INDIA INFO: India - More Indian Musical Instruments
by V.A.Ponmelil (Feedback)
More Indian Musical Instruments
Chitra Veena / Gotu Vadhyam
The Chitraveena which is also referred to as the gotuvadhyam is one of the most exquisite instruments. It is a 21 stringed fretless lute similar to Vichitraveena.
It contains a flat top, two resonant chambers, and a hollow stem of wood. While the right hand plectrums pluck the strings, the left hand slides a piece of wood over the strings.
It is one of the oldest instruments of the world and the forerunner of the fretted Saraswati Veena.
The word Jaltarang means "waves in water". The jaltarang is an interesting ancient musical instrument consisting of a series of tuned bowls arranged in a semicircle around the performer.
The bowls are of different sizes and are tuned precisely to the pitches of various ragas by adding appropriate amounts of water. The instrument is played by striking the inside edge of the bowls with two small wooden sticks, one held in each hand.
Jal tarang is not very common and is normally found in the accompaniment of kathak dancers.
The Morsing is a tiny instrument which is held in the left hand, the prongs against the upper and lower front teeth.
The tongue, which protrudes from the mouth, is made of spring steel. This is plucked with the Index finger of the right hand (backwards, not forwards) while the tone and timbre are adjusted by changing the shape of the mouth cavity and moving the tongue. Further control of the sound can be achieved with the breath.
Like the mridangam, the morsing is tuned to the Shruti and fine tuning is achieved by placing small amounts of bee's wax on the end of the tongue.
The Shank is one of the ancient instruments of India. It is also referred to as the sushirvadya which is associated with religious functions.
In India it is considered very sacred. It is being regarded as one of the attributes of Lord Vishnu. Before using, the Shankh is drilled in such a way as to produce a hole at the base taking care that the natural hole is not disturbed. In Athar¬Veda, one finds reference to Shankh, though it existed long, before. In Bhagvad Gita, during the time of war, Shankh had played an important role. It also has different names like Panch Janya Shankh, Devadatt Shankh, Mahashan Ponder Shankh and more.
Even in Valmiki's Ramayna, the mention of a Shankh can be traced. In the temples, Shankh is played in the mornings and evenings during the prayers. In homes, it is played before the starting of havan, yagnopavit, marriage, etc.
The Kombu is a wind instrument or a kind of trumpet which is usually played along with the Panchavadyam or the Pandi Melam or the Panchari melam. This musical instrument is like a long horn and is usually seen in Kerala state of South India.
Travel Information on top destinations of India
Hill Stations of India


Evolution can fall well short of perfection. Claire Ainsworth and Michael Le Page assess where life has gone spectacularly wrong
THE ascent of Mount Everest's 8848 metres without bottled oxygen in 1978 suggests that human lungs are pretty impressive organs. But that achievement pales in comparison with the feat of the griffon vulture that set the record for the highest recorded bird flight in 1975 when it was sucked into the engine of a plane flying at 11,264 metres.
Birds can fly so high partly because of the way their lungs work. Air flows through bird lungs in one direction only, pumped through by interlinked air sacs on either side. This gives them numerous advantages over lungs like our own. In mammals' two-way lungs, not as much fresh air reaches the deepest parts of the lungs, and incoming air is diluted by the oxygen-poor air that remains after ...
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Walter Bagehot (February 3, 1826 – March 24, 1877) was a British journalist, political analyst and economist, famous for his analysis of British Parliament and money market. Under his leadership The Economist became one of world’s leading business and political journals. Bagehot recognized that economics in not just a matter of the external, material aspects of financial transactions, but also involves the internal aspects of people's desires, motivations, and personality. Thus, he always emphasized social issues in his writings, and endeavored to make issues of government transparent to the public. Bagehot had an original and insightful mind, recognizing that the character of leaders was often more important than their political affiliation or beliefs. His work has continued to inform and inspire debate, contributing to our understanding of the functioning of human society and its improvement.
Walter Bagehot was born in on February 3, 1826, in Langport, Somerset, England, the son of a local banker. He attended the University College London, where he earned a Master's degree in mathematics in 1848. He studied law and was called to the Bar, but decided not to practice, instead joining his father in the banking business, in Stuckey & Co. in the west of England.
While still working as a banker, Bagehot started to write, first for some periodicals, and then for The National Review. He soon became the editor of the paper. In 1857, he met James Wilson, founder and editor of The Economist, a political and financial weekly newsmagazine. Bagehot married Wilson’s daughter in 1858.
In 1860, Bagehot succeeded his father-in-law, James Wilson, as editor of The Economist. After taking over he expanded the publication's reporting on the United States and on politics, and is considered to have increased its influence among policymakers. Bagehot became influential in both politics and economics, among whose friends were statesmen George Cornewall Lewis and Grant Duff, Lord Carnarvon, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and the governor and directors of the Bank of England.
Bagehot made several attempts to be elected as a Member of Parliament, but without success. He remained at the head of The Economist for the rest of his life. He died suddenly on March 24, 1877 in his home in Langport, Somerset, England, at the age of 51.
Bagehot was a person with a whole variety of interests. He wrote on the topics of economics, politics, law, literature, and so forth. He remains most famous however for his three books: The English Constitution (1867), Physics and Politics (1872), and Lombard Street (1873). In addition to these volumes, he commanded substantial influence through his editorship of The Economist.
The English Constitution
In 1867, Bagehot wrote The English Constitution which explored the constitution of the United Kingdom, specifically the functioning of the British Parliament and the British monarchy, and the contrasts between British and American government. Bagehot revealed how the Parliament operated as it were "behind a curtain," hidden from public knowledge. He divided the constitution into two components:
- The Dignified – symbolic side of the constitution, and
- The Efficient - the real face of the constitution, the way things actually work and get done.
Instead of describing the constitution from the point of the law, as a lawyer would, Bagehot focused on the practical implications of the constitution, as experienced by the common man. The book soon became widely popular, ensuring Bagehot worldwide fame.
He criticized American presidential system, claiming that it lacked flexibility and accountability. While in the English parliament real debates took place, after which changes could take place, in the American Congress debates had no power, since the President made the final decision. In Bagehot's view:
a parliamentary system educates the public, while a presidential system corrupts it. (The English Constitution 1867)
He also criticized the way American presidents are chosen, saying:
Under a presidential constitution the preliminary caucuses that choose the president need not care as to the ultimate fitness of the man they choose. They are solely concerned with his attractiveness as a candidate. (The English Constitution, 1867)
Physics and Politics
Bagehot wrote Physics and Politics in 1872, in which he tried to apply the principles of evolution to human societies. The subtitle of the book reads: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society. The book represented a pioneering effort to make a relationship between the natural and the social sciences. Bagehot explained the functioning of the market, and how it affects the behavior of the people. For example, he believed that people tend to invest money when the mood of the market is positive, and restrain from it when it comes to a negative phase.
In this book Bagehot also reflected on the psychology of politics, especially on the personality of a leader. He stressed two things as essential for leadership: the personality of a leader and his motivation. Bagehot believed that motivation played one of the key roles in good leadership, and that the personality of a leader often counted more than the policy he endorsed:
It is the life of teachers which is catching, not their tenets.” (Physics and Politics 1872)
Bagehot claimed that the personal example of the leader sets the tone for the whole governance. That is why “character issues” are so important for any government. Character "issues" still play an important role in deciding the potential candidate for any leadership position in today’s modern world.
Bagehot coined the expression "the cake of custom," denoting the sets of customs that any society is rooted in. Bagehot believed that customs develop and evolve throughout human history, with the best organized groups overthrowing the poorly organized groups. In this sense Bagehot’s views are a clear example of cultural selection, closer to Lamarckian than Darwinian evolution. The central problem in his book was to understand why Europeans could break away from tradition and “the cake of custom” and instead focus on progress and novelty. He saw tradition as important in keeping societies cohesive, but also believed that diversity was essential for progress:
The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better. (Physics and Politics 1872)
In his famous Lombard Street (1873), Bagehot explained the theory behind the banking system, using insights from the English money market. As with his analysis of the English constitution six years earlier, Bagehot described the English banking system through the eyes of a simple person, as experienced in everyday life.
Bagehot showed that the English money system was solely relying on the central bank, the Bank of England. Bagehot had warned that the whole reserve was in the central bank, under no effectual penalty of failure. He proposed several ideas how to improve that system.
Bagehot’s work can be closely associated with the English historicist tradition. He did not directly oppose Classical economics, but advocated for its reorganization. He claimed that economics needed to incorporate more factors in its theory, such as cultural and social factors, in order to be more accurate in theorizing about economic processes.
Bagehot was one of the first to study the relationship between physical and social sciences from a sociological perspective. In his contributions to sociological theory through historical studies, Bagehot may be compared to his contemporary Henry Maine. He also developed a distinct theory of central banking, many points of which continue to be valued.
With his analysis of English and United States political systems in the English Constitution, Bagehot influenced Woodrow Wilson to write his Congressional Government.
In honor of his achievements and his work as its editor, The Economist named its weekly column on British politics after him. Every year the British Political Studies Association awards the Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.
- Bagehot, Walter. 1848. Review of Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Prospective Review, 4(16), 460-502.
- Bagehot, Walter. 1858. Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen. London: Chapman and Hall.
- Bagehot, Walter. 1875. A New Standard of Value. The Economist, November 20.
- Bagehot, Walter. 1879. Literary Studies. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
- Bagehot, Walter. 1998. (original 1880). Economic Studies. Augustus M Kelley Pubs. ISBN 0678008523
- Bagehot, Walter. 2001. (original 1867). The English Constitution. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192839756
- Bagehot, Walter. 2001. (original 1873). Lombard Street: A description of the money market. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 140210006X
- Bagehot, Walter. 2001. (original 1877). Some Articles on the Depreciation of Silver and on Topics Connected with It. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 140216288X
- Bagehot, Walter. 2001. (original 1889). The Works of Walter Bagehot. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1421254530
- Bagehot, Walter. 2006. (original 1881). Biographical Studies. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1428608400
- Bagehot, Walter. 2006. (original 1872). Physics and Politics. Dodo Press. ISBN 1406504408
- Bagehot, Walter. 2006. (original 1885). The Postulates of English Political Economy. Cosimo. ISBN 1596053771
- Barrington, Russell. 1914. Life of Walter Bagehot. Longmans, Green and Co.
- Buchan, Alastair. 1960. The spare chancellor: The life of Walter Bagehot. Michigan State University Press. ISBN 087013051X
- Cousin, John William. 1910. A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. New York, E.P. Dutton.
- Morgan, Forrest. 1995. The Works of Walter Bagehot. Routledge. ISBN 0415131545
- Orel, Harold. 1984. Victorian Literary Critics: George Henry Lewes, Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton, Leslie Stephen, Andrew Lang, George Saintsbury, and Edmund Goss. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0312843046
- Sisson C. H. 1972. The case of Walter Bagehot. Faber and Faber Ltd. ISBN 0571095011
- Stevas, Norman. 1959. Walter Bagehot a Study of His Life and Thought Together with a Selection from His Political Writings. Indiana University Press.
- Sullivan, Harry R. 1975. Walter Bagehot. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805710183
All links retrieved December 6, 2012.
- Bagehot and the Age of Discussion – Commentary on Bagehot’s Physics and Politics
- Major Works – Some full-text works of Walter Bagehot
- Quotations from Walter Bagehot
- Walter Bagehot – Biography
- Works by Walter Bagehot. Project Gutenberg
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Does Thinness Raise Alzheimer's Risk?
< Nov. 23, 2011 > -- In the search for early markers of Alzheimer's disease - in hopes of eventually preventing it - researchers have found that low body weight may somehow play a role.
In a study published this week in the journal Neurology, people with early signs of Alzheimer's disease were more likely to be underweight or have a low body mass index (BMI).
Earlier studies found that people who are overweight in middle age or earlier are at higher risk for Alzheimer's later in life. Other studies have shown that being overweight later in life seems to protect against the disease.
More research needed
What the latest study findings mean for diagnosing or preventing Alzheimer's disease is unclear.
"A long history of declining weight or BMI could aid the diagnostic process," says study author Eric Vidoni, Ph.D., at the University of Kansas. But, he adds, it's too early "to make body composition part of the diagnostic toolbox."
Dr. Vidoni and colleagues studied brain imaging and analyzed cerebrospinal fluid in 506 people. Study participants ranged from those with no memory problems to others with Alzheimer's.
Impact of body weight
People who had evidence of Alzheimer's - either in brain scans or protein levels in the cerebrospinal fluid - were more likely to have a lower BMI than those who did not show early evidence of the disease.
The researchers aren't sure why body weight might have a bearing on Alzheimer's risk. They speculate that the disease may affect the hippocampus, the area of the brain that controls metabolism and appetite. Or, they say, perhaps inflammation is driving both the drop in BMI and the cognitive changes that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's.
For more information on health and wellness, please visit health information modules on this website.
Although you can't control certain risk factors for Alzheimer's disease like advancing age, you can reduce your odds of developing the condition. The latest findings show you can reduce risk by:
Always talk with your health care provider to find out more information.
(Our Organization is not responsible for the content of Internet sites.)


LESSON ONE: Transforming Everyday Objects
Marcel Duchamp: Bicycle Wheel, bicycle wheel on wooden stool, 1963 (Henley-on-Thames, Richard Hamilton Collection); © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo credit: Cameraphoto/Art Resource, NY
Man Ray: Rayograph, gelatin silver print, 29.4×23.2 cm, 1923 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, photo © The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Meret Oppenheim: Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), fur-lined cup, diam. 109 mm, saucer, diam. 237 mm, spoon, l. 202 mm, overall, h. 73 mm, 1936 (New York, Museum of Modern Art); © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zurich, photo © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
Dada and Surrealist artists questioned long-held assumptions about what a work of art should be about and how it should be made. Rather than creating every element of their artworks, they boldly selected everyday, manufactured objects and either modified and combined them with other items or simply se-lected them and called them “art.” In this lesson students will consider their own criteria for something to be called a work of art, and then explore three works of art that may challenge their definitions.
Students will consider their own definitions of art.
Students will consider how Dada and Surrealist artists challenged conventional ideas of art.
Students will be introduced to Readymades and photograms.
Ask your students to take a moment to think about what makes something a work of art. Does art have to be seen in a specific place? Where does one encounter art? What is art supposed to accomplish? Who is it for?
Ask your students to create an individual list of their criteria. Then, divide your students into small groups to discuss and debate the results and come up with a final list. Finally, ask each group to share with the class what they think is the most important criteria and what is the most contested criteria for something to be called a work of art. Write these on the chalkboard for the class to review and discuss.
Show your students the image of Bicycle Wheel. Ask your students if Marcel Duchamp’s sculp-ture fulfills any of their criteria for something to be called a work of art. Ask them to support their obser-vations with visual evidence.
Inform your students that Duchamp made this work by fastening a Bicycle Wheel to a kitchen stool. Ask your students to consider the fact that Duchamp rendered these two functional objects unus-able. Make certain that your students notice that there is no tire on the Bicycle Wheel.
To challenge accepted notions of art, Duchamp selected mass-produced, often functional objects from everyday life for his artworks, which he called Readymades. He did this to shift viewers’ engagement with a work of art from what he called the “retinal” (there to please the eye) to the “intellectual” (“in the service of the mind.”) [H. H. Arnason and Marla F. Prather, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography (Fourth Edition) (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), 274.] By doing so, Duchamp subverted the traditional notion that beauty is a defining characteristic of art.
Inform your students that Bicycle Wheel is the third version of this work. The first, now lost, was made in 1913, almost forty years earlier. Because the materials Duchamp selected to be Readymades were mass-produced, he did not consider any Readymade to be “original.”
Ask your students to revisit their list of criteria for something to be called a work of art. Ask them to list criteria related specifically to the visual aspects of a work of art (such as “beauty” or realistic rendering).
Duchamp said of Bicycle Wheel, “In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a Bicycle Wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.” [John Elderfield, ed., Studies in Modern Art 2: Essays on Assemblage (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 135.] Bicycle Wheel is a kinetic sculpture that depends on motion for effect. Although Duchamp selected items for his Readymades without regard to their so-called beauty, he said, “To see that wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting . . . I en-joyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace.” [Francis M. Naumann, The Mary and William Sisler Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 160.] By en-couraging viewers to spin Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp challenged the common expectation that works of art should not to be touched.
Show your students Rayograph. Ask your students to name recognizable shapes in this work. Ask them to support their findings with visual evidence. How do they think this image was made?
Inform your students that Rayograph was made by Man Ray, an American artist who was well-known for his portrait and fashion photography. Man Ray transformed everyday objects into mysterious images by placing them on photographic paper, exposing them to light, and oftentimes repeating this process with additional objects and exposures. When photographic paper is developed in chemicals, the areas blocked from light by objects placed on the paper earlier on will remain light, and the areas exposed to light will turn black. Man Ray discovered the technique of making photograms by chance, when he placed some objects in his darkroom on light-sensitive paper and accidentally exposed them to light. He liked the resulting images and experimented with the process for years to come. He likened the technique, now known as the photogram, to “painting with light,” calling the images rayographs, after his assumed name.
Now that your students have identified some recognizable objects used to make Rayograph, ask them to consider which of those objects might have been translucent and which might have been opaque, based on the tone of the shapes in the photogram.
Now show your students Meret Oppenheim’s sculpture Object (Déjeuner en fourrure). Both Rayograph and Object were made using everyday objects and materials not traditionally used for making art, which, when combined, challenge ideas of reality in unexpected ways. Ask your students what those everyday objects are and how they have been transformed by the artists.
Ask your students to name some traditional uses for the individual materials (cup, spoon, saucer, fur) used to make Object. Ask your students what choices they think Oppenheim made to transform these materials and objects.
In 1936, the Swiss artist Oppenheim was at a café in Paris with her friends Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Oppenheim was wearing a bracelet she had made from fur-lined, polished metal tubing. Picasso joked that one could cover anything with fur, to which Oppenheim replied, “Even this cup and saucer.” [Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim: Defiance in the Face of Freedom (Zurich, Frankfurt, New York: PARKETT Publishers Inc., 1989), 39.] Her tea was getting cold, and she reportedly called out, “Waiter, a little more fur!” Soon after, when asked to participate in a Surrealist exhibition, she bought a cup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and lined them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. [Josephine Withers, “The Famous Fur-Lined Teacup and the Anonymous Meret Oppenheim” (New York: Arts Magazine, Vol. 52, Novem-ber 1977), 88-93.]
Duchamp, Oppenheim, and Man Ray transformed everyday objects into Readymades, Surrealist objects, and photograms. Ask your students to review the images of the three artworks in this lesson and discuss the similarities and differences between these artists’ transformation of everyday objects.
Art and Controversy
At the time they were made, works of art like Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and Oppenheim’s Object were controversial. Critics called Duchamp’s Readymades immoral and vulgar—even plagiaristic. Overwhelmed by the publicity Object received, Oppenheim sunk into a twenty-year depres-sion that greatly inhibited her creative production.
Ask your students to conduct research on a work of art that has recently been met with controversy. Each student should find at least two articles that critique the work of art. Have your students write a one-page summary of the issues addressed in these articles. Students should consider how and why the work chal-lenged and upset critics. Was the controversial reception related to the representation, the medium, the scale, the cost, or the location of the work? After completing the assignment, ask your students to share their findings with the class. Keep a list of shared critiques among the work’s various receptions.
Make a Photogram
If your school has a darkroom, have your students make photograms. Each student should collect several small objects from school, home, and the outside to place on photographic paper. Their collection should include a range of translucent and opaque objects to allow different levels of light to shine through. Stu-dents may want to overlap objects or use their hands to cover parts of the light-sensitive paper. Once the objects are arranged on the paper in a darkroom, have your students expose the paper to light for several seconds (probably about five to ten seconds, depending on the level of light) then develop, fix, rinse, and dry the paper. Allow for a few sheets of photographic paper per student so that they can experiment with different arrangements and exposures. After the photograms are complete, have your students discuss the different results that they achieved. Students may also make negatives of their photograms by placing them on top of a fresh sheet of photographic paper and covering the two with a sheet of glass. After ex-posing this to light, they can develop the paper to get the negative of the original photogram.
Encourage your students to try FAUXtogram, an activity available on Red Studio, MoMA's Web site for teens.
GROVE ART ONLINE: Suggested Reading
Below is a list of selected articles which provide more information on the specific topics discussed in this lesson.


ActiveMQ via C# using Apache.NMS Part 1
Java Message Service (JMS) is the de facto standard for asynchronous messaging between loosely coupled, distributed applications. Per the specification, it provides a common way for Java application to create, send, receive and read messages. This is great for enterprises or organizations whose architecture depends upon a single platform (Java), but the reality is that most organizations have hi-bred architectures consisting of Java and .NET (and others). Oftentimes these systems need to communicate using common messaging schematics: ActiveMQ and Apache.NMS satisfy this integration requirement.
The JMS specification outlines the requirements for system communication between Java Messaging Middleware and the clients that use them. Products that implement the JMS specification do so by developing a provider that supports the set of JMS interfaces and messaging semantics. Examples of JMS providers include open source offerings such as ActiveMQ, HornetQ and GlassFish and proprietary offerings such as SonicMQ and WebSphere MQ. The specification simply makes it easier for third parties to develop providers.
All messaging in JMS is peer-2-peer; clients are either JMS or non JMS applications that send and receive messages via a provider. JMS applications are pure Java based applications whereas non JMS use JMS styled APIs such as ActiveMQ.NMS which uses OpenWire, a cross language wire protocol that allows native access to the ActiveMQ provider.
JMS messaging schematics are defined into two separate domains: queue based and topic based applications. Queue based or more formally, point-to-point (PTP) clients rely on “senders” sending messages to specific queues and “receivers” registering as listeners to the queue. In scenarios where more a queue has more than one listener, the messages are delivered in a round-robin fashion between each listener; only one copy of the message is delivered. Think of this as something like a phone call between you and another person.
Topic based application follow the publish/subscribe metaphor in which (in most cases) a single publisher client publishes a message to a topic and all subscribers to that topic receive a copy. This type of messaging metaphor is often referred to as broadcast messaging because a single client sends messages to all client subscribers. This is some analogous to a TV station broadcasting a television show to you and any other people who wish to “subscribe” to a specific channel.
JMS API Basics
The JMS Standard defines a series of interfaces that client applications and providers use to send messages and receive messages. From a client perspective, this makes learning the various JMS implementations relatively easy, since once you learn one you can apply what you learned to another implementation relatively easily and NMS is no exception. The core components of JMS are as follows: ConnectionFactory, Connection, Destination, Session, MessageProducer, and MessageConsumer. The following diagram illustrates communication and creational aspects of each object:
NMS supplies similar interfaces to the .NET world which allows for clients to send messages to and from the ActiveMQ JMS via OpenWire. A quick rundown of the NMS interfaces are as follows:
Note that the Apache.NMS namespace contains several more interfaces and classes, but these are the essential interfaces that map to the JMS specification. The following diagram illustrates the signature that each interface provides:
The interfaces above are all part of the Apache.NMS 1.30 API available for download here. In order to use NMS in your .NET code you also need to down load the Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ client as well and to test your code, you will need to download and install the ActiveMQ broker, which is written in Java so it requires the JRE to be installed as well. The following table provides links to each download:
For my examples I will be using the latest release of Apache.NMS and Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ as of this writing time. You should simple pick the latest version that is stable. The same applies for ActiveMQ and the JDK/JRE…note that you only need the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to host install ActiveMQ. Install the JDK if you want to take advantage of some the tools that it offers for working with JMS providers.
To start ActiveMQ, install the JRE (if you do not already have it installed – most people do already) and unzip the ActiveMQ release into a directory…in directory will do. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder with the ActiveMQ release and locate the “bin” folder, then type ‘activemq”. You should see something like the following:
Download and install the Apache.NMS and Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ libraries from the links defined in the table above. Unzip them into a directory on your hard drive, so that you can reference them from Visual Studio.
Open Visual Studio 2008/2010 and create a new Windows project of type “Class Library”:
And once the project is created, using the “Add Reference” dialog, browse to the directory where you unzipped the Apache.NMS files defined above and a reference to the Apache.NMS.dll. Do the same for the Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ download. Note that each download contains builds for several different .NET versions; I chose the “net-3.5” version of each dll since I am using VS 2008 and targeting the 3.5 version of .NET.
For my examples you will also need to install the latest and greatest version NUnit from www.nunit.org. After you have installed NUnit, add a reference to the nunit.framework.dll. Note that any unit testing framework should work.
Add three classes to the project:
- A test harness class (ApacheNMSActiveMQTests.cs)
- A publisher class (TopicPublisher.cs)
- A subscriber class (TopicSubscriber.cs).
Your solution explorer should look something like the following:
The test harness will be used to demonstrate the use of the two other classes. The TopicPublisher class represents a container for a message producer and the TopicSubcriber represents a container for a message consumer.
The publisher, TopicPublisher is a simple container/wrapper class that allows a client to easily send messages to a topic. Remember from my previous discussion about topics that topics allow for broadcast messaging scenarios: a single publisher sends a message to one or more subscribers and that all subscribers will receive a copy of the message.
Message producers typically have a lifetime equal to the amount of time it takes to send a message, however for performance reasons you can extend the life out to the length of the application’s lifetime.
Like the TopicPublisher above, the TopicSubscriber class is container/wrapper class that allows clients to “listen in” or “subscribe” to a topic.
The TopicSubscriber class is typically has a lifetime that is the equal to the lifetime of the application. The reason is pretty obvious: a publisher always knows when it will publish, but a subscriber never knows when the publisher will send the message. What the subscriber does is create a permanent “listener” to the topic, when a publisher sends a message to the topic, the subscriber will receive and process the message.
The following unit test shows the classes above used in conjunction with the Apache.NMS and Apache.NMS.ActiveMQ API’s to send and receive messages to ActiveMQ which is Java based, from the .NET world!
Here is quick rundown of the ApachNMSActiveMQTests class:
- Declare variables for the required NMS objects and the TopicSubscriber
- Declare variables for the broker URI, the topic to subscribe/publish to, and the client and consumer ids
- Create a ConnectionFactory object, create and start a Connection, and then create a Session to work with.
- Create and start the TopicSubscriber which will be a listener/subscriber to the “TestTopic” topic. Also, to receive messages you must register an event handler or lambda expression with the MessageReceivedDelegate delegate. In this example I in-lined a lambda expression for simplicity.
- On the test the method, create a temporary publisher and send a message to the topic.
- Tear down and dispose of the subscriber and Session.
- Tear down and dispose of the Connection.
After you run the unit test you should see something like the following message:
Note that ActiveMQ must be up and running for the example to work.


Ever wonder what would happen if every single adult in the U.S. took a few hours each month to support a program that supports the well-being of children? Perhaps you would choose to advocate for a child in an unstable environment; or a child in poor health; or one who is struggling with their academics; or one who facing a bully? What kind of impact would that make on the future of our country?
I recently came across some information about National Make a Difference in Children Month; a grassroots call to action sponsored by long-time child advocate, Kim Ratz. The intention of this annual observance is to bring awareness on how our actions can make a positive difference to a child.
Ms. Ratz outlines 4 key actions we can take to have a direct impact on the life of a child on her Website:
1. Pick one (or more) event or activity to do with a child … that will make some kind of positive difference or impact on that child. Need ideas? Read 100+ Ways to Make a Difference to Children.
2. Support an organization that serves children …It could be your local community ed. or schools, YMCA, Boy or Girl Scouts, place of worship, park and recreation or any other organization that serves kids.
3. Tell your policy makers to support initiatives that are good for kids … like your school board, city council, county commissioners, state legislators & congressional delegation; summer is generally a more relaxed time to communicate with them. Share your own story about Making a Difference to Children … and WHY it’s important to support programs for children …
4. Tell other people about this campaign …like your neighbors, relatives, friends, people at work, worship, school or play.
Here are some more ideas from Early Childhood News and Resources on how you can make a difference to a child this month:
- Volunteer at a local center that helps teen or single mothers (or fathers)
- Volunteer with your local elementary school
- Help at a soup kitchen for needy families
- Help at church with Sunday School, VBS or another faith-based program
- Locate a service in your area that assists homeless children with school supplies, medical care or social-emotional development
- Volunteer to read for kids at your local library
- Teach classes at a local rec center or community center: arts, crafts, reading, sports, ASL, music, etc.
- Offer your time at the Foundation for the Blind (they often run children’s classes)
- Find a local farm that hosts classes for special needs kiddos and volunteer there (horse therapy, etc)
- Don’t have time to volunteer your time? How about a simple donation?
What can YOU do to help a child in need? Share your ideas and inspiration!


Reading Classic Literatures
Classic literature, even though they were written fifty or hundred years ago, still has the power to affect the readers. The gift of literature to educate and inspire people transcends time. Unfortunately, not all people like to read classic literature. Sometimes, to understand classic literature, you have to be mature enough to enjoy and comprehend these writings.
Although we read classic literature because we have to do a report in school, we can also read them for enjoyment. You may have heard of famous authors of classical novels on the television and internet, you can check out their writings and their books.
If you really want to get into the habit of reading classical literature, you can start by reading 30 minutes every day. You should have a dictionary near you when reading classical novels since the words used are always deep or its meaning has changed over time.
To have a better understanding of the setting and the plot of the story, you can make a little background research on the era or its time period. You can also research on the background of the author.
You really have to follow the structure of the story. Most classical literature have complex storyline and plots which makes it hard sometimes to follow the story. The character development is also very extensive. Seeing the overall theme of the story is very important as well as following the basic development of the characters and their story.
There are literature companions that you can buy to help you get started with the classical literature. An example of a literature companion is the "Oxford Companion to Classical Literature."
Another key to understanding classic literature is by understanding the use of the footnotes. These classical literature are full of footnotes that references the social and culture elements of their time.


Image: Sierra Nevada Corporation
Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser spacecraft is being prepared for its first test flights as part of NASA’s commercial space program, and it’s a design that wouldn’t look out of place on a poster stuck to a 10-year-old’s wall.
The Dream Chaser is one of three vehicles competing for NASA contracts to replace the space shuttle orbiters for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station and elsewhere in low Earth orbit. Unlike its capsule competitors from Boeing and SpaceX, the Dream Chaser is a flying, lifting body design that could land on a runway, much closer in concept to the orbiters that were retired in 2011.
Sierra Nevada announced that it will be partnering with veteran space vehicle maker and aerospace juggernaut Lockheed Martin to build the second Dream Chaser vehicle. The two companies will also collaborate on ongoing parts of NASA’s commercial crew program, which is currently in the Certification Products Contract phase. Sierra Nevada, SpaceX and Boeing are developing versions of their space vehicles that will meet NASA certification for safety and performance.
“The SNC team is thrilled that Lockheed Martin will be joining our expanding world-class team of partner organizations,” said Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada’s space system group.
Lockheed Martin will build the next Dream Chaser at the facility in Michaud, Louisiana where the external tanks for the space shuttles were made. The company is no stranger to the current commercial space programs as it builds the Atlas V rocket (in a joint venture with Boeing) to be used by the Dream Chaser as well as Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft.
Sierra Nevada says the first Dream Chaser spacecraft is currently bring prepared for transport at the company’s facility in Colorado. In the next few weeks SNC expects to transport the vehicle to Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert where flight testing will take place.
The Dream Chaser will be dropped from a helicopter at 12,000 feet and and is expected to reach speeds of around 300 knots (345 mph) before landing at a touchdown speed of around 180 knots (207 mph). For the initial test flights, the Dream Chaser will glide to the ground autonomously without a pilot. The glide flights are scheduled to begin within the next two months and Sierra Nevada says the flight test vehicle will make just a few flights to gather the data necessary to further refine the flight characteristics of the design.
The second Dream Chaser – built by Lockheed Martin – will be the vehicle used for sub-orbital flight testing that the company hopes will begin in the next two years. NASA is expected announce at least two companies to fly astronauts to low earth orbit by 2017.
Via FlowingData: http://flowingdata.com/


American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To establish in office; install.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To set or place; establish, as in a rank or condition.
- To invest.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To set, place, or establish, as in a rank, office, or condition; to install; to invest.
- From in- + state. (Wiktionary)
“North Carolina improved to 21-1 in instate tournament games, including 6-0 in games played here - home to Atlantic Coast Conference rival Wake Forest.”
“While this was not a war, the instate was the same.”
“But, the difficult national environment for Democrats coupled with a surge in Republican energy instate -- the result of the passage of a stringent immigration bill -- quickly turned the race into a serious contest.”
“Soccer Board of Directors voted to re-instate the provisional sanction.”
“After a first refusal, Obama says he'll now re-instate solar water heating to the White House roof, and will add photo-voltaic cells that will generate electricity.”
“If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change and avoid climate disaster, we need to instate a moratorium on drilling in the Arctic.”
“I think only money from instate sources should be allowed to pay for the campaign.”
“This seems like more of a power play to me: they want a worldwide governing body to oversee this and have them instate rules in place that will change our lives forever.”
“It's time to re-instate the tax breaks from the 2000-2004 period and we all have to face the fact that these bills must be paid.”
“Then if Congress really thinks this is incorrect, they can re-instate them.”
These user-created lists contain the word ‘instate’.
The only letters without a "satine" bingo possibility: J, Q, Y
Words found through Wordie's random word function. I didn't take phrases, foreign, misspelled, or madeupical words, so I looked at about 200 words to assemble this list.
I was surprise...
Looking for tweets for instate.


Volume 11, Number 3—March 2005
Rumor Surveillance and Avian Influenza H5N1
We describe the enhanced rumor surveillance during the avian influenza H5N1 outbreak in 2004. The World Health Organization’s Western Pacific Regional Office identified 40 rumors; 9 were verified to be true. Rumor surveillance informed immediate public health action and prevented unnecessary and costly responses.
In January 2004, 14 persons in Vietnam were admitted to provincial hospitals with severe respiratory illness (1). Avian influenza H5N1 was detected in samples from 3 of these patients. Health officials and the World Health Organization (WHO) were concerned, as these were sporadic cases of an influenza strain that normally infects birds exclusively (2). Furthermore, little was known about the extent of the outbreak, its potential for international spread, and the possible evolution of a pandemic influenza strain. WHO issued an international public health alert on January 13, 2004, to inform the world about the outbreak (1).
News of the outbreak led to international anxiety and the propagation of unofficial outbreak reports or disease rumors (3). These rumors could have led countries to impose trade and travel restrictions with negative social, economic, and health consequences (3,4). To protect both the international community and the affected countries, WHO introduced enhanced rumor surveillance for reports of avian influenza H5N1, a process of investigating unofficial reports of disease events to determine their veracity. Rumor surveillance aims to decrease the potential for misinformation and misunderstanding and to inform the public and health officials about disease outbreaks, facilitate a rapid response, and promote public health preparedness (3).
Rumor surveillance is a passive process, where rumors are identified from media reports, professional groups, the public, and persons in the WHO network, which is made up of WHO headquarters, country offices, and WHO Collaborating Centers. In an enhanced system, rumor surveillance is intensified by actively seeking out rumors and undertaking more rigorous follow up. This surveillance includes analyzing more media sources and regularly requesting information from the WHO network about outbreak events. Previous studies have examined the role of enhanced rumor surveillance during public health emergencies, such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 and the outbreak of Ebola in Uganda in 2000 (5,6). However, research has not examined the role of rumor surveillance in multicountry or regional outbreaks.
The importance of rumor surveillance is likely to increase as the international community considers the revised draft of the International Health Regulations (IHR). Article 8 of the IHR Working Paper (7) states, “WHO, in consultation with the health administration of the State concerned, shall verify rumors of public health risks which may involve or result in international spread of disease.”
During the avian influenza outbreak, WHO’s Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO) was the focal point for identifying rumors and coordinating their investigations in the region (8). WPRO covers 37 nations and stretches from China in the north and west, to New Zealand in the south, and to French Polynesia in the east (9). This study examines whether the enhanced rumor surveillance undertaken by WPRO during the first 40 days of the outbreak achieved its aims of 1) offering timely assistance to potentially affected nations, 2) prompting countries to undertake preparedness measures appropriate to their level of risk of being affected, and 3) informing the public and the international community about relevant events.
WPRO designated a rumor surveillance officer to develop and implement the rumor surveillance system for avian influenza in animals and humans. This officer actively assessed media sources and email-based public health discussion and regularly contacted the WHO network to identify rumors. Media sources included journalists visiting WPRO and Web sites for television networks and newspapers. Most were English-based media sources; however, some were also in Japanese and Arabic. To increase the scope of the active media search, this officer also accessed the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (10), an electronic surveillance system that continuously monitors >600 media sources and biomedical journals in a number of languages, including Chinese, Spanish, English, and French.
Each rumor was followed up by an email or a telephone request to the relevant WHO country office to investigate its veracity. The WHO country office in turn sought verification from the country’s health authorities. Overall, the onus of the verification process was in the hands of the affected countries’ health authorities. The authorities had to demonstrate to WHO that appropriate investigations were conducted to deem rumors correct or incorrect. To ensure this process, WHO sometimes supported rumor verification by assisting in laboratory testing or shipment of isolates.
Once available, the outcome of the investigation was disseminated to WHO stakeholders, including the outbreak response team. For events reported in the media, WPRO’s media officers made information publicly available through press releases and media interviews, as well as providing up-to-date information on the WHO Web site (http://www.who.int).
From January 20 to February 26, 2004, a total of 40 rumors were identified, most within 4 weeks of the outbreak alert (Figure). The rumors concerned 12 countries and 1 special administrative region. Of the total rumors received, 19 (48%) were received from the media, 18 (45%) from the WHO network, 2 (5%) from embassy staff living in affected countries, and 1 (2%) from ProMED Digest with a media source as the origin. Nine (23%) rumors were confirmed to be true events: 5 in China and 1 each in Cambodia, Japan, Laos, and South Korea. Of the incorrect rumors, 6 were in China, 6 in Laos, 4 in Vietnam, 4 and in Hong Kong, 3 in Cambodia, 2 in Germany, and 1 each in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
The average period for verification of true events was 2.7 days (range 1–5 days). The average period to verify that a rumor was incorrect was 9.3 days (range 1–26 days). Sixty percent of the rumors related to human outbreaks, of which 1 was true, and 40% to animal outbreaks, of which 8 were true. The Table provides examples of rumors received during the 40-day study, the outcomes of the investigation, and the public health action taken. The remaining 32 rumors are not shown for reasons of brevity and privacy; however, not all rumors resulted in public health action after the verification process. This finding was expected because the high sensitivity of the system decreased the predictive value positive.
WPRO’s enhanced rumor surveillance system identified many rumors. Most were identified in the first few weeks after the public health alert. A similar pattern was also observed during the 2003 SARS outbreak, when most rumors were received within the first 7 weeks of the public health alert (11). The decreased rate of rumor detection later in the outbreak is consistent with Allport and Postman’s basic law of rumor (12). According to this law, the amount of rumors in circulation is roughly equal to the importance of the rumor multiplied by the uncertainty surrounding the rumor. We found that, as more information became available about the outbreaks and about the H5N1 virus, fewer rumors circulated. This decrease was despite the fact that the importance of the disease remained high because of the ongoing risk for evolution of a pandemic influenza strain.
Through rumor surveillance, WHO assisted affected countries by issuing guidelines, providing technical expertise, and mobilizing supplies. Unaffected countries also took action by banning the importation of poultry from affected countries. This action was crucial in preventing the further spread of avian influenza.
An important part of rumor surveillance is the timely dissemination of accurate information to reduce misunderstanding and unwarranted concern, especially for rumors reported in the media. One example was the need to address the international concern that arose about the rumor that pigs were infected with avian influenza (13). If the rumor had not been reported to be incorrect publicly after the verification process, health authorities may have heightened avian influenza surveillance to include the investigation of persons with symptoms of influenza and a history of contact with pigs.
The literature lacks guidance on how to establish and operate enhanced rumor surveillance during large outbreaks. Based on our experience and drawing on the recommendations in standard texts on public health surveillance (14,15), we suggest the following criteria for developing rumor surveillance: 1) Define the goals of surveillance as part of an early warning system in which each rumor deserves investigation to determine its veracity; 2) Apply a case definition that will have a high level of sensitivity (and therefore a relatively lower specificity) to identify the event of interest early in the outbreak; 3) Articulate clearly the steps to be undertaken to assess the veracity of the rumor, the criteria for deeming the verification process complete, and the ethics and confidentiality in conducting investigations; 4) Clarify the actions to be taken if the rumored events are true, or incorrect, or if the response of the verifying authority lacks credibility; 5) Delegate responsibility for data collection, management of the rumor database, and verification to a person trained in surveillance. This person must have access to relevant national and international networks and appropriate negotiation skills to investigate the veracity of the rumors. In selected instances, multilingual staff may be essential; 6) Include among the data sources print and electronic media, the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, national health authorities, and professional bodies and networks. Consider mechanisms for the public to report rumors through a hotline or an email address; 7) Develop mechanisms to provide regular updates on current verification activities, the number of rumors investigated, and their outcomes to the outbreak response team; 8) Provide regular feedback on the outcomes of investigations to those who provided data, and where appropriate, to the international community; and 9) Evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the investigations and upgrade the rumor surveillance system through a process of continuous quality improvement.
Ms. Samaan is completing a field epidemiology training program at the Australian National University and is currently working at the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. Her research interests include emergency disease outbreak response and mental health epidemiology.
We thank Roseanne Muller and Janet Li for their comments.
This research was supported by the Masters of Applied Epidemiology Program at Australian National University.
The Masters of Applied Epidemiology Program is funded by the Australian Department of Health and Ageing.
- World Health Organization. Avian influenza A (H5N1) in humans and poultry in Viet Nam. [cited 2003 May 14]. Available from http://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_01_13/en/
- Yuen KY, Chan PK, Peiris M, Tsang DN, Que TL, Shortridge KF, Clinical features and rapid viral diagnosis of human disease associated with avian influenza H5N1 virus. Lancet. 1998;351:467–71.
- Grein TW, Kamara KO, Rodier G, Plant AJ, Bovier P, Ryan MJ, Rumors of disease in the global village: outbreak verification. Emerg Infect Dis. 2000;6:97–102.
- Health Canada. Learning from SARS: renewal of public health in Canada, October 2003. [cited 2003 May 14]. Available from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/protection/warnings/sars/learning.html
- Rahu M. Health effects of the Chernobyl accident: fears, rumors and the truth. Eur J Cancer. 2003;39:295–9.
- Okware SI, Omaswa FG, Zaramba S, Opio A, Lutwama JJ, Kamugisha J, An outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. Trop Med Int Health. 2002;7:1068–75.
- World Health Organization. International health regulations: working paper for regional consultations. [cited 2004 Jun 21]. Available from http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/csrpublications/en/index8.htm
- World Organization for Animal Health. Update on avian influenza in animals in Asia. [cited 2004 May 15]. Available from http://www.oie.int/downld/AVIAN%20INFLUENZA/A_AI-Asia.htm
- World Health Organization Western Pacific Regional Office. In brief. [cited 2004 Oct 6]. Available from http://www.wpro.who.int/in_brief.asp
- World Health Organization. Epidemic intelligence—systematic event detection. [cited 2004 Oct 6]. Available from http://www.who.int/csr/alertresponse/epidemicintelligence/en/
- Muller R. Chasing rumors: a field placement with the WHO SARS team in Manila April–June 2003. The Northern Territory Disease Control Bulletin 2003;10:1–4. Available from: http://www.nt.gov.au/health/cdc/bulletin/June_2003.pdf
- Allport GW, Postman L. The psychology of rumor. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 1947.
- Health e-line. Bird flu death toll hits 18, pigs in focus. Reuters Health Online. 2004 Feb 6. Available from http://www.nt.gov.au/health/cdc/bulletin
- Teutsch SM, Churchill RE, eds. Principles and practice of public health surveillance. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000.
- Thacker SB, Birkhead GS. Surveillance. In: Gregg MB, editor. Field epidemiology. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press; 2002. p. 26–50.
Suggested citation for this article: Samaan G, Patel M, Olowokure B, Roces MC, Oshitani H, and the World Health Organization Outbreak Response Team. Rumor surveillance and avian influenza. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet] 2005 Mar [date cited]. http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid1103.040657
1WHO Western Pacific Region Team: Richard Brown, Maria Roces, Elizabeth Miranda, Peter Cordingley, Karen Shaw, Masahiro Ueno, Kumi Ueno, Lance Jennings, Akira Suzuki, Reiko Sato, Kevin Carroll, and Clara Witt.
Comments to the Authors
Lessons from the History of Quarantine, from Plague to Influenza A


Japan has been hit by the worst crisis since 1945, as an earthquake and tsunami have killed 10,000, destroyed tens of thousands of buildings, displaced hundreds of thousands, and left millions without power or water. As the nation braces for more aftershocks, people have resorted to using sea water in an attempt to prevent a nuclear meltdown from adding a third catastrophe, which has already leaked and caused a mass evacuation. According to Greenpeace,
"We are told by the nuclear industry that things like this cannot happen with modern reactors, yet Japan is in the middle of a nuclear crisis with potentially devastating consequences…The evolving situation at Fukushima remains far from clear, but what we do know is that contamination from the release of Cesium-137 poses a significant health risk to anyone exposed. Cesium-137 has been one if the isotopes causing the greatest health impacts following the Chernobyl disaster, because it can remain in the environment and food chain for 300 years.”
Whereas the first two catastrophe’s were natural and unpredictable, a nuclear meltdown is entirely unnatural and entirely predictable. According to the local anti-nuclear group, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre,
The nuclear crisis comes a month before the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the largest nuclear meltdown in history, which showered Europe in a radioactive cloud causing a quarter of a million cancers, 100,000 of them fatal. As of this writing the disaster in Japan is already the third worst in history, behind Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, and comes only 12 years after a fatal overexposure of workers at a nuclear plant in Tokaimura, Japan. Even without the inherent risk of a meltdown, nuclear power is a threat to health. The problem is not just the few terrible times when they don't work, but the daily experience of when they do work. As climate campaigner George Monbiot wrote more than a decade ago,
“The children of women who have worked in nuclear installations, according to a study by the National Radiological Protection Board, are eleven times more likely to contract cancer than the children of workers in non-radioactive industries. You can tell how close to [the nuclear plant in] Sellafield children live by the amount of plutonium in their teeth.”
Add to this the morbidity and mortality or working in uranium mines and the dangers of disposing of radioactive waste, and you have negative health impacts at every stage of nuclear power (for a summary see the UK’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Despite this, governments have invested massively in the nuclear industry and globalized the risk. Canada has exported nuclear reactors while building seven of its own, and despite concerns about safety the Ontario government plans on investing $36 billion into nuclear power at the same time as its backing off wind power.
REASONS AND EXCUSES
While nuclear power is a clear and present danger to the health of the planet and its people, it is a thriving industry driven by economic and military competition. Vandana Shiva—who studied nuclear physics and now leads the climate justice movement in India—has exposed the hypocrisy of US hostility to Iranian nuclear power when it is doing the same thing to promote nuclear power and weapons in India as a bulwark against China:
As Shiva summarized in her book Soil Not Oil, “nuclear winter is not an alternative to global warming”, and it is a tragedy that Japan has become the test case against both military and civilian arms of the nuclear industry--from the atomic bomb 65 years ago to the nuclear meltdown today. But instead of admitting the problems of nuclear power, the nuclear industry and its supporters have greenwashed it and presented it as a solution to global warming. Some environmentalists, such as Gaia theorist James Lovelock, have fallen prey to these claims. Lovelock, whose ideas are driven by apocalyptic predictions and an extreme pessimism, has gone so far as to claim that “nuclear power is the only green solution”.While former US president George Bush defended his country’s 103 nuclear power plants as not producing "a single pound of air pollution or greenhouses gases”, Dr. Helen Caldicott has refuted the claim in her important book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, which proves that even without meltdowns nuclear power is a threat to the planet:
The false dichotomy between carbon emissions and nuclear power is also refuted by those developing the Tar Sands, who have proposed using nuclear power to pump Tar Sands oil.
PEOPLE POWER, GREEN JOBS
Fortunately there are growing anti-nuclear campaigns uniting indigenous groups, NGOs and the broader climate justice movement to challenge nuclear power in all its stages—from mining to use to waste disporal. As Vandana Shiva writes in Soil Not Oil,
Meanwhile in Canada indigenous groups are leading opposition to transportation of nuclear waste through the Great Lakes and their surrounding communities, declaring “what we do to the land, we do to ourselves.” Last year the German government extended nuclear power against the will of the majority but after news of the leak in Japan, 50,000 people formed a human chain from a nuclear reactor to Stuttgart demanding an end to nuclear power.
Uniting these campaigns with the labour movement raises the demands of good green jobs for all, to transform our oil and nuclear economy into one based on ecological and social sustainability and justice. Instead of the billions in subsidies for the nuclear industry, governments could be investing in solar, wind and clean electricity, while retrofitting buildings, which could solve the economic and climate crises without the inherent dangers of nuclear power. As Greenpeace wrote,
"Our thoughts continue to be with the Japanese people as they face the threat of a nuclear disaster, following already devastating earthquake and tsunami. The authorities must focus on keeping people safe, and avoiding any further releases of radioactivity...Greenpeace is calling for the phase out of existing reactors, and no construction of new commercial nuclear reactors. Governments should invest in renewable energy resources that are not only environmentally sound but also affordable and reliable.”


Photography - Overview
The millions of photographs in the Museum's collections compose a vast mosaic of the nation's history. Photographs accompany most artifact collections. Thousands of images document engineering projects, for example, and more record the steel, petroleum, and railroad industries.
Some 150,000 images capture the history, art, and science of photography. Nineteenth-century photography, from its initial development by W. H. F. Talbot and Louis Daguerre, is especially well represented and includes cased images, paper photographs, and apparatus. Glass stereographs and news-service negatives by the Underwood & Underwood firm document life in America between the 1890s and the 1930s. The history of amateur photography and photojournalism are preserved here, along with the work of 20th-century masters such as Richard Avedon and Edward Weston. Thousands of cameras and other equipment represent the technical and business side of the field.


Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2012 June 23
Explanation: As seen from Frösön island in northern Sweden the Sun did set a day after the summer solstice. From that location below the arctic circle it settled slowly behind the northern horizon. During the sunset's final minute, this remarkable sequence of 7 images follows the distorted edge of the solar disk as it just disappears against a distant tree line, capturing both a green and blue flash. Not a myth even in a land of runes, the colorful but elusive glints are caused by atmospheric refraction enhanced by long, low, sight lines and strong atmospheric temperature gradients.
Authors & editors:
Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.
A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.


Do not imagine the Mona Lisa with a mustache! If you failed to carry out this instruction, it is because your power of visualization is so strong that it takes any suggestion, positive or negative, and turns it into an image. And as the maestro emphasized, “the thing imagined moves the sense.” If you think you cannot visualize. Chances are you answered these questions easily by drawing on your internal image data bank, the occipital lobe of your cerebral cortex. This data bank has the potential, in coordination with your frontal lobes, to store and create more images, both real and imaginary, than the entire world’s film and television production companies combined.
From How to think like Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael J. Gelb, published by Delacorte Press, 1998.


|Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary|
3:1-10 To expect unchanging happiness in a changing world, must end in disappointment. To bring ourselves to our state in life, is our duty and wisdom in this world. God's whole plan for the government of the world will be found altogether wise, just, and good. Then let us seize the favourable opportunity for every good purpose and work. The time to die is fast approaching. Thus labour and sorrow fill the world. This is given us, that we may always have something to do; none were sent into the world to be idle.
Verse 8. - A time to love, and a time to hate. This reminds one of the gloss to which our Lord refers (Matthew 5:43), "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy," the first member being found in the old Law (Leviticus 19:18), the second being a misconception of the spirit which made Israel God's executioner upon the condemned nations. It was the maxim of Bias, quoted by Aristotle, 'Rhet.,' 2:13, that we should love as if about some day to hate, and hate as if about to love. And Philo imparts a still more selfish tone to the gnome, when he pronounces ('De Carit.,' 21, p. 401, Mang.), "It was well said by them of old, that we ought to deal out friendship without absolutely renouncing enmity, and practice enmity as possibly to turn to friendship. A time of war, and a time of peace. In the previous couplets the infinitive mood of the verb has been used; in this last hemistich substantives are introduced, as being more concise and better fitted to emphasize the close of the catalogue. The first clause referred specially to the private feelings which one is constrained to entertain towards individuals. The second clause has to do with national concerns, and touches on the statesmanship which discovers the necessity or the opportuneness of war and peace, and acts accordingly. In this and in all the other examples adduced, the lesson intended is this - that man is not independent; that under all circumstances and relations he is in the hand of a power mightier than himself, which frames time and seasons according to its own good pleasure. God holds the threads of human life; in some mysterious way directs and controls events; success and failure are dependent upon his will. There are certain laws which, regulate the issues of actions and events, and man cannot alter these; his free-will can put them in motion, but they become irresistible when in operation. This is not fatalism; it is the mere statement of a fact in experience. Koheleth never denies man's liberty, though he is very earnest in asserting God's sovereignty. The reconciliation of the two is a problem unsolved by him.
Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible
A time to love, and a time to hate,.... For one to love his friend, and to hate a man, a sinner, as the Targum; to love a friend while he continues such, and hate him, or less love him, when he proves treacherous and unfaithful; an instance of a change of love into hatred may be seen in the case of Amnon, 2 Samuel 13:15. A time of unregeneracy is a time of loving worldly lusts and sinful pleasures, the company of wicked men, and all carnal delights and recreations; and a time of conversion is a time to hate what was before loved, sin, and the conversion of sinners, the garment spotted with the flesh, the principles and practices, though not the persons, of ungodly men; and even to hate, that is, less love, the dearest friends and relations, in comparison of, or when in competition with, Christ;
a time of war, and a time of peace; for nations to be engaged in war with each other, or to be at peace, which are continually revolving; and there is a time when there will be no more war. In a spiritual sense, the present time, or state of things, is a time of war; the Christian's life is a warfare state, though it will be soon accomplished, in which he is engaging in fighting with spiritual enemies, sin, Satan, and the world: the time to come, or future state, is a time of peace, when saints shall enter into peace, and be no more disturbed by enemies from within or from without. In the Midrash, all the above times and seasons are interpreted of Israel, and applied to them.
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
8. hate—for example, sin, lusts (Lu 14:26); that is, to love God so much more as to seem in comparison to hate "father or mother," when coming between us and God.
a time of war … peace—(Lu 14:31).
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16.4 Suggested Reading
Axilrod, Stephen H. Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin Through Greenspan to Bernanke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Hetzel, Robert L. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Mishkin, Frederic S. Monetary Policy Strategy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.


|Main Entry:||happy as a clam|
|Part of Speech:||adj|
|Example:||Happy as a clam refers to its being dug from its bed of sand only at low tide; at high tide it is quite safe from molestation.|
|Etymology:||1830+; orig. happy-as-a-clam-at-full-tide|
|an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance.|
|a gadget; dingus; thingumbob.|
Dictionary.com presents 366 FAQs, incorporating some of the frequently asked questions from the past with newer queries.


Click link below picture
Vast numbers of cells that can attack cancer and HIV have been grown in the lab, and could potentially be used to fight disease.
The cells naturally occur in small numbers, but it is hoped injecting huge quantities back into a patient could turbo-charge the immune system.
The Japanese research is published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
Experts said the results had exciting potential, but any therapy would need to be shown to be safe.
The researchers concentrated on a type of white blood cell known as a cytotoxic T-cell, which can recognise telltale markings of infection or cancer on the surfaces of cells. If a marking is recognised, it launches an attack.
.Click link below for article:


The pleura are two thin, moist membranes around the lungs. The inner layer is attached to the lungs. The outer layer is attached to the ribs. Pleural effusion is the buildup of excess fluid in the space between the pleura. The fluid can prevent the lungs from fully opening. This can make it difficult to catch your breath.
Pleural effusion may be transudative or exudative based on the cause. Treatment of pleural effusion depends on the condition causing the effusion.
Effusion is usually caused by disease or injury.
Transudative effusion may be caused by:
Exudative effusion may be caused by:
Factors that increase your chance of getting pleural effusion include:
- Having conditions or diseases listed above
- Certain medications such as:
- Nitrofurantoin (Macrodantin, Furadantin, Macrobid)
- Methysergide (Sansert)
- Bromocriptine (Parlodel)
- Procarbazine (Matulane)
- Amiodarone (Cordarone)
- Chest injury or trauma
- Radiation therapy
Surgery, especially involving:
- Organ transplantation
Some types of pleural effusion do not cause symptoms. Others cause a variety of symptoms, including:
- Shortness of breath
- Chest pain
- Stomach discomfort
- Coughing up blood
- Shallow breathing
- Rapid pulse or breathing rate
- Weight loss
- Fever, chills, or sweating
These symptoms may be caused by many other conditions. Let your doctor know if you have any of these symptoms.
The doctor will ask about your symptoms and medical history. A physical exam will be done. This may include listening to or tapping on your chest. Lung function tests will test your ability to move air in and out of your lungs.
Images of your lungs may be taken with:
Your doctor may take samples of the fluid or pleura tissue for testing. This may be done with:
Treatment is usually aimed at treating the underlying cause. This may include medications or surgery.
Your doctor may take a "watchful waiting" approach if your symptoms are minor. You will be monitored until the effusion is gone.
To Support Breathing
If you are having trouble breathing, your doctor may recommend:
- Breathing treatments—inhaling medication directly to lungs
- Oxygen therapy
Drain the Pleural Effusion
The pleural effusion may be drained by:
- Therapeutic thoracentesis —a needle is inserted into the area to withdraw excess fluid.
- Tube thoracostomy—a tube is placed in the side of your chest to allow fluid to drain. It will be left in place for several days.
Seal the Pleural Layers
The doctor may recommend chemical pleurodesis. During this procedure, talc powder or an irritating chemical is injected into the pleural space. This will permanently seal the two layers of the pleura together. The seal may help prevent further fluid buildup.
Radiation therapy may also be used to seal the pleura.
In severe cases, surgery may be needed. Some of the pleura will be removed during surgery. Suregery options may include:
- Thoracotomy—traditional, open chest procedure
- Video-assisted thorascopic surgery (VATS)—minimally-invasive surgery that only requires small keyhole size incisions
Prompt treatment for any condition that may lead to effusion is the best way to prevent pleural effusion.
- Reviewer: Brian Randall, MD
- Review Date: 02/2013 -
- Update Date: 03/05/2013 -


Osteoarthritis is usually diagnosed after your doctor has taken a careful history of your symptoms. A physical exam will be done. There are no definitive lab blood tests to make an absolute diagnosis of osteoarthritis. Certain tests, specifically x-rays of the joint, may confirm your doctor’s impression that you have developed osteoarthritis.
X-ray examination of an affected joint —A joint with osteoarthritis will have lost some of the normal space that exists between the bones. This space is called the joint space. This joint space is made up of articular cartilage, which becomes thin. There may be tiny new bits of bone (bone spurs) visible at the end of the bones. Other signs of joint and bone deterioration may also be present. X-rays , however, may not show very much in the earlier stages of osteoarthritis, even when you are clearly experiencing symptoms.
Arthrocentesis —Using a thin needle, your doctor may remove a small amount of joint fluid from an affected joint. The fluid can be examined in a lab to make sure that no other disorder is causing your symptoms (such as rheumatoid arthritis , gout , infection).
Blood tests —Blood tests may be done to make sure that no other disorder is responsible for your symptoms (such as rheumatoid arthritis or other autoimmune diseases that include forms of arthritis). Researchers are also looking at whether the presence of certain substances in the blood might indicate osteoarthritis and help predict the severity of the condition. These substances include breakdown products of hyaluronic acid (a substance that lubricates joints) and a liver product called C-reactive protein.
- Reviewer: Rosalyn Carson-DeWitt, MD
- Review Date: 09/2011 -
- Update Date: 09/01/2011 -


Tiruvellore Thattai Krishnamachariar
(1899–1974) was the Indian
Finance Minister from 1956–1958 and from 1964-1966. Krishnamachariar, who was born into a Tamil Iyengar
Brahmin family graduated from Madras Christian College
(MCC) and was a visiting professor to the department of economics at MCC. He resigned from the position twice. He was popularly known as TTK.He was also a member of drafting committee,and entrepreneur and congress leader
Krishnamachari was one among the founders of modern India. He was instrumental in building the basic economic and industrial infrastructure of the country and also left his mark on the Indian Constitution as a member of the Drafting Committee. Krishnamachari began his life as a businessman and went on to lay the foundation of the hugely successful firm TT Krishnamachari & Co. in 1928, in Chennai, which is now known as the TTK Group
. By the mid-thirties, when the company was well established, Krishnamachari decided to turn his attention to politics. He was initially elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly as an independent member, and later joined the Congress. In 1946, he was made a member of the Constituent Assembly at the Centre.
From 1952 to 1965, he served the country twice as a Central Minister. He was the first Minister for Commerce and Industry and then Finance Minister. He also remained in charge of the Steel Ministry for quite some time. He became Minister again in 1962, first without... Read More


Ten thousand people were killed and 10 to 15 million left homeless when a cyclone slammed into India's eastern coastal state of Orissa in October 1999. In the aftermath, CARE and the Catholic Relief Society distributed a high-nutrition mixture of corn and soy meal provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development to thousands of hungry storm victims. Oddly, this humanitarian act elicited cries of outrage.
"We call on the government of India and the state government of Orissa to immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from distribution," said Vandana Shiva, director of the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. "The U.S. has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM [genetically modified] products which have been rejected by consumers in the North, especially Europe." Shiva's organization had sent a sample of the food to a lab in the U.S. for testing to see if it contained any of the genetically improved corn and soy bean varieties grown by tens of thousands of farmers in the United States. Not surprisingly, it did.
"Vandana Shiva would rather have her people in India starve than eat bioengineered food," says C.S. Prakash, a professor of plant molecular genetics at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, observes: "To accuse the U.S. of sending genetically modified food to Orissa in order to use the people there as guinea pigs is not only wrong; it is stupid. Worse than rhetoric, it's false. After all, the U.S. doesn't need to use Indians as guinea pigs, since millions of Americans have been eating genetically modified food for years now with no ill effects."
Shiva not only opposes the food aid but is also against "golden rice," a crop that could prevent blindness in half a million to 3 million poor children a year and alleviate vitamin A deficiency in some 250 million people in the developing world. By inserting three genes, two from daffodils and one from a bacterium, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created a variety of rice that produces the nutrient beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A. Agronomists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines plan to crossbreed the variety, called "golden rice" because of the color produced by the beta-carotene, with well-adapted local varieties and distribute the resulting plants to farmers all over the developing world.
Last June, at a Capitol Hill seminar on biotechnology sponsored by the Congressional Hunger Center, Shiva airily dismissed golden rice by claiming that "just in the state of Bengal 150 greens which are rich in vitamin A are eaten and grown by the women." A visibly angry Martina McGloughlin, director of the biotechnology program at the University of California at Davis, said "Dr. Shiva's response reminds me of... Marie Antoinette, [who] suggested the peasants eat cake if they didn't have access to bread." Alexander Avery of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues noted that nutritionists at UNICEF doubted it was physically possible to get enough vitamin A from the greens Shiva was recommending. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that poor women living in shanties in the heart of Calcutta could grow greens to feed their children.
The apparent willingness of biotechnology's opponents to sacrifice people for their cause disturbs scientists who are trying to help the world's poor. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last February, Ismail Serageldin, the director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, posed a challenge: "I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want 2 to 3 million children a year to go blind and 1 million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way golden rice was created?"
Vandana Shiva is not alone in her disdain for biotechnology's potential to help the poor. Mae-Wan Ho, a reader in biology at London's Open University who advises another activist group, the Third World Network, also opposes golden rice. And according to a New York Times report on a biotechnology meeting held last March by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Benedikt Haerlin, head of Greenpeace's European anti-biotech campaign, "dismissed the importance of saving African and Asian lives at the risk of spreading a new science that he considered untested."
Shiva, Ho, and Haerlin are leaders in a growing global war against crop biotechnology, sometimes called "green biotech" (to distinguish it from medical biotechnology, known as "red biotech"). Gangs of anti-biotech vandals with cute monikers such as Cropatistas and Seeds of Resistance have ripped up scores of research plots in Europe and the U.S. The so-called Earth Liberation Front burned down a crop biotech lab at Michigan State University on New Year's Eve in 1999, destroying years of work and causing $400,000 in property damage. (See "Crop Busters," January.) Anti-biotech lobbying groups have proliferated faster than bacteria in an agar-filled petri dish: In addition to Shiva's organization, the Third World Network, and Greenpeace, they include the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Institute of Science in Society, the Rural Advancement Foundation International, the Ralph Nader-founded Public Citizen, the Council for Responsible Genetics, the Institute for Food and Development Policy, and that venerable fount of biotech misinformation, Jeremy Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends. The left hasn't been this energized since the Vietnam War. But if the anti-biotech movement is successful, its victims will include the downtrodden people on whose behalf it claims to speak.
"We're in a war," said an activist at a protesters' gathering during the November 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. "We're going to bury this first wave of biotech." He summed up the basic strategy pretty clearly: "The first battle is labeling. The second battle is banning it."
Later that week, during a standing-room-only "biosafety seminar" in the basement of a Seattle Methodist church, the ubiquitous Mae-Wan Ho declared, "This warfare against nature must end once and for all." Michael Fox, a vegetarian "bioethicist" from the Humane Society of the United States, sneered: "We are very clever little simians, aren't we? Manipulating the bases of life and thinking we're little gods." He added, "The only acceptable application of genetic engineering is to develop a genetically engineered form of birth control for our own species." This creepy declaration garnered rapturous applause from the assembled activists.
Despite its unattractive side, the global campaign against green biotech has had notable successes in recent years. Several leading food companies, including Gerber and Frito-Lay, have been cowed into declaring that they will not use genetically improved crops to make their products. Since 1997, the European Union has all but outlawed the growing and importing of biotech crops and food. Last May some 60 countries signed the Biosafety Protocol, which mandates special labels for biotech foods and requires strict notification, documentation, and risk assessment procedures for biotech crops. Activists have launched a "Five-Year Freeze" campaign that calls for a worldwide moratorium on planting genetically enhanced crops.
For a while, it looked like the United States might resist the growing hysteria, but in December 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was reviewing its approvals of biotech corn crops, implying that it might ban the crops in the future. Last May the Food and Drug Administration, which until now has evaluated biotech foods solely on their objective characteristics, not on the basis of how they were produced, said it would formulate special rules for reviewing and approving products with genetically modified ingredients. U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) has introduced a bill that would require warning labels on all biotech foods.
In October, news that a genetically modified corn variety called StarLink that was approved only for animal feed had been inadvertently used in two brands of taco shells prompted recalls, front-page headlines, and anxious recriminations. Lost in the furor was the fact that there was little reason to believe the corn was unsafe for human consumption-only an implausible, unsubstantiated fear that it might cause allergic reactions. Even Aventis, the company which produced StarLink, agreed that it was a serious mistake to have accepted the EPA's approval for animal use only. Most proponents favor approving biotech crops only if they are determined to be safe for human consumption.
To decide whether the uproar over green biotech is justified, you need to know a bit about how it works. Biologists and crop breeders can now select a specific useful gene from one species and splice it into an unrelated species. Previously plant breeders were limited to introducing new genes through the time-consuming and inexact art of crossbreeding species that were fairly close relatives. For each cross, thousands of unwanted genes would be introduced into a crop species. Years of "backcrossing"-breeding each new generation of hybrids with the original commercial variety over several generations-were needed to eliminate these unwanted genes so that only the useful genes and characteristics remained. The new methods are far more precise and efficient. The plants they produce are variously described as "transgenic," "genetically modified," or "genetically engineered."
Plant breeders using biotechnology have accomplished a great deal in only a few years. For example, they have created a class of highly successful insect-resistant crops by incorporating toxin genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Farmers have sprayed B.t. spores on crops as an effective insecticide for decades. Now, thanks to some clever biotechnology, breeders have produced varieties of corn, cotton, and potatoes that make their own insecticide. B.t. is toxic largely to destructive caterpillars such as the European corn borer and the cotton bollworm; it is not harmful to birds, fish, mammals, or people.


Student Learning Outcomes
Students who complete the French Program will be able to:
- Communicate in a meaningful context in French.
- Analyze the nature of language through comparisons of the French language and their own.
- Demonstrate knowledge of and sensitivity to aspects of behavior, attitudes, and customs of France and other French speaking countries.
- Connect with the global community through study and acquisition of the French language.


Published on Monday, April 09, 2012 02:34
Written by Los Angeles TravelingMom
Fields of gold and orange poppies swaying in the breeze are a spectacular sight in spring when California’s landscape blooms with a mosaic of colorful wildflowers and shrubs.
Winter rains determine the intensity and duration of wildflowers such as poppies, lupine, cream cups and towering ocotillos. Round up the kids, pack a picnic and bring your camera. Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve
Masses of poppies grow in this western Mojave Desert 15 miles west of Lancaster, a stone’s throw from Los Angeles. Other wildflowers include owl’s clover, goldfields, and the scented grape soda lupine found along the Tehachapi Vista Trail. Singing meadow larks and hawks break the silence of the quiet countryside.
During the wildflower season, the nearby Jane S. Pinheiro Interpretive Center shows a short video, and offers free guided tours. Shaded picnic tables available.
Seven miles west of the Poppy Reserve is the Arthur B. Ripley Desert Woodland State Park, where a native Joshua Tree and Juniper Woodland are among the last standing in this habitat that once spread across the Antelope Valley. http://www.parks.ca.gov.Joshua Tree National Park
A variety of flowers at different elevations brighten the park’s two deserts – the higher Mojave Desert and lower Colorado Desert. Wildflowers usually begin blooming in the lower elevations of the Pinto Basin and along the park’s south boundary around February, and at higher elevations in March and April.
Where there are clusters of rocks, expect plenty of wildflowers. Seen throughout the park is the desert dandelion, a hearty flower that forms brilliant patches of gold across the landscape. The flowers are yellow and some have a red dot in the center. Look carefully, you may even see a desert tortoise snacking on one!
For flower updates, call the Joshua Tree National Park 760-367-5500 or visit www.nps.gov/jotr
.Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
California’s largest state park, encompassing more than 600,000 acres, has one of the most spectacular wildflower displays in the west. Here you’ll find a kaleidoscope of flowers from tiny bursts of color and gold poppies to towering ocotillos sprouting fiery spines of scarlet blossoms.
The canyons west of Borrego Springs usually have a pageant of wildflowers and colorful clumps of beavertail cactus that sprout hot pink flowers. At Desert Gardens, five miles north of the visitor center, park along the road and explore desert dandelion and desert pincushion blanketing the washes. For information, call the Wildflower Hotline at 760-767-4684 or visit http://www.parks.ca.gov.
FYI: California Overland (www.californiaoverland.com) offers Wildflower Adventure Tours aboard open-air vehicles into Anza-Borrego Desert’s palm oases and canyons through early April.Santa Monica Mountains
An easy jaunt from the city is Franklin Canyon Park, where peaceful trails meander through fields of blue and white flowers, poppies, sticky leaf monkey flowers, canyon sunflowers and purple nightshade. http://www.lamountains.com.Public gardens and nature centers
For more travel stories, follow Mimi on Twitter @mimitravelz.
- Situated on 22 acres, the Theodore Payne Foundation operates a California native plant nursery and offers classes but is also popular for its Wildflower Hill. A short walk leads to buckwheat, sage brush, white sage, sugarbrush, sticky monkey leaf flower, elegant clarkia, gilia and showy penstemon. For 30 years the nonprofit organization has provided a wildflower hotline for the latest flora blooms at 818-768-3533. The website’s Wildflower Hill link provides detailed monthly reports. Amenities: Picnic tables in the sycamore grove, restrooms. Located at 10459 Tuxford St. Sun Valley; www.theodorepayne.org.
- Eaton Canyon Natural Area has trails brimming with black sage, honeysuckle and yellow pincushion. 1750 N. Altadena Drive, Pasadena; http://www.ecnca.org/.
- Placerita Canyon Nature Center: There’s usually a good showing of elderberries, golden currant and large bush poppy on the two-mile (one way) Canyon Trail. 19152 Placerita Canyon Road, Newhall; www.placerita.org.
- Among Descanso Gardens’ many themed areas is the eight-acre California Garden, featuring native plants and the showy matilija poppy. 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada-Flintridge; www.descansogardens.org.
- Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden: Free admission third Tuesday of the month; 302 North Baldwin Ave., Arcadia; www.arboretum.org.
- The Huntington: Free the first Thursday of every month with advance tickets; 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; www.huntington.org.