies dedicated to helping people manage their finances better. They will give you money management advice for refi and other alternatives. Don’t just listen to what everyone SAYS about refinancing but do what everyone SHOULD know! Why do banks want you to refinance? With cash-out refi, could increase your monthly mortgage payments and extend the life of your loan. This means banks could earn more from you each month for a longer period of time. Why is refinancing a bad idea? Cash-out refi is only a bad idea if you don’t plan beforehand. You should conduct prior research and check all available refi options before applying. Does your loan start over when you refinance? Yes, you will restart your home loan by cash-out refinancing. You’ll replace your old mortgage with a new one. However, you may choose how long your new mortgage loan will last. How much does a refinance typically cost? The overall cost of refinancing depends on numerous factors, such as your existing mortgage and credit rating. You may consult the available lenders for an accurate quotation.

Cause Guide Black Equity Petition · Justice for Breonna Taylor – Breonna Taylor was an emergency medical technician (EMT) in two hospitals during the pandemic. One month ago, Louisville Police Department performed an illegal, unannounced drug raid on her home. Not a single officer announced themselves before ramming down her door and firing 22 shots, shooting Breonna 8 times, killing her. Support Black Lives Matter. Petition · Justice for Ahmaud Arbery! I Run with Maud! – On February 23, 2020, 25 year-old Ahmaud Arbery was chased and shot down by a father and son. He was just jogging around the block. Sign the petition to seek justice for Ahmaud Arbery. Petition · Justice For Tony McDade – Tony McDade was a transgender black man who was shot and killed by Tallahassee police without warning. Tony appeared to have matched the description of a suspect on the police list. Sign the petition to hold the Tallahassee Police Department accountable. Petition · Hands Up Act – We know many people of cultural minorities are in constant fear of leaving their household. Every single week we hear about another unarmed Black human being shot by the police. We need legislation now that prohibits police officers from shooting unarmed citizens. This is a necessary action to support black equality. Local officials’ impact our everyday life and make decisions that affect us one way or another. They vote on issues that impact our communities, safety, schools, housing, and public transit. For example, if you wanted more bike lanes or fewer stop signs, it turns out your local officials make that decision. Voting in local elections is a great place to start to make your priorities heard. Rock the Vote makes it super easy to register to vote, sign up for election day reminders, and find information on where you should go to vote on the day of (or if you need to mail in an absentee ballot). You can also learn about the people running in the elections in one place. Check out Rock the Vote and select your state to get started – it’s that easy! Below is a list of phone numbers for your local government officials. I know, it’s been a while since you used your cell to call. But, it’s one of the most effective ways to get your voice heard by your elected official. This is all you have to do: We understand it can be intimidating to reach out but your local officials are here to listen, and they can’t hear us if we don’t call! Take the step to take this small action to support black equality. What To Say – Not sure what to say? Yeah, we get it. There’s too many issues sometimes. But, check out 5calls.org — an amazing resource explaining who best to call, what to say and other good information to have on hand when reaching out to a local official. They’ve got awesome voicemail templates you can use to draft a follow up email as well that are specific to the cause you’re calling about Still feel like your voice isn’t being heard? Lifehacker.com has awesome tips on how to make sure your voice is heard! Check out their article on How to Get your Local Government to Pay Attention to Me. At Hey Social Good we focus on providing small, simple steps to help each of us do social good in our daily life. Just by altering a single purchase decision, you can make a positive impact on the planet and the communities in our world. Now, multiply that by 1000 people you know and imagine the change we can make! While this is the core of our business and a part we’re extremely passionate about, we know social good is more than just about purchasing habits. We have to talk about social equality. Social good encompasses everything in life: how you treat others (especially those who may not look like you), how you vote, how you communicate, how pop culture influences us, and more. We get excited because every time our team looks deeper, we find so many amazing actions anyone can take to adopt social good. We are committed to expanding and learning – this is why we are including small actions to do good that goes far beyond just making different purchasing choices. A Californian organization committed to building healthy communities and supporting Black women and girls. They do this by expanding healthcare access and advancing political advocacy. Proceeds go towards supporting BWW’s programs for nutrition, disease prevention, breast cancer, reproductive and sexual health services, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) works to protect black lives with their We Are Done Dying Campaign. Their primary action is focused on urging congress to take action and fight systemic racism. Donate Here. This organization was founded in 1979 by WWII and Vietnam veterans in response to the racist policies and the lack of support for black veterans coming out of war. Their mission is to provide help in any way to ensure smooth transitions into civilian life for black veterans. Their Veterans Resource Center has programs that help homeless veterans, offer food pantry services and support the Veterans Action Group that help veterans in the New York City community. Donate! A nonprofit organization focusing on campaign solutions and moving decision-makers to end racial injustice. Their current campaign is working on educating Congress on the issues faced by Black business owners. Donations go towards expanding campaigns and stopping the exploitation of Black business owners Donate Here.

Have you ever wondered how much your home or property is worth? It can be tricky to estimate the value, but you can come up with a good approximation with a bit of research and some simple math. In this blog post, we’ll give you a few tips on how to estimate the value of your property. Keep reading for more information! Checking Worth of Similar Properties The easiest way to estimate property value is by checking the selling price of similar or nearby homes. You can consult online listings or ask a real estate agent for more information. For example, if you want to determine how much your house is worth, you could compare it to recently sold properties in your area. You could also compare your house to recently-listed properties that are currently available. When checking a listing in online listings, check carefully and avoid basing your estimations on “list price,” which can be different from what the seller wants for the property because of real estate agent commissions and negotiation. Also, note whether the property is sold as a “price per square foot” price. In addition, you could check out your neighborhood and see what other houses have recently been listed for sale or sold. Refer to listings on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a collection of all real estate properties available in a particular area that real estate agents maintain. Real Estate Agents You could also ask a real estate agent to help you estimate the value of your home. If you’re not thinking about selling any time soon, though, they might be more hesitant to help appraise your property. However, they may still give you an idea or two on how much similar homes are worth in your area, which is still helpful information for you. Again, be sure to ask about properties similar in location and size to yours. Steps for How to Estimate the Value of Your Property Are as Follows Look at properties that have recently sold The first and foremost step for estimating the value of your property is to look at similar properties in the area that have recently sold. From this, you can determine what percentage of a typical listing price is equal to a typical selling price. Use this percentage to determine the estimated market value of your home You can use the sale price to determine the estimated market value of your home by ascertaining what percentage of a typical listing price is equal to a typical selling price. For example, if the house were listed at $500,000 and sold for $480,000, this would be 90% of the listing price Compare the estimated value to the sale price Once you have determined what percentage of a typical listing price equals a typical selling price, compare this with your home’s estimated market value by seeing what percentage of your house fits in with this range. Although the steps for estimating the value of your property can appear somewhat daunting and complex at first glance, they are not entirely difficult to comprehend and follow. Figuring out your home’s value doesn’t have to be complicated. With a few simple steps, you can come up with a reasonable estimate that will help you when it comes time to sell or plan for the future.

I was contacted by a student at Exeter University to answer some questions for her dissertation. Anyway, here are my responses. I hope they make good reading. 1. What is your impetus to write? When and why do you write and perform? I suppose with me the impetus is just to make people laugh. I’ve always been a fan of comedy and humour but never found the vehicle to do this myself until I discovered performance poetry about five years ago. And once I started I realised I could tackle subjects such as gender, sexuality, human rights, loneliness and my own personal failures as a lover but using humour to mask these themes and make them more accessible for the audience. Oh, and lust. Lust is a great impetus to write! Saying the things that you never could say in real life, knowing that the object of your affections will never know! I write every day for at least an hour, and on my day off I try and write all day, with gaps for swimming etc. Exercise makes my brain work! The actual physical act of writing feels kind of like a little ceremony and that’s the only time when I feel like a real poet 2. Do you use YouTube/social media to promote your work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using online platforms? Yes indeed. In fact I don’t think I’d be getting half the gigs I do get without social media. For a start it’s a great way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the spoken word world. But it also gives you an accessible platform for promoters and other poets to see your work. I can go to a gig in Wolverhampton or Basingstoke and people know about my work because they’ve seen me on YouTube or Facebook. You do tend to feel more like an avatar at times. I always wear the same sorts of clothes for performing because this is my trademark and people recognise me from photos. I’ve not had many drawbacks from using social media, no stalkers or online abuse or anything, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time! And sometimes I wonder if I’m online too much and that people will get sick and tired of seeing yet another spikey haired selfie. I think you do have to be a bit shameless at times! 3. Do you try to cultivate a relationship with the audience? If so, how do you go about it? Yes, it is always good to connect with the audience. I’ve actually read about this in performance books and acting manuals because I do not come from a performance background. I try to be warm on stage, I try to look at everyone in the room and look up from the page as I write. I try to smile a lot. If I go to a gig in a new place, I’m usually very accommodating beforehand, being pleasant and saying hello, because these are the people who will be the audience once the gig starts. I also try to react to the previous performer. It’s hard to go on stage and do a poem about (for example) getting envious about beards, when the previous poet has just done a stirring emotional piece about her dead grandmother. So I try to warm everyone up perhaps with some audience participation. Everybody say yeah! I also try to react to things that happen. Every now and then one audience member will make some funny sort of laughing noise at a place during a poem where it’s never happened before, so I will stop performing and look over at them. That always gets a laugh. And luckily, you don’t get heckled much during poetry. (See below). 4. Do you care what an audience thinks of your work? It would be nice not to, but sometimes you do. If it all goes right and people laugh at the funny poems or clap enthusiastically, it’s a magnificent feeling. But every now and then you’ll get someone who disagrees. There have been a couple of notable heckles. The first was sheer comedy, because I have a poem which starts with the words ‘isn’t it annoying when you turn the page’. I got as far as ‘isn’t it annoying . . ‘ when someone shouted, ‘Yes!’ And recently out in the sticks I did a gig in a church and I performed my Jeremy Clarkson poem, which usually gets a fantastic reaction in the city urban centres where I normally perform, Bristol, London, Exeter. But out in the sticks it was evident that everyone was a big Clarkson fan, and after the poem someone shouted, ‘At least Jeremy Clarkson makes me laugh’. And afterwards I thought, wow, if only they’d liked that poem! I shouldn’t have cared too much, but I did, and I thought of an amazing comeback to zap him with. Trouble was, it was six hours later, as I cried myself to sleep. 5. Would you alter your style to cater toward an audience? you were being paid and were asked to edit a poem (ex for swears), would you do it? If you weren’t being paid, would you do it? Yes, absolutely. I’ve done this on numerous occasions. My poetry isn’t rude or heavy on expletives, but every now and then I do radio, or street poetry, or family fun days. (What the hell are they doing booking me for a family fun day?!). So I’ve excised verses and taken out rude bits, certainly. I’m very aware that he promoter is the person in charge and I don’t want to upset them. I’d love to be more passionate about this and say things like, ‘I don’t want to compromise my artistic integrity’. But then I always think, ‘There’s a time and a place for everything . .’. Last summer I did a family fun day on Paignton Green to a beach full of families and kids in the hot August sun, and before I performed they played that ‘What does the fox say?’ song, and I remembered chuckling to myself before I went on thinking, ‘I’d love to do the poem about Orgasms right now’. But I was very professional. 6. What do you think an audience is looking for when they attend a performance poetry night or slam? I think if it’s performance poetry, the audience just wants to be entertained. Poets like Pam Ayres and John Cooper Clarke have revolutionised the way that performance poetry is perceived. The audience will always be different to the more weighty, beard-stroking patrons of page poetry ‘readings’. In this, there are links to stand up comedy. Performance poetry is a wide church which embraces poetry, ranting, comedy, rhyming, rapping, and every night is different, so audiences love the mix and the variety. A well run night will have a bit of everything. Slam audiences are up for the same but with the added bonus of a competitive element. Slams have a reputation for being youthful and raucous with lots of whooping and stamping of feet. Getting whooped is always a bonus. I’m always glad to be whoop-worthy, even if I’ve just crashed out of last place in a slam. 7. What is new about spoken word? Is spoken word poetry even new? As you know, there’s always been a tradition of spoken word, and someone once told me that all poetry was originally intended for word of mouth. I think lately spoken word has enjoyed a renaissance because of social media. A three minute poem makes a great YouTube video. A politician can say something stupid on the nine o clock news and by six o clock there are poems uploaded getting millions of hits. Social media allows politically aware poets with a good ear for a rhyme to react quickly. Lately, performance poetry has been adapting to other media and using the language of stand up comedy, rap, chanting, pop music, even computing. (I’m currently working on a batch of poems which are written as if they’ve been produced by a computer programme that’s ever so slightly faulty). I know of performance poets who incorporate magic and juggling. And Cat Brogan performs which hula hooping! In this regard I think performance poetry is the most postmodern of crafts. But it’s not new. My hero, Frank O’Hara, was influenced by movies, theatre and abstract expressionist art, and he was writing in the 1950s. And thanks to YouTube, Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame is now down to three minutes. 8. Do you use multimedia, props, or technology in your work (videos projected while you perform, music, loop pedals, etc) and why? Personally, I’m rubbish at technology. But over the years I have (take a deep breath) performed a duet with a videoed version of myself on an iPad, built a large hadron collider on stage out of garden hose and custard cream biscuits, built a robot version of myself on stage out of cardboard boxes, a hair brush and a fishing rod, played a theremin on stage made from two French loaves and a pair of Wellington boots, and I regularly perform with a pink bird puppet called Mister Pinkerton. 9. What has spoken word poetry done for you in terms of shaping an identity? What has it done for you in general? Has performing poetry improved your confidence? Yes, indeed. I’d been in a play before I discovered performance poetry, but I was terribly shy and unsure of the world right up until about 2011. When I started performing I discovered that there really isn’t that much to be scared about, particularly with performing, and better still, that everyone has a right to a voice and views and can be treated equally because of these. Coming from an LGBT background and being a teenager in the 1990s meant that I always saw myself as Not Being Right compared to the rest of society, but thankfully now things are a little more equal, and the fact that I can be judged – or better still, not judged at all – has come about purely through performance poetry and Being Myself. If that makes any kind of sense! 10. Do you feel that as a spoken word poet you’ve become part of a community? What is that community like and what does it do for you/what do you do for it? Yes, there’s a wonderful community particularly down here in the south west, because there are so many different voices and styles of performance. There’s also a very strange crossover between page and performance here that you don’t tend to get in other areas. There’s no snobbishness! We are also very welcoming to newcomers, such as students from the university. Ian Beech, Tim King, Morwenna Aldiss and I all run different poetry nights and we are all keen on giving new people a platform to perform and to advance their abilities. I often get emails for advice. And also, over the last few years I’ve begun to realise that my best friends are all now spoken word poets. We hang out and drink and talk about our lives and that, I suppose, is a community! Going back to the LGBT thing, I grew up seeing the LGBT community as being something to aspire to but also something that didn’t seem very interested in me. Last year I performed at London gay pride and afterwards I got this sense of my poetry helping me affirm who I am. It told me that i was already a member of this particular community! 11. Do you think you can “find yourself?” Does spoken word allow you to do this, and if so, how? I’ve probably answered that already, actually. It’s helped me discover my identity and it’s given me friendship with similarly minded people. And the writing process itself is somewhat like therapy. Being insecure about love and relationships and sex and the state of the world is a horrible state, but the moment you start to write about it, or make fun of (for example) having really bad sex, then it somehow makes you feel much better. So now I know how those ranty poets feel! It’s such a good therapy! 12. How would you characterize “yourself” on stage? What do you turn into? ex do you have a persona you fall into? It took a while to find this character. I used to perform in tshirt and jeans. Then one day I came from work in a shirt and tie and I just kind of kept that up. I don’t think many performance poets wear shirts and ties, because they’re all so trendy and they’ve got interesting hair. So my stage persona began to adapt to the clothes that I was wearing. Next I added a jacket, and then a jumper, and now the quintessential Robert Garnham look is complete! (And the tie is a little nod to Ron Mael, one of my favourite musicians). My stage persona is an exaggerated version of myself. I always think of myself as being super confident on stage, but someone’s mother said that she really liked my slightly nervous manner. I became terribly self aware after this, which probably made me even more nervous! But I think if I go in with a clear idea of what to do and what to say, and then add this layer of nervousness, then that’s probably what’s working. I try to sound like a very deep, meaningful poet who just happens to be saying very weird things. Slightly academic, a bit old fashioned. That’s my persona, I suppose. It’s hard, then, slipping out of this persona. I usually need to wear different clothes and have a shower to get rid of the gel, and change my glasses, before I feel like the version of myself that I’ve always been. When poets see me in ‘real life’, in a hoodie and shorts for example, they always say, ‘I didn’t recognise you’. I’m not sure. There are so many different types of poet and performer. I think more people would do it if it had the media coverage that comedy gets. I mean, if I can do it, then others can, because it felt like it was ready made for me before I’d even performed a poem! If I look at the backgrounds of my closest poet friends, there’s an amazing array of routes into performance. Chris White comes from a theatrical trained background, Tim King was in music, Chris Brooks was a comedian. Yet there also seems to be a lot of librarians: Ian Beech, James Turner, Alaisdair Paterson. What’s that all about? And come to think of it, my background is in museum management! Slam poets and performance poets often come from minority backgrounds. They act as powerful voices for their communities, such as Vanessa Kisuule, Chanje Kunda, Dean Atta and your good self. They have something to say, which needs saying, and performance poetry is as good a vehicle, and as accepting a vehicle, as any. Often there seems to be a gender bias towards men, which makes programming events difficult when you realise that you’ve got 10 men and 2 women appLying for slots at a poetry night, which is where curating comes into effect. (That’s my museum training coming out again!)

Thornton, St Michael's Church History, tourist information, and nearby accommodation The current east window occupies the space that was the original medieval chancel arch. The church underwent another rebuilding in the Victorian period, but it retains its Georgian box pews, including a squire's pew, and a double-decker pulpit. The most interesting historical features of Thornton church are the wonderful alabaster effigies of John Barton and his wife, and the late medieval tomb chest of Robert Ingylton. This tomb chest was removed to serve as a curiosity in a grotto built in the Thornton House grounds and was only replaced in the church in 1946. There is also the effigy of an unknown 14th-century priest, found beneath the floorboards of the north aisle during restoration work. The first known church at Thornton was dedicated in 1219. The current St Michaels was built roughly a century later, possibly by John de Chastillon, who is known to have founded a chantry chapel here in 1344. When John Barton died in 1434 the terms of his will requested his successors to create a chantry for himself and his parents. He also provided funds to give six pence weekly to six poor people, provide clothes for six poor children each year, and for the parish priest to educate the children of the town. The provision of a chantry was eventually carried out by Robert Ingylton, who rebuilt the 14th-century chapel according to Barton's wishes around 1464. On the east wall is a painted depiction of the royal arms. This was uncovered in 1992, and had apparently been painted on top of two earlier royal coats of arms! One final furnishing worth noting is a very nice relief carving of the royal coat of arms, made of different varieties of wood joined together. The church is no longer used for regular worship and is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. There is a very thorough historical review of the church on the website of the Wolverton and District Archaeological and Historical Society.

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HOW DOES A DONNA, TEXAS TRUCKER DRIVER INJURY CLAIM WORK? If you or someone you know has sustained severe injuries while driving a commercial truck or 18 wheeler in Donna, Texas, you must first seek immediate medical care. It is imperative that you document all of your truck driving accident injuries! Next, take the following steps: - If you have not already done so, seek medical attention, and collect all of your medical records. - Gather as much evidence from the scene of the truck accident as you can. Our Donna truck driver accident attorney with the Reyna Law Firm will do this on your behalf! - Make an official report. 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You will be able to hand your case off to a team of dedicated attorneys who will fight to receive compensation for your injuries, pain, and suffering, and lost wages you have suffered. If you or someone you know has been in a truck driving accident, contact a Donna truck accident lawyer at the Reyna Law Firm today. Certainly, we want to fight for you! Furthermore, we are available 24/7/365! TYPES OF DONNA TRUCK DRIVER INJURIES THAT OCCUR Donna Truck driver accidents can result in many kinds of serious injuries. Common accidents include, but are not limited to: Donna Truck on Truck Accidents: While truck drivers are the safest operators on the roadways, unfortunately, they too are responsible for causing severe truck on truck accidents. Due to the weight of a loaded 18 wheeler or semi-truck, these kinds of Donna truck driver accidents cause severe injuries and deaths! Donna truckers often rely upon 3rd party mechanics and shops to provide repairs and maintenance on their 18 wheelers, rigs, and trucks. When negligent repairs and or maintenance occur, Donna truck drivers find themselves in harm’s way, and serious truck accidents and injuries arise! Tire Blowouts and De-treads: Every Donna trucker has had to deal with a blown-out tire or de-tread if they drive long enough! Unfortunately, when a tire blows out, or de-treads at highway speeds, Donna 18 wheelers, and loaded trucks can lose control and crash, causing severe truck driver injuries and deaths! Donna Truck Driver Pedestrian Accidents: Donna truck drivers are often victims of pedestrian accidents as they stop to rest at a trucking rest stop or a trucking filling station. Instead of getting needed rest and nourishment, pedestrian truck drivers often find themselves the victims of a negligent truck or car driver, causing severe and life-threatening injuries! 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Donna Trucker Slip and Falls: Pursuant to the Federal and State department of transportation regulations, Donna truck drivers must stop and rest in order to ensure their and the public’s safety. Certainly, truck stops and truck filling stations must be in a safe condition and manner in order to avoid slip and fall accidents and injuries. Consequently, when a commercial establishment fails to exercise reasonable care in keeping its premises safe from dangers and defects, Donna truck drivers far too often sustain serious slip and fall injuries![FMSCA regulations] All of these types of Donna truck driver accidents can cause serious injuries, including orthopedic lumbar and cervical injuries, crushed limbs, burns, amputations, traumatic brain trauma, head injuries, and even death. Furthermore, these types of serious truck driver accidents are caused by the negligence of others. By talking to a Donna truck driver accident attorney at the Reyna Law Firm, you will be able to hold the negligent parties responsible for the harm they have caused. Call the Reyna Law Firm today! In short, we fight for Donna truck drivers!

Teaching can be a really tough gig sometimes. We don’t often stop to see all of the good! Between all of the tasks, big and small, that you do each and every day, it’s so important to pause and remember why you are here. To acknowledge the amazing value of your efforts! We think you are amazing, and so we have put together a little list of inspirational quotes for teachers that go a little way to summarising the importance of all that you do. Hopefully, casting your eyes over these words will be exactly the kind of micro-moment you need to get through the rest of your day. Or, if you have a teacher friend who you know needs a little love and light right now, you might like to send this post to them! 10 Inspiring Quotes for Teachers 1. Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching kids what counts is best. – Bob Talbert We all know there is so much more to learn than reading, writing and arithmetic… 2. A good education can change anyone. A good teacher can change everything! Sometimes it can be hard to remember the greater impact that is created by the sum of seemingly tiny everyday actions. 3. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela There is no better way to contribute to the kinds of changes that really matter in our world! 4. Children learn more from who you are than what you teach. Patience, kindness, compassion, growth mindset – our actions and behaviours speak louder than any of our ‘lessons’ do! 5. Teachers are those who help find strengths, wipe away tears, overpower demons and conquer fears. Sometimes our students can spend more time with us than they do with their families. Which makes ours such an important role in their lives. 6. Teachers who love teaching, teach children to love learning. Passion and excitement are infectious! 7. My teacher gave me the best gift of all… Believing in me! We all know that hard things seem easier when we have a cheer squad surrounding us! 8. Every child is gifted. They just unwrap their packages at different times. And, who are we to know just where a child is at on their journey? We may be supporting them through their hungry caterpillar stage, only to hear about how they found their wings long after leaving our classroom for the very last time… 9. The influence of a good teacher can never be erased. The impacts of ‘bad’ teaching can be overcome with time, patience and support. A good teacher’s legacy is forever. 10. It takes a big heart to shape little minds. You completed most of the hard work needed to become a good teacher before you stepped into your classroom for the first time… becoming the heart-full person that you are! Did you need that little reminder of just how awesome you are?! Even if you didn’t, we hope that these words warmed your heart a little.

Europe's COVID-19 Vaccination Effort Is Criticized For Slow Start Back in August, the drug company AstraZeneca signed a deal with the European Union. It promised to provide 300 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine. That didn't happen. It fell short. NPR's Rob Schmitz has been following this from Berlin. Good morning, Rob. ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Noel. KING: How many doses did the E.U. get if it didn't get 300 million? And what went so wrong here? SCHMITZ: Well, we're not really sure yet what the final answer on the number is yet, but... SCHMITZ: And whether we're going to get it is - you know, as far as what went wrong, it depends on who you want to believe. AstraZeneca's CEO, Pascal Soriot, says his company is playing catch up and that the source of the delay is a production facility in Belgium. But EU leaders suspect this is an excuse for not being able to fulfill the bloc's initial order of 300 million doses, as you mentioned, because it's been too focused on getting its vaccine to the U.K. at the expense of the EU, a hint that there's a bit of vaccine nationalism because AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish company. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tried to lay down the law last week in a public address. And here's what she said. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) URSULA VON DER LEYEN: Europe invested billions to help develop the world's first COVID-19 vaccines to create a truly global, common good. And now the companies must deliver. They must honor their obligations. SCHMITZ: And, Noel, von der Leyen was so angry about AstraZeneca's vaccine shortage that she had EU investigators visit the company's plant in Belgium to confiscate documents to get to the bottom of the shortage. And she then ordered restrictions on exports of the vaccine to the U.K., which did not go over well with the Brits. And then she reversed that decision over the weekend. KING: OK, this is interesting. And the stakes are quite high and the accusations are quite serious. Is Ursula von der Leyen the only person who's angry? Who else in Europe is saying what? SCHMITZ: I think everyone - it's fair to say everyone is angry right now. And von der Leyen is under fire for the EU's slow rollout of vaccines for its 27 member states. And the main criticism here is how long it's taken the EU to approve vaccinations, as well as the EU's seeming inability to change gears when it became clear last autumn that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were ahead of the rest in their trials. Many Europeans criticized the EU for not ordering more of those vaccines at that time. Last week, the German daily Spiegel ran what can only be described as a hit piece on von der Leyen herself, focusing on her history of failings as an EU politician. So it's getting a little nasty. Europeans have been watching for months as their American and British friends are being vaccinated and they feel left behind. The U.K. has administered 14 doses per 100 people; the U.S., nine doses per hundred. Compare that to just three doses per hundred Germans and two doses per hundred French, and you've got a lot of frustration here in Europe. KING: And so what does that mean for EU member states who are trying to get their citizens vaccinated? SCHMITZ: It means they're going to have to wait longer. AstraZeneca isn't the only drugmaker facing production delays to the EU; Pfizer-BioNTech is, too. And that's because the production capacity is not quite there yet. But that could change in the coming months. BioNTech, which is based in Germany, is putting the finishing touches on a new production facility in Marburg, Germany, which could speed up the rollout. That'll be up and running by the end of this month. Other companies have also offered to help out with production, and that should speed it up, too. Some countries like Germany are simply making their own bilateral deals. Germany ordered 30 million of its own doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and it was roundly criticized for it at the time. This was back in the fall. But now, given how poorly the EU has handled the vaccine rollout to its member states, it seems like it was a pretty wise move. KING: And, Rob, pull back a second, if you would. What are caseloads like across Europe these days? SCHMITZ: Yeah, I think it's helpful to look at the incidence rate, and that is how many individuals are infected per 100,000 people over the past week. You know, currently, that number in Spain is more than 500, which is incredibly high. In France, more than 200 per 100,000 have been infected in the past week. But here in Germany, things are gradually getting better. The country's lockdown has managed to get that number down below 100. But it's been a struggle. And for much of Europe, the vaccine is sorely needed right now.

Imagine taking a long journey through a treacherous land down paths you had never been before. The sun beats down at times and the wind and temperature change daily. There are valleys to traverse, rivers to cross, and mountains to climb. Now, imagine taking that trip with a hundred pounds of dead weight on your back. It obviously would make this trip much tougher. If you had a choice, you would certainly get rid of this unnecessary weight. It seems like an easy decision, yet many people choose to carry unnecessary burdens through similar journeys in life on a daily basis. How is this possible? We’ve all been wounded by events in our lives. What happens to us is not the problem. How we respond, however, can become a problem. When someone hurts us, it causes us pain. What we do with that pain and the potential resentment towards the other person now becomes a crucial choice that we have to make. We have an opportunity to forgive or not. What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a choice – one that we freely make. Choosing to forgive is motivated out of love, not out of guilt. Forgiveness is a gift we give to ourselves. When we hold unforgiveness towards others, it hurts us a lot more than it does them, regardless of what we tell ourselves. When we choose to forgive, we are shedding unnecessary weight from our backs so that we can experience a greater journey through life. Forgiveness opens doors in relationships that resentment and bitterness have slammed shut years ago. Forgiveness allows rivers of communication to once again flow freely. Forgiveness is more than just saying sorry. Forgiveness is a process and one that takes God’s grace and our willingness to get started. Three Steps to Accomplish Forgiveness 1) First, we need to give up our right for revenge. We have God-given rights and human rights. It is a human right or response to want to take revenge on someone who has wounded us. When people hurt us, we want to hurt them back. Now, we don’t always respond that way, but because of our makeup there is a potential to want to seek revenge. By choosing not to take revenge, we choose to take the first step towards forgiveness. 2) The next step involves our choice to pray for the person who has hurt or offended us. This prayer must be motivated out of love. Prayers that ask God to punish another person who hurt us are still motivated out of our own hurt. Once we have received God’s grace for our situation and our perspective, we can begin to operate in His love. When we can pray blessings over someone who hurt us, we are showing true love. “Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10). 3) The last step in forgiveness usually takes the longest time, and it is a step that can only truly be accomplished with God’s help. We know we have achieved forgiveness when we have rediscovered the other person for who they are, instead of by what they have done to us. If you were abused when you were younger and have not fully forgiven that person, it may be because whenever you see or think of that person, you see the pain they caused you in the past. With God’s grace, you can learn to pray for that person, allowing God’s love to flow through you. God’s love has everything you need to change your perspective about another person if you fully receive it. God’s love “does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:6-8). God’s love can help you to rediscover anyone who has hurt or offended you. When you can see another person the same way God sees them, as a precious life that needs healing, God’s truth, and love, then you know that you have forgiven this person.

Water Transportation in Canada Robert McCalla provides up-to-date information on trends in water transport and the rapidly changing balance of power among major Canadian ports. Transportation by sea, lake and river has been vital to Canada's development as a nation. It remains so today. This book is an up-to-date analysis of the importance of water transportation to the present-day Canadian economy. It examines current trends and outlines the rapidly changing balance of power among major Canadian ports: the rivalry between Halifax and Saint John, the emergence of Vancouver as a major cruise port, the struggle over land use on the Montreal waterfront, for example. It also considers the future of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the prospects for shipping in Arctic waters, with the questions for Canadian sovereignty that the latter entails. Water Transportation in Canada is a pioneering, in-depth study of the current state of marine activity in this country.

Ideal Earth Water Refreshing water like a mountain spring... from your tap 5 Things Every Parent Needs to Know About Water Our bodies are 70% water. Water is the foundational building block of life. We cannot live long without it. Would we want our babies to drink a toxic substance that is an environmental hazard – used as a pesticide and rodent poison? You can’t dump it in the environment, so if you just dilute it enough, it is safe to add to the water? What happens to babies and young children? What happens to fertility? Let me tell you a bedtime story. . . Once upon a time there was a toxic substance called fluoride. It was a valuable ingredient used by industry and the military for economic power. If it was added to a compound, it made the compound stronger and more potent, so it was very useful in a variety of ways. It attracted plutonium and uranium particles that otherwise would not be harnessed, paving the way to the creation of atomic and nuclear bombs. It made the surfaces it coated slippery, so it paved the way for non-stick Teflon pans, as well as furniture and carpets that became stain resistant. It was wonderfully useful to so many industries and to the military in weapon creation! In fact, it is a component of Sarin, a nerve gas used during World War II that kills through inhalation. But, there was “a sticky problem.” Fluoride is a poison, as lethal as arsenic and lead. If the industries and military were going to use lots of it, there would be billions of tons of waste, far more than could be used by the fertilizer and pesticide industries. What could they do? So the heads of the large corporations paid their scientists to come up with a solution, and one of them did. In order to duck potential lawsuits that could put them out of business, he theorized that small amounts of fluoride reduced the amount of dental cavities. Eureka! A way to easily dispose of a toxic poison and make billions of dollars in profits! Other scientists were hired to provide results to back up the claims. They chose results that agreed with their theories and ignored those that didn’t. Because fluoride was a well-known pesticide and rodent poison, a successful PR campaign was started, and voila! They now had a workable solution to get rid of the toxic substance without terrible environmental pollution. Fluoridation of public water supplies began, and any scientist who upset the apple cart with results that showed fluoride’s damaging toxicity was slandered and blacklisted, while their scientific studies “disappeared.” Only careful research has brought them to light. The evil queen has been poisoning us and our children. How does this affect us? 5 Things Every Parent Needs to Know About Fluoridation: 1. More than 60 studies on animals have identified a link between fluoride exposure and male infertility. Fluoride is an enzyme poison that damages chromosomes and DNA. University of Missouri research showed damage to the ovaries and testes. Could our increasing infertility be contributed to by fluoride? The studies say “Yes.” 2. Because fluoride affects collagen, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones are damaged. Osteoporosis and deformation of bones inevitably follow. Fluoride is particularly harmful during pregnancy and fetus development in the womb, especially to the baby’s developing nervous system. Mental retardation and increased incidence of Down’s syndrome has been documented. 3. Researchers have found that fruit juices contain significant amounts of fluoride. 42% of samples analyzed had greater than 1 ppm and grape juice was the worst offender with up to 6.8 ppm, due to fluoride-containing pesticides used on grapes. 4. Baby bottle tooth decay, often the target of pro-fluoridaters, supposedly caused by giving baby milk, juice, or sugared water has been shown to be more prevalent in fluoridated communities and among migrant workers who are subject to fluoride toxicity. 5. Recent studies indicate that fluoridating chemicals added to the water with other chemicals, such as chloramine, leach lead from brass fittings and increase uptake of lead into children’s blood. Even low levels of lead can compromise intellectual development in children. Maybe leaded paint was the wrong target! Many studies have proven lowered IQ in children who are subject to fluoride. 6. OOPS – There are more than 5 reasons: Children make up 40% of the asthma cases. The Clean Air Campaign Task Force found in 2000, that “hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer from asthma attacks, cardiac problems and upper and lower respiratory ailments associated with fine particles from power plants.” Researchers found babies in high-pollution areas were 40% more likely to die from respiratory causes and a 26% risk increase for sudden infant death syndrome. 7. Cooking increases fluoride. Any food that contains fluoride has been shown to have increased levels after being cooked in fluoridated water. What about when you are using Teflon coated pans? The fumes from a hot Teflon pan can kill a pet bird in the kitchen. So what about tooth decay? Well fluoride has actually been proven to cause teeth to crumble. Crest toothpaste carries a warning for children less than 3 years of age – that they should not use it. Fluoride has been proven not to prevent tooth decay. It is only clever endorsements and PR that have forwarded that lie. Do you really want your family, especially your children, to be drinking and bathing in fluoridated water? Bathing in fluoridated water was one of the treatments in the 1930s used by doctors to depress an overactive thyroid. Maybe your child’s obesity is not yours or their fault. Sources: “Fluoride: Killing Us Softly,” by Dr. Gary Null; “The Effects of Fluoride on the Thyroid Gland,” by Dr. Barry Durrant-Peatfield MBBS LRCP MRCS; “The Fluoride Deception,” by Christopher Bryson; “The Case Against Fluoride,” by Paul Connett PhD, James Beck MD, PhD, and H.S. Micklem DPhil

Tradable Lows in the Canadian Technology Sector Understanding market technicals becomes a very important tool when emotion takes over and price swings don’t make sense. This is especially true during times of uncertainty and periods of market volatility like we’re experiencing now. Many people consider technical analysis voodoo and refer to it as people drawing lines on a stock chart. Although the drawing lines part might be true, technical analysis is about documenting investors psychology. Resistance and support levels, trendlines, market breadth and the VIX (market volatility index) are all created by fear and greed (people’s emotions). My job as a chartist is to document that fear and greed. What most people don’t understand is that the stock market will bottom before the bearish news flow hits its peak. If anyone has tuned into the news, they’d think the sky was falling. I have also noticed through my interactions that investor psychology has flipped and in my “opinion” it is wrong. – READ MORE Three Trend Following Ideas This quote is from my favourite podcast Top Traders Unplugged, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. The philosophy is explained in Barkha’s November 8th blog titled: Why buying at all-time highs is a good strategy. Below are three trends following ideas that fit the strategy perfectly. After selling off from the IPO date of October 8, 2019, Docebo (TSX:DCBO) has nearly recovered that entire move and is now threatening a breakout to a new all-time high. Watch for a price move above $16.23 as it would suggest the beginning of an uptrend. – READ MORE Three Stocks Poised to give a Technical Buy Signal Three So-Called “Boring” Stocks Poised to Maintain Momentum Momentum is an anomaly that demonstrates securities that have outperformed relative to other assets (or peers) will continue to outperform while losers (who have performed poorly) will continue to underperform. The existence of momentum within the stock market has been documented as far back as 1801. There’s even evidence that predates any academic research suggesting that momentum has been part of the market from the very beginning. During this current period of market concern (increased volatility due to trade woes and fears of slowing economic growth) there has been no exception to the momentum rule. The demand for safety and yield has continued to make momentum investing extremely successful. Not only has the momentum strategy continued to outperform in this environment but it’s also provided a strategy that allows investors to block out all external noise (such as recession fears) while allowing them to stick with the trends that are working. – READ MORE Three Stocks Poised for All-Time Highs Navigating the Market Noise When I first got involved in the market over 14 years ago, not only was it difficult for the Canadian retail investor to find information, but it was virtually impossible. I was always good at finding nice technical chart setups but I never had a place to go seek out information. If I was lucky I’d find a tidbit of information on the only stock forum available or I’d have to watch hours of business television with the hope of my stock getting mentioned. Back then having access to any type of information was power. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore. As I get closer to my chartered designation, I find myself being more interested in behavioral finance (psychology). When investors hear the term technical analysis they often think of lines and patterns on a stock chart. I’ve even heard skeptics call it voodoo. Although, many are not aware that the driving force behind the lines and patterns is crowd psychology. A stock chart is nothing more than a picture of human emotions. The term ‘price has memory’ comes from the fact that support and resistance areas are created by human emotion and psychology. Not only is psychology important for understanding a stock chart, but it’s very important for understanding our own manifestations and helps us to block out the unnecessary market noise. The hardest part is developing awareness. Once aware investors are able to mitigate the effects of their own biases while taking advantage of the herd behavior. – READ MORE 3 Dividend Paying Stocks Nearing a Breakout Identifying breakouts from strong chart patterns is a skill that allows investors to take a position in stocks during the early stages of an uptrend. Often these breakouts can be the starting point of a major price move. A breakout to new highs makes this strategy even more favorable as there’s no resistance (overhead supply) from people selling at a loss or breakeven. This asymmetrical equation can translate into an acceleration in upside price momentum. When combined with a dividend, this strategy can be very profitable. It also doesn’t hurt getting paid to wait until upside price momentum kicks in. – READ MORE Three Stock Charts Poised to Trend Higher Many companies trading in the Canadian stock markets such as the TSX and TSX Venture exchange go through periods of consolidation where not a whole lot happens with either the share prices or the fundamentals at the company. This is where technical analysis can be helpful as it provides a bit of a guide as to when these ‘quieter’ stocks may be set to make a move. Here are a few stock charts with companies poised to trend higher. – READ MORE Consumer Staples and Telecommunication Stocks Breaking out on Seasonal Cue The old investing adage “sell in May and go away” may not always hold true to the exact month, but as we enter the dog days of summer, sector rotation is showing up on seasonal cue. Today I’ll be focusing on consumer staple and telecom stocks which consistently outperform the TSX index between the months of May and October. If you are a frequent visitor to my website, you’ll notice that I’ve been featuring many of the following stocks over the last few weeks as they began to issue a momentum alert to signal their breakout. – READ MORE Technical Analysis: Three Trading Ideas for this Week Technical Analysis on Photon Control, VersaBank, Dollarama Over the last 6-months, Dollarama (TSX:DOL) has been consolidating within a falling wedge continuation pattern. What caught my attention is the tight trading range that has formed during the last 4-weeks. This price action is being compressed like a coiled spring below the volume by price bar. Periods of low volatility are often followed by high volatility. A breakout from this trading range could be explosive. This also comes at a time when the MACD-histogram is making higher lows. The MACD-histogram was designed to anticipate signals in the MACD, which was designed to identify changes in the price momentum. – READ MORE Logarithmic Scale vs. Arithmetic Scale The term “trend is your friend” derives from the theory that stocks trending in one direction will continue to go much higher than assumed possible. In other words, great companies with a proven track record tend to continue to perform well. The difficulty with this investment strategy is emotions because people have trouble buying stocks breaking out to new highs. This psychological barrier becomes troublesome as many investors avoid these breakouts. One way to help mitigate some of this emotion is to use logarithmic scale charts. – READ MORE Be Aware of Crowd Psychology Schiller’s dictum – “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.” At a time when many retail investors use tools like social media as a resource to find investment information, understanding crowd psychology becomes crucial. – READ MORE The Relative Strength Indicator Since the goal of many investors is to outperform the market, the relative strength indicator is a very important tool for identifying opportunities. The relative strength indicator is often used to compare the performance of a stock vs. a benchmark such as the TSX index. More importantly, at a time when the TSX is down more than 900 points from the January high, the relative strength indicator can also be used to find pockets of strength. – READ MORE Technical Analysis: Three Trading Ideas for this Week New Flyer Industries (NFI-T) has given a textbook trend following a signal. Price action spent the last eight months consolidating within a cup & handle continuation pattern before breaking out to new all-time highs. Often people find it hard buying stocks at all-time highs. To show the potential of this type of breakout below, I included a chart of The Stars Group (TSGI-T), which in November had a very similar continuation pattern and breakout to what we are currently seeing with New Flyer. The Stars Group has since went on to yield approximately a 20% – READ MORE Using Weekly Charts to Identify Long-Term Trends The Importance of Having a Plan No matter how much experience you have as an investor, a trend following system is a straight forward approach to systematic trading that can be easily deployed and managed by anyone. This is a great way to profit from large moves without having to manage positions on an intraday basis. If you have spent time learning lessons the hard way, like myself, then you will relate to what I am about to say. The two problems I struggled with the most were taking a position too large for my account and selling too soon. In my experience these problems often go hand in hand, I was always putting myself in the perfect position for emotional ruin. Every time I would get onto a winning trade I became greedy or scared and locked in profits prematurely, cutting my potential returns short. – READ MORE The Importance of Volume Indicators & Not Fixating on Major Indexes My main focus is tracing abnormal volatility which flags the potential of momentum coming into an underlying name or sector. As a momentum trader, I rarely look at major indexes, but at small-cap names with high institutional or insider ownership. This is because small-cap names offer many advantages to traders. One being that they tend to move with a greater velocity than large-cap names. This is due to supply and demand. Generally, retail traders follow the major indexes, while assuming these benchmarks reflect the entire market. However, this is often not the case. Just analyzing the major indexes limits your ability to make higher profits. This is not a problem for the hobby trader, but for the trader interested in making a living, this can become a major issue. Rather than limiting oneself to big name companies, retail traders should embrace every potential trade. Small-cap stocks that are not components of a major index rarely follow the same price action. Small-cap stocks often move in advance of the indexes and at times are not correlated, especially here in Canada. – READ MORE Technical Analysis Stock Picks on Savaria (TSX: SIS), Stella-Jones (TSX: SJ), and AGF Management (TSX: AGF.B) Savaria Corp. (TSX:SIS) has just performed what looks like a successful retest of the March breakout on massive volume. There’s a saying in the technical world, “What was once resistance will now become support”. When price action breaks out above resistance, it signals a change in supply and demand. If price action returns to this level that once was resistance, there is likely to be an increase in demand and that past resistance will now become support, and that is exactly what happened last week with Savaria. Not only did the price action come back to successfully retest the breakout, but it was clear that there was an increase in demand as the buyers aggressively stepped up. – READ MORE As part of the free trial, you’ll also receive access to 3 model portfolios (balanced, dividend/income, and growth), over 70 easy-to-understand research reports, and access to over 57,000 answered investment questions.

You got an interview! How do you do your best so they choose you for that elusive position on the faculty of a college or university? Actually most of this advice applies to any kind of in-person job interview. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that you are never out of scrutiny and they are likely to know each other and to talk. Most of these pitfalls are easily avoided if you take some time to absorb both them and the reasons behind them. The actual talks are worthy of their own posts. You may get to give a research lecture, a sample class, or a chalk talk. Pitfall 1. Inadequate preparation. More than anything, you want no surprises on the job interview. You want your answers to questions to fit in the context of the place you are interviewing. Some of this is obvious. You won’t want to say you love straight research at a primarily teaching college, for example. But you should really dig into the structure of the place, who is there, what collaborations exist, and what people do inside and outside academia as much as possible. You should then be able to ask strategic questions, or find bonds with people whose research interests are different, for example if you both knit, or are both hikers. If this were advice for the hiring side, I would point out that those extraneous connections should not be part of hiring decisions, but on your side, I say whatever it takes. It is human to look for connections and feel good when they are found, so the more you can help with this the better. Pitfall 2. Inappropriate dress. You do not want your clothes, your hair, or any part of your body to come into the hiring decision. Of course all of this is illegal, but it doesn’t stop people even inadvertently bringing it in. A rule of thumb is to dress a step up from what is normal for the place and to show as little skin as possible. This is easier for men. They can wear a suit and tie, or a sports coat and tie, taking the tie off if necessary. Remember male deans often wear ties, though. Women should not show their collarbones or anything below. Did you get that? Collarbones. Do what you want after you get the job. Pants are safer than dresses, but dresses and skirts can work with dark tights, not transparent hose. For a job on the East Coast, I would go with black. And wear comfortable shoes you can walk miles in. I went on one job interview about 15 years ago where the shoes I thought were comfortable turned out not to be. I only hoped no one saw the blood seeping out from broken blisters. When I interviewed for my first job at Rice University, Mary Ann Rankin took me shopping for clothes. I had a yellow dress in particular that my grandmother and her cousin happily hemmed with long French needles. The outfit was perfect for the occasion, though the grad students suspiciously thought I had never done any field work. A job interview is not the place to express yourself with your clothes, your hair, your jewelry, or your tattoos. Pitfall 3. Failing to keep to the schedule. You will be given a schedule of meetings with little time for breaks. You might be shuffled from one person to another in a very organized fashion or you may not. You may be stuck with professor long-winded who has no idea of time and get late to your next appointment. You will be blamed even if it is not your fault. So treat your schedule as your bible. Make sure it is up to date. You could even set a phone timer if you are not being well-minded so that it will ding, and you can have a reason to bring up the time. It will also help if you learn the buildings, but accept any offer made to take you to your next appointment. Remember, if you are late, it reflects poorly on you. Pitfall 4. Thinking any interactions are not important. In some ways, we learn the most about people when we see how they treat staff, janitors, and servers. Be unfailingly polite to everyone, even if someone has totally screwed up. Assume everyone knows everyone and the staff member you hope never to need could be the husband of the powerful professor. You are on show. I’ve heard of candidates who complained that the grad student who picked them up from the airport got lost. Not a good idea. I’ve seen candidates treat servers with impatience. The most off-hand interactions can be the most telling, so be sure they tell only good things about you, that you are kind, considerate, and patient. Pitfall 5. Meal complications. Perhaps nowhere is more of a minefield than the simple meal. We take people to meals both because everyone has to eat and because of what it tells us about them. You do not want to be seen as a difficult person. This does not mean you should eat things you are allergic to or that go against your principles, but do not let this become a matter for conversation. Get away from it by asking something about the department, for example. I was once with a blind woman who was being interviewed for a job in another department. We went casually out to lunch apart from the interview. She was so easy going, she didn’t ask to have the whole menu read to her, but just asked for 3 or 4 suggestions and picked from those. If I had been interviewing her, I would have been very positively impressed. Along these lines, don’t ask for anything on the side, or any alterations to the menu. Try to not be the first person to order, so you aren’t the only one getting or not getting an appetizer for example. Don’t get the spinach salad. I did that at lunch with the dean on the interview for my current job, and later discovered a huge leaf stuck to my teeth. Treat the servers with respect. If they bring you the wrong thing, just eat it, if it doesn’t make you sick. Alcohol: A job interview is not the place to drink. But you don’t want to seem to not fit in if everyone else is drinking. So, have one drink if you drink, no more. Have a soda water with lime if you don’t drink. If wine is going to be served with dinner, don’t have a cocktail before. If it is a US state university, all alcohol might be personally paid for by the faculty inviting. If they don’t get wine, you shouldn’t. I have to say I’m baffled at the number of job candidates I’ve seen get tipsy on the interview. It is not the place for drinking. Remember, they are watching you. Pitfall 6. Not mentioning your partner, or mentioning them too much. There are a lot of opinions on how and when you should mention your partner, or even your lack of partner. Some think you will be less likely to get the job if you have a partner who also needs a position. But at all the places I have been, we are not surprised you have an academic partner. We want to do what it takes to get you, if you are our choice, so information is good and the sooner the better. We have turned one position into two with strong partners. For that, both of you should apply for the position right from the start. That is actually what Dave and I did for the Wash U jobs. If your partner is junior, it is quite standard at places I have been to simply offer them a three year position with some funding to get to the stage they are competitive for a tenure track job. If you have a partner at your same stage or more senior who is markedly weaker and you think your strength will make us offer them a position, be ready for a disappointment. We won’t. Your partner might not be in academia. Tell us. The sooner we know, the sooner we can start dealing with the dean about what we need to hire you, should you be our choice. But don’t talk alot about them. The interview is about you. If you mention your partner to anyone, you should also mention them to the chair. They will talk and soon everyone will know. Pitfall 7. Thinking the interview is about you. You will talk to a lot of people on an interview. Each person will have their own way of interacting. Some may launch right into their own research. You should be aware of what they do and ask meaningful questions. If you get stuck and have no idea, ask something about what excites them the most about their work now. If conversation is not working at all – after all, these are academics – you can ask to see the lab or something like that. But you must talk about them. You might get asked to tell them something you won’t be covering in your formal talks. Have two or three things prepared for this and mention the one closest to their work. But then bring the conversation back to them. Ask about their research, about the strengths of the place. If they are negative, try to move the conversation on to something else. Don’t commiserate over particular problems. The more you let them talk, the more brilliant they will think you are. If the meeting is with grad students, postdocs, or post-docs, listen to their concerns. Ask them about the place. Answer their questions. Treat this as a very important part of the interview. Pitfall 8. Taking the wrong tone with the chair, dean or search committee head. These administrators are busy, but hiring good faculty is one of the most important things they do. They will want an idea of your big ideas, your collegiality, and your interest in the whole job. They may also want an up front idea of your research needs. The chair may show you some space. The chair may ask you how much start up money you might need. I recommend that you never say space is inadequate at this stage. I also recommend that you do not name a dollar amount for start up. Instead, ask questions that show you are evaluating the space carefully. For start up, ask about available equipment, or support for students. Keep the conversation on capabilities, things, and people, not square feet or dollars. Indicate you are enthusiastic about sharing. The chair or dean may also try to determine if you will take this job. Exhibit maximal enthusiasm for it, unless you already have an offer you like better. Pitfall 9. Department politics. Remember, you do not know how this department works. You do not know how the decision will be made. It could be mostly the head, the whole department, or just the search committee. There may be factions. There may be difficult people, or people with a lot of power that you never would realize from their title. Keep your mouth shut about anyone in the department. Do not gossip. Take in information but do not release it. Even if you have a good friend in the department, you do not understand how it works. Pitfall 10. If you don’t get the offer, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did something wrong. This one is about you. You may have done everything right. Some elements of the interview are beyond your control. There may be areas of research they simply like better. There may be someone they already met that they think is amazing. Grow from the interview. Contact people afterwards if there were people you were especially drawn to and ask if there was a problem. I have mentored people we did not hire about exactly what might have gone differently. But just because you got an interview does not mean you are on equal footing. So never forget to enjoy the process and keep in touch with your almost-colleagues.

A Son Lost In '3 1/2 Minutes' — And A Tragic Anniversary For His Parents It's Thanksgiving week, a time when many American families travel to reconnect. Kids come home. It's a happy time, unless, tragically, a phone call comes - the kind no parent wants to get. Three years ago tomorrow, the parents of 17-year-old Jordan Davis got that phone call. While out with friends, Jordan had been shot at a gas station by a man named Michael David Dunn, who objected to the loud music the teens had been playing in their car. That shooting took place against the backdrop of the killing of another unarmed black teenager in Florida months earlier. But although the dynamics of the two cases were similar, the outcome was different. Dunn was eventually convicted of murder. Now there's a new documentary about the story and the trial. It's called "3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets." It premieres on HBO tomorrow night. The parents of Jordan Davis, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, are featured prominently in the film. And I asked them what it was like to live through that period - the grieving, the trial - in front of a film crew. LUCIA MCBATH: It's very difficult. Strangers and people that don't know you don't understand your pain. There's no way they can completely understand your pain. They don't understand completely the fear that you have, you know, that - these things continuing to happen, and nobody's willing to listen, or nobody's willing to do anything about it. You know, we're not valued as black Americans - that we have no value if we have to live in this country that way. MARTIN: Mr. Davis, what about you? What did you want to say about this? RON DAVIS: Well, you know, the film shows that strong men do cry, you know? Strong men cry for their sons and their daughters and their families. And so I think through the media, whenever these tragedies happen - they don't show the men and how we feel as protectors of our families. MARTIN: I want to play short clip from the film. This is where you're actually reminiscing about the birth of your son. Let me just play a short clip. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "3 1/2 MINUTES, TEN BULLETS") DAVIS: When me and Lucy tried to have a child, she had a few miscarriages, and we were, you know, really distraught about that. We thought, we'll never have a child together. Like a miracle - you know, it was like - she's pregnant, and she just couldn't believe it. MARTIN: Is part of your mission here to help people see your son and, by definition, other black boys as people? DAVIS: Right. You know, when you have African-Americans you see on television and you see in the movies, for the most part, they advertise you as being a drug dealer or somebody that Michael Dunn would put in his head that they're a gangster. This film shows you - no, we're not that type of people. You know, we're the people that care about our family. We're the people that have feelings, and we hurt. And so that's what I want to show in this film. Actually, it's also for the families that don't get justice. You know, we're one of the few families that got complete justice where there's no watered-down justice - first-degree murder, no pardon, no probation, no nothing, you know. And so... MARTIN: To that end, the film has quite a lot of footage from the trial, but it also has interactions that Michael Dunn, the shooter, had with other people in his life leading up to it. And I just want to play a short clip from a conversation he had with his then-fiancee from the jailhouse. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "3 1/2 MINUTES, TEN BULLETS") MICHAEL DUNN: I just can't shake the notion that I'm, like, you know - I'm the rape girl that they're blaming because I was wearing skimpy clothes. Like, I'm the victim that's being blamed. I was attacked, and I refused to be the victim. And now - now I'm being punished for it. MARTIN: Ms. McBath, what was that like for you to hear that? MARTIN: Clearly, not - this is not just the substance of that conversation. That really was the substance of his defense - was that he was the victim. MCBATH: Absolutely. I mean, that only validated for me who we were dealing with. I mean, we knew there was a racial element to the shooting and... MARTIN: Because Mr. Dunn is white and because her son is African-American? Or... MCBATH: And because of the things that he said. He called them thugs. He called them gang bangers - that they had a gun. You know, he, within the first three and a half minutes, he sized up those boys and decided that they were thugs. He already racially profiled them. MARTIN: You know, it's - in case people don't remember, your son was killed in the same year that Trayvon Martin was killed. DAVIS: I knew the evidence would point that Michael Dunn was wrong. He tried to escape. He didn't dial 9-1-1. You know, he had every chance in the world to turn himself in. This guy - he ran back to his home two and a half hours away and... MARTIN: Ordered a pizza. DAVIS: ...Ordered a pizza, had a rum and Coke, you know, walked his dog. And so because of where Jordan was at the same year - that they had to win this case at all costs. MARTIN: What about you, Ms. McBath? Going into this, did you have an expectation that there would be an outcome that you wanted? MCBATH: I was very skeptical and very afraid because I'd seen what happened with Trayvon Martin's case. And that was the first time, too, I'd ever had any understanding as to what stand-your-ground was and how it was being used in these cases. Based upon what we'd seen in the country, you know, with other cases with white shooters against black males, I was not so sure that we were - even with all the evidence that we had, even as justified as those boys were to be in that space, doing whatever they were doing, I was not sure that we would walk out with a conviction, really, of any kind. MARTIN: What would you say, though, to those - and I know this is an issue that came up during the trial - that there are people who did identify with Michael Dunn because your son did get into an argument. Michael Dunn, you know, expressed some distaste for the music? Apparently, the boys turned it down initially, and then your son said, no, I'm not doing that, and turned it - and they got into kind of a verbal altercation. The prosecutor referenced this in his opening statement. Apparently, some people found that threatening. How would you respond to that? MCBATH: Those are only words. Those are only words. If my child has not said, I'm going to kill you, and he's not getting out of the car, those are only words. And those were teenagers - just Jordan trying to be bad and brash in front of his boys. You simply either park your car down the way, roll up your window and ignore them. But the fact that he would ensue an altercation with them was simply because... MARTIN: He started this confrontation. MCBATH: He started the confrontation. Absolutely. MARTIN: Right. What do you make of all this, now that this is all transpired? How do you think about all these events now? Obviously, you still - and I should've started by saying, I'm very sorry for your loss of your son. MCBATH: Thank you. DAVIS: Thank you. MCBATH: Thank you. MARTIN: But what do you think about all this? MCBATH: It's devastating. When we look at the table for Christmas and Thanksgiving, there's always an empty chair. You know, when Jordan's friends convene together, going to the games or the movies, there's always one person missing. You know, so even though there's been justice, there's still complete injustice of the fact that we're having to deal with these kinds of killings - senseless killings that continue to go on. DAVIS: The next time you say goodbye to somebody might very well be goodbye because when I said goodbye to Jordan on Black Friday, and I gave him some money to go to the mall, and I'm hugged him and said, I'll see you tonight, you couldn't tell me that I wouldn't ever, ever see my son alive again. So that has changed me. So when I talk to people, and I hug people, and they feel that heartfelt hug, I really mean it because I never know if I'm going to see you again ever. Maybe I'm not here, or you're not here. So I'm very genuine when I hug people and talk to people, and I look them straight in the eye and realize - I see you. I see you. I see you.

As debates continue about how and whether to expand Medicaid to serve low-income Americans, it's important for communities to remember that they don't have to wait for the government to improve healthcare access for their neighbors. While serving as the volunteer medical director from 1993 to 2015 at The CARE Clinic, an indigent clinic in Fayetteville, N.C., I witnessed many healthcare professionals working in ways that reflected the passions of our youth and the pragmatism of our years. Partnerships between medical professionals, especially medical schools, and the communities they serve can help create unique local solutions that help provide access to care for everyone. Building a Support Network In Fayetteville, local physicians and dentists had long cared for indigent patients but were hampered by the lack of a support network for lab tests, x-rays, medications, and referrals. In 1992, Catholic Social Ministries arranged for Sister Jean Rhoads, a Daughters of Charity nurse, to come to Fayetteville to serve as the clinic's first executive director. As a member of the initial steering committee meeting from 1992 to 1993, I was continuously impressed with how well the stakeholders -- including four local hospitals, medical and dental providers, businesses, churches, and civic organizations -- worked with one goal in mind: caring for the indigent. From the beginning, I expected many challenges, and they did come: fundraising, provider recruitment, developing a support network, getting buy-in from patients and the community, and dealing with institutional regulations. It was amazing to see innovative solutions develop. I was surprised when local politicians recommended private fundraising because government grants could not be assured from year to year. The clinic operated with private and foundation funding, bolstered by three local fundraising events each year. No money has ever been received from the government or insurance companies. Professional fundraisers were never used, because all of us were willing active participants in fundraising efforts. Our executive director relentlessly sought grants from nonprofit organizations as well as other direct and in-kind contributions. Administrative costs were kept under 12.8% of donated dollars, thanks to excellent business practices and our large volunteer staff. Successful Team Effort The clinic opened Nov. 16, 1993, and continues to operate today. From 1993 to 2015, over 100,000 medical and dental visits were managed. Hundreds of physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and dentists treated the patients either in the clinic or for free in their offices. At no cost, local medical facilities and radiologists provided radiologic procedures, the clinic pharmacy provided prescriptions, and LabCorp provided thousands of lab tests. Patient buy-in was achieved with outreach to local hospitals and the health department, as well as through churches, civic organizations, and word of mouth. Patients weren't charged, but were asked to consider donating to help pay for the next patient. Patients sometimes became volunteers. Many patients continued their care there for over 20 years. Getting Healthcare Providers Involved As the former director of the family medicine residency program at nearby Fort Bragg, I recognized three opportunities: a large potential source of volunteers, a site for community medicine education, and an opportunity to pass on a passion for indigent care. Because most army providers didn't have a North Carolina medical license, Fort Bragg proposed an interesting solution: a formal training agreement making The CARE Clinic the location for the residency community medicine rotation. For more than 20 years, Fort Bragg family medicine residents and their supervising physicians have worked in The CARE Clinic every Tuesday evening. Malpractice coverage was addressed early. Employed physicians at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center worked under the hospital's malpractice coverage. Medical Mutual of North Carolina, a medical malpractice company, agreed that volunteer work at the clinic would be covered by the clinician's primary policy with the company. The clinic's supplemental malpractice policy included a tail end clause. The clinic has not had a claim. For older healthcare professionals, indigent care is seen as a personal responsibility and obligation. I don't know if the newer generation of medical professionals will share the same passion. However, I'm convinced that community involvement by individual providers is partially the answer to addressing the healthcare disparities faced by uninsured and underinsured patients. Medical schools and indigent clinics can be laboratories for primary care innovation when they become allies in providing affordable and accessible healthcare as well as educational opportunities. Involving the Next Generation My experiences at The CARE Clinic lead me to believe that involvement in similar clinics should be part of every medical school's curriculum. In my work with medical students and family medicine residents at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, I actively promote the need for community-based care, with indigent care being a key component. A family medicine manual I wrote for my students and residents contains a section on The CARE Clinic and is a topic for many discussions. I believe medical and dental educators must take the lead by utilizing all available community resources to provide access to affordable healthcare. Despite the best efforts to create a safety net through Medicaid or other governmental programs, some people will fall through. I saw firsthand how passionate healthcare professionals and community volunteers can work together to make a significant difference in their community.

Influence of organic and inorganic fertilizers on growth and tuber yield of coleus (Coleus forskohlii Briq.) under northern dry zone of Karnataka. Being the only source of the forskolin to this species, the indiscriminate collection of C. forskohlii from the wild has made the species vulnerable and it has been included in the list of endangered species (Vishwakarma et al., 1988). Post harvest behavior of different sweet potato ( Ipomoea batatas ( L . ) Lam ) germplasm under ambient conditions An experiment was undertaken to study the postharvest behavior of different sweet potato germplasm under ambient conditions. The study indicated that minimum physiological loss in weight was observed… Organic fertilizer management in cultivation of medicinal and aromatic crops: a review Medicinal and aromatic plants constitute a major segment of the flora, which provides raw materials for use in the pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and drug industries. Looking into the important role of… Enhancement of germination and seedling growth attributes of a medicinal tree species Pterocarpusmarsupium Roxb. through pre sowing seed treatments Pterocarpus marsupium Roxb. is an important tree species belongs to family Fabaceae and it is distributed in deciduous forests throughout India which is a good source of dye, timber and also used as… Effect of pre-sowing treatments on seed germination and seedling growth of Annona reticulata L Bullock's heart (Annona reticulata Linn.) is one of the traditionally important fruit plant and also used in the treatment of various ailments which belongs to family Annonaceae. The fruits having… Enhancement of seed germination rate and seedling vigour index in red sanders (Pterocarpus santalinus (Linn. F.)): An endangered tree medicinal plant through different pre-sowing seed treatments Red Sanders (Pterocarpus santalinus (Linn. F.)) is an important tree species belongs to family Fabaceae. It is commonly known as Rakta Chandana and Lal chandan. It is a medium sized deciduous tree… Influence of seed priming with gibberlic acid on antidiabatic vine - bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) Genotypes It was concluded that soaking of seeds in gibberlic acid @ 100ppm for 24 h helps to enhance the seed germination percentage in bitter gourd. Studies on heterosis for fruit yield, quality and Yellow Vein Mosaic Virus resistance in Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.Moench.) - 18 June 2019 Assessment of combining ability for fruit yield and its related traits in brinjal The investigation on combining ability for yield and yield-related traits in brinjal revealed that dominance variance was higher than additive variance for the majority of characters indicating a… Evaluation of different sweet potato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam] genotypes for suitability of chips preparation BSP-23 and BSP-21 were considered as the most favourite for chips preparation based on the sensory and nutritional characters and there is a similar recovery percentage obtained in other genotypes.

Carl Warner’s Whimsical Food Landscapes What the London skyline has to do with asparagus, rhubarb, and Pink Floyd. By Maria Popova British photographic artist Carl Warner, whom you might recall as one of our favorite architects of edible landscapes, is a master of food and form, crafting astounding fantasy food landscapes that are part Ansel Adams, part Anthony Bourdaine, part your childhood daydreams dreamt from the counter of your grandmother’s kitchen. These miniature vignettes are painstakingly hand-crafted with only minimal Photoshop involvement and exude a kind of vibrant whimsy that stands in stark contrast with the mundane, dully ordinary ingredients Warner uses. Food Landscapes collects Warner’s most magnificent work, alongside detailed production notes and ingredient lists for each scene. Making landscapes out of food seems like a rather unusual thing to do for a living, and people often ask, ‘What made you start doing this?’ It seems that the burning heart of this question is really the curiosity about what it is that motivates any human being to do something out of the ordinary, and my short answer to this is usually a simple, because I had the idea and I chose to do something about it.” ~ Carl Warner And since we’re on the subject of influences today, Warner traces the kernel of his inspiration to the work of Tessa Traeger, a food photographer who in the early 1990s published A Visual Feast, a collection of painterly, two-dimensional pictures composed using food. Warner wondered whether he could take this a step further and create three-dimensional vignettes with food. Then, one day, as he was strolling through the fruit and vegetable market, he noticed the curving trunks and parasol canopies of portobello mushrooms were reminiscent of trees in the African savannah. He quickly grabbed the mushrooms and some grains, and headed back to his studio to create a tabletop scene that would photograph like a larger landscape. The rest was creative history. Of his start with photography, Warner recounts: For me, drawing and music were a means of escape into other worlds and alternate realities, and this provided the means to stimulate and exercise the muscles of my imagination. This went on for years, until I discovered photography. I found that I could photograph the real world but make it surreal by the techniques and the processes I was able to use in the camera and in the darkroom. I soon realized that this was a lot quicker than drawing, and I was able to develop ideas and concepts with more ease… At the same time, album cover art was in its heyday, and graphic designers such as Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis were creating amazing surreal images for bands like Pink Floyd. I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life.” A pinnacle of finding magic in the mundane, Food Landscapes is an absolute treat and a living manifesto for the power of truly running with the seemingly crazy creative ideas that take hold of your imagination.

Before Chicago became the architectural mecca that stands today, the city was defined by Lake Michigan and the branches of the Chicago River. Now known as the nation’s “Third Coast,” the river has been instrumental in the transformation of Chicago into the thriving city that is becoming a world destination, and an essential part of the movement toward more sustainable, resilient landscapes. For more than 29 years, site design group, ltd. has been transforming urban lands into dynamic civic spaces that encourage residents and visitors to gather, play, and grow. Throughout the past decades, the City’s approach to riverfront development has evolved dramatically, from forgotten and contaminated vacant lands into valued asset. During that time, the Chicago River has transitioned from being used solely as an industrial thoroughfare into a precious resource and opportunity to create world renowned developments and open spaces. This shift has set the stage for the numerous guidelines, master plans, developments, and parks that have been implemented along the Chicago River’s 156 miles of frontage. This session will outline several key case studies that tell the story of the evolution of the Chicago River, the City, and its approach to development, beginning with Ping Tom Memorial Park (phased implementation, 1999–2013), the Bubbly Creek Framework Plan (2010), the North Branch Industrial Corridor Framework Plan and Design Guidelines (2017), the River Edge Ideas Lab (2017), CH Robinson Headquarters (2018), River Design Guidelines Update (2019), Riverwalk East (2019), and several planned future developments. The issues, processes, strategies, and outcomes described have been formulated into a set of best practices for riverfront development in cities all over the world.

How To Improve Health Insurance. Economic losses further extend to absenteeism and decreased productivity. It doesn't hurt to contact a health insurance broker and see what they can find for. They might work for many. Individuals’ decisions are also influenced by the. Create an action plan for when you reach out to prospects. Tax Benefit Up To Rs.75,000. Health benefits aside, increasing investment in primary prevention presents a strong economic imperative. While the 28 million people 1 who were not insured for all or part of the year comprise one of many factors widening health disparities, around half of americans. For example, a study found that uninsured children in the us were less likely to have a regular source of primary health care, and they used medical and dental care less often (institute of medicine 2002). After All, Most Of Them Make Their Money From Commissions. Economic losses further extend to absenteeism and decreased productivity. A variety of interventions to either reduce costs or increase awareness of benefits can increase health insurance adoption. Save up to 12.5%* on 2 year payment plans. Insurance Providers, And Social Services Throughout The Patient’s Entire Healthcare Journey. For example, a study found that uninsured children in the us were less likely to have a regular source of primary health. As health insurance becomes more expensive, fewer employers are willing and able to provide coverage for their employees. Ad compare top expat health insurance in indonesia. To Make The Aca More Affordable For Individuals And Families, The Ama Is Advocating To: Expand eligibility for tax credit offsets to premiums to five times the federal poverty level. 70% of diabetes costs, 23% for cvd and 9% for cancers. Many think that having a health insurance policy can come to their rescue during medical emergencies. Get ₹5 Lac Health Insurance Starts @ ₹200/Month*. That knowledge brings more control, greater flexibility, the ability to customize plans, and cost savings that can help keep a company’s bottom line healthy. Health insurance can improve access to. At the same time, health insurance premiums have increased as much as 60% in the individual market in.

With technology and other reasons that are driving the need for change in education, it is no longer a trend to learn subject or to master skills only by reading and writing. No doubt, these two are very basic skills but since the requirement in the workforce is of 21st century skills like critical thinking, teamwork, communication, quick decision making, they play an important role too. And here comes the need for practices such as project based learning. Project based learning is a vibrant methodology in which students discover the real-life challenges and problems, and acquire skills to handle them. Project based learning is fill with engaging and creative activities, hence help student to get deeper knowledge. So, if you are a teacher and thinking to start project based learning then here are some useful tips for you. Take a look at these dos and don’ts to get the best out of your students. Make Things Real Issues related to real-world actually interest students, they are more keen to learn about real things. So always motivate your students to use those tools that are used by the experts face real world challenges and problems. Give Space for Improvement However, every project has beginning and ending point. Give your students sometime in the middle of the project to improve their work. Engage them in interactive feedback, so that they can review their own work. Help them to learn from setback; it enhances their confidence. Keep accommodating ideas to your students time to time. You can take help from project based learning libraries, forums, blogs and other online platform to get the latest idea. Customized these readymade ideas based on the on-going project and convey to your students in an effective and easy way. Highlight Team not Groups Team work and collaboration is actually is very crucial to reach the goal. Always emphasis team not groups to make understand about the relevance of working as a team. Teach them how to be accountable to their team and how to take join decision in team. Give them real life examples how an effective team can accomplish project easily. Always Share Result Students always get excited when they know that their project will be judged by the actual audience. Project exhibition is the best way to showcase parents and other people accomplishments of student. It builds confidence in the students. Do Not Leave the Basics of Teachings Teaching methods will change when you shift conventional learning from project based learning. Do not start from the scratch but try to include some practices in your project. For instance- In place of giving long lectures, address the small group of students explain the key points of the project. Like this way, you can incorporate some of the traditional ways in the project based learning. Never Make Project Afterthought In some of the educational intuitions, projects are the main part of curriculum. Otherwise students take it as fun. Project based learning must not be taken as fun by the students; else there will be no learning. Never Forget to Reflect Sit with the students and ask them about the difficulties and challenges they faced while working on the projects. You can use various platform online or offline to communicate with your students. At the end of the project, after their presentation, brief them about the key point of the projects and give them tips for the next project. Don't Get Stuck But Explore Do not just get stuck only between your students and you. Explore the project in between your colleagues and get new ideas and feedback from them. Also invite experts and ask them to offer their valuable advice to your students to make project successful. Adopting project based learning in your school is the best way to deliver education with technology effectively. Project based learning makes education interesting and full of fun. Student’s knowledge becomes more relevant when they apply it to the real situation. It is the most purposeful way of engaging students into complex ideas, challenges and curriculum. With the advancement in the technology, project based learning has become more easy. Gadgets like iPad, iPod and of course the web is playing crucial role in educating students in the most effective way.

Any scholarly papers, original sources for carcinogenicity and criticisms of insulin analog? I have not yet read the three articles. I was wondering about zinc. I thought that I heard that there could be concerns about zinc and possible negative health effects. Are you aware of the specific risks associated with zinc and also the more recent insulins such as Tresiba? Many of us are using Tresiba for our basal insulin. The specific mention of cancer is rather new to me. I will look into the zinc issues, I haven’t heard of that specifically. The studies that will yield the best benefit will be European analyses of their diabetic populations. The reason is they have the ability to include every patient in the country in a registry and collect the data. The Dutch do this, as well as the UK and some others.

This class explores how and why objects move the way they do. Students will learn what the laws of Physics mean and then apply them, pick them apart, and experience their implications. We will examine the simplest sorts of motion, figure out the forces involved and apply them to real life situations. Why do you feel the way you do when riding a high-speed elevator? How fast is a rollercoaster? Does gravity act the same on all bodies? How do rockets work, and can you build one that will actually launch? Your mathematical skills will be honed with real data, collected from a variety of equipment. We will also journey to a local amusement park and other off-site locations to test our skills. Prerequisite: Successful completion of one year of Algebra.

Leading Canadian solar company Mitrex launched operations of its new production factory in Toronto. The structure is the largest building in the world to employ the company’s patented building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) technology. BIPV technology consists of solar power generating products or systems that are seamlessly integrated into a building’s envelope and components, including façades, roofs and windows. These façades can satisfy up to 100 per cent of on-site electricity consumption, enabling buildings to obtain net-zero emissions. “It’s all about creating a sustainable green energy microgrid at a scale that it could become one of the largest energy companies in the world,” Danial Hadizadeh, CEO, Mitrex told SustainableBiz. A typical 30-storey building incorporating Mitrex’s products can generate enough solar energy to power 48 homes per year, which is equivalent to removing 61 cars from the road. The technology essentially converts building exteriors into micro power plants. The GTA-based solar technology manufacturer will call the new building its headquarters, allowing it to localize its production in the Canadian market while expanding to other markets, including the United States. The factory will also enable 100 per cent of the company’s products to be produced in Canada. Inspired by nature, Mitrex’s tall buildings can generate a significant amount of energy, much like plants and trees. Rather than draining power from the grid, self-sufficient buildings with solar cladding and railings can generate clean energy The company’s solar solutions include solar cladding, windows and railings. These features convert solar energy into electricity and provide building envelope functions, such as: – weather protection (including water proofing and sun protection); – thermal insulation; – noise protection; – daylight illumination; – and safety. Mitrex’s new structure consists of a 3D outer wall, created using the company’s cladding technology, and will cover 100,000 square feet. The building includes a fully-automated production line, which will make the company’s manufacturing process faster and more efficient, while ensuring competitive product prices in North America and abroad. The features of this first-of-its-kind facility are designed to help establish Mitrex as a leader in the global green building market. The factory’s design will be replicated in the construction of future facilities in Canada, the U.S. and ultimately abroad. “The new factory, equipped with our robust production line, will allow Mitrex to produce 25,000 square feet of solar integrated panels such as solar cladding and solar glass for windows and railing per day,” said Hadizadeh in a release. “With the opening of the new factory, it will allow us to create construction materials that meet the architectural demands of our clients while creating a blueprint for future Mitrex factories across the world.” Attractive, affordable and energy-efficient Launched in December 2020, the company’s self-sufficient power systems will benefit architects, developers and building owners, while remaining affordable. The company’s solar-integrated products provide the opportunity to build structures that are both aesthetically pleasing and energy efficient. The company aims to fulfill any aesthetic desire, building efficiency need or safety requirement. Mitrex marketing materials say traditional rooftop solar panels in urban areas provide poor design choices and are limited by roof space. Its products include cladding and railing systems with frameless modules, hidden mounting, homogeneous surfaces, and they can be adapted to look like any pattern, colour or material in the world. “We firmly believe that we can turn any surface the sun touches into an energy source with our products, without compromising beauty and aesthetics. Our malleable technology is the future of solar infrastructure and will be critical in supporting efforts in curbing carbon emissions,” said Hadizadeh in a release. “As the climate crisis continues to deepen, we need to rethink how we invest in integrated solar technology that is cost-effective, malleable and efficient.” The new facility’s eco-friendly features support the company’s mission to become a catalyst to accelerating the adoption of sustainable, energy-generating structures. Mitrex consistently strives for rapid, low-cost sustainable manufacturing.

Explore the best places Monuments in Odivelas Rua de Angola Building built by the municipality of olive groves in 1873, in a property named "Quinta do Mr Stolen or of souls". Been long abandoned, and only recovered in the years 80, being adapted to the realization of cultural events. It was opened as a theatre in December 1989. Belonging to the set attached to the Águas Livres Aqueduct, an aqueduct, in stone, created to get water to the Terreiro do Paço de Queluz for consumption of the Royal Mews. The work was created in the place of two sources: the source of Gargantada and do Pocinho and served several fountains and fountains in Queluz. Built by d. João V, in 1731, was only to be done in the mid-19th century. The main section is 14 kilometres in length, of which eight in the municipality of Amadora. Largo da Memória Monument composed of a large pointed arch superimposed a Colonnade which supports three-lobed arches, surmounted by a crest. Its initial function was to demarcate the territorial limits on the jurisdictional area of the monastery of Odivelas. It is unknown if the correct date of its construction, believed to date from the 14th century. Rua Almirante Gago Coutinho Fountain built in 1756 and rebuilt in 1843. In 1983 it was moved and assembled at the current location. Rua das Fontaínhas This font was born in Ribeira das Águas Livres, became, after the construction of the Aqueduct with the same name, reduced to a spring and a small ribeira, who has worked as a public laundry. It was built in 1888, and the exploitation of its waters started in 1910. Rua dos Castanheiros Composta por três arcos de volta perfeita, encimado por um frontão, de lanços, que enquadra três medalhões de embrechados, a Fonte dos Castanheiros remete-nos para um revivalismo bucólico e neoromântico. Situada numa quinta pitoresca, foi a primeira a ser explorada por particulares em 1931. Rua da Fonte Velha Source dating from 1951. Is in a poor state of conservation.

The name “Learn Enough” refers to the philosophy that you don’t have to learn everything about most subjects—you just have to learn enough to be dangerous. In this context, “dangerous” is meant to have a positive meaning, indicating that you are able to get things done. We also believe in the importance of technical sophistication, the ability to figure out technical problems on your own. Technical sophistication includes concrete skills like command lines, text editors, and coding, as well as fuzzier skills like Googling the error message and knowing when to just reboot the darn thing. Everything we do is for real Another aspect of the Learn Enough approach is doing everything for real. This means that right from the start you’ll be using the real tools used every day by software developers and other technical people. You’ll also be making and shipping real projects. For example, in Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous, you use the amazing Git version control system to track changes in a real HTML project. I don’t want to spoil the Secret Bonus at the end, but let’s just say that if you’ve never published anything to the live Web, that situation will be remedied by the end of the tutorial—and all before you’ve even reached Learn Enough HTML! An integrated system The Learn Enough tutorials are designed as a careful system of integrated, interlocking projects that build on each other. This means that each tutorial is as self-contained as possible, while referencing other tutorials in the sequence. For example, as noted above, Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous teaches version control using a simple but real HTML website. Learn Enough HTML to Be Dangerous the incorporates Git right from the start, allow us to deploy a live site in the first section. Meanwhile, both tutorials build on and reference Learn Enough Command Line and Learn Enough Text Editor, the previous two tutorials in the sequence. Taken together, the Learn Enough tutorials prepare you for a comprehensive introduction to web application development, the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. We believe the most useful kind of programming is web development, and the best technology for learning it is the free and open-source web framework known as Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, or just “Rails” for short, has many features that make it ideal for learning web development. It’s a “batteries included” framework that comes with everything you need to write a complete full-stack web app right out of the box.

What is Montessori for the 6-12 year-old? Primary children, typically, can be characterised by their questioning minds, their ability to abstract and imagine, their moral and social orientation and their unlimited energy for research and exploration. They move from the concrete through their own efforts and discovery to the abstract – thus greatly expanding their field of knowledge. In a research style of learning, elementary children work in small groups on a variety of projects which spark the imagination and engage the intellect. Lessons given by a trained Montessori teacher direct the children toward activities which help them to develop reasoning abilities and learn the arts of life. Children, at this age, are driven to understand the universe and their place in it and their capacity to assimilate all aspects of culture is boundless. Elementary studies include geography, biology, history, language, mathematics in all its branches, science, music and art. Exploration of each area is encouraged through trips outside the classroom to community resources, such as library, planetarium, botanical garden, science centre, factory, hospital, etc. This inclusive approach to education fosters a feeling of connectedness to all humanity, and encourages their natural desire to make contributions to the world. The Great Stories (Cosmic Education) Dr Montessori developed the Great Stories – also known as Cosmic Education – as an introduction to all topics, providing a ‘big picture’ to demonstrate how the sciences, art, history, language, and geography are interrelated. Through the Five Great Stories, children become aware that the universe evolved over billions of years, and that it is based on particular laws that order the ways in which all the plants, animals, and the rest of creation is maintained. The Five Great Stories are first presented in Junior Primary (6-9 years) using impressionistic lessons and are then presented every year until the end of Senior Primary (9-12 years). Unlike the 3-6 environment, where the child is introduced first to “small” ideas that gradually widen into larger concepts, the primary child is introduced right away to large concepts – the largest of all being the beginning of the universe. With this ‘big picture’ in mind, Junior Primary children have a larger framework on which to hang smaller ideas as they discover them in their independent research. There are Five Great Stories that are used to paint a broad picture before moving to more specific study: First Great Story: The Coming of the Universe and the Earth Second Great Story: The Coming of Life Third Great Story: The Coming of Man Fourth Great Story: The Story of Writing Fifth Great Story: The Story of Numbers

“Braving Iceland’s Volcano” by Lucas Laursen [Laursen notes: By the time I pitched this, I’d completed my reporting trip and published a story from it for Science, so I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted to tell my next story about the volcano. I’d also had a look at the FT Weekend’s very thorough feature pitch guidelines and I tried to address each item in their guidelines with a section of this pitch. If I hadn’t seen their guidelines I might have kept the first pitch shorter and waited for questions from the editor. I think the published story more or less kept to the issues I raised in this pitch. That’s unusual for features—I usually pitch before I’ve done my heavy reporting and the story often morphs during that phase and the editing phase. Probably my thinking was more focused this time because it was essentially my second round of storytelling working from the same core material.] Thanks again for passing me your commissioning note Friday. To briefly introduce myself, I write about science research and policy for magazines such as Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology (whose news editor suggested I approach the FT), and consumer-facing magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American. Clips on . I returned from Iceland last week, where I was covering volcano monitoring systems as used on Eyjafjallajökull for Science Magazine (feature here: /clips/eyjafjallajokull.pdf). I noticed that a lot of the coverage understandably focused on how aviation authorities might make their ash-related flight bans less black-and-white. They might install lasers at weather stations to detect ash densities, the thinking goes, or conduct engineering tests to see what levels of ash jet engines can tolerate. That will certainly be part of the solution. But I haven’t seen much written about the root of the problem: the type of eruption at the volcano, which has a major impact on whether and for how long the volcano will send ash into airways. My story for Science focused on gas monitoring, but I learned that volcanologists are testing half a dozen different tools, some adapted from military equipment, to try to better predict and characterize eruptions. They told me that the chemistry of the magma and the shape of the volcano and how much ice covers it all determine how explosive eruptions become and how high the ash will fly. When the eruption on Eyjafjallajökull began on 20 March, they flocked to the volcano to sample rocks, gas, glacier runoff and did flyovers with brand-new radar and infrared instruments. I tagged along on two field trips and spoke with a dozen Icelandic volcanologists and others in Italy, the Azores and Hawaii. I propose an overview of the budding, uncertain art of high-tech, real-time volcano monitoring using the ongoing Eyjafjallajökull eruption as the news peg and the field trips, also still ongoing, as narrative devices. The volcano is my central character, I suppose, but I interviewed so many researchers that I can use them to interpret the volcano’s language for the FT’s readers. These researchers listen closely to seismic stations, which let them pinpoint magma-induced earthquakes 10 kilometers below the surface, and sniff chemicals such as fluorine in the ash cloud, which can harm farm animals. They have furious debates at the university and weather office over the effect of a change in lava viscosity on the duration of the ash cloud. There is a certain drama in caring so much and knowing so little about what a volcano will do, despite their very serious efforts. There was more than a little frustration among Icelandic scientists, for instance, when Iceland’s president practically threatened Europe with an eruption from Eyjafjallajökull’s big sister Katla last week, for instance. As usual, it’s more complicated than that, but I’m in the business of

What are the keys to sport and public health in EU? Based on lengthy reflection and taking into account the magnitude of the sport/health issue, Sport and Citizenship has several recommendations for European public authorities. This seems to be a good time, spanning two EU Presidencies, in the middle of the European Year for Active Ageing. On 22nd March, in line with the Sportvision 2012 Conference, a workshop was organised by our think tank in Copenhagen to try to find ways of promoting sport as an innovative tool for well-being and for combating non-communicable diseases. This workshop united members of the “Sport and Health” network developed by Sport and Citizenship in the framework of its work programme supported by the European Commission. Can sport be an innovative tool for well-being and for combating non-communicable diseases? At a moment when “new” illnesses typical of an increasingly sedentary society (obesity, cardio-vascular diseases) and the European population is getting older, it is still apparently necessary to promote equal opportunity and the benefits of sport for everybody. The fact is that physical inactivity is one of the major health risk factors. It is probably responsible for a million deaths (about 10% of the total) per year in the WHO European region (1). According to the statistics available, between 40% and 60% of the EU population leads a sedentary life (2). Used for preventive purposes, physical activity has a wide range of beneficial effects on both physical and mental well-being: it reduces by about 25% the risk of various problems linked to inactivity (such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and certain forms of cancer and decreases stress, anxiety and loneliness (3). Which role for the EU? In order to protect and develop this potential, the role of the EU lies in developing public health policies where sport has an integral part. Apart from the basic problem of including sport/health in a legal process, there are three distinct areas where the EU can bring added value: multisectoral cooperation, providing incentives and responding to specific needs. Our think tank recently published a position paper (4) suggesting proposals and recommendations in response to these issues. We are obviously very pleased that questions about health and sport have been on the agenda of the institutions and the Member States for several years now, and we agree that these questions should not be left solely to public authorities (civil society and the sports movement need to show themselves capable of innovation in developing a suitable response to the new needs and requirements of European citizens), but our think tank also calls on the EU and the Member States to provide symbolically strong and binding action in the sport/health matter. In our opinion, sport in the service of health constitutes a key aspect of the current public health problem.

This report forms part of the project The Role of Good Governance and the Rule of Law in Building Public Trust in Data-Driven Responses to Public Health Emergencies, a COVID-19 Rapid Response research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (grant AH/V015214/1). As the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020 and 2021, governments turned to data-driven technologies to help save lives and, ultimately, to pave a way out of lockdown and back to normality. Statistical data informed decisions on when and where to impose a lockdown, when to lift one, what safety measures to impose, and when to lift them, who to prioritise for vaccination, and many other types of future planning. Much of the debate in the first part of the pandemic swirled around the hoped-for "silver bullet" of the contact tracing app. After some first failed attempts, most European countries deployed technologies that were more rights-protective, driven not just by public concern but by the need to cooperate with the infrastructure policies of large technology companies such as Google and Apple. These "contact tracing app" wars are of lasting significance but have been well documented already and are traced in summary in our Rapid Response Evidence Review (WP3-D1 pages 5-11). Here we have tried to break new(er) ground and provide useful advice to policymakers on how a wider range of data driven technologies have challenged principles drawn from human rights, rule of law and good governance literature . This policy document discusses four data-driven Covid-19 technologies deployed in the UK which we have studied in detail: • contact tracing apps (part of WP3-D1) • "vaccine passports" (WP3-D1 and WP3-D2A) • vaccine allocation algorithms (QCovid), (WP3-D1 and in discussions with citizens juries run by the Ada Lovelace Institute) • venue check-in apps (WP3-D2B) We also analysed separately in WP3-D2C, the judiciary's attitude to scrutinising the actions of the executive during the pandemic - as there have been no decided cases directly on data-driven COVID technologies, we drew on cases involving data, and COVID-related cases not related to technology. The success and effectiveness of these technologies rests on public trust and widespread participation. The more people use them or respect their decisions, the more successfully they can achieve their aims. Public trust is underpinned by respect for good governance and the rule of law on the part of the government implementing these technologies. Drawing on research carried out in other parts of this work package, and on insights from the Ada Lovelace citizens juries, the four technologies are thus examined in light of good governance and rule of law principles: transparency, non-discrimination, privacy, and democratic accountability and scrutiny. We became aware while working through these papers that governance by app - "code as law" - is a relatively unaddressed problem in terms of rule of law and human rights scrutiny in the UK. This issue has come to the fore in COVID-19, where apps such as vaccine passports have the potential to substantially affect rights and freedoms yet are subject to little or no public or legislative scrutiny in their development phases. This policy brief concludes with a series of recommendations aimed at government policy makers with respect to the development and deployment of data-driven technologies during public health emergencies. These are not intended to be specific to the Covid-19 pandemic, but rather take forward lessons learned from the experience in the UK with the four technologies discussed in this paper.

- Ampere's equation : An expression for the magnetic force between two electric current-carrying wire segments. - Ampere's law : The integral of a magnetic field over a closed path is equal to the conduction current through the surface bounded by the path. - Ampere's rule : Is a right-hand rule for the direction of deviation of a compass needle caused by the presence of a straight, electric-current carrying, wire. - Biot-Savart's law : Add brief definition or description - Coulomb's law : An inverse-square distance law, like Newton's gravitational law, describing the forces acting between electric point charges; also valid for the force between magnetic poles. - Coulomb's law (magnetic) : An inverse-square law for the force between two magnetic monopoles. - Faraday's law (electromagnetism) : States that a change in magnetic flux generates an electromotive force (EMF). - Gauss' law (electrostatics) : Relates the surface integral of the electric displacement through a closed surface to the electric charge enveloped by the closed surface. - Gauss' law (magnetism) : States that the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero; this means that magnetic monopoles do not exist. - Lenz' law : States that a change in magnetic flux gives an induced current that opposes this change.

Walter Sickert – an artist of controversy and complexity England was copying France in this late Victorian era. It was really just an American named Whistler and Sickert challenging French supremacy. But these two had to go to France and learn to paint in the first place. And it was the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and Edgar Degas in particular, that they had to learn. Old Bedford Gallery, painted in 1894, shows the influence transmitted to him by Degas. Degas liked to paint theater scenes that show parts of the audience, like photographic clippings. So you don’t necessarily see the stage, but the audience watching. This tableau is brilliant with its subdued light and color and its almost cartoonish audience in the gods, in the cheapest seats. Increasingly, Sickert showed the poor side of Victorian and then Edwardian life. The gloom of city life, even duller than anything the French painted at the time. There was nothing good in this world, poor and defeated. It was the world beyond polite society. There was little or no enjoyment in the kind of decay that Sickert was increasingly describing. His later work Boredom (1914), showing a couple unable to decide what to do next, lost in their living room, is one of the best of this style of painting of defeated life. No wonder Sickert was associated with a flea-ridden world, as he took a series of cheap rooms in run-down boarding houses and used them to paint. His interest in the Ripper murders in the 1880s and the subsequent murders in the run-down London of Camden Town helped make him a suspect in Knight’s book. On the contrary, I imagine he enjoyed the risky and threatening world of poverty and the depressed, enjoying – as a tourist would – a visit to the seedy and dodgy. Many artists have made the rundown world of poverty their focus and subject.

Some kind of carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) might therefore be necessary and no strong preferences were expressed for structuring this as a carbon border tax/customs duty, a shadow emissions trading system or a carbon excise tax, although the latter would need to be coupled with some kind of green subsidy to encourage investment in greener production. While the charge may be levied on some kind of average carbon content of products, accepted certification methods exist which should allow importers to demonstrate the actual embedded carbon content of products so that any CBAM charge could be reduced appropriately. There was support for developed countries providing support for low income developing countries to transition to a green economy The second roundtable on Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM) was held on 9 April 2021 with a group of 14 representatives from 10 companies, across three continents. The write up of the first roundtable, held with a group of experts on 9 March 2021, can be accessed here. Participants discussed the impact of carbon pricing and potential effects of a CBAM. While reference was made to the various options for a CBAM, which were set out in the EU Commission’s consultation launched in 2020, the discussion focused on the principles in general. They were not intended solely as a critique of any EC proposals. Attendees spoke in their private capacity rather than on behalf of any organization. The meeting was held under the Chatham House rule and any attributed comments have been cleared with the speaker. In some cases, there was general agreement among the participants but on other points there were differing views. This note is not intended as advice and does not necessarily reflect the views of any KPMG firm. Loek Helderman, Tax Lead for KPMG IMPACT began with a short introduction outlining the four different propositions for a CBAM referred to in the EU Consultation: - Some kind of Carbon Tax – probably structured as a customs duty; - Extending the existing EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) to include importers – this would create a number of complexities and it was assumed it is not likely this option will be adopted by the EU; - A Shadow ETS, whereby importers would buy allowances from an unlimited pool of shadow or deemed allowances at the prevailing EU ETS allowance price; - A New carbon excise tax – applying both to EU products and imported products. It is likely that an EU CBAM would apply (at least initially) to industries most at risk from carbon leakage - for instance, steel, aluminium, cement, chemicals. The aim would be to ensure that there is an equivalent carbon cost for imports into the EU in comparison with locally manufactured products. In feedback to the EC Consultation, business respondents generally preferred Option 1 – i.e. a carbon tax/customs duty. Interestingly, at the first KPMG CBAM roundtable, there appeared to be a preference for Option 4 – i.e. a carbon excise tax. In considering what form of CBAM the EU might introduce, it is important to recognise that if it were structured as a tax it would require the unanimous consent of all EU Member States. If it was introduced as a non-tax measure – e.g. a shadow ETS – it could be introduced with the less onerous majority voting procedure. Carbon leakage can occur in various ways. Participants thought that while there was no strong empirical evidence for carbon leakage at present, as CO2 emissions reduction aspirations increased - resulting in an increased carbon price - it was very likely that it could become a significant problem One participant referred to a carbon leakage “prevention paradox”. There is little empirical evidence of leakage and some argue it is not really a significant issue. However, there is little actual leakage because carbon prices are low and there are already protection measures in place. In the EU, industries which are vulnerable to carbon leakage are issued free allowances based on the emissions produced by the top 10% most efficient facilities in the industry. This means that allowances only need to be purchased to the extent that a facility produces more CO2 than is covered by this benchmark. So the paradox is that the danger of carbon leakage - which a CBAM is designed to address - does not appear to arise precisely because measure have already been taken against it. If the free allowance quota is reduced going forward - as seems likely - the carbon price and pressure for leakage will increase. Participants pointed out that there are different ways of defining carbon leakage. Various industry association have tried to provide examples and the issue is always to define what sort of leakage is being identified. If it is thought of as, say, a company closing a steel plant in one country and moving it to another due to carbon pricing, that is unlikely to happen. However, leakage can also occur where domestic products are substituted by imports. For example, 15 years ago the EU was a marginal net exporter of steel. Now, the EU is a net importer. While there may be various factors driving this change, it does indicate that carbon leakage is occurring. As another example, in the chemical industry there are concerns that certain new investments have not gone into the EU but been diverted elsewhere due to the impact of carbon pricing. There is a tension between having a high cost of carbon for environmental purposes and the impact this can have on the competitiveness of exports It was agreed that where products are openly traded on the world market there is a concern that increased carbon prices adversely affect exports. This is true, for example, as regards steel and chemicals. It was noted that there is an unavoidable tension between environmental policy and maintaining export competitiveness. If a jurisdiction or region (such as the EU) has high emission reduction aspirations and therefore a high carbon cost, it is bound to impact the competitiveness of exports. This also means that if the EU phases out the free allocation of allowances under the ETS, it could have an impact on competitiveness. If exports are not covered by the carbon price in order to maintain competitiveness it follows that the environmental policy is restricted to the domestic market - in other words adequate carbon pricing would depend upon the price in the country of importation. Evidence from the EU ETS shows that carbon pricing can be effective in driving emissions reductions. But some participants raised concerns that where abatement technology is not available and costs cannot be passed on to consumers, a carbon price becomes a deadweight and, in particular, can adversely impact exports One participant asked about the extent of evidence that carbon pricing worked to reduce emissions. It was pointed out that according to the EC the EU ETS has reduced carbon emissions by covered industries by 30% between 2005 and 2018. Certain industries such as the steel industry have made huge steps in decarbonisation. To go further however it may require new technologies and in the meantime the industry is looking at carbon capture and storage options. However, such developments are expensive and someone has to bear the cost. There was some discussion about who does and who should incur the cost of carbon tax. Some noted cost should pass through to consumers – so it changes behaviour; structuring the charge as an excise tax or even a VAT could facilitate this. Another participant thought that governments simply assume that markets will do the work and capital will be allocated to the most environmentally friendly technology. Nevertheless, it was pointed out that from a policy perspective it was important to identify who should bear cost so as to structure the tax as efficiently as possible. Even if a carbon cost cannot be passed on, if it incentivises the producer to use greener technology – as that is cheaper than paying the tax – it will result in reduced emissions. However, it was argued that carbon pricing does not achieve a reduction in CO2 emission where abatement or low carbon alternatives are not available. A real-life example was given within the metal industry in a developing country. The producer is charged the cost of a carbon tax by certain suppliers. As it is not possible to obtain the raw material from a less carbon intensive source, this cost cannot be mitigated by the producer. Furthermore, the producer is not able to pass on the cost to its own customers. There is, therefore, no incentive for the customers to mitigate the cost by reducing the quantity of product used or switching products to less carbon intensive ones. Another participant noted that this is a real issue for small exporting countries; they may lack the market power to pass on the price in exports. Participants recognised concerns about the impact of applying a CBAM to products from low income developing countries. A possible solution could be developed countries providing financing to assist a green transition in such countries – perhaps financed through recycling the CBAM revenues. Simply exempting imports from a CBAM was not generally favoured A concern was raised that a CBAM applied by a developed country to imports from a developing country could be seen as protectionism and forcing the cost of decarbonisation onto poorer nations. It was noted that it is often suggested that the revenues from a CBAM should be used for financing the transition to green technology in developing countries rather than being seen as a windfall the importing country. Such destination of revenues could help obtain global acceptance of a CBAM and mitigate trade tensions. Nevertheless, the EU proposals suggest that any tax raised will become an own resource of the EU to finance EU development. One participant pointed out that there were arguments that developed countries should subsidise the transition to green technology in, say, low income developing countries. However, this should be done at the macro, country to country level. It did not follow that it would be appropriate to provide an exemption from a charge under a CBAM to specific imports from developing countries as this would provide an un-level playing field between companies depending upon the location. Participants noted that facilities covered by the EU ETS have to measure and certify actual carbon emissions. It should therefore be possible to allow importers to obtain certification of embedded carbon so the CBAM could be calculated on the actual emissions rather than some industry benchmark There was some discussion about the need and viability of determining embedded carbon emissions in imported products. It was pointed out that if a charge was levied on some average carbon content of a product, while the charging mechanism would be simplified, there would be no incentive for overseas producers to reduce emissions. It would therefore be more effective to allow importers to demonstrate the actual embedded carbon in products so that if it was lower than the benchmark the tax would be accordingly reduced. In the EU it is necessary for industries covered by the ETS to determine their carbon emissions which are then certified by third parties. It should therefore be possible, and desirable, for importers to be given the opportunity to do the same. Nevertheless, it was noted that for some products it is possible to establish the carbon footprint with a very high degree of accuracy but for others it may be necessary to use some kind of global or local benchmark and so better ways to measure the carbon content is needed in some cases. It was noted that the EU Consultation document proposed that a CBAM would cover both Scope 1 Emissions (i.e. direct, produced by the facility itself) and Scope 2 Emissions (i.e. indirect but owned – such as emissions arising from purchased electricity and heat) but not Scope 3 Emissions (i.e. indirect, not owned, emissions generated within the value chain). While no concerns were raised about measuring Scope 1 Emissions some participants noted measuring Scope 2 was much harder and could complicate a CBAM The EU ETS only applies to Scope 1 emissions but in practice this should not lead to discrimination – which could be contrary to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. Assume that a steel plant in the EU is using electricity which is not produced by renewable power such as wind. The facility producing electricity would also be subject to the ETS. The plant producing steel would be subject to the ETS in respect of its own direct emissions but not the indirect emissions from the electricity - as these would already have been subject to the ETS. In practice therefore both the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions associated with the steel would have been subject to the ETS which means that if imported steel was also subject to a charge on both types of emissions the situation will be comparable. One participant pointed out that while they are able to measure their own Scope 1 emissions it is difficult for them to measure the Scope 2 emissions. This could create a practical difficulty in applying a CBAM. The question was raised whether or not an EU CBAM would also apply to Scope 3 emissions The EU Consultation does not extend that far although the European Parliament has suggested that Scope 3 should be included. Another participant pointed out that some businesses already do attempt to measure Scope 3 emissions as part of their own net zero strategy - although this is different from the base which is currently subject to carbon pricing in the EU. To reach such targets business need to have insight into their total carbon footprint and change the way they operated. Furthermore, if a government’s ultimate goal is to arrive at decarbonisation it could be necessary for Scope 3 emissions to be measured and included in any carbon regime. It would then be necessary to ensure there was relief for any other carbon tax paid in the supply chain to ensure there was no double charging. Several other participants noted that measuring Scope 3 emissions in industries such as the chemical or extractive industry would be very difficult. Another pointed out that many businesses have made net zero commitments and know they need to move faster but are struggling to find ways to do so. The participants did not raise any major concerns about the application of one of the possible CBAM options as opposed to the others - although each has flaws. Nevertheless, during the conversation it was assumed that the viable options were a carbon tax/customs duty, a shadow ETS, or a carbon excise tax as opposed to simply extending the EU ETS to importers. It was generally thought that a carbon excise tax would need to be combined with some kind of subsidy to incentivise green production It was noted that a carbon tax/customs duty and a shadow ETS automatically incentivise green production whereas an excise tax does not. Therefore, the latter would have to be combined with some kind of subsidy which would be paid to producers where their carbon emissions were lower than the benchmark at which the duty was set. While technically they would be separate instruments, the net effect of the excise duty and the subsidy would be similar to a carbon tax on the embedded carbon content of the product. One participant thought this would work if the excise tax was applied at the top of the value chain - for example to steel, aluminium, cement and chemicals - but it would become too complicated if it was applied lower down the value chain to derivative products. Another participant noted that subsidies or refunds can be the subject of fraud. He noted this is a serious issue with VAT refunds. Therefore, any subsidy system would require a tight system of certification control to avoid abuse. Furthermore, even non-fraudulent taxpayers may have issues with the integrity of their data which could lead to additional errors in subsidies or refunds. While participants accepted it is likely that free allowances under the EU ETS would be reduced over time, it was considered it would be possible for them to be continued for a transition period while a CBAM was in operation If the EU adopts a shadow ETS it raises the question whether or not free allowances should be continued. If an importer had to purchase and surrender shadow allowances at the prevailing ETS allowance price it would be disadvantaged in comparison with an EU-based competitor which received some allowances for free and this could breach The WTO rules. One participant noted that what is important is that EU producers are not given double protection i.e. benefiting from the allowances while competitor products are subject to a full CBAM. One way to address this might be for the charge under a CBAM to be initially set at the average cost of carbon in the EU - i.e. taking account the impact of any free allowances - rather than at the prevailing price of an allowance traded in the market. There may be an administrative burden for importers if they wished to demonstrate a product had lower than average emissions and should be charged at a lower rate – but that would be their decision and would be in their interest. As free allowances were reduced over time the price could be increased until it eventually matched the full ETS allowance market price. Participants generally thought we need cooperation, not CBAM. Ideally the best approach would be some kind of global agreement on a minimum carbon price – perhaps only amongst the largest CO2 producing nations – it was generally thought this could be very difficult. If countries or regions were to unilaterally increase their emissions reductions ambition, this did point to the need for some kind of CBAM to address carbon leakage There was general agreement that rather than countries imposing CBAMs it would be better if there could be a global agreement on a minimum carbon price. Given that the majority of global emissions are produced by a few major economies it could be sufficient for these countries to reach an agreement under some kind of carbon club. It was suggested that maybe the threat of the spread of CBAMs would drive such cooperation. However, one participant pointed out that these major economies all have very different interests and so reaching an international consensus could be very difficult. Another participant noted that given the difficulties in agreeing an appropriate carbon price some stakeholders are starting to think more about alternative nature-based solutions and carbon capture and storage. It was pointed out though that such technologies are still largely in their infancy. An example was given of green hydrogen (i.e. hydrogen produced from electrolysing water using renewable power); while it is technically possible it has been estimated that it would take 30% of the entire wind power of the Netherlands to produce enough green hydrogen for one steel plant located there. Participants recognised that that transition to a carbon neutral economy is very difficult. If countries are to increase carbon reduction ambitions, there is likely to be a need for an increased carbon price. If only certain countries or regions take this step there will be a severe risk of carbon leakage and loss of competitiveness in exports leading to unacceptable economic consequences. There is therefore a need for a correction mechanism of some sort such as a CBAM.

Investigating flooding in York - a visit to the York Community Flood Hub Are you interested in or teaching about flooding in York? York has a long history of flooding and evidence suggests that water levels on the Rivers Ouse and Foss are rising. This is likely to be due to climate change and changes in upstream land management. If this trend continues, properties and people could be at greater risk of flooding in the future. We at the Environment Agency have been allocated £45 million by the Government to better protect properties in York from flooding. As part of this project, we have opened up a community flood hub for the public to come in and talk to us about flooding in York. Here you can learn about what flooding means to the city and our plans to improve its resilience to rising river levels.

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I’m a little late on bringing some heart health awareness during Heart Health Awareness month, but it’s never too late to give your heart some love! February is (was) a month dedicated to heart health awareness. Maintaining good heart health is important when it comes to preventing chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Millions of Americans are suffering from high blood pressure which can lead to heart attacks, stroke, and/or heart disease so keeping blood pressure under control is a great start to preventing health problems down the road. One easy way to start taking control of your blood pressure is through the foods that you eat. Every day, at every meal YOU have the chance to take control of your heart health. Here are some easy, and helpful tips to keeping blood pressure low and preventing heart disease: - Eat less meat: Reducing your intake of meat helps to lower overall saturated fat intake. Saturated fat can lead to high cholesterol levels, as well as raise blood pressure. Take one or two days out of the week to go meatless, replacing it with other protein sources such as beans, tofu, tempeh, or meat-free alternatives (veggie burgers, plant-based meats, etc.) One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2015 was to watch at least one documentary every month. I wrote them all down in the back of my planner, and thought it would be cool to share them all with you, and rate each one on a scale from 1-10. I’m hoping to do the same in 2016, it’s a great way to spend a little time each month educating yourself on different topics and information that’s out there. Fed Up – 7 Breastmilk – 8.5 Please Subscribe – 6 Sexy Baby – 7 Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret -10 (GO WATCH IT RIGHT NOW) A Place at the Table – 6.5 Two: The Story of Roman & Nyro – 6 Dear Zachary – 8.5 (amazing film, but prepare for your heart to be destroyed) Jonestown: A Lost Paradise – 8.5 Continue reading “Documentaries Watched In 2015” As you may have noticed, I took a much needed…yet longer than expected hiatus from blogging. With nutrition club responsibilities, final projects, a brutal final’s week, taking the GRE, and a busy holiday season, blogging unfortunately got pushed to the back burner for a while. But I think I’ve given myself a long enough break, because I’m ready to get back to blogging about food, recipes, and all things nutrition and health! A little update on the past three months… Traveled to the beach, and the mountains over fall break.. Taught a kid’s cooking class on how to make hummus Continue reading “Update: I’m Alive” It seems like it’s been a while since my last What I Eat In A Day post, but I guess I can attribute that to tests, papers, and school-related responsibilities. But I’m back with a pretty epic day of food (and drinks!) so hopefully this will make up for it! This morning, I started off with..you guessed it..two slices of Ezekiel toast and a banana. I ran out of peanut butter, so I’ve been using Earth Balance spread on one slice, and blackberry jelly on the other. I of course paired it all with a warm cup of black coffee. After breakfast I headed over to our dietetic club’s garden spot at the community garden. The garden spot is such a cool place, because it’s a great escape for all of us stressed out students. Our club tries to get a few people together once a week to weed, water, plant, harvest, etc. and keep the garden up and running. We donate all the food we make to Hospitality House. The Hospitality House is an incredible organization that helps the homeless and those in crisis rebuild and get full care and attention. Continue reading “What I Eat In A Day | October 10, 2015” September is one of my favorite months, because it includes the start of fall, as well as my birthday! I guess I was enjoying it so much, it seemed to fly by! But here are some of the things I loved during the best month of the year!

Noah DeFerraris is a 17-year-old high school senior who’s taking a heavy load of college prep courses, like AP calculus and biomedical innovations, courses where being able to see the classroom board is critical. “At the beginning of my sophomore year, I started having problems seeing, especially in the classroom,” Noah admitted. “Even if I was sitting in the front row, I had to squint to read the board.” When he went for his annual eye exam, his optometrist noticed Noah’s vision was much worse than the year before. “Noah has worn glasses and contacts since the first grade,” said his mom, Rose DeFerraris. “But this was different. He couldn’t even read the giant ‘E’ on the eye chart. His vision was terrible.” Noah’s optometrist suspected he might have a condition called keratoconus, a progressive thinning and distortion of the cornea causing blurred or hazy vision and sensitivity to bright light. Keratoconus affects about one in 2,000 people and is more common in children with allergies and Down syndrome, and is usually diagnosed in adolescence or early adulthood. “Noah has severe allergies and asthma, and often has rubbed his eyes. The doctor thought that might have contributed to the condition,” Rose explained. After a test to map the shape of his corneas, the doctor concluded that Noah indeed had keratoconus. Initially, Noah’s optometrist treated the condition with glass contact lenses, but they were uncomfortable and difficult for him to wear. “Noah’s eyes were red all the time, and he was still having trouble seeing,” Rose said. In her job with Liberty Public Schools, Rose said she frequently refers students to Children’s Mercy Kansas City, so she decided to contact the hospital about Noah. “I called the main number and explained that my son had been diagnosed with keratoconus,” Rose said. “They scheduled an appointment for Noah to see Erin Stahl, MD, an amazing corneal eye specialist with a great bedside manner!” Dr. Stahl confirmed Noah’s diagnosis, and told him about a new option to treat the condition called corneal cross linking. Children’s Mercy was the first pediatric hospital in the nation to perform corneal cross linking, a treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration. “Until recently, we treated keratoconus with glasses, then contact lenses, but at some point, scar tissue develops and the contact lenses no longer work,” Dr. Stahl explained. For about 20 percent of patients, the next step is a corneal transplant, which is expensive, can be risky and requires a lengthy recovery period. Though keratoconus can’t be cured, the goal of corneal cross linking is to halt the progression of the condition. The procedure is performed on an outpatient basis. Most patients heal quickly and are back to their usual routine in a week to 10 days. During the procedure, Dr. Stahl makes an incision to loosen the superficial layer of the cornea. Drops of riboflavin, or vitamin B2, are dripped onto the eye every two minutes, along with anesthetic every five minutes, for a half hour. The riboflavin-soaked cornea is then exposed to ultraviolet light for another 30 minutes. The light strengthens the bond between the riboflavin and collagen molecules, stiffening their fibers and ultimately strengthening the cornea. “This is actually a natural process,” Dr. Stahl explained. “Riboflavin is naturally in your tears, and once we reach about age 50, we become naturally cross-linked. But that takes more than 30 years.” Dr. Stahl completed the first corneal cross linking procedures in February 2017. Noah’s first procedure was performed on his right eye in May 2017, and his left eye was completed in July 2017. Dr. Stahl worked with Christina Twardowski, OD, optometry, to create a special pair of glass contacts that help Noah see 20/20. His eyes healed just in time for the start of his junior year of high school. Now a year later, Noah said the procedure did what it was supposed to—stop the progression of the keratoconus. In addition to wearing the glass contacts, he will return to Children’s Mercy once a year until he turns 21 so that Dr. Stahl can be sure his vision remains stable. In the meantime, he’s working hard, taking advanced placement courses to prepare for college, and a possible engineering major. “I can see a lot of things I couldn’t see before, like road signs and the board,” Noah said. “I’m definitely glad I had the surgery. Dr. Stahl was great and my vision is better than ever!”

Air pollution: causes and impacts Air pollution is a major and global concern, arising for the most part from human activities. Air pollutants can be emitted by a variety of sources or formed directly in the atmosphere. They alter the air we breathe and have clear negative effects on our health. But they also affect the Earth's climate and have a tremendous, often underestimated, impact on our economies. This 3-week course shares the basics of air pollution and its effects. During the first week, you will discover the major causes of outdoor and indoor air pollution. The next two weeks detail the environmental, economic and health impacts of this pollution.

Acacia mellifera (=Senegalia mellifera) is very drought resistant, hardy, thickset, deciduous Acacia with vicious, hook thorns. Bauhinia bowkeri is a hardy, semi-deciduous, scrambling shrub or small tree with bright green, glossy bi-lobed leaves that look like butterfly wings. It bears big, frilly white flowers that are sweetly scented from October to December. This plant is spectacular when in flower. Plant in sun or semi-shade in well-drained soil. They look wonderful in an informal hedge, as a backdrop or low screen or climbing up trees giving a real forested feel. Dombeya tiliacea is a hardy, deciduous, small tree or multi-stemmed shrub with dark, heart-shaped, thinly textured leaves and dark fissured bark. Brachylaena discolor is a hardy, evergreen, fast growing tree or large shrub with beautiful silver and dark green leaves. White, nectar rich flowers are borne from July to September. Male and female flowers on separate plants. Ideal as a windbreak and screening plant. Galpinia transvaalica is a hardy, decorative, thickset, small to medium sized, sometimes multi-stemmed, evergreen tree. It has waxy, glossy, wavy-edged leaves that flush an amazing red in spring. Showy white flowers are borne from December to April which attract insects to the garden. It is also a butterfly host tree. A quick growing small to medium sized tree that makes a good container plant. It can also be pruned into an attractive, formal hedge in sun or semi-shade. Size 3 to 10 m Buddleja saligna is a very hardy, evergreen, fast growing, drought resistant tree with silver-grey leaves and beautiful twisted bark that looks almost woven. It bears profuse panicles of sweetly scented, white flowers from August to January that attract insects and birds. Diospyros whyteana is a large, hardy, very decorative, evergreen shrub or small tree with glossy, almost mirror-like, dark green leaves. The clusters of small, fragrant, bell-like white flowers are borne from July to October The fruits are red when ripe, enclosed by bladder-like structures. Euclea natalensis is a hardy, evergreen, very attractive shrub or small to medium sized tree (depending on where in grows). Gymnosporia buxifolia is a very hardy, drought resistant, semi-deciduous, small tree or large shrub. It is armed with formidable long, straight spines. Blooms profusely with white flowers that cover the branches from August to March. Ochna natalitia is a hardy, semi-deciduous, large shrub with glossy leaves that flush red in spring. Freylinia tropica "Blue" is a very hardy, evergreen, slender shrub that has spreading branches, smooth grey bark and shiny, bright green leaves. It blooms profusely in late winter when little else is flowering but does bear some bright blue flowers throughout the year. It makes a good screen plant and can be clipped into a formal hedge or used in an informal hedge. It also makes a beautiful container plant. It grows in sun or semi-shade. Attracts insects and butterflies to the garden. Size 1 to 3m Olea europaea africana is a very hardy, evergreen, drought resistant tree with gorgeous silvery foliage and a rounded crown. It bears scented, greenish flowers from October to December followed by delicious edible small black Olives (these can be eaten directly from the tree and need no treatment to make them edible). It is an excellent bird and insect tree that is much favoured by wildlife.Birds love to probe under the rough dark bark for insects. Pittosporum viridiflorum is a very hardy, evergreen, small to medium-sized, well-shaped tree with glossy leaves that have a resinous smell when crushed. The bark has small pits in it and is an attractive feature of this tree. It is grey in young trees and becomes darker, rough and slightly fissured in mature specimens, and smells slightly of liquorice. The dense clusters of sweetly scented, cream flowers are borne from September to November and are followed by brilliant red, sticky fruit in yellow-green capsules, that attracts birds. A beautiful garden tree, which can be grown in sun or semi-shade, and can be used in forest and bush clumps as well as being used as a hedge plant. Wonderful shade tree, and with its non-aggressive root system is ideal for small gardens and containers. Size 3 to 10m Searsia (=Rhus) leptodictya is a very hardy, evergreen, drought resistant, small, decorative tree with a drooping crown of bright green foliage. The bark on young stems is reddish brown, becoming darker and rougher as the tree matures. The lovely reddish wood is used to make beautiful small pieces of furniture. The inconspicuous flowers (male and female flowers on separate plants, therefore only female plants bear fruit) are borne from January to April. These are followed by bunches of edible fruit which attract birds to the garden. It grows in most soil types and makes a beautiful, graceful tree that is ideal for a small garden in sun or semi-shade. It is also beautiful as a small avenue tree. A valuable fodder tree especially in times of drought. Size 3 to 4m Gymnosporia (=Maytenus) bachmannii is a very pretty evergreen shrub with small, narrow leaves that have pink stalks. It bears abundant, small, white flowers that have pink stalks from January to March and attract insects to the garden. It then bears red berries for most of the year. This is a well-shaped, excellent garden plant that can be pruned to make a stunning small hedge or topiary. Plant in sun or semi-shade in compost rich soil. Size 1 to 3m Aloe arborescens is a very hardy, drought-resistant, large, branched Aloe with narrow, curved, bluish-grey leaves that form rosettes. Aloe arborescens yellow is a very hardy, drought resistant, branched Aloe with narrow curved, bluish-grey leaves that form rosettes. Three to four flowering stems of yellow flowers arise from each rosette and bloom all winter. Halleria elliptica is a hardy evergreen shrub, with very showy, orange-red, broadly tubular flowers in summer and winter. The olive green foliage turns purple in winter which contrasts beautifully with the orange-red flowers. Aloe ciliaris is a hardy, climbing Aloe with stems climbing up to 5m if they are supported, but otherwise makes a lovely, clump forming sprawling shrub. The leaves are in loose rosettes around the stem and fringed with white hairs. Orthosiphon labiatus is a very hardy, semi-deciduous, fast growing shrub. It forms a much branched rounded shrub with aromatic, heart-shaped leaves. From mid-summer to early winter it is covered in spikes of pinky-mauve tubular flowers that are irresistible to a number of insect pollinators. Butterflies especially enjoy the flowers. Pruning it back in early spring encourages flowering. Ideal for smaller spaces, plant in sun or semi-shade. Plant in well-composted soil, and although extremely drought hardy, watering well will keep it at its best. Size to 1.5m Plectranthus hereroensis is a hardy, attractive, fast growing, evergreen but short-lived shrub. It's broad, bright green leaves contrast beautifully with darker foliage planted behind it. It is a particularly floriferous shrub, and if pruned regularly will bush out with many flowering stems. The deep bluish-purple flowers are borne in long tapered spikes from about April through to the end of May. It is a host plant to a number of butterfly species, and an attractive food plant to bees and other insects. This shrub will flower and grow best in full sun, which is unusual for most Plectranthus species. Plant in well-drained soil, and add plenty of compost for healthy plants. If left unpruned, it can grow to 2m. A most worthwhile addition to any garden, as it's lovely blue flowers contrast beautifully with other colourful plants flowering at this time of the year. Some examples are Leonotis leonurus and some Aloe species, as well as Syncholostemon densiflorus and Euryops pectinatus. Although very drought hardy, it is suitable for gardens where frost is not too severe. Plectranthus hereroensis is being investigated further for compounds found in its roots that have shown anti-bacterial activity. Occurs in hilly terrain in sandy, dry savannah. Size: up to 2m, but generally about 1m Coleus livingstonei (=Pycnostachys urticifolia) is a hardy, evergreen, herbaceous perennial with angular pinky-brown stems and bright green, toothed leaves that are roughly triangular. The leaves are aromatic when crushed. The flowers are borne in autumn (April to June) in spikes at the ends of branches. The beautiful deep blue to mauve flowers attract bees and other pollinating insects to the garden. Hedgehog Sage is an ideal ingredient to a cottage garden, and contrasts beautifully with other plants flowering at this time of the year (for example: orange flowers of Leonotis leonurus and pink flowers of Hypoestes aristata and Syncolostemon densiflorus) To make sure that one can benefit from the lovely flowers in late autumn, it needs to be planted in a spot that is protected from frost. It prefers well-drained, well-composted soil in sun or semi-shade. Size: 1 to 2m tall Strelitzia reginae is a hardy, evergreen shrub with large, ornamental, banana-like leaves. The brilliant orange and shimmering peacock-blue flowers have an interesting structure resembling an exotic bird and flower from May to Dec. The nectar attracts sunbirds while the black seeds with an orange aril attracts many seed eating birds to the garden. The blade-shaped leaves and flowers are widely used for flower arranging. This beautiful shrub makes a stunning accent and container plant. On the Highveld and in other dry regions it grows best in partial shade. Size 1 to 1.75m Lippia javanica is a very hardy, evergreen, erect, small shrub with aromatic leaves. Leonotis leonurus is a very hardy, drought and frost resistant, evergreen perennial shrub. This well-loved, decorative shrub has masses of showy, compact clusters of orange or white, velvety flowers repeated in circles up the length of every long stalk from February. to July. An important food and nectar plant for sunbirds, bees and butterflies during autumn and winter. Plant in sun or semi-shade and cut back severely after flowering for best results and mass flowering the next season. It has been grown as a garden plant in Europe since the 1600s. It is extensively used as a traditional medicinal and magical herb. Ruttya fruticosa is a fairly hardy, evergreen, beautiful rounded shrub with glossy dark green foliage. It bears unusual, exceptionally attractive two-lipped tubular orange or yellow flowers that have a shiny black in the throat. It blooms from spring to late summer and attracts bees, birds and butterflies. Plant in compost rich soil – it also tolerates slightly acidic soil. Prune back after flowering to keep in shape. Jasminum multipartitum is a very hardy, evergreen, fast-growing creeper or scrambler with small, glossy, dark-green foliage. It bears masses of fragrant, white (with deep pink undersides), star-shaped flowers, from August to January. Jasminum stenolobum is a hardy, evergreen, scandent, bushy shrub or climber, with glossy, dark-green leaves. Masses of large, fragrant, white, star-shaped flowers with a pink underside are borne from August to January. Hypericum revolutum is a hardy, evergreen, medium-sized to large, fast-growing, moisture-loving shrub with reddish-brown, scaly bark. Salvia namaensis is a perennial, evergreen small shrub that is both drought and frost hardy. It has fine, dissected little leaves that are lime green, tough and aromatic. They, as well as the young branches are covered in tiny little hairs. Young branches are reddish purple. The small white to pale mauve flowers are borne in spring and summer. Many insects including bees and butterflies are attracted to the flowers. Plant in full sun, in well composted, well drained soil. Lovely contrasting foliage for bold-leaved plants with the same growing conditions. Makes a good container plant, but prune fairly regularly. Size to about 1m Karomia speciosa (= Holmskioldia speciosa) is a hardy, deciduous, sparsely-branched shrub or small tree with smooth, pale-grey bark. Acokanthera oppositifolia ia a hardy, evergreen, drought-resistant, medium to large upright, woody, shrub with brown, deeply fissured bark on the old wood. Andrachne ovalis is a fairly hardy, deciduous shrub or small tree that has smooth, light grey bark and attractive dark-green leaves with bluish undersides. It bears tiny clusters of white flowers in the axils of the leaves from November to March. Asparagus laricinus is a very hardy, evergreen, shrubby Asparagus with fine, feathery foliage and silvery, zigzag branchlets. It has a myriad of tiny, white, nectar-rich flowers in spring and summer that are fragrant and attract insects and birds. Aloe striatula is a very hardy, robust, shrub-like, scrambling Aloe that has attractive, smooth, glossy, dark-green, curved leaves, carried on sturdy stems. The spikes of flowers are bright-yellow or orange on unbranched, flowering stems. It flowers from November to March and attracts insects and Sunbirds to the garden. An excellent plant for an exclusion zone of a bird garden or planted as a hedge. This Aloe can tolerate extremely low temperatures.It will grow in sun or semi-shade. Size: 7 to 1m Hypoestes aristata is a hardy, evergreen, small to medium sized, rounded shrub with grey-green leaves that have lighter veins giving them a variegated look. It bears abundant spikes that are densely packed with 2-lipped deep purple flowers with darker purple spots in the middle of winter, from March to August, when very little else is in flower. The flowers attract butterflies and other insects to the garden which is a boon to the insect eating birds. Freylina tropica is a very hardy, evergreen, slender shrub that has spreading branches, smooth grey bark and shiny, bright green leaves. It blooms profusely in late winter when little else is flowering but does bear white or lilac flowers throughout the year. Attracts insects and butterflies to the garden. Ochna serrulata is a hardy, small, semi-deciduous shrub with glossy, mirror-like leaves that flush red in spring. The profuse, bright yellow, scented flowers are borne from September to December. The flowers are short lived but are followed by black fruit on an enlarged red calyx that looks like a flower and persists on the shrub for months. As with Ochna natalitia this plant deserves pride of place in any garden. The seeds attract birds to the garden. Ehretia rigida is a very hardy, deciduous, drought resistant, attractive shrub with an interesting shape. Eriocephalus africanus is a hardy, attractive, fast growing evergreen, aromatic, small shrub, with fine, soft, grey, heavily scented leaves. It flowers from autumn to winter with white, daisy-like flowers that have a purple centre and are followed by attractive, white, woolly seed heads. Plant in a well-drained, sunny position and ensure it is well watered. Euryops pectinatus is a very hardy, attractive, fast growing, evergreen, free flowering shrub that has soft grey-green foliage. It bears bright yellow daisies all year round but in profusion in spring. It grows best in well-drained, well-composted soil in the full sun and flowers most of the year if deadheaded regularly. Water well in winter as this is its main growing season. The flowers attract butterflies and insects to the garden.It makes a particularly beautiful, informal hedge. Size 1m x 1m Euryops virgineus is a very hardy, fast growing, evergreen shrub that is both drought and wind resistant. It has attractive, dense, fine bright green leaves and is covered in masses of small, golden-yellow flowers in winter and early spring. The sweetly scented flowers attract insects to the garden. Plant in full sun and prune back at least once a year after flowering and make sure it is watered in winter . Plectranthus ecklonii is a fairly hardy, erect, shrubby Plectranthus with attractive, large, quilted leaves. Plectroniella armata is a hardy multi-stemmed, deciduous shrub or small tree with smooth grey bark and straight hard spines. The attractive glossy leaves are dark green on top and pale green below. Plumbago auriculata white is a hardy, scrambling, much branched, evergreen shrub. It bears masses of edible, white Phlox-like flowers on and off all year round. It is an important butterfly host plant and attracts both butterflies and birds to the garden. A popular garden and hedging plant that is also suitable for covering banks. Prune regularly to keep smaller and in shape as it can get quite wild. Plumbago auriculata blue is a hardy, scrambling, much branched, evergreen shrub. It bears masses of edible, sky-blue Phlox-like flowers on and off all year round. It is an important butterfly host plant and attracts both butterflies and birds to the garden. Polygala myrtifolia is a hardy, large, evergreen shrub with glossy green leaves. It bears abundant, mauve pea-like flowers almost all year round with a flush in late winter. It makes a decorative small tree if pruned into a standard and makes a beautiful floriferous screening plant. It can also be pruned into a formal hedge. Attracts Carpenter Bees to the garden. The seeds are relished by laughing doves and other seed-eating birds. Grows in sun or semi-shade but flowers best in full sun and makes an excellent container plant. Size 1 to 4m Portulacaria afra is a hardy, evergreen, neatly shaped, small tree or shrub with pretty round, succulent leaves and ruby red branches. The leaves have a pleasant acid flavour and can be used in salads. From October to January, after rain, it is covered in clear pink to rosy mauve, nectar rich flowers - a wonderful sight. The papery 3-winged ornamental fruits resemble pinkish lanterns. Plant in well-drained soil in sun or shade. Useful for binding soil. Rhamnus prinoides is a very hardy, evergreen, very fast growing, large shrub with beautiful glossy almost mirror-like leaves. The small inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers are borne all year round and attract insects. The black berries which follow provide food for fruit eating birds almost all year round. Sclerochiton odoratissimun is a hardy, evergreen, small, shrub with attractive, glossy, small dark green leaves. It bears masses of pretty white flowers that are streaked with red or purple lines and are wonderfully fragrant in late summer and autumn. The flowers are like little hands facing the sun. Scutia myrtina is a hardy, evergreen, drought resistant, thorny shrub with beautiful glossy, tiny leaves. The new growth of leaves is a pretty bronze colour. Bauhinia tomentosa is a hardy, fast growing, drought resistant, deciduous, scandent shrub with deeply lobed leaves, like butterfly wings. It bears masses of lemon yellow, bell-like flowers with a purple blotch at the base of one petal and flowers throughout summer. Plant in full sun or partial shade. Dracaena aletriformis is a fairly hardy, evergreen, shade loving, Yucca-like accent plant. Acacia hebeclada (=Vachellia hebeclada) is a hardy, small to medium-sized, spreading, deciduous tree or large shrub with paired, sharp spines. The dark brown to grey bark is fissured and flaking.Birds, such as the Red-billed Wood Hoopoe, enjoy probing under the bark for insects. The blue-green leaves are hairy and catch the sun. Mostly creamy-white, but sometimes pale-yellow, large, round puffball flowers, are scented and borne in large attractive clusters at the nodes of the leaves. They adorn the tree from July to September and offer up a bounty of pollen and nectar to the numerous small pollinating insects and insectivorous birds that visit them. As the shoots age their colour changes giving the crown a lovely mottled look. The large, distinctive pods stand upright and persist on the plant for a few seasons, hence the common name ‘Candle Thorn’. An ideal addition to a security hedge because of its height and ferocious thorns. It is often referred to as ‘The House of the Lion’ as lions often shelter under it in the hot dry areas where this tree occurs. Size: 4 to 7m Volkameria glabra (=Clerodendrum glabrum) is a very hardy, semi-deciduous, fast-growing, small tree or large shrub with a dense crown. It has shiny, dark-green leaves that are pungent when crushed. From December to June it bears profuse, dense clusters of white to pinkish flowers that have long stamens. In some specimens the flowers are wonderfully scented, whilst in others the scent can be pungent.These are followed by tightly packed yellowish-white berries that attract birds to the garden. An important host plant of moths and butterflies – an absolute must for a butterfly garden. The flowers also attract a whole host of pollinating insects and the nectar in the flowers is an important food source for bees. It is extensively used for medicinal and traditional purposes. Plant in sun or semi-shade in well-composted soil. Size: 2 to 6m Helichrysum petiolare is a hardy, evergreen, dense, very fast growing perennial with beautiful, silvery-grey velvety, rounded, aromatic leaves. A lovely foliage and textural plant. It has cream flowers from November to January which can be used in dry arrangements. The lovely grey colour of the foliage adds colour and texture to a mixed border. It can also be pruned into a small hedge. The leaves are used as bedding hence the common name. Campers believe the smell aids a peaceful nights sleep. Needs to be pruned regularly to keep in shape. A good plant in sun or semi-shade in larger gardens in well-drained soil. Size 30 to 50cm Carissa edulis is a hardy, much-branched, evergreen, fast growing shrub or climber that has glossy, leathery leaves, which are sometimes hairy and have red growing tips. The hard rigid spines are almost always single. Masses of beautiful, white flowers tinged with pink appear from September to December. These are followed by edible fruit that turns purplish-black when ripe, and because it is so sweet and juicy, makes a good jam or jelly. The fruits attract birds to the garden. It makes a good hedging plant, whether pruned to keep compact or left to grow freely. It needs to be controlled in a smaller garden but can be allowed to grow wild if you have the space where it will scramble through the trees. Can be grown in semi-shade, but prefers full sun and flowers more profusely in the sun. Size 1 to 3m Acacia brevispica (=Senegalia brevispica) is a hardy, semi-deciduous, robust, prickly, scrambling Acacia that can be trained into a large beautiful shrub. It has feathery, large, soft, bipinnate leaves with small hook thorns along the ribs on the underside. Hypoestes aristata white is a hardy, evergreen, small to medium sized, rounded shrub with grey-green leaves that have lighter veins giving them a variegated look. It bears abundant spikes of 2-lipped white flowers in the middle of winter, from March to August, when very little else is in flower. The flowers attract butterflies and other insects to the garden which is a boon to the insect eating birds. Podocarpus henkelii is a very hardy, evergreen, large decorative, beautifully-shaped tree and is one of our best-known indigenous trees. The bark is khaki brown that, when it matures, flakes into long, thin strips which expose the attractive reddish underbark. It has long, drooping, narrow, dark-green leaves. The female cones develop into olive-green seed that ripens in May. Although it is quite slow-growing it does develop into a huge forest tree that is only suitable for large gardens. For small gardens plant it in a large container to limit its size. In a container, it makes a great Christmas tree when decked out in its finery. Plant in either east- or south-facing areas as it prefers damp, cool and shady conditions. If planted as a single specimen in the middle of lawn, remove at least 1.5m diameter of lawn around the tree, as its roots cannot compete with lawn. Mulch and water well or it will not grow properly. Always mulch the soil around the trees as this it keeps the roots cool. Size: 20 to 30m Metalasia muricata is a hardy, evergreen medium-sized shrub that is very variable in appearance and frost hardiness, depending on the region in which it occurs. This rounded, robust, sturdy shrub has fine silvery grey-green, needle-like foliage. The leaves can be smooth or woolly. In winter, the shrub is covered in honey-scented clusters of tiny white to pinky-purple flowers. The flowers attract many pollinating insects, and the seeds are eaten by birds. Dried leaves are used as tea in Lesotho. It is useful as a tall filler in flower beds, providing grey-green foliage for colour and textural contrast. In some coastal areas, this species is used with other plants to stabilise sand dunes. As it is drought and wind tolerant, it can be used to screen lower plant beds from the wind. Plant in sunny areas, in sandy, well drained soils. It can also tolerate acidic soils. Size to 4m Buddleja auriculata is a very hardy, beautiful, evergreen, fast growing shrub with a weeping habit and beautiful black-green glossy leaves that are white on the underside. From July to August, it bears beautifully fragrant creamy white flowers with an orange centre. The flowers of the Weeping Sage are borne profusely in small rounded clusters that are densely packed along the stems towards the ends of gracefully arching branches. When planted close together or with other shrubs it makes an effective windbreak. It also makes a beautiful, large informal hedge. It can be planted as a specimen but prune fairly regularly to keep it in shape. It attracts insect-eating birds and many pollinating insects including butterflies to the garden. Planted in conjunction with B. saligna and B. salviifolia it ensures a long fragrant blooming season. Plant in sun or semi-shade, in well composted, well drained soil. Size 2 to 4m Jasminum angulare is a hardy, evergreen, drought-resistant climber with glossy, dark-green, trifoliate leaves. The clusters of star-shaped, white flowers look velvety and are sweetly-scented, especially at night. These wonderful flowers are borne from October to January and attract a whole host of tiny insects. They are followed by decorative black berries that attract birds to the garden. Used for both medicinal and magical purposes. This is quite a delicate climber that can be trained over arches and along fences and walls. It also grows well in containers. Use as a climber or as a rounded shrub depending on how it is pruned.Plant close to a patio or window where the wonderful scent when it is in flower can be appreciated. It takes a little time to settle once planted out, but once it has done so, it grows quite quickly. Flowers add a delicious scent to potpourri. Regular pruning will keep it in shape and encourage flowering. Plant in sun or semi-shade in compost-rich soil. Size: Climbs to 4m Justicia capensis is fairly hardy, evergreen medium to large shrub with small, glossy, velvety leaves and scented, magenta flowers with white markings all year. Flowers attract numerous pollinating insects including butterflies. Used in traditional medicine to attract customers to a business or to improve the chances of employment. Good garden plant for forest gardens or shady gardens. Prune to encourage a denser growth habit. Plant in sun or shade, in well-drained, loamy soil. Size to 2m Helichrysum crispum is a hardy, evergreen, dense, very fast-growing, compact perennial with beautiful, small, dainty, silvery-grey velvety, rounded, aromatic leaves. Noltea africana is a very hardy, evergreen, very fast growing, small to medium sized tree. The glossy leaves are darker above and paler underneath, and have purple petioles. The branchlets are also purplish-red. The flowers are pretty, small, white sprays borne in the axils of the leaves from August to September. The black seeds are encased in a three-lobed, brown woody capsule that splits to release them when ripe. A decorative tree that is ideal for the smaller garden but should be kept as a single stem. Grows well in sun and semi-shade. Hyparrhenia tamba is a very hardy, evergreen to semi-deciduous, impressive, tall grass with blue, almost turquoise, leaves and thick stems. They also display beautiful colours of yellow and red as they mature, when planted in full sun. The tangled flower- and seed-heads also have a turquoise hue and are borne from January to June. Plant in containers, or as a backdrop to a grassland garden. It is beautiful planted in pots as a screen on balcony gardens or in small gardens. It is also useful as a soil stabilizer, especially in damp areas. Plant in sun or light semi-shade areas. This grass should be cut back every two or three years and raked to remove the thatch. Size: 2 to 2.5m Dovyalis longispina is a hardy, evergreen to semi-deciduous shrub or small to medium-sized tree with glossy, dark-green, roundish, shiny leaves. The new growth is red. The small whitish-yellow flowers appear in clusters from August to October Male and female flowers are on separate plants, therefore only female plants will bear fruit. The leaves drop during flowering but new leaves re-appear immediately. The delicious, edible fruit is a beautiful pale red with white spots (they look a lot like strawberries). The long, thin spines make this an ideal plant for a security hedge, but it is also an attractive garden plant. Attracts birds to the garden. Plant in full sun or semi-shade in sandy or well-drained soil. Size: 5 to 8m Cassinopsis ilicifolia is a hardy, evergreen, decorative large shrub with glossy, bright green leaves and green stems. The branchlets have a zigzag pattern and single spines. Warburgia salutaris is a fairly hardy, medium sized tree or large shrub with brown bark that has slightly raised, yellowish lenticels and a peppery smell. The attractive glossy green leaves also smell strongly of pepper when crushed. The young leaves are blue green and resemble the Silver Cluster Leaf (Terminalia sericea). The greenish-yellow flowers are borne in the axils of the leaves from July to December and are inconspicuous. They are followed by large green berries. The bark of this tree is collected extensively for medicinal purposes and the over harvesting of the bark has killed off the majority of these trees making it highly endangered. This beautiful, neatly shaped tree with a non-aggressive root system makes a great garden plant. It makes a dense and effective hedge and grows exceptionally well in containers. Plant in sun or semi-shade, in well-composted, well-drained soil Size 3 – 8M Sclerochiton apiculatus is a hardy, evergreen, drought-resistant, scrambling shrub for sun or semi-shade. It takes well to pruning, so Blue Lips is useful for smaller gardens, and can be used as a backdrop to a bed, a screening plant or in a mixed herbaceous border. It also makes an attractive container plant. From November to April it bears beautiful, scented, blue flowers with silvery undersides. Size: Up to 2 metres Euryops tysonii is a very hardy, evergreen shrub with small, densely packed, small, leathery leaves are arranged close to the stems. These make it a particularly decorative small shrub which is dense and has an upright, and at the same time sprawling, growth habit. The relatively large, sweetly scented, bright yellow, daisy-like flowers are clustered at the end of the stems and are borne from September to May. The flowers attract many pollinating insects to the garden and if you watch carefully you may be lucky enough to see a perfectly camouflaged Crab Spider living in the centre of the flower. It requires full sun and looks beautiful in the rock garden, shrubbery, mixed border, on terraced slopes, in retaining walls and also makes a lovely container plant. Euclea natalensis subsp. capensis is a hardy, evergreen, very attractive shrub or small to medium sized tree (depending on where in grows). It has a dark, spreading crown of shiny, hard and leathery leaves with red undersides. The strongly scented small, creamy white flowers are borne from August to March and are followed by edible round red to black fruit from March to December. It attracts birds and insects to the garden. With its dense crown it makes a good screening plant and can be planted singly as a beautiful specimen tree. It has many traditional, medicinal and magical uses. Twigs are used as toothbrushes. It is a little slow growing and should be planted in sun or semi-shade. Size: 3 to 10m Buddleja glomerata is a very hardy, evergreen, large shrub or small tree with light brown, bark that peels in strings. Searsia [=Rhus] burchellii is a very hardy, evergreen, large shrub with dark-brown bark and small, glossy, waxy leaves. The foliage is beautiful and adds texture to the garden. It flowers from February to April, with sprays of inconspicuous flowers. Male and female flowers are on separate plants, therefore only female plants bear fruit. The flowers attract pollinating insects and therefore insectivorous birds to the garden. The flowers are followed by bunches of reddish-brown fruit. The flowers and fruit attract birds to the garden. Use in an informal hedge, as a screen or as an element of a bush clump.If pruned into a standard it makes a lovely small tree. This is a really tough, drought-resistant plant for full sun or semi-shade areas. Size: up to 3m Gymnosporia harveyana is a hardy, evergreen, spiny shrub that is densely leafy and has long, slender, straight spines. The beautiful, glossy, dark-green foliage is a distinctive feature of this plant. From October to May it bears clusters of small, white flowers that attract insects. These are followed by white berries on slender stalks. From November to June the berries turn ruby-red and adorn the tree. When these split, birds are attracted to the food source. As it is either in flower or fruit all year round it is a great addition to a wildlife garden. It has many uses – it can be pruned to form a small tree, trimmed into a formal hedge, left as an informal hedge or planted in a security barrier. It also makes a beautiful container and accent plant. This stunning plant grows in deep or filtered shade. Plant in shade to semi-shade, in compost-rich, well-drained soil and give it moderate water. Size: 1 to 4m Acacia ataxacantha (=Senegalia ataxacantha) is a hardy, deciduous Acacia that can grow as a scrambling shrub or medium sized tree with many hooked prickles. It is drought resistant and fairly fast-growing. The fine leaves are either bright green or blue green and are densely hairy. It bears spikes of creamy flowers from November to February. These are followed by attractive, flattened deep red to maroon pods. The Satyr Charaxes butterfly uses it as a host plant. It is used in traditional medicine, and the wood is split to weave baskets. This tree is ideal to plant as a security hedge, as its tangled thorny branches will climb through other plants and create an impenetrable barrier. It requires well drained soil and full sun, but can tolerate light, dappled shade to semi-shade. Size: 5 to 10m Salvia africana-lutea is a very hardy, evergreen, small- to medium-sized shrub with aromatic, grey leaves. Clusters of unusual brown, funnel shaped flowers are borne from June to December, and when the flowers fall off a decorative, purplish calyx remains. The copious nectar offered by the flowers attracts insects and Sunbirds to the garden. It is an attractive, easy plant to grow and forms beautiful silvery clumps. Plant in well-drained soil in full sun or semi-shade and water in winter. This tough plant tolerates very dry conditions and should not be overwatered. Prune regularly to keep it in shape. Size: 50 to 75cm Barleria rotundifolia is a hardy, evergreen, fairly fast growing, rambling shrub that has a rounded shape. The spiny branches produce small, shiny green leaves. From December to March it produces yellow tubular flowers, with the four upper lobes of the flower separated from the lower lobe to form an open tube from which 2 stamens and the style protrude. The fruit is a small exploding capsule. The nectar rich flowers attract pollinating insects (including many butterfly species) and therefore many insectivorous birds to the garden. The many spines make it an effective barrier plant for a security hedge. Plant in clumps in a shady flower bed under trees or in a sunny rockery. Plant in well-drained soil in full sun to semi-shade. Size up to 1m Freylinia lanceolata is a very hardy, evergreen, fast growing, graceful shrub with a lovely weeping shape. The long, drooping lanceolate leaves add to the shape. Bunches of creamy-yellow, fragrant, tubular flowers, appear in profusion from May to August when little else is flowering. A few flowers will appear sporadically during the rest of the year. The flowers smell of honey and their nectar attracts a myriad of butterflies and other insects. It can be clipped into a formal hedge but does need a lot of maintenance. Prune regularly to keep looking neat. It grows well in a sunny garden although it does tolerate partial shade. It grows naturally along streams and enjoys wet conditions, but also grows well in a normally irrigated garden. Carissa macrocarpa is a hardy, drought resistant, dense, spiny shrub to small tree with large leathery, dark green, glossy leaves. It has large, beautiful, scented, white flowers that are followed by large edible red fruits on and off throughout the year. It attracts butterflies and fruit eating birds to the garden. Duvernoia aconitiflora is a fast growing, hardy, evergreen shrub with glossy, light green leaves. Aloe tenuior Orange is a hardy, pretty, dainty, rambling Aloe that bears spikes of bright orange flowers. It has long, narrow, sheathing leaves, crowded in a loose rosette at the tip of the branches. In cultivation, it flowers freely, for most of the year, but mainly from May to August. A good ‘bee plant’ that has many traditional uses. It will form large bush clumps, making it a useful landscape plant. This Aloe grows well in a normally-irrigated garden that has well-drained soil and will grow in full sun or semi-shade. Size: Up to 3m Dovyalis zeyheri is a hardy, deciduous, small to medium-sized, tree with spines on the young branches. The tree is very decorative with interesting grey-green foliage. The leaves have a distinctive pungent smell. The spines make this a good addition to a security hedge. From December to March it has small greenish-yellow flowers, followed by bright orange, edible but sour fruit that make a delicious jelly. Male and female flowers are on separate trees, therefore only female plants will bear fruit. A great bird tree, as the flowers attract insects which, in turn, attract birds as do the fruits. Plant in sun or semi-shade. Size: 2 to 13m Dovyalis rhamnoides is a fairly hardy, evergreen bushy shrub or slender small tree with grey bark. Long, very sharp, slender spines are massed on the branches. Bauhinia galpinii is a hardy, deciduous, drought and frost resistant rambling shrub or climber with bi-lobed leaves that look like butterfly wings. Dovyalis caffra is a hardy, evergreen, fast growing, drought resistant, large, shrub or small tree. Long spines make it an excellent addition to a security hedge. It has small, creamy-green, nectar laden flowers from November to January. The edible, plum-like, yellow fruits are rich in vitamin C are refreshing and make a delicious jelly preserve. They are also much sought after by birds. Plant in sun or semi-shade. Barleria elegans is a hardy, evergreen small shrub with oval shaped, dark green leaves that are paler beneath. The reduced leaves are hardened and spiny-toothed. Flowers profusely in late summer and autumn (February to July) with clusters of pure white trumpet-shaped flowers. The flowers attract butterflies and pollinating insects to the garden. It is adaptable in the garden, making a good rockery subject and helps to stabilise the soil on embankments. Due to its thorny nature, it can form an effective barrier. Prune back after flowering to keep in shape and ensure mass flowering the following year. Can tolerate a light frost. Plant in sun or semi-shade in well drained and well composted soil. Size: up to 1m Salvia dolomitica is a very hardy, evergreen, small shrub with attractive, grey-green, aromatic leaves. The spikes of beautiful pale lilac spikes of flowers are borne in spring and summer (September to February). They attract bees and other pollinating insects to the garden. The calyx persists on the plant and turns a deep purple and only drops when the seeds are ready to be dispersed. Plant in an herbaceous border, or use as a small screening plant. It is a beautiful subject in a container. Prune back hard after flowering to encourage bushiness. Grows in full sun but requires well-drained, well-composted soil. Dichrostachys cinerea is a hardy, deciduous, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree with fine feathery Acacia-like leaves and rough fissured bark. The small tough branchlets end in sharp points. It bears beautiful, elongated, puffball, bi-coloured, pink and yellow pendulous flowers from September to February. It then produces distinctive sickle shaped pods that are coiled into each other. This plant will quickly grow into dense stands in disturbed areas, where its nitrogen fixing ability will help restore the soil. Use as a small specimen tree where its shape and flowers will delight you or create beautiful bonsai with this plant. It also makes a great addition to a barrier planting. Plant this drought-resistant plant in full sun or partial shade and prune regularly to keep in shape. Size: 3 to 7 meter. Buxus macowanii is a hardy, evergreen, slow growing, small tree that has a slender upright stem and a dense, rounded crown of stiff, leathery, shiny leaves. The clusters of small flowers are borne from July to October. Only one flower of each cluster is female and bears a seed. The beautiful wood was used to such an extent that it was a protected species, but is no longer be exploited for its timber. Very attractive garden or container plant. It can also be clipped into a low hedge, and often grows in pure stands in nature. It tolerates deep shade, so is a suitable indoor plant. Plant in shade to semi-shade, in well-drained, loamy soil. Crassula arborescens is a hardy, evergreen, succulent, tree-like Crassula, which is unusual for this genus as they are usually relatively small plants. It has a thick, fleshy trunk with smooth, grey-green bark. The fleshy, bright green leaves have a pretty red rim. They have a waxy, powdery bloom which helps to keep them cool. The attractive clusters of pink or white flowers are carried in densely packed, rounded, branched, flowering heads from August to December. The flowers are nectar-rich and attract birds and insects to the garden. It has many medicinal uses. This unusual tree makes a great form and container plant. Plant as an element of a rock garden, on slopes or in a succulent garden. Flowers best in full sun but also grows well in semi-shade. Plant in well-drained soil. Size: up to 3m Carissa macrocarpa Variegated Green Carpet is a hardy, evergreen, drought resistant, dense, spiny, dwarf spreading shrublet. This particular variety has leathery, striking dark green and yellow variegated, glossy leaves. It has beautiful, quite large, scented, white flowers and large edible red fruits on and off throughout the year. It attracts butterflies and fruit-eating birds to the garden. This versatile plant can be used to cover large areas or clipped into an attractive small formal hedge. It also looks great in a container. Erect shoots should be clipped to keep the dwarf habit. Plant in shade, semi-shade or sun, in well-drained, well-composted soil. Size: up to 40cm

Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC) is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of our work. We believe that our goal of sharing land conservation benefits with every single person in the Triangle cannot be reached without actively working to end systemic racism, which for centuries has led to ongoing inequities in access to enjoyment and ownership of land. After several years of exploring issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion as an organization and individually, TLC staff has worked with numerous partners to develop a program addressing three problems in the Triangle: - Rapid loss of farmland - Land retention barriers and lack of land ownership by African American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian people - Unattainable land prices or leases that don’t provide equity for those seeking farms to grow food With one solution: using conservation tools to increase land ownership, retention, economic opportunities for people of color at prices unaffected by development potential. The Good Ground Initiative (GGI) uses “Buy-Conserve-Sell” as an approach to land protection and equity promotion in the agricultural space. Properties designated for Good Ground are bought and managed by either Triangle Land Conservancy through a bargain sale or by conservation buyers—third-party investors who purchase land in a standard real estate transaction with the intention of selling through the GGI. After land has been purchased, TLC works with investors, eligible funding sources, and participating farmers to place a Working Lands Easement on the property. Easements are voluntary agreements between land trusts or other public agencies and landowners to permanently limit certain land uses (mainly, development) to protect the conservation values of a piece of land (read more about TLC’s land conservation values here). Because the right to develop is permanently severed from the land, the appraised value of conserved property is markedly less than its fair market value, allowing TLC to sell it at a reduced price to farmers, foresters, and other land seekers of color who can still utilize the land for a multitude of uses. Selling the property transfers ownership and management responsibility from TLC to the new landowners, who become the land’s stewards. Easements, Equity, and Economic Opportunity Working Land Easements purchased for farms or forestry projects are beneficial not only because they protect a site’s conservation values, but they also allow for continued use and profitability from the land. In the Triangle region, conserved farmland presents an economic opportunity for interested buyers due to the simultaneous increase in population and loss of critical farmland to development. These easements enable people of color to access, own, manage, and sell land, all while building financial wealth for themselves and subsequent generations. Building the Good Ground Initiative Funding from Self-Help Credit Union enabled TLC to contract Seeds of Change Consulting, who conducted a feasibility study and created an equitable structure for the basis of the Good Ground Initiative. LaShauna Austria, founder and principal of Seeds of Change Consulting, is a farmer herself who has assisted multiple local and state-level food and farming initiatives. She integrates an understanding of racial equity within the food system in order to help organizations develop policies and campaigns that promote equity and inclusion for historically excluded stakeholders. Jean Willoughby, lead consultant, has spent more than ten years in economic development and working with farmers and land trusts around the country. Her work has focused on bringing together traditional conservation tools, new legal models, and innovative investment strategies to support small and mid-scale growers. Kicked off at the beginning of 2021, Austria and Willoughby’s multi-phase approach has continued in three phases. The focus of Phase 1 was information gathering through stakeholder interviews and data analysis to test the feasibility of the proposed program as well as stakeholder interest and capacity for participation. It incorporated partner organizations already engaged in important conversations around land justice and equity in the food systems to ensure that TLC’s efforts uplift and contribute to current initiatives. Used the information gathered from the community in Phase 1 to inform detailed development of the Good Ground Initiative. Conservation tools were adapted to address the gaps identified in Phase 1, while conforming to Land Trust Alliance accreditation and IRS 501c3 standards. Based on the results of Phase 1, TLC staff are designing a structure, identifying program partners, and establishing protocols for the pilot project. Carries out established procedures by opening applications to properties identified for Good Ground purposes. The application and interview process invites applicants to define their vision and agricultural plans and assesses the conservation values demonstrated by them. These are reviewed and elected by a third-party committee of community members who represent professions relevant to the Good Ground Initiative. Chosen recipients participate in finalizing the structure of the land’s easement during the transfer process. They are connected to resources that facilitate their becoming successful land stewards. TLC will review lessons learned from the pilot project and incorporate improvements for future properties. As Good Ground progresses, we will continue working to implement more programs that turn organizational resources and power into to conservation and stewardship benefits accessible to all in our community. Read below to learn about how TLC’s decade-long equity journey, the history of land in North Carolina, and the organization’s commitment to supporting local farms inspired development of the Good Ground Initiative. Since 2012, we have worked to help tell the story of the land at our nature preserves. That year, TLC opened Horton Grove Nature Preserve and named the trails in honor of the descendants of enslaved Black people who were forced to live and work on the land for generations. We’ve also worked to document and share the histories of Black and Indigenous communities at the Bailey and Sarah Williamson Preserve. In 2016, TLC hired a third party to complete an equity audit, which revealed several areas for improvement that have guided TLC’s conduct as an employer, community representative, and recreational resource. Following this audit, TLC recognized that since 1983, many of the organization’s projects have reflected the lack of diversity in land ownership. Uncovering and understanding both our state’s and our own history has made it impossible to ignore the people who stewarded, cultivated, and cared for the lands we now conserve without official recognition in the ownership structure or a share in the wealth that land yields. Though North Carolina is home to a long lineage of Indigenous and Black land stewards, they are scarcely reflected in land ownership and agriculture. In 1920, Black farmers owned 14 percent of American farms. Today however, they account for 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million producers. In 1997, a North Carolina farmer brought what would become the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in our country’s history. Leveled against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Pigford v. Glickman case uncovered systemic discrimination against Black farmers and helped lay the groundwork for two decades of further legal action by Indigenous, Latinx, and female farmers. While monetary relief flowed from these settlements, structural change was not forthcoming. Today, 98 percent of farmland is owned by white producers and much of it is under threat of development. Without a concerted, long-term effort, this profound inequity will continue to burden not only rural communities but American agriculture and land stewardship for generations to come. TLC has protected more than 4,000 acres of farmland since 1983 in the Triangle region, which is under enormous pressure from development. Between 2001 and 2016, more than 731,600 acres of agricultural land in North Carolina were developed or compromised. Of the 46,000 farms that remain in the state, there are five times as many farmers over the age of 65 as under 35. With the population of North Carolina growing nearly 10% in just 10 years, TLC recognizes the urgency of creating opportunities for younger farmers to secure critical land and sustainably grow food on it. The reality of historic discrimination and present-day farmland loss in North Carolina helped define the Good Ground Initiative’s main objectives to address. We understand the necessity of administering equity-based programs with measurable outcomes, such that in the process of doing conservation, TLC will engage in the reversal of disparities in land stewardship and wealth building.

Many people who catch COVID-19 may develop long-lasting immunity to the new virus, SARS-CoV-2. (Pixaba/) People who have recovered from COVID-19 mount an immune response that persists for at least eight months, scientists reported on January 6 in the journal Science. Researchers detected multiple components of the immune system specific to defending against the novel coronavirus, including antibodies and white blood cells, in the blood of COVID-19 survivors months after their symptoms first appeared. While it’s not clear yet how much protection this immune response will offer against reinfection, the findings raise the possibility that many people who catch COVID-19 may develop long-lasting immunity to the new virus, SARS-CoV-2. “Essentially we see that in 90 percent of the people there is a robust immune response at the six to eight months level,” says Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and coauthor of the new research. “We don’t know how long will it last beyond the eight months, but it looks like things are fairly stable, so I would not be surprised if the immune response would last for years.” Understanding how long COVID-19 immunity lasts will be crucial for determining how frequently people will need to be vaccinated (for example, will it need to become a yearly vaccine like the flu shot) and what proportion of the population will need to be infected or vaccinated to create herd immunity, says Irving Coy Allen, an immunologist studying the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the new research. “In order to win our war against this virus, it is essential that we develop and deploy effective vaccines and establish long lasting immunity in the majority of the population,” Allen said in an email. “The rapid pace of vaccine development has been truly amazing to witness. However, there is a lingering question about the duration of the protective immune response following either virus infection or vaccination.” Last spring, Sette and his colleagues reported that COVID-19 survivors produce disease-fighting antibodies and white blood cells that recognize the virus. Other researchers have reported that antibodies to the novel coronavirus begin to wane after three to four months, though. It’s not clear if low levels of antibodies would still protect a person if they were exposed to the virus a second time. However, it’s pretty normal for antibody levels to diminish after a person recovers from a viral infection, Sette says. Recently, other teams have reported that several kinds of immune cells persist after infection even as antibodies diminish. The new findings also suggest that the immune system continues to recognize SARS-CoV-2 long after a person recovers. Taken together, these reports all indicate that “once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional,” Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, told The New York Times in November, when Sette and his team’s new findings first appeared in pre-print. Sette and his colleagues examined blood samples from 188 adults with COVID-19 cases that ranged from asymptomatic to severe. The scientists looked for antibodies and immune cells that could recognize and react to different fragments of the virus, particularly the spike-shaped protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 that helps it invade host cells. The role of these antibodies is to glom onto the virus and prevent it from infecting cells. So-called memory B cells produce these antibodies. If the virus does manage to get inside our cells, Sette says, “Then it becomes invisible to antibodies, because antibodies can’t get inside of infected cells.” This is where several kinds of white blood cells called T-cells come in. Killer T-cells recognize and destroy infected cells, while helper T-cells assist the immune system in orchestrating its defenses. “In general, the immune response tends to follow a pattern where there is an initial phase where it ramps up, then it peaks and then contracts a little bit, and then goes on a plateau—a steady state level,” Sette says. His team observed that antibody levels had stabilized by six to eight months after symptoms began, while both kinds of T cells declined slowly. Intriguingly, the amount of memory B cells actually increased over the six months following infection. “Once the attacker—the virus—is gone then the B cells may stop making antibodies, or they will not make as many antibodies, but they are still deployed; they are still there in great numbers,” Sette says. “So if the virus will come back the immune system would have a huge head start.” One caveat to the new findings, Sette says, is that the immune response could vary tremendously from one participant to the next; there was a 200-fold difference in antibody levels among the group. This implies that some people who recover from COVID-19 may not develop a very durable immune response after infection. “So we would recommend people not to throw away their mask and not to abandon acting responsibly in terms of masking and social distancing,” Sette says. Additionally, he says, “We don’t know exactly what levels of immune reactivity are associated with what level of protection.” The new research “represents one of the best studies to date to explore what is known as ‘immunological memory,’” Allen said. “This suggests that it will be possible to achieve relatively effective, long-lasting immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and minimize secondary COVID-19 symptoms in most individuals following initial infection or vaccination.” However, like Sette, he emphasized that more research will be needed to confirm that this is the case. “The study is limited by its focus on indirect assessments of immune memory, based on SARS-CoV-2 circulating antibodies and immune cell populations,” Allen said. “We are currently limited by the lack of long-term data and studies that can only be generated as the virus spreads through populations and vaccine use escalates.” One piece of good news is that, while cases where people have become reinfected with the novel coronavirus have been documented, they seem to be relatively rare. Additionally, COVID-19 vaccines are expected to provoke a more consistent immune response than what Sette and his colleagues observed in people who’d caught COVID-19. “The vaccines are designed to deliver the spike protein…in a high enough dose to induce a good immune response [along] with the booster after a certain period of time,” Sette says. “The faster we get as many people as possible vaccinated, the better off we will be and that would be a more permanent solution.”

The Power Station of Art in Shanghai has opened a new exhibition by Andy Warhol, but the famous pop artist’s portraits of Chairman Mao have been left out of the picture. Agence France-Presse reports that the Andy Warhol Museum, which created the traveling exhibition, was told by the Chinese government that images of Mao would not be needed. Warhol painted many pictures of the Chinese revolutionary leader, such as this one hanging in Berlin shown here courtesy Wikimedia Commons. As everyone knows, China has been reinventing itself as a capitalist superpower while still maintaining its Communist leadership. Images of Chairman Mao have been steadily disappearing from public display because the new China doesn’t jive with his idea of a peasant revolutionary Communist state. Bringing up memories of his Cultural Revolution, which saw countless works of art destroyed, also doesn’t sit well with Shanghai’s new image as a center for the arts. The traveling exhibition, titled “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal,” has already been to Singapore and Hong Kong and will run in Shanghai until July 28, at which point it will continue on to Beijing and Tokyo.

The term “open carry” is commonly heard when talking about the civilian use of weaponry. We all know that this obviously means to carry a weapon openly. So what are the gritty details and from where does this term originate. I hope to answer the common questions surrounding open carry and make it just a little easier to understand. Open carry is publicly carrying a weapon in plain sight of another person(s). That being said, the first question that comes to mind is “what is plain sight”… is it on a belt, on the back, what about a shirt pocket??? This is where things can get a little messy. “Plain Sight” is broadly defined as not being hidden from common view of those around you. The problem is, different states interpret the meaning of plain sight differently than others. In some states, plain sight means that the weapon is partially visible to those around you. In other states, it means that the weapon can be fully seen. Types of Open Carry Laws (Primarily Firearms) Permissive Open Carry Laws Permissive open carry defines law around firearms. This does not prohibit open carry for everyone who has not been prohibited for any reason and does not require a license or permit to carry. This is lawful while in a car or during walking. While it is legal to carry this way, if you are carrying a firearm you may be detained by law enforcement if there is public alarm. Licensed Open Carry This is where all citizens who have not been prohibited to carry, can carry after they have received a permit or license. This is also allowed in a vehicle and on foot. Anomalous Open Carry This is where the legality of openly carrying a weapon is different by state, because of local laws. These local laws can lead to different restrictions and sometimes no carry at all. Non-Permissive Open Carry This means that no open carry is allowed, or it is allowed but there are very strict restrictions so it is pretty much not allowed. A few examples of this may be lawful self-defense, carrying on your own property and hunting. Rural Open Carry This is effective in states where open carry is not allowed but in some areas, the population is so low that there are exceptions made for open carry in these areas. Those prohibited to carry firearms are usually prohibited because of felonies committed, misdemeanors or domestic violence, those addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and citizens admitted into mental institutions. Open Carry and the Second Amendment Open carry is one of the ways our second amendment rights are upheld. The second amendment states “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The ability we have to open carry firearms in some form or another is in part what gives us our second amendment rights. What are the Rules in My State? The different types of “open carry rules” vary by state. They are as follows: Permissive: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Licensed: Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah Anomalous: Arkansas, California, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon and Pennsylvania. Non-Permissive: Florida, Illinois, South Carolina and Texas. There are a few commonalities throughout the states based on federal laws concerning open carry. For example, no open carry is allowed on school grounds, courthouses and at some public events.

Unless you’re an attorney, most people have no idea when they need a lawyer or what kind they actually need. There are numerous types of law in the United States. This means there’s at least twice the number of lawyers out there for each field of law. It can be a stressful process trying to find the right attorney for your specific law needs. You have to spend research deciding what lawyer to hire but how can you even get that far if you don’t know what type you actually need? We wrote this guide of the main types of lawyers out there to make your vetting process go much smoother. Sometimes we get ourselves in debt too deep that we can’t climb our way out. We don’t see the light, and if we don’t ask for help, we keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper. In a country where credit is king, it can feel impossible to get through. That’s when a bankruptcy lawyer can lend you a helping hand. Filing for bankruptcy is a legal process that helps you be relieved of either part of your debit or in more dire situations; all your debt can be relieved. A commercial bankruptcy lawyer helps businesses or the people behind the business file for bankruptcy. Not only can they help you relieve your business’ debt, but they can help you gain time to rebuild your business. [See our list of commercial bankruptcy lawyers] A consumer bankruptcy lawyer helps you, the individual, file for bankruptcy. [See our list of consumer bankruptcy lawyers] Car Accident Lawyers Being involved in a car accident can be a headache, even if it’s only a fender bender. There’s so much behind the scenes fighting against you from receiving an insurance claim. Insurance companies don’t like to pay out, so they’ll fight you every step of the way. A car accident lawyer can help you receive monetary compensation for any damages done to your vehicle as well as help you prove that you weren’t at fault for the accident in the first place. A car accident lawyer can also be considered a sub-type of a personal injury attorney. They can make sure you receive compensation for any injuries that resulted from your accident as well as compensation for pain and suffering. [See our list of car accident lawyers] Child Support Lawyers Child support can be a difficult matter, whether a couple has divorced or a dead beat parent refuses to step up to their responsibility. It can bring up raw emotions, and two exes aren’t always the best at negotiating. A child support lawyer falls underneath the specialty of Family Law and specializes in child support cases. They will aid you in the paperwork and steps it takes to get money to help support your child. Not only can they help you receive child support, but they can also help determine the amount the judge will grant you as well as make sure you are continually receiving the child support. If you are on the other side of the fence, but you have split custody, a child support lawyer can make sure you aren’t overpaying since you’re already supporting your child when your child is with you. [See our list of child support lawyers] Criminal Defense Lawyers Maybe you find yourself in some hot water, or maybe you’re being accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Either way, it’s time to lawyer up with a criminal defense attorney. A criminal defense lawyer will defend you if you’re charged with a criminal offense. They can prove your innocence before a jury due to a lack of evidence or confused witnesses. Or they can help you get the best possible outcome by making a plea deal with the prosecutor if you are guilty of the crime you’re being charged for. They can also help you maintain your rights if you’re being questioned or interrogated by the police. This is to keep you from incriminating yourself or even to make sure the police are following procedures. [See our list of criminal defense lawyers] Filing for disability for a physical and mental disability is time-consuming and difficult. And even after all that effort, you have a low chance of being awarded disability by a judge. You can go about it alone, but if you want a real chance, you’re going to want to hire a disability lawyer. They can help you through the entire process. If you’re denied, they can appeal the decision for you. Plus, they have experience dealing with the Social Security Administration. They know what it takes to get accepted for disability compensation. [See our list of Social Security disability lawyers] Divorces are messy, and when you’re going through one, you’re bound to be an emotional wreck. When divorcing, these emotions can get in the way of logic and keeping the peace. A divorce lawyer, who also falls under the specialty of Family Law, is there to be your mediator. They’re also there to make sure the two of you split up your possessions the way they should be. If you deserve alimony, they make sure you receive it. Medical malpractice refers to when a medical professional causes you or a loved one injury or death due to their negligence. To sue a medical professional of medical malpractice, it must be proven that you wouldn’t have this injury or illness if it hadn’t been for their direct actions. A medical malpractice lawyer helps gather evidence for your case as well as speaks to other professionals to better understand what happened to you. They fight in court for you for monetary compensation that you’re deserved due to the suffering of the complications. A patent gives you and only you reign over your invention or idea. This is to ensure that someone doesn’t take credit or make money off of something that you created. It prevents anyone else from profiting off of your invention. A patent lawyer helps you through the patent process. They know the ins and outs of the paperwork for receiving a patent. If someone does attempt to steal your idea or invention, a patent lawyer will back you up on legal proceedings to stop this person from their wrongdoings. [See our list of intellectual property lawyers] Personal Injury Lawyers A personal injury lawyer ensures that you receive compensation when you’re injured from the negligence of someone else. That negligence may not be a crime by federal or state standards, but you still deserve some type of justice, even if it’s only monetary. This money will help you pay your medical bills and compensate you for your pain and suffering. They’ll build your case with evidence and witness statements. They’ll negotiate for you and take it to court if an agreement can’t be made. [See our list of personal injury lawyers] Wrongful Termination Lawyers A wrongful termination lawyer helps you get compensation if you’ve wrongly been fired from your job. Whether it was a result of discrimination or a breach in a contract, this type of attorney will help you out. You have rights as an employee, and a wrongful termination lawyer has the knowledge to make sure you’re protected, and some justice is served. [See our list of employment lawyers] These are just a few types of lawyers out there. We’ve listed the most common types and categories of attorneys below to get you started. You can also use our simple Ask a Lawyer tool to chat with an attorney online who can get you pointed in the right direction. No matter what your situation is, you’ll find a lawyer in your needed field. Ultimately, it’s up to you on how specialized you want your lawyer to be, but he or she should have experience in the type of matter you’re trying to resolve.

Calloway Football was on the scene at the 2016 College Football National Championship game in Glendale, AZ. In this video, Coach Calloway reflects on how these two programs have a clearly defined PURPOSE, carry it out with PASSION, and stick to the PROCESS Extra resources. Purpose, passion, and process are key ingredients to achieving excellence and winning championships. With increased national conversation around the effects of head injuries, concussions and the rise of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) diagnoses among athletes engaged in contact sports, the sport of football at all levels has come under fire from the media and from health advocacy groups. With much of the current media coverage painting football in a negative light, I found this recent article by Brad Schaffer rather insightful. I have coached literally thousands of young men over my 26-year coaching career, so I certainly understand the seriousness of head injuries. As a parent of three active and athletic boys who play football, lacrosse, and hockey, I can also absolutely relate to a parent’s concern for the safety and health of their children. These concerns do not need to be understated or overlooked. There is risk of injury in anything our children do including activities outside of sports. As a responsible parent we have to weigh these risks and do what we feel is best for our children. We have allies in this fight for our children’s safety. Sports equipment companies have worked to provide cutting-edge protective technologies that have lowered the risks of head injuries for our children, but teaching the game the right way is more critical than it has ever been. With all of the new skills and techniques that have been developed with player safety in mind, staying current on the latest coaching innovations is critical for safety and success. Football has changed. Rules have changed. How we teach blocking and tackling has changed. At Calloway Football, we are dedicated not only to teaching coaches how to win, but how to win safely. Above and beyond concerns for player safety, I can tell you that football brings so much more to the table. You can not overstate the life lessons the sport of football teaches. I fully agree with Mr. Schaeffer when he says “Football coaches fulfill a role sorely missing in our society.” As coaches we hold in our hands the trust of our parents and players and we must take our role as a leader very seriously. We are much more than just football coaches. As the article points out, the sport of football: Coaches… do not take your role lightly. Football participation is falling across the country. Concerns about player safety, a reduction in school system investment in sports and the expense tied to playing youth sports has parents across America making tough choices. We should all be active in the fight to keep growing our sport because many young men need football. You have a tremendous impact on the young men you are coaching. How you handle yourself as a coach may be the only example that young man will ever see of an authority figure. Despite the risks facing young men who choose our great sport, your choices and behaviors can help shape young men’s lives for the better.

Astronomers have detected elusive pulsation patterns in dozens of young, rapidly rotating stars thanks to data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The discovery will revolutionize scientists' ability to study details like the ages, sizes and compositions of these stars -- all members of a class named for the prototype, the bright star Delta Scuti. "Delta Scuti stars clearly pulsate in interesting ways, but the patterns of those pulsations have so far defied understanding," said Tim Bedding, a professor of astronomy at the University of Sydney. "To use a musical analogy, many stars pulsate along simple chords, but Delta Scuti stars are complex, with notes that seem to be jumbled. TESS has shown us that's not true for all of them." A paper describing the findings, led by Bedding, appears in the May 14 issue of the journal Nature and is now available online. Geologists studying seismic waves from earthquakes figured out Earth's internal structure from the way the reverberations changed speed and direction as they traveled through it. Astronomers apply the same principle to study the interiors of stars through their pulsations, a field called asteroseismology. Sound waves travel through a star's interior at speeds that change with depth, and they all combine into pulsation patterns at the star's surface. Astronomers can detect these patterns as tiny fluctuations in brightness and use them to determine the star's age, temperature, composition, internal structure and other properties. Delta Scuti stars are between 1.5 and 2.5 times the Sun's mass. They're named after Delta Scuti, a star visible to the human eye in the southern constellation Scutum that was first identified as variable in 1900. Since then, astronomers have identified thousands more like Delta Scuti, many with NASA's Kepler space telescope, another planet-hunting mission that operated from 2009 to 2018. But scientists have had trouble interpreting Delta Scuti pulsations. These stars generally rotate once or twice a day, at least a dozen times faster than the Sun. The rapid rotation flattens the stars at their poles and jumbles the pulsation patterns, making them more complicated and difficult to decipher. To determine if order exists in Delta Scuti stars' apparently chaotic pulsations, astronomers needed to observe a large set of stars multiple times with rapid sampling. TESS monitors large swaths of the sky for 27 days at a time, taking one full image every 30 minutes with each of its four cameras. This observing strategy allows TESS to track changes in stellar brightness caused by planets passing in front of their stars, which is its primary mission, but half-hour exposures are too long to catch the patterns of the more rapidly pulsating Delta Scuti stars. Those changes can happen in minutes. But TESS also captures snapshots of a few thousand pre-selected stars -- including some Delta Scuti stars -- every two minutes. When Bedding and his colleagues began sorting through the measurements, they found a subset of Delta Scuti stars with regular pulsation patterns. Once they knew what to look for, they searched for other examples in data from Kepler, which used a similar observing strategy. They also conducted follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes, including one at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and two in the global Las Cumbres Observatory network. In total, they identified a batch of 60 Delta Scuti stars with clear patterns. "This really is a breakthrough. Now we have a regular series of pulsations for these stars that we can understand and compare with models," said co-author Simon Murphy, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney. "It's going to allow us to measure these stars using asteroseismology in a way that we've never been able to do. But it's also shown us that this is just a stepping-stone in our understanding of Delta Scuti stars." Pulsations in the well-behaved Delta Scuti group fall into two major categories, both caused by energy being stored and released in the star. Some occur as the whole star expands and contracts symmetrically. Others occur as opposite hemispheres alternatively expand and contract. Bedding's team inferred the alterations by studying each star's fluctuations in brightness. The data have already helped settle a debate over the age of one star, called HD 31901, a member of a recently discovered stream of stars orbiting within our galaxy. Scientists placed the age of the overall stream at 1 billion years, based on the age of a red giant they suspected belonged to the same group. A later estimate, based on the rotation periods of other members of the stellar stream, suggested an age of only about 120 million years. Bedding's team used the TESS observations to create an asteroseismic model of HD 31901 that supports the younger age. "Delta Scuti stars have been frustrating targets because of their complicated oscillations, so this is a very exciting discovery," said Sarbani Basu, a professor of astronomy at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies asteroseismology but was not involved in the study. "Being able to find simple patterns and identify the modes of oscillation is game changing. Since this subset of stars allows normal seismic analyses, we will finally be able to characterize them properly." The team thinks their set of 60 stars has clear patterns because they're younger than other Delta Scuti stars, having only recently settled into producing all of their energy through nuclear fusion in their cores. The pulsations occur more rapidly in the fledgling stars. As the stars age, the frequency of the pulsations slows, and they become jumbled with other signals. Another factor may be TESS's viewing angle. Theoretical calculations predict that a spinning star's pulsation patterns should be simpler when its rotational pole faces us instead of its equator. The team's TESS data set included around 1,000 Delta Scuti stars, which means that some of them, by chance, must be viewed close to pole-on. Scientists will continue to develop their models as TESS begins taking full images every 10 minutes instead of every half hour in July. Bedding said the new observing strategy will help capture the pulsations of even more Delta Scuti stars. "We knew when we designed TESS that, in addition to finding many exciting new exoplanets, the satellite would also advance the field of asteroseismology," said TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge. "The mission has already found a new type of star that pulsates on one side only and has unearthed new facts about well-known stars. As we complete the initial two-year mission and commence the extended mission, we're looking forward to a wealth of new stellar discoveries TESS will make." TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT's Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

Q11-3 Observations on Mixed Turbulent Convection in Vertical Tubes The interaction of forced and natural convection can be very complex because of its dependence on flow regime and flow direction. Aiding flow occurs when both driving forces act in the same direction (heating upflow fluid and cooling downflow fluid); opposing flow occurs when they act in different directions (cooling upflow fluid and heating downflow fluid). This article discusses the buoyancy effect on mixed turbulent convection for single-phase applications in vertical tubes. Using experimental data, we demonstrate that natural convection - can greatly increase or decrease the convective heat transfer coefficient - should not be neglected if the mixed turbulent parameter is higher than 0.05, even with Reynolds numbers higher than 10000 High resolution CFD simulations of several experimental conditions confirm the importance of the buoyancy effect on the production of turbulence kinetic energy.

Born: May 9th, 1408 Shri Annamacharya, also known as Sankeertanacharya and Pada Kavita Pitamah (Grandfather of Word Poetry), is one of South India’s greatest Vaishnav devotees and has dedicated his entire life to Lord Venkateshwar. He used to write only bhajans (songs in praise of God) and sing them in different and sweet tunes, spending all his time reciting God’s name. Shri Annamacharya was born on May 9th, 1408 (some people believe it to be 1414) in a village named Thallapaka in the Kadapa district in Andhra Pradesh. His father’s name was Narayan Suri and his mother’s name was Lakkamamba. He was very spiritual from childhood and always prayed at the temple of Lord Keshav in the village. At the age of sixteen, he had a darshan of Lord Venkateshwar and, after this, he started writing and singing bhajans for Lord Venkateshwar. After this day, whatever he would say to God would become a bhajan and whatever he would sing would become melodious. Once, Shri Annamacharya went walking to Tirupati without informing his family members. On reaching Tirupati, due to a lack of information, he started climbing the mountain with his shoes on. On the way, he went off to sleep as he was tired. Mata Alamelmanga gave him darshan in his sleep and told him to climb the Tirumala Mountain barefooted as this mountain was made of Shaligram stone. Shri Annamacharya was delighted with this divine glimpse of Mata and just as he woke up, Shri Annamacharya wrote 100 stanzas in praise of Devi Mata which later became famous under the name of “Shri Venkateshwara Shatakamu”. After this, he climbed the mountain barefooted and, after taking a bath in Pushakarini, visited Lord Venkateshwar. Following that, he went on pilgrimages such as Gogarbham, Akashganga, and Papavinasanamu, and after bathing at each location, he wrote 100 padas in praise of Lord Venkateshwar. Once he came to the temple for darshan of the lord, but at that time the temple was closed. He began singing prayers to the Lord and begged God to grant him darshan. Surprisingly, with the prayers of Shri Annamacharya, the gates of the temple opened on their own, and Shri Annamacharya entered the temple and finished his pooja. While in Tirumala, Shri Annamacharya ceremoniously accepted Vaishnavism and became a disciple of Adhi Van Sathkopa Jiyyar. After a few days, Shri Annamacharya’s mother reached Tirumala, searching for him and persuading him to return home. Shri Annamacharya did not want to go back, but because of his guru’s order, he went back with his mother. His parents got him married in the village, and while living a householder’s life, he started doing pooja and praying to the lord. After some time, he went back to Tirupati, where he wrote devoted songs based on Valmiki Ramayan. After his marriage, he wrote many bhajans which became famous under the name “Shringar Sankirthanalu”. Slowly and gradually, Annamacharya’s fame extended in all four directions. Influenced by this, Penukonda’s King Salua Narsimha invited him with great hospitality. Annamacharya used to create bhajans for Lord Venkateshwar and sing for the King. Once, impressed with his poetic talent, King Narsimha asked Shri Annamacharya to write a poem in his praise, but Shri Annamacharya refused, saying that he only wrote in praise of God and could not write anything for a human being. Hearing this, the king got very angry and got him tied up with chains and put him in jail. In the jail, Shri Annamacharya started singing a new song in praise of God, and his chains opened up on their own. Hearing this, the king called him in front of him and once again tied him up with a chain and asked him to sing. As soon as he started singing, once again the chains opened up and fell down. Seeing this, the king bowed down at his feet and apologized to him. Shri Annamacharya forgave him with his heart, and once again they became friends. After some time, Shri Annamacharya permanently started living in Tirumala and started living life happily. Shri Annamacharya began writing a poem in praise of God every day after seeing the Lord for the first time at the age of sixteen. He had written 32,000 bhajans in praise of Lord Venkateshwar. At that time, his bhajans were secured by writing them on copper plates. When Shri Annamcharya became old, Karnataka’s great devotee, Purandar Dass had come to see him. He had considered him to be the incarnation of Lord Venkateshwar. Shri Annamacharya had also written in Sanskrit, apart from Telugu. In the year 1503, on the twelfth day of Phalguna, Shri Annamacharya left his physical body and left for his heavenly abode. Many years have passed after Shri Annamacharya left this world, but even today people sing bhajans written by him.

A Simple Reason Why You Need To Upgrade Competition brings out the best in the development of better drives for computers, and one way it really shows is the advancements made in Solid State Drives (SSDs). In past articles, we’ve talked about Hard Disk Drives and how they are the most common storage medium for desktop and laptops today. However, a strong contender for that spot has been lurking in the shadows and gaining popularity in recent years, Solid State Drives. SSDs are not entirely new technology since the first examples have been around since the late 70s and early 80s. Unfortunately, they were incredibly cost-prohibitive to manufacture, and as such were only used in critical applications. It wasn’t until roughly 2009 when it started to become much more affordable and took off in the regular consumer market. Solid State Drives vs Hard Disk Drives – Their Composition Hard disk drives make use of metal platters to store data. An electromagnetic head will write single zeros and ones as the metal platters are spun at very high speeds (upwards of 7,200 RPMS). On the other hand, SSDs are made up of flash memory using electronic logic gates that are made up of transistors. Due to their composition, a solid-state drive provides many improvements over the more traditional hard disk drives, like reading speeds, startup times, and power consumption. But they aren’t perfect. There are a few disadvantages that we will discuss in a minute. Should I Upgrade? You may ask, “For the average consumer, would we recommend upgrading to an SSD?” Absolutely! Even the average consumer will be able to perceive the increased performance that comes after upgrading to a solid-state drive from an older hard disk drive. Faster Startup Times Improved startup times will be the first thing that you will notice when upgrading to an SSD. Due to the architecture of flash memory, almost any PC will benefit immensely when an operating system is loaded from an SSD. You can expect loading times to be about 15 seconds on average. Compare that to the loading speed time of your old disk drive. Another great benefit of SSDs is the improved read speeds thanks to flash memory. Typical hard disk drives will have average read speeds of around 128 MB per second, while a solid-state drive will average read speeds of 500 MB per second. Check it out. Any program that used to take a while to open, or any software with loading bars, such as games, will boot up dramatically faster. The benefits of SSDs don’t end there; the next significant benefit is faster write speeds. Faster Writing Speeds A typical hard disk drive will generally have write speeds of around 120 MB, while the new SSDs will have average write speeds of about 300-400 MB. Higher write speeds provide several advantages; for example, they will allow you to copy or transfer files faster, or if you work with music or video production, you will save time and your efficiency will increase. Another way to say it is, you will be able to create larger files in less amount of time; or if you work with design software, such as CAD, then you will be able to save your data much more quickly. Another benefit that a solid-state drive provides to the average consumer is their higher Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS). These can be 3-4 times higher. The advantage of higher IOPS speeds is that the computer will feel more responsive, clicks will respond faster, and menus will pop up and close more quickly. SSDs have many more benefits, although some might not be too important for the average consumer. They include lower power draw (save on electricity), no moving parts (more resistant to shock such as drops), completely silent, and weigh far less than traditional hard drive disks. A solid-state drive have higher storage density per area, thus smaller physical drives that can store more information. And finally, they are more reliable than hard disk drives. SSD vs HDD – Price War Due to the newer technology, a solid-state drive is also much more expensive in a dollar-to-GB ratio. Today you would be able to find a 2TB hard disk drive for about $50, but a similar 2TB SSD would run you more than $200. Quite a difference. But don’t worry. The price of HDDs is bottoming out while at the same time SSDs are expected to decrease in price year after year with predictions showing that SSDs will equal HDD prices sometime in the next 5-10 years. SSD vs HDD – Storage Retention Another minor drawback of SSDs is that their storage retention is not as long-lasting as most hard disk drives. This means that if left disconnected from a computer and without power, a hard disk drive can better retain the data inside it. However, if you power on your SSD once a year, it will typically keep its data, and you won’t have any problems with data retention. Also, one thing to note is that SSDs are somewhat sensitive to sudden power cutoffs. Due to the way that SSDs write, read and manage the data inside it, a power outage may cause it to lose track of its previous location, possibly giving you erroneous messages or even complete loss of the drive. However, just because they are sensitive to power interruptions does not mean that they will break down the first time the lights go off in your home. The best practice is to always turn off your computer correctly whenever you’re done using it. One last thing that should be talked about is the endurance of a solid-state drive compared to a hard disk drive. Generally speaking, a hard disk drive platter does not deteriorate at all when data is written onto it. In fact, other components will fail years before the hard drive platter stops being able to store data. A solid-state drive is different. The cells that store data do deteriorate, not with time but with each data write. Here’s why. SSD Like a Large Excel File Think of an SSD as a kind of large excel file, and a cell of that excel file is like a battery cell of the SSD. Each battery cell of the SSD can hold a single (1) bit, although new technologies have come out in which cells can hold 2, 3, or even 4 bits. Every time that the solid-state drive writes or erases from a cell that battery deteriorates a tiny bit. If the SSD was to reuse the same blocks of cells too many times, then those blocks would deteriorate to the point where they could not store any more data, and hence the overall storage capacity of the SSD would begin to decrease. To counteract that outcome, the controller inside the SSD will strategically write bits so that all the cells deteriorate at the same rate. While this sounds scary, it really shouldn’t be since even most bottom of the line SSDs are capable of writing several hundred times their capacity before they break down. The only people who should be wary are the people who design servers or artists who produce video or music files that use hundreds of gigabytes every single day. In their case, they should choose Enterprise SSDs, which have much higher endurance ratings. Moving on, the next important thing when considering an upgrade is to figure out what kind of hard drive your device is compatible with. SSD vs HDD – Laptop and Desktop Upgrades If you are planning on upgrading your hard drive on a desktop, you can use any SSD that you might find in a store. Just make sure that your motherboard supports SATA connections. SATA stands for Serial AT Attachments. Practically all motherboards from the past 20 years will have SATA connections. If you are planning on upgrading for a laptop or tablet device, however, you might have to do a little more research. Depending on the size and form factor of your device, it might only accommodate a particular SSD form factor. When dealing with tiny laptops (around 12-inch screen size or smaller) or thin laptops, the device might have a BGA (Ball Grid Array) style hard drive that is not upgradeable whatsoever. It comes from the factory that way and can not be changed. If you go up to a larger laptop or a form factor tablet, then that device might have what is called an mSATA mini or mSATA hard drive. Generally, these types of form factors come with a minimal storage capacity from the factory, and as such, an upgrade in storage size might be desired. For even larger laptops, you will probably encounter the ever famous 2.5in hard drive bay. This 2.5in drive is by far the most common in the world of notebooks, and usually slow hard disk drives populate them. However, these are the most comfortable laptops to upgrade because the 2.5in SSD form factor is the most prevalent kind and a direct drop-in replacement. Now with laptops and tablets, you generally have only one hard drive slot available, so you might want to upgrade to a large SSD. However when dealing with desktops, you generally have at least 4 SATA slots, which means more freedom. In such a case, you could select a relatively small SSD to store your operating system on for fast boot-up times and excellent responsiveness, and then you might choose a second larger (and cheaper) hard disk drive to store items that are not speed-critical, such as pictures or videos. There is one final thing to consider when you are making an upgrade to an SSD, and that is the type of flash memory that they contain. We mentioned above that the cells that makeup flash memory in an SSD could hold anywhere from 1 to 4 bits. If each cell holds 1 bit, then it is Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory, Multi-Level Cell (MLC) at 2 bits per cell, Triple Level Cell (TLC) at 3 bits per cell, and finally Quad Level Cell (QLC) at 4 bits per cell. In a nutshell, the fewer bits that a single cell carries, the higher the speed, endurance, and price of that SSD. SLC memory is the fastest and most durable, often sporting five-year warranties. However, it is extremely expensive and, as such, generally reserved for enterprise (heavy application) use. TLC and QLC are the slower two of the bunch, although still dozens of times faster than a hard disk drive, and they have less endurance than SLC and MLC but also come at a much lower price. For the average consumer, we normally recommend TLC and QLC solid-state drives. On the other hand, if you are the type of consumer that writes huge files every day (video or audio producing), then it might be worth it to spend the extra cash for a nice MLC, or even SLC, solid-state drive. Then again, there also exist TLC and QLC solid-state drives containing a small amount of SLC cache that makes them perform like an SLC drive as long as you don’t overburden the total amount of cache. So everything about SSDs sounds good, and you are ready to ditch your old hard disk drive and upgrade. Where exactly do you go from here? Well, you can let the experts at Steve’s Computer Repair take care of that for you. We have services that include SSD upgrade, data migration to SSDs, as well as Operating System reloads on new SSDs. We use quality brands and can upgrade to whatever storage size SSD you wish.

The Untold Reason Why Some Americans Are “Leaving” the U.S. Labor Force Hardly a month goes by that I don’t hear about someone I know directly or indirectly who is moving from the U.S. to an international destination for a job. This trend was in place before the severe, late 2000s recession hit. Prompted by President Obama’s Town Hall meeting on CNBC, I found a graph (below) depicting how the U.S. is increasingly at a disadvantage as the countries we compete with continue ratcheting down their corporate income tax rate while the U.S. corporate income tax rate remains elevated at the second highest level in the world among the 33 member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Japan, a country whose economy has been in a long-term funk, has the highest corporate rate but they have recently pledged to reduce their corporate income tax rate so the U.S. is soon to have the highest corporate tax rate. The High U.S. Corporate Tax Rate and The Lost Decade Much has been written about stagnant U.S. stock prices during the decade just past and the fact that total employment ended the decade about where it began. Little, however, has been written about the contributing role that increasingly high U.S. corporate income tax rates have had on slowing U.S. economic growth and employment. In the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, the U.S. was not at a competitive disadvantage in terms of U.S. corporate income tax rates. Check out the longer-term graph below which compares the U.S. corporate income tax rate to the average of OECD countries. The U.S. rate was about in line with the OECD average during the 1980s. During the U.S. economic boom of the 1990s, the U.S. rate was consistently lower. During the 2000s, the OECD average has been consistently lower and the gap widening so that now, the OECD is about 10 full percentage points lower than the U.S. rate. I recently spoke with Curtis Dubay who is a Senior Tax Policy Analyst with the Heritage Foundation about these facts and here are the highlights of his comments: - “There are lots of factors driving jobs out of the U.S. overseas and keeping companies from expanding in the U.S. The comparatively high U.S. corporate income tax rate is a major factor and one which is often overlooked.” - It’s not easy or politically popular for politicians to argue for lower corporate tax rates. - The U.S. is the only OECD member country to increase its corporate income tax rate over the past 20 years. - Two senators – Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Judd Greg (R-NH) – recently proposed reducing the U.S. corporate income tax rate from 35% to 24% in their “Bipartisan Tax Reform and Simplification Act.” Their bill will also eliminate a number of special interest tax breaks. - The U.S. is the only country that taxes domestically headquartered companies on income they earn overseas. What This Means for Your Investments As I have long stressed, when investing in stocks, it is essential to have a globally diversified portfolio. Besides wanting investments in foreign companies and economies which have higher growth rates and offer better investment values, some overseas companies and economies enjoy faster growth thanks to lower corporate tax rates. Unfortunately, in all the partisan, political debates, there’s little discussion about what is an “optimal” tax rate on corporations and individuals. Arbitrarily arguing for higher or lower tax rates without context and knowledge about its economic impact is foolish. As my regular readers know, many countries are growing faster than the U.S., are enjoying far lower rates of unemployment and experiencing robust stock markets. Political ideologues like Paul Krugman who argue that the world is in a depression fail to examine these facts and instead dwell on the shortcomings of the U.S. economy without correctly identifying their real cause (he thinks the path to U.S. economic success will come from more government stimulus spending). We do know that all other things being equal, if you tax something at a higher rate, you’re generally going to get less of that taxed activity. Relatively high U.S. corporate tax rates leads to lower U.S. economic growth and domestic hiring. That’s Econ 101 and the 2000s are proof positive of that. Corporations - just like people - can vote with their feet. Consider that at the individual level, some Americans have chosen in recent years to move overseas and even given up their U.S. citizenship given the prospect of increasing higher-end individual U.S. income tax rates. The Financial Times documented this phenomenon in their article, “Americans who swap passports:” “At the US Embassy in London, there is a waiting list that none of the officials likes to discuss. On the list are Americans hoping to give up their citizenship, as they seek shelter from the Internal Revenue Service…The backlog at the US Embassy, where no appointments are available until February [six months], stems from a rise in the number of American expatriates living in the UK who have been seeking to escape paying US tax on their worldwide income and capital gains since the simplification of US tax laws in 2008.” An earlier FT article on the topic found: “The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008.”

It's hard to change human habits and behavior. Take this quiz to learn more about yourself, and your patients. Sick-care and disease prevention has become one big data management exercise. Patients are data sets and doctors are data managers. In addition, in the gap between the data and the doctor, are many others including data scientists, navigators, care coordinators, and, of course, the payers. But, in order for any of this to do any good, there needs to be an intervention based on identified risk factors and that intervention has to change behavior. If you took the time to take the test, you will get some understanding of why it's so hard to change human behavior and habits and why people don't. Simply put, we're all built differently, were brought up differently and have different approaches to changing our habits. In researching and writing “Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives,” Gretchen Rubin realized that all of us differ dramatically in our attitude towards habits, and our aptitude for forming them. She described 4 distinct groups: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. Research like this is giving us a better understanding of patient psychographics and what makes them tick, particularly when it comes to changing their behavior. Giving people data alone does not change behavior. For information to be effective, the people who receive the data need the tools to change and the motivation to do so. Until then, throwing data at doctors and patients might be an interesting way to try to make a few bucks, but it's unlikely to improve outcomes.

WASHINGTON — The Sentinel Landscapes Partnership, comprised of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Interior (DOI) have announced three new areas designated as sentinel landscapes, where natural and working lands thrive alongside military installations and ranges. These landscapes play a key role in strengthening the nation’s military readiness while addressing natural resources concerns like climate change and contributing to the America the Beautiful initiative. The three new sentinel landscapes are the Camp Bullis Sentinel Landscape in Texas, Northwest Florida Sentinel Landscape and Southern Indiana Sentinel Landscape. “These new sentinel landscapes are a testament to the power of collaboration and partnership,” said USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Terry Cosby. “By using USDA’s conservation programs to protect and enhance farmland, rangeland, forestland and grasslands around military installations, we can invest in critical water resources and wildlife habitat on working lands and support climate-smart agriculture, while also advancing military training and testing opportunities.” “The USDA Forest Service is proud to partner with the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership,” said Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. “We are committed to investing in this collaborative conservation effort with our fellow federal partners in the spirit of shared stewardship. The Sentinel Landscapes Partnership provides a great opportunity to support military readiness while securing conservation benefits for communities.” “DoD is proud to support the growth of the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership and add Camp Bullis, Northwest Florida, and Southern Indiana to the list of designated sentinel landscapes,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Real Property Ron Tickle. “These new landscape designations will leverage DoD funding and programs to protect the missions at 14 key DoD installations and ranges, protecting essential testing and training operations, enhancing resilience to climate change, and preserving our nation’s natural resources and working lands.” “The Service is a proud partner in this Sentinel Landscapes effort,” said Martha Williams, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Principal Deputy Director. “Programs like the Sentinel Landscapes are shining examples of what the Biden Administration’s America the Beautiful initiative can achieve through collaborative locally led conservation efforts. Working together our diverse federal, state and local partners can improve vital landscapes, wildlife habitat and natural resources that benefit all Americans.” Since 2013, sentinel landscapes have worked with private landowners to permanently protect over 515,000 acres and implement sustainable management practices on an additional 2.7 million acres around military testing and training areas. These efforts have preserved wildlife habitat, bolstered agricultural and forest production and reduced land use conflicts around military bases.

The easiest and most effective way of getting vitamin D is through sun exposure. However for those many millions of people that do not live in a state where there’s sunshine most of the time there are other ways of getting vitamin D. For those that live in the sunny states, they must be aware that while you might be wearing sun protection, such as sunscreens, that protection also blocks the intake of vitamin D. Studies suggest that even those who live in the sunny states run the risk of vitamin D deficiency because they either spend most of the time indoors or they try to avoid the sun at all costs. This is a problem with people over 65 years of age and also those people with kidney issues, who may have a difficult time absorbing Vitamin D into their system. Vitamin D is essential for the regulation of minerals such as calcium and phosphorus found in the body. It is also a key vitamin to be able to maintain proper bone structure. For those people that can’t get Vitamin D through the sun it’s important for them to take vitamin D supplementation. Vitamin D is effective for treating a condition known as softening of the bones, this condition is often due to liver disease and at times caused by medications or poor absorption syndrome. There is a number of effective uses for Vitamin D such as bone loss prevention, weak and brittle bones, psoriasis, cavities, heart problems, and lung infections or infections of the airways. While there might be claims at vitamin D is effective for Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, increased athletic performance, eczema, heart issues comma, breast cancer, long term kidney-disease, and many others, there isn’t enough scientific evidence to support those claims.

The main idea behind Sonargraph has always been to provide a tool that eases the creation and maintenance of high-quality software. For any serious project that must live longer than a couple of months, it is actually cheaper to spend a part of your resources to keep your software constantly at a good level of quality than using all your time to create new features. Martin Fowler explains this very well in his article “Is High Quality Worth the Cost?”. The bottom line is, that apart from the very early development stages, high-quality software is actually cheaper to develop, because it allows adding new features at almost constant speed, whereas it becomes more and more time consuming to add new features into a code base with low quality. According to our experience the most successful teams spend about 15% to 20% of their time on code hygiene. We at hello2morrow believe that a consistent architecture is a fundamental part of software quality. When we use the term “architecture”, we think of it in terms of the IEEE 1471 standard: “The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.” This blog post describes why architectural design as an activity is needed, why conformance checks need to be done automatically by a tool and how Sonargraph supports you as a developer and architect during these activities. The Need for Architecture Martin Fowler wrote another excellent article “Is Design Dead?” back in 2004. He argues that for anything serious, you cannot just code along and hope for the best, but need “planned design”: “If you want to build a doghouse, you can just get some wood together and get a rough shape. However if you want to build a skyscraper, you can’t work that way – it’ll just collapse before you even get half way up.”Martin Fowler He is not arguing to design everything up front, but rather making the design activity part of the agile development process. As a consequence, architecture needs to evolve together with the code base and the knowledge of the team. If you take the definition for architecture mentioned at the start of the chapter, then the top-level architecture should contain the main components and their dependencies. As with construction architectures for large buildings, no single diagram exists that contains all information for a large-scale software system. There is an upper limit of elements that our brain can process, especially if there are also interconnections of different types between elements. Thus, if the system grows beyond a certain size, abstractions are needed which can be thought of as maps at different scale. Simon Brown gives an example of this with the C4 model. Where details are needed, additional diagrams can be created. Of course, several viewpoints for software architecture exists as described by “The 4+1 ViewModel”. This “static” architecture that describes the decomposition of a system in its parts is the foundation for the “dynamic” aspects like information flow: If there is no direct dependency between two components or between them and any of their commonly shared components, there cannot be any information flow between them. Consistency of the diagrams now becomes a challenge: Higher-level abstractions must not be violated at the lower level: There must not be a secret tunnel at the detailed level where the higher level puts a clear barrier between components. The last decades of agile software development have shown that it is impossible and impractical to do a big design upfront. Not only the requirements from the outside (read ‘business’) may change, but most certainly the developers’ understanding of the domain improves over time and thus the architecture likely also needs to be adapted as a consequence. The effort needed to change a functionality and the effects this change causes for the rest of the system very much depend on the number of usages of this functionality. Design for changeability therefore means to minimize coupling (i.e. the number of dependencies) between elements, because elements with low coupling can be more easily re-arranged. Especially bad for coupling are cyclic dependencies that may cause mental challenges in form of hen-and-egg problems and also make it harder to understand a system’s structure if a large number of elements are involved. You want to avoid an entangled mess as shown in the following picture (where green arcs represent dependencies between Java packages and the direction of dependencies is counter-clockwise) that is often described as “big ball of mud”: - “Is High Quality Worth the Cost” by Martin Fowler, https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html, 2019 - “Sustainable Software Architecture: Analyze and Reduce Technical Debt” by Dr Carola Lilienthal, dpunkt.verlag, 2020 - “Is Design Dead” by Martin Fowler, https://martinfowler.com/articles/designDead.html, 2004 - “Large-Scale C++ Software Design” by John Lakos, Addison-Wesley, 1996 - “The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, Addison-Wesley, 1999 - “Applying UML And Patterns” by Craig Larman, Prentice Hall, 2000 Manually tracking the evolution of the internal structure of a software system is not efficiently manageable. With thousands of classes and millions of dependencies this is impossible for any large system. You need a tool that automatically reports deviations in the implementation from your envisioned architecture. We think that the lack of proper tool support is the reason why so many projects suffer from software rot. There are many static analysis tools and linters that report errors and problems at source-file level, but most are missing out on the big picture: Tracking dependencies across source files and validating if the structure matches the envisioned design. As a result, most systems contain a large number of cycle groups, elements are tightly coupled, no clear structure exists and if documentation exists, it is not up-to-date. New developers have a hard time to know how they should structure new functionality, where to place the new code and how it should interact with the existing code. Once you have lost control, the structural quality typically spirals downwards quickly and the software ends up in a “big ball of mud”. Regular quality initiatives feel like Sisyphean tasks, because problems are created faster than they can be fixed. Therefore, quality checks must be executed automatically by the Continuous Integration (CI) build, whenever new code is committed. Even better, quality checks should be executed while programming, so that those problems never get into the version control system. Setting the Focus Starting a new project with automated architecture checks in place is very practicable to maintain quality at a high level. It is harder to sustainably improve quality for existing projects. Resources are scarce, and new features need to be implemented, so it is not feasible to simply stop all work and clean up everything first. Instead we highly recommend incremental and measurable improvements. For any quality improvements, it is important to spend efforts where it supports the current work. This makes the positive effects visible, and the enthusiasm for code quality will stay and won’t fade away quickly. For this reason, Sonargraph offers to compare the current state of the system against a previously run analysis. This ‘System Diff’ identifies where quality was improved or worsened, making it ideal to support code and sprint reviews. Additionally, quality gates can be defined that ensure that quality trends in the right direction. Upcoming in the next release (11.5.0) is a ranking algorithm that highlights those issues where fixes provide high benefit, i.e. that are urgent and important: Issues that were added recently, that have a high impact on the system and where involved files have been changed recently. Sonargraph focusses on architecture and dependencies, but it offers also a large number of metrics, duplicate code checks and additional rules that can be activated as needed, e.g. to detect unused code. Sonargraph is built upon the experiences that hello2morrow gained during the development and support of the predecessor products Sonargraph 7, SotoGraph and SotoArc. Sonargraph is lightweight and integrates smoothly with different IDEs, build and quality infrastructures (e.g. Eclipse, IntelliJ, SonarQube, Jenkins, Ant, Maven, …). Sonargraph consists of several products that help to ensure quality throughout the software development as shown in the following image: - Sonargraph-Architect allows code exploration and definition of rules, i.e. architectures, metrics, anti-patterns, thresholds, tasks, refactorings. It offers additional analyzers. e.g. to detect code duplications and to provide custom metrics and issues. - Sonargraph-Developer are integrations into IDEs that provide early feedback to developers. With a Developer license it is also possible to start the Sonargraph-Architect application in read-only mode and use its advanced visualization and exploration capabilities. - Sonargraph-Enterprise is a web application that provides the history of metrics for multiple Sonargraph systems. - Sonargraph-Build are integrations for various environments to run the quality checks headless, e.g. on the continuous integration server. - Further plugins exist that allow the integration of Sonargraph into SonarQube and Jenkins. We host an Open Source project on GitHub that provides easy access to all information contained in a Sonargraph XML report and can be used for custom post-processing: Use Cases and Key Functionality The following describes key functionality of Sonargraph and typical uses cases. This is just a summary, the user manual provides more details. Sonargraph uses a Domain Specific Language (DSL) approach to describe the architecture. A system’s architecture can consist of multiple architecture aspects which are checked in parallel. Alternatively, the architecture can be defined interactively. Architecture diagrams can be generated allowing to investigate connections between architecture artifacts, see “Visualizing an Architecture as a UML Component Diagram”. Sonargraph allows the simulation of refactorings. For this, you can create multiple so-called virtual models. A virtual model is a space where the model from the parser(s) can be modified by refactorings and detected issues can be transformed into tasks or ignored (called resolutions). This allows the simulation of different approaches to change a given structure. The ‘cycle-breakup’ analyzer proposes refactorings to find an efficient way to eliminate a cycle. It takes into account defined architectures and allows to interactively fine-tune the solution. Sonargraph analyzes information from Source-Control Management (SCM), currently Git. The combination of issues and code changes and the visualization as software maps (a.ka. “Code Cities”) allows the visual identification of hotspots. If Sonargraph is used in existing projects there might be an overwhelming number of reported issues. The ‘System Diff’ analyzer allows focussing on changes, making it the ideal companion during reviews. Quality gates can be defined on the current system state or in comparison to a baseline, making it easy to follow the ‘Boyscout Rule’ and gradually improving the system’s quality. The ‘Issue Ranking’ view recommends issues that are both urgent and important to fix. Great Parser Model Detail, Little Memory Consumption Dependencies are tracked down to method and field level offering detailed exploration. Sonargraph has little memory consumption, as only the model coming from the different parsers is held in memory and all ‘derived’ structural elements (e.g. a layer) and their dependencies are calculated on demand. The complete model of a system is stored in a compact binary format. This enables fast startup times (the last snapshot is used if available) without having to perform a full re-parse. Furthermore, complete systems might be compared and historically analyzed – even passed around to enable reviews based on them – by directly loading the snapshot. Analyzers calculate metrics and analyze dependency structures (e.g. cycles) and content of source files (e.g. duplicated code). These analyzers run in parallel in a multi-threaded environment providing more speed while not blocking user interaction. Once an analyzer has finished, it`s results are available to the user. The user can extend Sonargraph’s functionality by writing Groovy scripts accessing the model created by Sonargraph. These scripts can either simply act as custom queries finding artifacts with specific characteristics and/or to create issues pointing to potential problems in the system or create additional metrics. Sonargraph also offers a plugin API to integrate external analyzers and to extend the parser model by custom elements. The currently existing plugins are ‘Spotbugs’ and ‘PMD’ for further file-local issues and ‘Swagger’ and ‘Spring Microservices’ to reveal web service dependencies. Multiple Language Support Sonargraph supports different languages depending only on the license without the need to have different installations. There is a unified approach (i.e. one user interface) to explore and monitor systems implemented in different languages. Systems have a module structure where each module can have a different language. Inter-module dependencies with different languages are detected where possible (e.g. by analyzing JNI calls). A generic component approach is used for all supported languages – currently Java/Kotlin, C#, C/C++, Python. Flexible Exploration of Dependency Structures You are free to decide how to explore dependencies. Sonargraph offers a tree-like explorer, a graph viewer and a simple table-based viewer. Automated Updates and Flexible User Interface Sonargraph is built upon the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and thus prompts you as soon as updates are available. Views can be flexibly arranged and context menu interactions allow smooth navigation. Sonargraph-Build plugins for Maven and Gradle can also be configured to update automatically. Exchangeable Quality Artifacts The software system analysis comes with a multiple file approach: The software system is comprised of a main software system file, analyzer configurations, user defined scripts, different architecture aspects and so forth. All files are text-based, so the quality definition can and should be placed into version control together with the source code. The approach makes it easy to track changes and to share valuable aspects of the analysis between software systems as well as to centralize common aspects in bigger companies. This blog post illustrated the motivation behind Sonargraph’s development: We think (and others, too!) that dependency management is essential to code quality. It is important that the checks are run automatically and require little to no effort. With powerful visualizations and simulated refactorings Sonargraph enables the efficient analysis and improvement of existing code bases. Our customers report significant speedup of development and we can say from our own experiences that programming a well-structured code base is a lot of fun.

The City of Rijeka: European Capital of Culture Rijeka (Croatia) and Galway (Ireland) are the joint European Capitals of Culture in 2020. Rijeka (in Italian Fiume) is one of the most important cities in Croatia, the largest port, and a cultural, educational and scientific centre. It is a major Croatian publishing centre and the seat of the University founded in 1973. Geographically and culturally Rijeka and the Bay of Kvarner connect the Istrian peninsula with mainland Croatia. To mark the first Croatian European Capital of Culture, and to showcase some rare items from the British Library Croatian collections, we team up with a Library user, Marko Grba a poet and PhD student at the University of Rijeka. Coincidentally, he has the same surname and initials as the curator of Southeast European collections in the Library. Rijeka’s cultural programme motto is “Port of Diversity”, and in this blog post we will try to revive the memory of the people, events, tradition, identity and culture that created the city and this region. To highlight a succession of eras in this beautiful city and the surrounding Bay of Kvarner we are presenting, in addition to the selected collection items, a poem in Croatian and in its English translation by the poet, together with a selection of personal photographs taken recently. This book is a translation from Miracoli della gloriosa Vergine Maria and other popular religious works of the period. It is the last of at least seven Glagolitic books from the Senj press, printed there between 1494 and 1508. A digital copy is available from the Digital Library of the Croatian Academy in Zagreb. The printer of this early Glagolitic book was Grgur Senjanin, the first known printer in Croatia, who printed the Glagolitic Missal (1494), among other books, in the Senj printing press founded by Silvestar Bedričić. The British Library copy is one of the five known copies in existence worldwide. Only six Glagolitic books have been identified so far from the Glagolitic printing house in Rijeka founded by Šimun Kožičić Benja, Bishop of Modruš, and the Croatian Missal of 1531 is regarded as the most beautiful work of the press. The book is printed in Church Slavonic, in Croatian Glagolitic script in two columns, in liturgical black and red letters, and decorated with woodcuts and initials in Gothic and Glagolitic uncial fonts. Bartolomeo Zanétti (b.ca. 1487), a typographer, is named as the printer of the book. The British Library copy is one of 15 copies identified in libraries around the world. A digital copy is available from the Digital Library of the National and University Library in Zagreb. Alfred Fest, Fiume zur Zeit der Uskokenwirren (Fiume, 1893). 10210.ff.9. A History of Rijeka in the 16th and early 17th centuries in the time of Uskoks, Christian rebels against the Ottomans who operated from the Habsburg border garrison in Senj and the Croatian Military Frontier in the Habsburg Monarchy. Giovanni Kobler, Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume (Fiume, 1896) 10201.ff.7. A history of Rijeka in three volumes, with two appendices: chronological notes on the history of Rijeka from the year 395 to 1875, and a register of useful historical records from 803 to 1839. The author, Giovanni Kobler (1811-1893), was a lawyer and historian from Rijeka and the work was posthumously published by the city of Rijeka in 1896. Facsimile of the emblem granted to the city of Rijeka by Emperor Leopold I on 6 June 1659. From Memorie per la storia della liburnica città di Fiume. We turn now to some images of Rijeka and the Bay of Kvarner past and present. In one such a photograph (below) the memory of old tradition of fishing is preserved. Tuna-fishing was an important source of income in the city and the ‘tunera’ – wooden poles used as observation points for spotting the schools of tuna fish coming up the coast of the Bay of Kvarner – used to be a familiar sight, but are now long gone, as reflected in Marko Grba’s poem. Around the Bay of Bakar, The place of a well known school of seafarers, Which bay the famed Halley of the Comet Gauged for the needs of the Royal Navy fleet, All the way to the old Tunera poles of Bakarac, And farther still, towards Kraljevica, Where the plot of Zrinski and Frankopan was forged, Until not so long ago, tuna were swimming: The pride and might of the Adriatic. They sail no more – And the Tunera poles are of no worth any more, But as a memory to the rapture that once was the Adriatic. * Menci Clement Crnčić (1865-1930), Croatian painter, graphic artist and co-founder of the Academy of Fine Arts The Rijeka City Library, housed in Palace Modello built in 1885 (photograph by Marko Grba) Rijeka University Library, housed in the former School for Young Ladies built in 1887 and converted first into the Scientific Library in 1948, then into the University Library in 1979 (photograph by Marko Grba) Korzo, Rijeka’s main promenade decorated with red and white ‘Rijeka 2020 European Capital of Culture’ flags (photograph by Marko Grba) A view of Rijeka in the distance across the Bay of Kvarner from Ičići a popular beach near Opatija (photograph by Marko Grba) Milan Grba, Lead Curator of South East European Collections & Marko Grba, poet and PhD student at the University of Rijeka

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a degenerative joint sickness that can bring about discomfort, stiffness, and restricted variety of movement. OA can have an effect on any joint, which include the wrist. The indicators of wrist OA incorporate soreness, swelling, and a decreased selection of movement in the wrist and hand. Wrist OA can direct to structural improvements in the hand and restrict a person’s ability to carry out day by day duties. This posting seems at wrist OA in a lot more depth, together with its signs or symptoms, prognosis, and treatment. OA comes about when cartilage wears absent. Cartilage is a easy, flexible tissue that cushions and shields the finishes of bones, allowing them to glide effortlessly around each other. When the cartilage at the ends of wrist bones wears absent, the bones may rub together, producing friction and swelling. A human being might also knowledge ache mainly because the exposed bone has nerve endings. Finally, the wrist joint may possibly transform condition, triggering extra agony and lessening the assortment of motion in the wrist and hand. Anatomy of the wrist The wrist connects the hand to the forearm and includes a number of bones. The radius and ulna are the forearm bones. There are 8 tiny carpal bones at the foundation of the hand, organized in two rows of four. In a healthier wrist, slippery cartilage addresses the joint surface area of just about every bone. In wrist OA, the cartilage wears away, creating the bones to rub in opposition to every other. Injuries these kinds of as a damaged wrist can accelerate cartilage loss and OA symptoms. The signs of wrist OA can incorporate: - ache or tenderness - restricted selection of motion - discoloration or heat - a improve in grip toughness or hand purpose - joint sound, called “crepitus,” when shifting the wrist - locking or catching sensations in the wrist joint - trouble making use of the hands Wrist OA can trigger different troubles, including: - Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS): Wrist OA can occasionally lead to CTS. This transpires when swelling in the wrist joint or tendons squeezes a nerve that potential customers to the hand. It can end result in numbness, weak spot, pins and needles, and discomfort that may worsen at night. A person really should converse with a health care provider if they encounter these indicators routinely. - Structural modifications: OA in the joint concerning the forearm bones may hurt the tendons that straighten the fingers. This may well reduce the vary of motion in the hand and bring about deformity in the fingers. - Problems with daily pursuits: People with wrist OA might be not able to execute specific actions, this kind of as opening jars and pouring from a weighty kettle. A physical therapist or occupational therapist may possibly be equipped to counsel means to make day by day jobs a lot easier. To diagnose wrist OA, a doctor will first perform a actual physical exam and acquire a person’s health care heritage. They may perhaps also order X-rays to assistance recognize structural modifications in the wrist and hand and to rule out other brings about. Despite the fact that OA does not lead to blood abnormalities, a health practitioner may order a blood check to assistance rule out other brings about, these kinds of as rheumatoid arthritis. If a doctor Though there is no heal for OA, a man or woman can try out the next administration tactics to reduce the symptoms and protect against OA from progressing: Bodily therapy can assistance a particular person manage range of movement and preserve their wrist as adaptable as achievable. A bodily therapist can educate certain routines that may well aid ease the indications of OA. These exercises may well contain: - vary-of-movement routines - strengthening exercises - cardio workout Heat or chilly remedy Warmth and chilly therapy supply distinctive rewards to folks with wrist OA. Some men and women uncover that implementing heat to agonizing joints can help ease pain. Heat treatment, such as a paraffin wax bath, will increase blood flow by dilating the blood vessels, helping ease stiffness in the wrist. Chilly treatment constricts blood vessels and can assist reduce inflammation and swelling. A particular person can wrap an ice pack in a fabric or towel and apply it to the impacted area. Wrist braces or straps Unique kinds of wrist supports can enable in unique strategies. Resting splints preserve the hand and wrist however when a person is resting. Operating splints help retain the hand and wrist in the proper place when a particular person is making use of them. It is finest to check with the suggestions of a healthcare expert prior to shopping for wrist braces or straps to make guaranteed that they are suitable. Master about far more house cures for arthritis. Health professionals may possibly advise the adhering to treatment plans along with the above home remedies: Physicians might recommend numerous medications to reduce the signs and symptoms of wrist OA. The possibilities incorporate: - Analgesics: Soreness aid medicine this kind of as acetaminophen or ibuprofen can ease the ache and irritation associated with wrist OA. - Topical discomfort relief: A man or woman can use nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) creams and gels instantly to the pores and skin of the wrist. Capsaicin creams use a compound that takes place the natural way in cayenne pepper to alleviate pain. - Corticosteroids: If about-the-counter or prescription suffering relievers are ineffective, a doctor might prescribe steroid injections. These injections, which health care industry experts supply instantly into the joint, can reduce signs or symptoms for a number of months. If nonsurgical options are ineffective, medical professionals may possibly recommend surgical treatment. In accordance to a 2022 article, the - Proximal row carpectomy: Surgeons remove a few carpal bones close to the forearm to simplicity agony and sustain the assortment of movement in the wrist. - Fusion or arthrodesis: Surgeons take away weakened cartilage and attach the wrist bones to make certain that they mend as a single strong bone. This treatment relieves discomfort but lessens the array of motion. - Wrist alternative: Surgeons eliminate destroyed bones and cartilage and change them with plastic or metal joints. Health professionals are considerably less likely to suggest this surgical process than those earlier mentioned. Wrist OA is a chronic ailment that brings about ache and stiffness in the wrist. It can also have an impact on mobility and make daily duties more tough. Folks can alleviate their signs or symptoms and gradual the development of the illness by next the suggestions of health care industry experts and using their medicine consistently. If a person with wrist OA does not obtain treatment method for it, the suffering could turn out to be debilitating. Wrist OA is a degenerative problem ensuing from getting older and overuse. It can guide to ache, stiffness, and a limited assortment of movement. Attainable difficulties include CTS and structural variations in the hand. Medical practitioners can diagnose wrist OA by way of a physical test and X-rays. There is no treatment for OA, but solutions are obtainable to support relieve the signs. Early diagnosis and remedy can help reduce additional joint injury.

There is complete lack of information on roosting behavior of the house swift, Apus affinis native to Chhattisgarh. Therefore, we studied the roosting behavior (exit and entry patterns from/to its roosting site) of the house swift. Attempts were also made to ascertain the modulatory role of environmental factors. We monitored the exit and entry timings of the house swift in the roosting site located on the busiest commercial area of Raipur city, India, for eight consecutive days, every month over a period of two years. The exit and entry timings showed positive relationship with the sunrise and sunset, respectively. The house swift exited tater and entered earlier in winter as compared with summer and monsoon seasons. A significant negative correlation between exit time and morning ambient temperature, and positive correlation between entry time and evening temperature was witnessed. Unlike exit time, the entry time was negatively associated with the humidity. The emry time was also associated with light intensity. In summary, we conclude that various environmental factors, viz., sunrise time, sunset time, temperature, humidity and light intensity are likely to produce statistically significant effect on roosting behavior of the house swift. This study is, however, inadequate to answer the following questions: (1) how the first bird of the colony determines that it is the time to fly out? (2) Is it the same individual that flies out first daily? Nonetheless, the findings of the present study may have important bearings on the safety of civil and military flights.