The term "health information technology" (health IT) is a broad concept that encompasses an array of technologies to store, share, and analyze health information.
More and more, health care providers are using health IT to improve patient care. But health IT isn't just for health care providers. You can use health IT to better communicate with your doctor, learn and share information about your health, and take actions that will improve your quality of life. Health IT lets you be a key part of the team that keeps you healthy.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
Your doctor keeps records of your health information, such as your history of diseases and which medications you're taking. Up until now, most doctors stored these in paper files. EHRs (sometimes called "electronic medical records") are electronic systems that store your health information. EHRs allow doctors to more easily keep track of your health information and may enable them to access your information when you have a problem even if their office is closed. EHRs also make it easier for your doctor to share information with specialists and others so that everyone who needs your information has it available when they need it. Some EHRs may also allow you to log in to a web portal to view your own health record, lab results, and treatment plan, and to email your doctor.
Personal Health Records (PHRs)
A PHR is a lot like an EHR, except that you control what kind of information goes into it.
You can use a PHR to keep track of information from your doctor visits, but the PHR can also reflect your life outside the doctor's office and your health priorities, such as tracking your food intake, exercise, and blood pressure. Sometimes, your PHR can link with your doctor's EHR.
A paper prescription can get lost or misread. E-prescribing allows your doctor to communicate directly with your pharmacy. This means you can go to the pharmacy to pick up medicine without having to bring the paper prescription.
There are other "e-Health tools" that you can use on your own, if you wish, that may be considered a part of the broader health IT world. These include:
Personal Health Tools
These are tools that help you check your health, get feedback, and keep track of your progress to better manage your health. Examples include smartphone "apps" that can help you set and monitor fitness goals and cell phone text reminders to take your medicine on time.
Online communities can help people connect with one another to try to maximize good health (such as during pregnancy) or to respond to concerns about poor health. Through online communities you can share information with -- and emotionally support -- others facing similar concerns about a particular disease or disability.
These e-health tools are designed to place you at the center of your care – helping to put the "I" in health IT.


After a Hurricane
After a Flood
- If you are in a safe location, do not leave until authorities say it is okay to leave.
- Make sure all electrical outlets and appliances are dry and free of water before you use them.
- Stay away from disaster areas unless authorities request volunteers.
- Donate money to a recognized disaster relief organization. Don't donate food, clothing, or other personal items unless they are specifically requested.
- Drive only when necessary. Roads will be filled with debris.
- Stay away from downed power lines and report them to the power company immediately.
- Report gas, sewer or water mains.
- Contact your insurance agent.
- Do not drive through a flooded area. More people drown in their cars than anywhere else.
- Avoid flood water. It may be contaminated by oil, gas, or sewage. The water may also be electrically charged from underground or downed power lines.
- Stay away from moving water. Moving water only six inches deep can sweep you off your feet.
- Stay away form downed power lines and report them to the power company immediately. Electric current passes easily through water.
- Donate money to disaster relief organizations. Unless specifically requested, do not donate food, clothing or other personal items.
- Wash your hands frequently with soap and clean water if you come in contact with flood waters. Listen to news reports to learn whether the community's water supply is safe to drink.
- Watch for animals. They lose their homes in floods and may seek shelter in yours.
- If your property has been damaged, call the insurance company or agent who handles your flood insurance policy right away to file a claim.
- Do not go in a building if there is any chance of the building collapsing.


To foster student success, DCC administers the COMPASS placement test to new students. This ensures that students are placed in classes consistent with their current level of academic ability. While other tests may be required based on a student's individual needs, the COMPASS test is the primary tool.
A computerized test of basic skills developed by the American College of Testing. Click COMPASS to download sample problems.
A written, timed test of basic skills developed by the American College of Testing. Click ASSET to download sample problems.
To determine which level course is right for you, you need to take a Spanish Placement Test. This test will evaluate your current skills. Your score will determine which level of Spanish you should start with. Because the Spanish Placement Test is a computerized test, it will be un-timed. Click on Spanish Online Placement Test S-CAPE to download sample questions.
The Michigan Test of English as a Second Language (ESL)
This test is an objective test of 100 questions. The first 20 questions test listening skills with questions asked on a cassette tape. The following 80 questions concern grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension skills. Students have 75 minutes to complete this test, and it is scored immediately. This test is used to determine whether a student is ready to enroll in an English course at Dutchess Community College, and if so, which course is appropriate.
Science Placement Test
A test for students who wish to place into BIO131.
Click Science Screening Test Guide for more information on the test.
Click Science Placement for sample questions.
English Course Placement Appeal
The English Course Placement appeal is available to students who place in a certain range on the Writing portion of COMPASS or ASSET. Students are given the opportunity to come in during some "walk-in" testing times to write an essay which is then evaluated by a professor from the English department to determine final course placement. Those students qualifying for the English Course Placement appeal will be notified with their test scores.


More U.S. mamas are breastfeeding their babes — that's according to a new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Researchers from the CDC reviewed the National Immunization Survey from 2002-2011 to uncover feeding trends of African American, white, and Hispanic infants born from 2000 to 2008. They found the number of mothers who nurse their newborns increased more than 4 percentage points. And mothers who still nursed at 6 months rose nearly 10 percentage points — from 35 percent to 45 percent — during the same time.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends moms breastfeed newborns for 12 months — exclusively for the first 6 months, then in combination with the introduction of foods to the baby's diet. (They encourage continuing past 12 months as long as it works for mom and baby.)
More good news: The gap between African American and white women who breastfeed is narrowing. The report showed the gap shrunk from 24 percentage points in 2000 to 16 percentage points in 2008.
"The striking news here is, hundreds of thousands more babies are being breastfed than in past years, and this increase has been seen across most racial and ethnic groups," says CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, in a press release issued by the CDC.
Here, the key findings from the report:
-From 2000 to 2008, breastfeeding at six and 12 months increased significantly among African American, white, and Hispanic infants.
-While numbers are rising across all groups, all mothers need more support to continue breastfeeding since less than half of mothers are breastfeeding at six months (45 percent) and less than a quarter of mothers (23 percent) are breastfeeding at 12 months.
Although rates of breastfeeding at six months increased by more than 13 percent among African American mothers, this group still had the lowest rates of breastfeeding duration, indicating that they still need more targeted support.
"Despite these increases, many mothers who want to breastfeed are still not getting the support they need from hospitals, doctors, or employers. We must redouble our efforts to support mothers who want to breastfeed," said Frieden.
In order to provide more support to African American mothers, the CDC is funding the project, Best-Fed Beginnings. The project will provide support to 89 hospitals, many serving minority and low-income populations, to improve hospital practices that support nursing mamas.
The CDC has also funded six state health departments to develop support programs in African American communities.
Photo credit: MorgueFile


Source: Dang TD, Tang M, Choo S, et al Increasing the accuracy of peanut allergy diagnosis by using Ara h 2. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2012;129(4):1056-1063; doi:10.1016/j.jaci.2012.01.056. See AAP Grand Rounds commentary by Dr. Sai Nimmagadda (subscription required).
Question: Among infants, does Ara h 2 antigen testing accurately diagnose peanut allergy?
Question type: Diagnosis
Study design: Randomized controlled
I just finished a handful of peanuts (roasted, unsalted of course) and count myself among the lucky folks who don't have peanut allergy. For those that might have allergy, diagnosis has long been plagued by lack of an easy, accurate means of diagnosis. The gold standard is an oral food challenge (OFC), but this is a costly and prolonged process that carries a risk of anaphylaxis. This study of 200 children, half with OFC-positive peanut allergy and half without, found that measurement of serum Ara h 2-specific IgE antibody was better than measurement of serum whole peanut-specific IgE antibody (sIgE). When cutoff values were set for equal specificities of 98% for both assays, the Ara h 2 antibody was 60% sensitive (95% CI 50-70%), compared to 26% (18-36%) for the sIgE. That's an improvement, but very far from what is needed to replace OFC. A screening test for a serious illness needs to achieve high sensitivity, to avoid missing any cases, accepting a few more false positive results as a tradeoff.
As noted by Dr. Nimmagadda in his commentary, Ara h 2 is the predominant peanut allergen in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, but Ara h 9 predominates in Spain. It's clearly not a simple problem to be solved.
On a final note, this study was performed by the HealthNuts study group in Australia. Normally I'm a bit nonplussed with cute names for study groups, but this one seems to hit an appropriate, nice tone.


People vary in their reactions to mosquito bites. Most people develop itchy, raised bumps on the skin that last several days. No treatment is necessary, but calamine lotion or over-the-counter hydrocortisone cream can reduce itching.
A few people have a significant allergy to mosquito bites. The bites can result in what’s called a large local reaction: swelling, blistering, itching, and pain affecting a wide area of the body (such as an entire arm or leg). Oral antihistamines like cetirizine (Zyrtec), diphenhydramine (Benadryl), or hydroxyzine (Atarax, Vistaril) can help ease itching. Topical hydrocortisone may also help.
Rarely, people with a severe allergy to mosquito bites develop anaphylaxis, a whole-body life-threatening allergic reaction. Symptoms of anaphylaxis include:
• Itching or rash, especially hives, in areas of skin away from the bite.
• Hoarseness or shortness of breath.
Anaphylaxis requires emergency medical attention. People who have had anaphylaxis-like symptoms previously should always have injectable epinephrine (an Epi-Pen) nearby.
This answer should not be considered medical advice...This answer should not be considered medical advice and should not take the place of a doctor’s visit. Please see the bottom of the page for more information or visit our Terms and Conditions.
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University Library, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
The year 1975 witnessed publication of the fifty-fifth volume of the Oklahoma Academy of Science Proceedings. The fifty-five volumes constitute a record of the activity of its members and a primary source of information about all phases of science of interest both within the state and beyond its borders. As the quantity of material has increased, four cumulated indexes of the contents of the Proceedings have been compiled. The latest of these has recently been produced by the authors of this article at the University of Oklahoma using computer-based informational systems to form a powerful new tool to be used wherever the Proceedings are consulted. This article is a description of the latest index together with its three predecessors.
The Oklahoma Academy of Science is the premier scientific society in the state. It was organized in December, 1909, by a group of twenty-one scientists from various schools and colleges throughout the state meeting in Oklahoma City. According to an account of the early history of the Academy (1), ten papers were delivered at that organizational meeting although no record exists of their titles or contents. Subsequent meetings have been held each year except 1914, 1918, and 1919 and proceedings of the meetings have been published annually beginning in 1921. The first volume of the Proceedings includes not only papers presented at the 9th annual meeting held that year, but also lists of titles of papers presented at each of the previous meetings which had been held since the founding except the first. A selected group of papers from those eight earlier meetings is also published in that first volume. Through the year 1975 over 4000 papers had been presented, most of which were published in the Proceedings.
In the first volume no attempt was made to arrange articles by subject, but beginning in 1923 the table of contents was divided into the four subject areas of Biology, Geology, Physics, and Psychology. Variations on these categories have been followed throughout the ensuing years. One can gain an appreciation for the wide range of interest of members of the Academy by an examination of the contents pages of various volumes of the Proceedings from across the years. In more recent years that variety of interest can be seen in the newer subject headings of Science Education, Geography (1953), and Conservation (1959), which have been added to the previous divisions. The annual volumes of Proceedings have thus become a storehouse of information on all aspects of science in the state. It is on account of this magnitude of material and the diversity of subject matter covered across the years that cumulated indexes are useful. Many volumes since 1957 contain memorial notes for recently deceased members of the Academy and thus provide biographical material that is often otherwise difficult to obtain. This information is also readily accessible through the more recent indexes.
While much of the information pertaining to the so-called "hard sciences" is accessible through special subject indexes, for example Chemical Abstracts and Biological Abstracts, the large amounts of literature in other disciplines such as geography, education, business, and history are not adequately indexed elsewhere. At the same time, the Proceedings indexes are especially convenient for use in obtaining information about Oklahoma in the fields of biology, geology, geography, and social sciences. It is in providing access to information related to Oklahoma that the major subject-oriented indexes are usually least adequate and for which Proceedings indexes serve the greatest need.
The first index, covering volumes one through ten, was published in 1931 as a bulletin of the University of Oklahoma.
It is both an author index and a conventional subject index (2). The second, published in 1942 with volume 22 of the Proceedings, cumulates volumes 11 through 20, 1931-1940 (3). It includes a subject index which arranges material under five broad science headings each of which is further subdivided several times. The third, a vicennial index, covers the next twenty years of the Proceedings, volumes 21 through 40, and was published as part of the latest of these volumes in 1960 (4). It too is arranged by broad subject headings as is its immediate predecessor. It includes a necrology index of the same twenty-year period.
The fourth index was produced primarily from information on the contents pages of each of the first fifty-five volumes of the Proceedings. However, an examination of contents sheets, especially those of earlier volumes of the Proceedings, reveals that much of the information on the contents pages is inaccurate and incomplete. In some instances, a title on the contents page is not exactly the same as it appears at the head of the article within the volume. Where such discrepancies occur, the title as it appears at the head of the article, rather than as it appears in the table of contents, was selected to be used in the index. At the same time, page numbers were added to the table of contents where they had been omitted in the earlier volumes. In this collation process, it was discovered that some articles which had been published in the Proceedings had not been listed on the tables of contents. During this collation process, these titles were inserted into the tables of contents for inclusion in the index. Each volume of the Proceedings was examined from cover to cover to be sure that the information pertaining to titles and page numbers, as it was contained within the volume, was correctly recorded on the title page.
When this verification and collation process had been completed this information was transferred to punch cards from which the machine-readable print-out of the index was created.
The index itself consists of three sections. The first section, an entry index, is an alphabetical list by first author of each of the titles which appears in the Proceedings between 1920 and 1975. Articles with joint authorship appear in the entry index only under the name of the first author. Each entry includes the author(s)' name, full title of the article, volume, date, and page numbers. The entry index is the only section of the index which includes full bibliographical description of articles within the Proceedings. Articles which are listed in the contents but for which no text was printed in the Proceedings are noted as being "by title" in each part of the cumulated index the same way they are designated in the tables of contents themselves. Each entry within this entry list is also assigned a number to which reference can be made from citations in either the author index section or the key-word-in-context (KWIC) subject index section which follow.
The second part is an author index in which all of the authors of papers, both single and joint, are listed. The bibliographical citation beside each author's name in this index includes volume number and page description. Included here also is the entry number which has been assigned to the particular article as it appears in the entry index. By means of this author index and by referring to the entry index, the user may determine the full title and bibliographical description of each of the papers which appears in the Proceedings.
The final part of the index is the KWIC subject index. This index is constructed by the computer using titles of all the articles in the Proceedings as its base.
All principal words in the titles themselves serve as subject descriptors of the material within the articles. Those principal words are printed in the subject index in alphabetical order with their context words printed before and after on the same line of the index. Thus not only do the key words in the title appear in the subject index, but the context in which each key word occurs is also presented in this KWIC subject index. Biographical articles such as necrologies appear in the KWIC index under names of the biographees the same as they appear in the tables of contents.
Bibliographical information included with the subject entry is the volume number and pages of the article to which the sub-
ject entry refers. Each line in this subject list also includes the entry number that identifies the article in the entry index where full bibliographical information is available.
The three older indexes to the Proceedings have been and continue to be valuable tools in gaining access to this literature. This is especially true of the vicennial index published in 1959 with its arrangement by author names under broad subject headings corresponding to the main divisions of the Academy itself.
The most obvious advantage of the 55-year cumulated index is the access it provides to all of the literature published since 1959. This is done by means of a complete author index including all joint authors. The KWIC subject index provides greater in-depth access also to information in the Proceedings. And then, of course, the fifty-five year cumulation provides the same thoroughness and depth of access to the older literature which has heretofore been available in a more limited way by its three predecessors.
Besides these immediate benefits, there is the added one which may be realized in the future. To the existing data base of computerized information from which this latest index was produced can easily be added author and subject information of each future volume as it is published. With relatively small investment in time and money, this latest index can itself be kept up-to-date for quick, convenient and thorough coverage of the Proceedings as soon as they are published.
The tape of this fourth index in its present form is currently stored at the computer center at the University of Oklahoma. Queries for copies of the print-out may be directed to the university library.
1. C. W. SHANNON, Proc. Okla. Acad. Sci. 1: 8-12 (1921).
2. Okla. Univ. Bull. N.S. no. 525 (1931).
3. Decennial Index to the Proc. Okla. Acad. Sci., vols. 11-20, 1931-1940, Proc. Okla. Acad. Sci. 22: 199-216 (1942).
4. Vicennial Index of the Proc. Okla. Acad. Sci., vols. 21-40, Proc. Okla. Acad. Sci. 40: 156-193 (1960).


- titter (v.)
- 1610s, "giggle in a suppressed or covert way," probably of imitative origin. Related: Tittered; tittering. The noun is first recorded 1728.
- titties (n.)
- 1746 (plural); see tit (n.1) + -ie.
- tittle (n.)
- late 14c., "small stroke or point in writing," representing Latin apex in Late Latin sense of "accent mark over a vowel," borrowed (perhaps by influence of Provençal titule "the dot over -i-") from Latin titulus "inscription, heading" (see title (n.)).
- titular (adj.)
- 1590s, perhaps by influence of Middle French titulaire, from Latin titulus (see title).
- tix (n.)
- short for tickets, by 1947, originally headlinese.
- tizzy (n.)
- 1935, American English colloquial, of uncertain origin, perhaps related to slang tizzy "sixpence piece" (1804), a corruption of tester, a name for the coin (see tester (n.2)).
- by 1953 as an abbreviation of tender loving care.
- Indian group in Alaska and Canada, the people's word for themselves, literally "human beings."
- 1570s, from Greek tmesis "a cutting," related to temnein "to cut," tome "a cutting" (see tome). The separation of the elements of a compound word by the interposition of another word or words (e.g. a whole nother).
- 1915, abbreviation of trinitrotoluene (1908).
- to (prep.)
- Old English to "in the direction of, for the purpose of, furthermore," from West Germanic *to (cf. Old Saxon and Old Frisian to, Dutch too, Old High German zuo, German zu "to"), from PIE pronomial base *do- "to, toward, upward" (cf. Latin donec "as long as," Old Church Slavonic do "as far as, to," Greek suffix -de "to, toward," Old Irish do, Lithuanian da-).
In Old English, the preposition (go to town) leveled with the adverb (the door slammed to) except where the adverb retained its stress (tired and hungry too); there it came to be written with -oo (see too).
The nearly universal use of to with infinitives (to sleep, to dream, etc.) arose in Middle English out of the Old English dative use of to, and it helped drive out the Old English inflectional endings (though in this use to itself is a mere sign, without meaning).
Commonly used as a prefix in Middle English (to-hear "listen to," etc.), but few of these survive (to-do, together, and time references such as today, tonight, tomorrow -- Chaucer also has to-yeere). To and fro "side to side" is attested from mid-14c. Phrase what's it to you "how does that concern you?" goes back a long way:
Huæd is ðec ðæs?
[John xxi:22, in Lindisfarne Gospel, c.950]
- particle expressing separation, from West Germanic *ti- (cf. Old Frisian ti-, Old High German zi-, German zer-), from Proto-Germanic *tiz-, cognate with Latin-derived dis-. Some 125 compound verbs with this element are recorded in Old English; their number declined rapidly in Middle English and disappeared by c.1500 except as conscious archaisms.
- to-do (n.)
- 1570s, from the verb phrase to do, from Old English to don "proper or necessary to be done" (see to). Meaning "disturbance, fuss" is first recorded 1827.
- toad (n.)
- Old English tadige, tadie, of unknown origin and with no known cognates outside English.
- toadstone (n.)
- "stone or stone-like object, supposedly magical (with healing or protective power) and found in the heads of certain toads," is attested from 1550s, from toad + stone (n.). Translating Greek batrakhites, Medieval Latin bufonites; cf. also French crapaudine (13c.), German krötenstein.
- toadstool (n.)
- late 14c., apparently just what it looks like: a fanciful name from Middle English tadde "toad" (see toad) + stole "stool" (see stool). Toads themselves were regarded as highly poisonous, and this word is popularly restricted to inedible or poisonous fungi, as opposed to mushrooms (e.g. toad-cheese, a poisonous fungi).
- toady (n.)
- "servile parasite," 1826, apparently shortened from toad-eater "fawning flatterer" (1742), originally referring to the assistant of a charlatan, who ate a toad (believed to be poisonous) to enable his master to display his skill in expelling the poison (1620s). The verb is recorded from 1827. Related: Toadied; toadying.
- toast (v.1)
- "to brown with heat," late 14c., from Old French toster "to toast or grill" (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *tostare (source of Italian tostare, Spanish tostar), frequentative of Latin torrere (past participle tostus) "to parch" (see terrain). Related: Toasted; toasting.
- toast (v.2)
- "to propose or drink a toast," 1700, from toast (n.1). This probably is the source of the Jamaican and U.S. black word meaning "extemporaneous narrative poem or rap" (1962). Related: Toasted; toasting.
- toast (n.1)
- "a call to drink to someone's health," 1700 (but said by Steele, 1709, to date to the reign of Charles II), originally referring to the beautiful or popular woman whose health is proposed and drunk, from the use of spiced toast (n.2) to flavor drink, the lady regarded as figuratively adding piquancy to the wine in which her health was drunk.
- toast (n.2)
- "a toasted piece of bread," early 15c., from toast (v.1); slang meaning "a goner, person or thing already doomed or destroyed" is recorded by 1987, perhaps from notion of computer circuits being "fried," and with unconscious echoes of earlier figurative phrase to be had on toast (1886) "to be served up for eating."
- toaster (n.)
- 1580s, agent noun from toast (v.1). Electrical type is from 1913. In reference to a person who proposes or pledges a drinking toast, from 1704 (from toast (v.2)).
- toasty (adj.)
- "warm and comfortable," 1890, from toast (v.1) + -y (2). Related: Toastiness.
- tobacco (n.)
- 1580s, from Spanish tabaco, in part from an Arawakan (probably Taino) language of the Caribbean, said to mean "a roll of tobacco leaves" (according to Las Casas, 1552) or "a kind of pipe for smoking tobacco" (according to Oviedo, 1535). Scholars of Caribbean languages lean toward Las Casas' explanation. But Spanish tabaco (also Italian tabacco) was a name of medicinal herbs from early 15c., from Arabic tabbaq, attested since 9c. as the name of various herbs. So the word may be a European one transferred to an American plant.
Cultivation in France began 1556 with an importation of seed by Andre Thevet; introduced in Spain 1558 by Francisco Fernandes. Tobacco Road as a mythical place representative of rural Southern U.S. poverty is from the title of Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel.
- tobacconist (n.)
- "dealer in tobacco," 1650s, from tobacco + -ist + abnormal inserted consonant; earlier meaning was "person addicted to tobacco" (1590s).
- masc. proper name, from Late Latin Tobias, from Greek Tobias, from Hebrew Tobhiyyah, literally "the Lord is my Good," from Hebrew tobh "good." Toby is a short form.
- toboggan (n.)
- "long, flat-bottomed sled," 1829, from Canadian French tabagane, from Algonquian (probably Micmac) tobakun "a sled." The verb is recorded from 1846. As American English colloquial for a type of long woolen cap, it is recorded from 1929 (earlier toboggan cap, 1928), presumably because one wore such a cap while tobogganing.
- familiar form of masc. proper name Tobias, in various colloquial usages, e.g. "jug" (1840), "drinking mug in the form of a stout old man;" as a type of collar (1882) it refers to that worn by the dog Toby in the 19c. Punch and Judy shows. Also in Toby show (by 1942, American English) "comedy act based on the stock character of a boisterous, blundering yokel."
- word used for the letter T in radio communication, 1898.
- toccata (n.)
- 1724, from Italian toccata, from toccare "to touch." A composition for keyboard instrument, intended to exhibit the touch and technique of the performer, and having the air of an improvisation.
- in reference to an extinct people and Indo-European language of Chinese Turkestan, 1927, from French tocharien, from Greek Tokharoi (Strabo), name of an Asiatic people who lived in the Oxus valley in ancient times. Earlier Tocharish (1910), from German tocharisch. The identification of this culture with the people named by Strabo was suggested in 1907 by F.W.K. Müller and "is obviously erroneous" (Klein).
- tocsin (n.)
- "alarm bell," 1580s, from Middle French toquassen "an alarm bell, the ringing of an alarm bell" (late 14c.), from Old Provençal tocasenh, from tocar "to strike" (from Vulgar Latin *toccare "strike a bell;" see touch) + senh "bell, bell note," from Late Latin signum "bell, ringing of a bell," in Latin "mark, signal." The current English spelling is from 1794, adopted from modern French.
- today (n.)
- Old English todæge, to dæge "on (the) day," from to "at, on" (see to) + dæge, dative of dæg "day" (see day). Generally written as two words until 16c., after which it usually was written to-day until early 20c.
Similar constructions exist in other Germanic languages (cf. Dutch van daag "from-day," Danish and Swedish i dag "in day"). German heute is from Old High German hiutu, from Proto-Germanic *hiu tagu "on (this) day," with first element from PIE pronomial stem *ki-, represented by Latin cis "on this side."
- masc. proper name, also a surname (late 12c.), from Middle English todde "fox," a Northern English word of unknown origin.
- toddle (v.)
- "to run or walk with short, unsteady steps," c.1600, Scottish and northern British, of uncertain origin, possibly related to totter (1530s); an earlier sense of "to toy, play" is found c.1500. Related: Toddled; toddling.
- toddler (n.)
- 1793, agent noun from toddle.
- toddy (n.)
- 1610s, alteration of taddy (1610s), tarrie (c.1600) "beverage made from fermented palm sap," from Hindi tari "palm sap" (in which the -r- sounds close to an English -d-), from tar "palm tree," from Sanskrit tala-s, probably from a Dravidian language (cf. Kannada tar, Telugu tadu). Meaning "beverage made of alcoholic liquor with hot water, sugar, and spices" first recorded 1786.
- toe (n.)
- Old English ta (plural tan), contraction of *tahe (Mercian tahæ), from Proto-Germanic *taikhwo (cf. Old Norse ta, Old Frisian tane, Middle Dutch te, Dutch teen, Old High German zecha, German Zehe "toe"), probably originally meaning "fingers" as well (many PIE languages still use one word to mean both fingers and toes). The Old English plural tan survived in southwestern England to 14c. To be on (one's) toes "alert, eager" is recorded from 1921.
- toe (v.)
- "touch or reach with the toes," 1813, from toe (n.). First recorded in expression toe the mark, which seems to be nautical in origin.
The chief mate ... marked a line on the deck, brought the two boys up to it, making them 'toe the mark.' [R.H. Dana, "Two Years Before the Mast," 1840]
Related: Toed; toeing.
- toenail (n.)
- also toe-nail, 1735, from toe (n.) + nail (n.).
- toff (n.)
- lower-class British slang for "stylish dresser, member of the smart set," 1851, said to be probably an alteration of tuft, formerly an Oxford University term for a nobleman or gentleman-commoner (1755), in reference to the gold ornamental tassel worn on the caps of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge whose fathers were peers with votes in the House of Lords.
- toffee (n.)
- 1825, tuffy, toughy, southern British dialectal variant of taffy. Modern spelling first recorded 1862.
- tofu (n.)
- soy bean curd, 1880, from Japanese tofu, from Chinese doufu, from dou "beans" + fu "rotten."
- tog (n.)
- 1708, "any outer garment," shortened from togman "cloak, loose coat" (1560s), thieves' cant word, formed from French togue "cloak," from Latin toga (see toga). Middle English toge "toga" (14c.) was also a cant word for "coat."
- toga (n.)
- c.1600, from Latin toga "cloak or mantle," related to tegere "to cover" (see stegosaurus).
The outer garment of a Roman citizen in time of peace; toga prætexta had a broad purple border and was worn by children, magistrates, persons engaged in sacred rites, and later also emperors; toga virilis, the "toga of manhood," was assumed by boys at puberty.
Breeches, like the word for them (Latin bracae) were alien to the Romans, the dress of Persians, Germans and Gauls, so that bracatus "wearing breeches" was a term in Roman geography meaning "north of the Alps." College fraternity toga party popularized by movie "Animal House" (1978), but this is set in 1962.
- Old English togædere, from to (see to) + gædere "together" (adv.), apparently a variant of the adverb geador "together," related to gadrian (see gather).
German cognate zusammen substitutes second element with Old High German verbal cognate of English same (Old English also had tosamne "together"). Adjective meaning "self-assured, free of emotional difficulties" is first recorded 1966.
- togetherness (n.)
- 1650s, "state of being together," from together + -ness. Sense of "fellowship, fellow-feeling," is from 1930.
- toggery (n.)
- "clothes collectively," 1812, from tog + -ery.
- toggle (n.)
- 1769, "short pin passed through the eye of a rope," a nautical word of uncertain origin, perhaps a frequentative form of tog "tug." Meaning "a kind of wall fastener" is recorded from 1934. Toggle bolt is from 1794; toggle switch first attested 1938.
- toggle (v.)
- 1836, from toggle (n.). Related: Toggled; toggling.


Surveying for Shipwrecked Mariner Graves off Loch Sloy, Kangaroo Island, SABy Maddy Fowler and Cassandra Morris
On the 27th March, Kyle Lent, Cassandra Morris and Maddy Fowler, maritime archaeology students at Flinders University, embarked on the Sealink Ferry to Kangaroo Island to participate in the 2012 survey of historic shipwreck burial sites lead by Amer Khan from the Department for Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). This project involved conducting an archaeological survey to investigate possible locations of the burials of twelve bodies recovered from the sea following the wreck of Loch Sloy. The vessel was bound for Port Adelaide when it wrecked north of Cape de Couedic in the early morning of 24th April 1899. The location of the remains of the shipwreck is at present unknown.
Upon arriving at the point where we would be leaving the vehicles and begin what turned out to be a four hour walk to site, the remoteness and isolation of where we were was suddenly impressed upon us. The walk took us along the cliff tops of the western coast of Kangaroo Island. There was no path to follow and the terrain was rough with broken limestone and low-lying vegetation. The feat of the four survivors of the wrecking event (one of which would perish before reaching help) was appreciated once the harsh environment into which they were thrown surrounded us.
When we reached the northern limit of the survey area we split into two teams and the survey team began by assessing the sea conditions. After some initial observations were undertaken from the cliff top, the survey team climbed down to the base of the cliffs, where a flat rock shelf softens the impact of the waves (Figure 1). At this point it was clear that the tide was too high for a survey to be undertaken along the base of the cliffs as at high tide waves sweep up to the cliff face.
It was decided that a survey along the top of the cliff would be undertaken. Historical documents pointed to the burials being placed at the base of the cliff, although it is quite possible that some bodies were buried at the top. The survey team walked a transect from the northern point of the survey area to where the excavation team were located, approximately 200 metres (m), and two possible burial sites were identified. Key points to look for in the landscape include: arranged stones usually in lines or with possible corner angles, upright stones, stones small enough to lift but big enough to hold back sediment, and an east-west alignment (to indicate Christian burials). The team recorded these two possible sites by taking GPS positions.
In the initial site survey, which took place in December 2011, a cliff top survey was undertaken with some possible burial sites located. The excavation team further investigated one of these sites. A scale drawing was made of the linear rock feature that appeared to be a possible grave. The grave ran in an east west direction with three rocks creating a line on the western end and a very distinct line along the northern edge. The rock feature was roughly rectangular and approximately human sized and the rocks were small enough to be easily lifted by people (Figure 2). Detailed photographs were also taken at this point. Both teams then traced their way back across the landscape to the vehicles.
Due to the long and difficult walk to and from the site, a different approach was taken on the subsequent trip—approaching the site from the north rather than the south. This involved walking down a ravine, over a headland, along a beach and then over another headland. On this day two people from the ABC News crew joined us. Conditions on the following visit were improved as it was just after low tide, and the survey team was able to undertake a search along the rock shelf at the base of the cliffs. Within the central section of the survey area, the rock shelf presented itself as a beach, with masses of rocks and boulders fallen from the cliffs (Figure 3). Amongst the fallen cliff faces was a multitude of deposited timber remains, buoys, and odd pieces of rubbish (a can of insect spray with Spanish packaging perhaps the strangest piece, along with the occasional flip-flop). In order to keep in contact with the other team, three volunteers remained at the top of the cliffs with one of the UHF radios to relay messages if need be.
Beginning the survey, possible sites were searched for while another team member acted as a spotter, watching the ocean in case of large waves. Clambering over the rock fall, there were few sites above the high water mark with enough sediment to bury a body. From historical accounts, written by those conducting the burials, the graves were described as being above the high water mark, at the base of the cliff. To pinpoint many of these areas required climbing up a sand hill or fallen boulders. Continuing along the base of the cliff until the beach ran out, only two possible sites had been found—both along the same ridge but impossible to get to, lessening the likelihood of being burials. Following this, the team moved on to survey the southern extent of the area (Figure 4).
This survey was short as no possible area could be identified along the rock shelf. Concluding the entire survey, it was decided that should the burials have been placed at the bottom of the cliffs, no trace remains to this day. The only possible location left unexplored was under the rocks and boulders. Observing the coast with the knowledge of the violent winter storms that occur every year, it is thought to be unlikely that the burials would have lasted through the first storm, let alone surviving 100 years on the rugged coastline.
While the survey was undertaken, the excavation team placed a 50 centimetre (cm) by 50 cm test pit and excavated to determine whether the primary possible gravesite contained human remains. This test pit was conducted using trowels to remove sediment in 10 cm spits. The spoil from each spit was sieved and the trench was photographed at each level (Figure 5). Bedrock was reached at approximately 50 cm depth and no cultural material was identified. It is therefore unlikely that the rock feature represents a gravesite, however it cannot be ruled out entirely. It is possible that the test pit targeted the wrong area of the site.
Along with the grave survey, we also undertook other survey projects. One project was to relocate and record a small vessel located in the Ravine des Casoars that had been reported to DENR by the park rangers when it was exposed in October of last year. Based on a GPS position we conducted a metal detector survey and dug test pits but were unable to relocate it (Figure 6). The river which flows nearby and exposed the wreck during high levels had also helped to cover the wreck in sand when it decreased.
Another project undertaken was to identify the location of a shelter hut at West Bay, built to assist people who came ashore in the area after wrecking. We used an historical photograph to try to find the location and conducted a pedestrian survey through the dunes. No remains could be located on the surface but an approximate area for the structure was identified (Figure 7).
A final task was to relocate a threshing floor near American River. This site, built in the 1950s, is a ring of rocks with a flat dirt floor in which sheaves of grain would be placed to be ‘threshed’—a process to tear grain from the stalks and loosen the husks. Listed on the government register, this site had not been relocated for many years, despite several attempts being made. We left the road on a bearing towards a rough GPS position. Part way to the GPS point we discovered a stone feature in a right-angled linear arrangement. This arrangement was recorded as it possibly relates to the threshing floor. The threshing floor was then located approximately 100 m further on. Viewing the site amongst the tall grass and bushes, the construction of the ring was flawless—stones were all the same height and length and had been placed upright, fitting together perfectly. The site was recorded and a new GPS point taken about 20 m away from the original mark.
We would like to thank Amer Khan and Cameron Hartnell from DENR for giving us the opportunity to volunteer on such a unique project. Also Terry Drew, Lynda Bignell and Steve Saville for supplying a box of Mars Bars and entertaining stories. Finally our appreciation to the Flinders Chase National Park rangers: Charlotte, Caroline and Alison, ABC news crew: Caroline and Chris, and all the volunteers with the Kangaroo Island Walking Group for carrying our equipment.
Please tune into ABC at 7:30 on Friday 20th to see the news feature about the site and the Loch Sloy.


2. System components
(1) Redox flow battery (1 MW x 5 hours)
A redox flow battery is a storage battery that comprises a charging/discharging cell section and a tank full of metal ion electrolyte.
It charges/discharges through oxidation-reduction of vanadium or other ions.
The battery features long service life as the electrodes and electrolyte are not subject to deterioration even after repeated charge/discharge
operations and is easily maintained as its uses the same electrolyte in both the cathode and anode.
It also provides increased safety as it does not require any combustible substances and is operated at ambient temperatures. This battery is suitable for irregular,
highly fluctuating charge/discharge operations, enabling accurate monitoring and control of stored electric power.
Accordingly, it is an optimal storage battery for efficient use of renewable energy and surplus electricity supplied during the night.
(2) Concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) unit (maximum power generation of a total of 28 units: 200 kW)
A CPV unit is a photovoltaic system incorporating small-size photovoltaic cells for energy conversion, directing high-intensity sunlight converged by a lens to photovoltaic cells.
The power generation efficiency of the CPV panel is about twice that of silicon solar panels currently on the market as CPV cells are made from a special compound semiconductor material.
Installed at an elevated position, concentrator panels provide usable space below them.
The newly developed CPV unit offers 7.5 times greater output power (7.5 kW/unit), and yet the CPV panels are thinner and lighter than conventional ones.
(3) Energy management system (EMS)
The EMS monitors the amounts of electric power generated by a total of 28 CPV units, provided via commercial power networks,
stored in a redox flow battery, and consumed at an office or plant to manage the electric power flow.
Obtained data is sent by optical communication networks to be collectively controlled at the central control server.
This system will be used in the demonstration test held at the Yokohama to achieve optimal supply-demand balance
(maximum demand control of 1 MW) and power demand control based on preset schedules.


Question: "When were the Gospels written?"
Answer: It is important to understand that the dating of the Gospels and other New Testament books is at best an educated guess and at worst foolish speculation. For example, suggested dates for the writing of the Gospel of Matthew range from as early as A.D. 40 to as late as A.D. 140. This wide range of dates from scholars indicates the subjective nature of the dating process. Generally, one will find that the presuppositions of the scholars greatly influence their dating of the Gospels.
For example, in the past many liberal theologians have argued for a later dating of many of the New Testament books than is probably warranted or valid, in an attempt to discredit or cast doubts upon the content and authenticity of the Gospel accounts. On the other hand, there are many scholars who look to a much earlier dating of the New Testament books. There are some that believe there is good evidence to support the view that the whole New Testament, including Revelation, was written prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. It is our contention that the evidence supports the earlier dating more than it does the later dating.
There are scholars who believe the Gospel of Matthew was written as early as ten to twelve years after the death of Christ. Those who hold to this earlier dating of Matthew believe he first wrote his Gospel in Aramaic, and then it was later translated into Greek. One of the evidences of this earlier dating of Matthew’s Gospel is that early church leaders such as Irenaeus, Origen, and Eusebius recorded that Matthew first wrote his gospel for Jewish believers while he was still in Palestine. In fact Eusebius (a bishop of Caesarea and known as the father of church history) reported that Matthew wrote his Gospel before he left Palestine to preach in other lands, which Eusebius says happened about 12 years after the death of Christ. Some scholars believe that this would place the writing of Matthew as early as A.D. 40-45 and as late as A.D. 55.
Even if the Gospels were not written until 30 years after Christ’s death, that would still place the writing of them prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This presents no major problem with their authority or accuracy. Passing on oral traditions and teachings was commonplace in the Jewish culture of that day, and memorization was highly cultivated and practiced. Also, the fact that even at that time there would have been a considerable number of eyewitnesses around to dispute and discredit any false claims, and the fact that none of the “hard sayings” of Jesus were taken from the Gospel accounts, further supports their accuracy. Had the Gospels been edited before being written down, as some liberal scholars contend, then it was a very poor job. The writers left far too many “hard sayings,” and culturally unacceptable and politically incorrect accounts that would need explaining. An example of this is that the first witnesses of the resurrection were women, who were not considered reliable witnesses in the culture of that day.
The bottom line for Christians is this—whether the Gospels were written soon after the death of Christ, or not until 30 years after his death, does not really matter, because their accuracy and authority does not rest on when they were written but on what they are: the divinely inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16). We should also remember that one of the promises Jesus gave His disciples was that He would send them “another helper,” the Holy Spirit, who would teach them all things and “bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26). So, whether it was few years or many after Jesus’ death that the Gospels were written, we can have total confidence and faith in their completeness and accuracy, knowing that they were written by “men moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21), who accurately recorded the very words of God.
© Copyright 2002-2013 Got Questions Ministries.


These LEDs are connected to a thermistor that’s running just a little bit hotter than the ambient room temperature. So, by blowing on the thermistor, the birthday boy or girl is cooling it down, thus increasing the resistence. The microcontroller senses this and turns off a few of the LEDs as a result. Make one of these guys and you’ll never again have to worry about melted wax on your cake. For detailed instructions, head on over to Instructables.


The Habsburg Empire May Be Dead, but its Honest Bureaucracy's Legacy Lives On
When I think Habsburg Empire, I think of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination famously marked the beginning of World War I and less famously, the decline of the empire itself until its dissolution in 1918. However, the silhouette of the empire still marks a psychologically different part of Europe, according to research by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann. In their 2011 short paper, The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy, (summarized here) they compared levels of trust on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries. Surprisingly, they found that the border was still meaningful. Within the border, firms and people have higher trust in courts and police. Outside the border--specifically in regions that were once part of the Ottoman empire--levels of trust are relatively lower. Historians have described the Habsburg bureaucracy as “fairly honest, quite hard-working, and generally high-minded” (Taylor 1948). According to Becker and Woessman, this lies at the root of the higher trust levels.
Taylor, AJP (1948), The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, Penguin Books (reprint 1990)


A boy in my 8-year-old daughter's class has a cleft palate. I know that he has trouble finding friends because other kids — including my daughter — are wary of his difference. How can I encourage her to reach out to him so other kids will too?
This is an excellent opportunity for you to teach your daughter about accepting others. Kids are often sharp observers of physical appearances and, like your daughter, many are initially wary of others with noticeable differences.
Provide basic information about cleft palate so your daughter will understand it. Emphasize that although some kids may look different, they are just like other children in many ways. Keep it as simple and direct as possible, perhaps saying something like: "Johnny was born with an opening on the roof of his mouth, called a cleft palate. His doctors are working to make it better and he sometimes has trouble saying certain sounds."
Focus on how the boy is just like other kids, perhaps saying something like, "He's a good reader like you and likes to play soccer."
Encourage your daughter to talk to him or ask him to play in the same ways she does with other kids. If she's reluctant to do this for fear of what her friends think, ask her to consider how she would feel if others excluded her based on a physical feature that she couldn't help, like glasses or a birthmark.
Forcing your daughter to develop friendships with specific kids isn't likely to work. But you can continue to gently encourage her to reach out to the boy, help her feel more comfortable and confident interacting with people who are different for any reason, and teach ways to be more accepting of them.
And don't forget to pay attention to the way you treat others with differences, as the example you set will strongly influence your daughter's behavior.


A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to the local PBS affiliate to hear the results of a study recently commissioned by PBS Kids. We are a PBS Kids family for sure, so the whole family was excited to attend the event with me. While I was hearing about the study, my little guy was hanging out with Curious George. [Cue the Pre-School Squee!]
According to PBS Kids, “The national survey of parents with children ages 2-12 also indicated that parents are less likely to support their kids’ math skills from the earliest ages, and that many parents have anxiety about supporting math learning at home.”
Responding to this need, PBS Kids and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced a new program called “It All Adds Up.” It All Adds up is “an effort that aims to boost math learning at home – and everywhere – by providing resources for parents.”
PBS Kids and the CPB have already been doing great work over the last two years in literacy and math via more than 100 games and apps through the Ready to Learn program. It All Ads Up will build on that success and make them accessible online at PBS Kids’ Lab, “a site that aggregates games, apps and offline activities to help support math and reading learning for kids 2 -8.”
Here are a couple of photos of my little guy and a little girl playing a particularly awesome Curious George game available at PBS Kids’ Lab. It uses the microphone and the camera on the computer to allow the game to be interactive with little ones who maybe haven’t mastered the mouse or the keyboard. My guy LOVED it.
Here are a few of the awesome new resources:
New FETCH! 3-D Online Game: Ruff Ruffman’s Monumental Mini-Golf
Kiddos aged 6 to 8 will help Ruff build his mini golf course. Kids will partner up (safely) with other kids who are also online to solve puzzles and create structures. All along they will be practicing spatial reasoning, measurement, and shape manipulation. At the end of the game, kids get to play through the mini golf course that they just helped create! This game is in public beta, so there will likely be more changes to the game, but it’s a great time to get in and try it!
PBS Parents Play & Learn App
This is PBS Kids’ first app designed exclusively for parents. Available for free download, the app offers games and ideas for parents to practice math skills with their kids. The games are organized around familiar places like home or the grocery store and also divided by stages: baby, toddler, and pre-school. I happen to LOVE this app and wish it was around when my guy was even younger. It’s available in English and Spanish plus on basically every platform you could possibly want: iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Android phones/tablets (including Kindle Fire).
Launch of Peg + Cat
I’m very excited about this. PBS Kids will be launching a new show called Peg + Cat in Fall of 2013. It features “spirited Peg and her sidekick Cat as they embark on adventures and learn foundational math concepts and skills.” We got to see a quick clip at the event, and it is adorable. Can’t wait! I’m sure my guy is going to love it!
To stay up to date on all of the good things going on at PBS Kids, be sure to follow them on Facebook.


by Jeremiah Akin and Jim March
This talk will expose the slight of hand tricks used by government agencies to make them appear more transparent than they are. "Transparency" is a common buzz word that suggests that government operates in a manner that is clear, visible, and understandable. Open Data Centers are supposed to increase accountability and transparency in government computer-based operations. However, can you use the data they provide to spot waste or corruption in government? Vote counting used to be a process that people could watch, but now you only see a false replica of the open counting process. Meanwhile the votes are actually counted where they can not be observed. The public needs to be able to differentiate between transparency and transparency theater, just as it needs to learn to differentiate between security and security theatre. Several examples of how government agencies produce this theatre will demonstrate how what is supposed to be transparent is intentionally hidden.
9th–13th March 2012


(Message Oriented Middleware) Software plumbing. Message-oriented middleware is the term for software that connects separate systems in a network by carrying and distributing messages between them. The messages may contain data, software instructions, or both together. MOM infrastructure is typically built around a queuing system that stores messages pending delivery, and keeps track of whether and when each message has been delivered. Most MOM systems also support autonomous publish-subscribe messaging. MOM products frequently use proprietary messaging technologies -- well-known examples include IBM MQSeries, MSMQ from Microsoft and Tibco Rendezvous -- but emerging standards specifications such as JMS and WS-ReliableMessaging are now enabling standards-based MOM infrastructures.


If you're a backpacker you need a reliable yet lightweight method for purifying and filtering water in the wild. Most commercial methods are either bulky and heavy or need supplies such as salt and/or batteries. Instead you can make a gravity water filtration system using two water bladders, a $17 Aquamira Frontier Pro filter or likewise, and a pack of chlorine dioxide purification tablets.
YouTube user and veteran backpacker Jason Klass demonstrates the light weight, versatility, and low cost (around $40 for everything) of this setup. Basically you fill your "dirty" water bottle directly from a river, lake, or stream, add a purification tablet, and connect your clean water bottle to the Aquamira filter. The other side of the filter is connected to the water resevoir you drink from. Hang the dirty water from a tree branch and keep the clean water on the ground and in half an hour you'll have a couple of liters of clean water to drink.
Why does this system use both a chemical and a mechanical filter? The aquamira filter is good at keeping out dirt and objects that would change the taste of your water but does not filter closely enough to remove most bacterias and viruses. A chlorine dioxide chemical treatment (same as what most municipal water supplies use) will kill 99.999% of all viruses and bacterias and shouldn't change the taste of the water. If you run out of purification tablets while on the trail you can always gravity filter the water into a pot and boil it.


Gospel of Matthew
Authorship and writing of the Gospel
Although the document is internally anonymous, the authorship of this Gospel has been traditionally ascribed to St. Matthew. The surviving testimony of the Church Fathers is unanimous in this view, and the tradition had been accepted by Christians at least as early as the 2nd century up to modern times. In addition, the title "According to Matthew" is found in the earliest codexes, which date to the fourth century.1
According to Tradition, after Pentecost St. Matthew preached the Good News of the Lord's Resurrection throughtout Palestine. Then, "at the request of the Jewish converts at Jerusalem, the holy Apostle Matthew wrote his Gospel describing the earthly life of the Savior before leaving to preach the Gospel in faraway lands." 2 He then left to preach his Gospel in Syria, Media, Persia, Parthia, before being martyred in Ethiopia.
Because it was first recorded in Palestine, there is some speculation and evidence that Matthew's Gospel was originally written in Aramaic, though the earliest surviving version now in existence is in Greek. According to OCA, "many of the linguistic and cultural-historical peculiarities of the Greek translation give indications of it [the Gospel's original Aramaic form]." It was probably written somewhere from AD 60-65, though more liberal scholars put the date at 80-100.
For convenience, the book can be divided into its four structurally distinct sections: Two introductory sections; the main section, which can be further broken into five sections, each with a narrative component followed by a long discourse of Jesus; and finally, the Passion and Resurrection section.
- Containing the genealogy, the birth, and the infancy of Jesus (Matthew 1; Matthew 2).
- The discourses and actions of John the Baptist preparatory to Christ's public ministry (Matthew 3; Matthew 4:11).
- The discourses and actions of Christ in Galilee (4:12–26:1).
- The Sermon on the Mount, concerning morality (Ch. 5–7)
- The Missionary Discourse, concerning the mission Jesus gave his Twelve Apostles. (10–11:1)
- The Parable Discourse, stories that teach about the Kingdom of Heaven (13).
- The "Church Order" Discourse, concerning relationships among Christians (18–19:1).
- The Eschatological Discourse, which includes the Olivet Discourse and Judgement of the Nations, concerning his Second Coming and the end of the age (24–25).
- The sufferings, death and Resurrection of Jesus, the Great Commission (28:16–20).
The one aim pervading the book is to show that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah — he "of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write" — and that in him the ancient prophecies had their fulfillment. This book is full of allusions to passages of the Old Testament which the book interprets as predicting and foreshadowing Jesus' life and mission. This Gospel contains no fewer than sixty-five references to the Old Testament, forty-three of these being direct verbal citations, thus greatly outnumbering those found in the other Gospels. The main feature of this Gospel may be expressed in the motto "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (5:17). The Apostle Matthew preached among people who were awaiting the Messiah. His Gospel manifests itself as a vivid proof that Jesus Christ is the Messiah foretold by the prophets, and that there would not be another (Mt. 11:3).
The preaching and deeds of the Savior are presented by the evangelist in three divisions, constituting three aspects of the service of the Messiah: as Prophet and Law-Giver (Ch. 5-7), Lord over the world both visible and invisible (Ch. 8-25), and finally as High Priest offered as Sacrifice for the sins of all mankind (Ch. 26-27).
The theological content of the Gospel, besides the Christological themes, includes also the teaching about the Kingdom of God and about the Church, which the Lord sets forth in parables about the inner preparation for entering into the Kingdom (Ch. 5-7), about the worthiness of servers of the Church in the world (Ch. 10-11), about the signs of the Kingdom and its growth in the souls of mankind (Ch. 13), about the humility and simplicity of the inheritors of the Kingdom (Mt. 18:1-35; 19 13-30; 20:1-16; 25-27; 23:1-28), and about the eschatological revelations of the Kingdom in the Second Coming of Christ within the daily spiritual life of the Church (Ch. 24-25).
The Kingdom of Heaven and the Church are closely interconnected in the spiritual experience of Christianity: the Church is the historical embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven in the world, and the Kingdom of Heaven is the Church of Christ in its eschatological perfection (Mt. 16:18-19; 28:18-20).
In general, the text of the gospel of St Matthew is used most consistently in liturgical worship of the Orthodox Church. This may be because it was the most common gospel in the very early Churches. It contains the version of the beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer that is used in services.
Only this gospel contains the post resurrection order of the Lord to his apostles, "to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (28:19). And it contains the longest and most detailed record of Christ's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount (5-7)


Quantum Diaries has an interesting introduction to the higgs. It makes it seem like the way that the higgs field gives mass to particles is via all of the interactions with virtual higgs particles.
My question is, how can interaction with the field give rise to mass? It seems almost like Flip Tanedo is saying that, due to the interaction with the higgs field, the particle (electron, say) is experiencing a large number of changes in direction, and thus it takes a path much longer than the one that you measured.
It seems to imply that, when going from A to B, the electron 'bounces' off of a number of virtual higgs particles and takes a much longer path than the straight line from A to B, travelling at light speed all the while.
Is this a good way to look at the creation of 'mass' (i.e. a particle appears to move slower than light speed because it takes a path longer than the shortest one)? Or is there some other way to understand how the higgs mechanism imparts mass?


During the Turkish wars the wild hordes of riders advanced as far as Purbach. On such occasions the townspeople of Purbach fled into the nearby Leitha Mountains to seek refuge there from the hordes. During one such attack Andreas Grein remained at home.
When the Turkish horde found Grein, they placed him in handcuffs, tied him to a horse's tail, and thus forced him to run along behind. The Turks took Grein back to their country, where he was housed in a stall and forced to pull a plow by day. For food he received nuts and millet.
After seven years of terrible suffering he succeeded -- with the help of a fellow countrywoman -- in escaping from Turkey. In October 1647, after traveling on foot for many months, he arrived at Purbach. He stopped to rest on his own property, about 1000 steps from the town. He then went to his home, where he encountered his wife, who had recently remarried. She did not recognize Grein, because of his wild appearance. After much discussion she recognized her husband from his voice. She asked him for forgiveness, and they lived happily together until they died. The second husband, of course, had to step aside.
At the place where he had rested, Grein erected a Holy Trinity column, inscribed with the year 1647.


There are some interesting things to note in there:
I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I’m not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing. But, I do think that there is a very strong possibility as we move towards next generation technologies for a ray tracing architecture that uses a specific data structure, rather than just taking triangles like everybody uses and tracing rays against them and being really, really expensive. It
involves ray tracing into a sparse voxel octree which is essentially a geometric evolution of the mega-texture technologies that we’re doing today for uniquely texturing entire worlds. It’s clear that what we want to do in the following generation is have unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel across everything.
- ray tracing in the classical sense, in which rays intersect with triangles, is far too expensive for use in games, even with next generation hardware
- the sparse voxel octree format permits unique geometry
Octrees can be used to accelerate ray tracing and store geometry in a compressed format at the same time.
Quote from a game developer (Rare) on the voxel octree:
Storing data in an octree is far more efficient than storing it using textures and polygons (it's basically free compression for both geometry and texture data). It's primarily cool because you stop traversing when the size of the pixel is larger than the projected cell, so you don't even need to have all your data in memory, but can stream it in on demand. This means that the amount of data truly is unlimited, or at least the limits are with the artists producing it. You only need a fixed amount of voxels loaded to view a scene, and that doesn't change regardless of how big the scene is. The number of voxels required is proportional to the number of pixels on the screen. This is true regardless of how much data you're rendering! This is not true for rasterization unless you have some magical per-pixel visibility and LOD scheme to cut down the number of pixels and vertices to process, which is impossible to achieve in practice. Plus ray casting automatically gives you exact information on what geometry needs to be loaded in from disk, so it's a "perfect" streaming system,
wheras with rasterization it would be very difficult to incrementally load a scene depending on what's visible (because you need to load the scene before you know what's visible!)
If you want to model micrometer detail, go ahead, it won't be loaded into memory until someone zooms in close enough to see it. Voxels that are not intersected can be thrown out of memory. Of course you would keep some sort of cache and throw things out on a least recently used basis, but since it's hierarchical you can just load in new levels in the hierarchy only when you hit them.
Voxels have some very interesting benefits compared to polygons:
- It's a volumetric representation, so you can model very fine details and bumps, without the need for bump mapping. Particle effects like smoke, fire and foam can be efficiently rendered without using hacks. Voxels are also being used by some big Hollywood special effects studio's to render hair, fur and grass.
- id wants to use voxels to render everything static with real geometry without using normal maps.
- Voxels can store a color and a normal. For the renderer, textures and geometry are essentially the same.
- The position of the voxel is defined implicitely by the structure that is holding it (the octree). Here's the good part: this structure represents both the primitives that need to be intersected and the spatial division of these primitives. So, in contrast to triangle ray tracing which needs a separate spatial division structure (kd-tree, BVH, ...), voxels are right away structured in a grid or an octree (this does not mean that other structures can't be used as well). So for voxel ray tracing, octrees are perfect.
- Voxels are very cheap primitives to intersect, much cheaper than triangles. This is probably their biggest benefit when choosing between voxel and polygon ray tracing.
- A voxel octree permits a very natural multiresolution. There's no need to go deeper into the octree when the size of a pixel is larger than the underlying cell, so you don't have to display detail if it's not necessary and you don't streal in data that isn't visible either way.
- Voxels are extremely well suited for local effects (voxel ray casting). In contrast to triangle rasterization, there are no problems with transparency, refraction, ... There are also major benefits artwise: because voxels are volumetric, you can achieve effects like erosion, aging materials, wear and tear by simply changing the iso value.
- Ray casting voxels is much less sensitive to scene complexity than triangles
(partly translated from http://forum.canardplus.com/showpost.php?p=1257790&postcount=96)
Disadvantages of voxel ray tracing vs polygon ray tracing:
- Memory. Voxel data sets are huge relative to polygon data. But this doesn't have to be a problem, since all data can be streamed in. This does however create new challenges when the point of view changes rapidly and a lot of new data bricks have to be streamed in at once. Voxels sets have the benefit over polygons that voxel subsets can be loaded in, which permits some sort of progressive refinement. Other possible solutions are: using faster hard disks or solid state drives to accelerate the streaming, limiting depth traversal during fast camera movement or masking the streaming with motion blur or depth of field postprocessing.
- Animation of voxels requires specialized tools
- Disadvantages of ray tracing in general: dynamic objects require the octree to be updated in realtime. However, there are solutions for dynamic objects which don't require updating of the octree (such as building a deformation lattice around dynamic objects so that when you raycast into it bend the rays as it hits the deformation lattice). id Tech 6 plans to tackle the problem of having many dynamic objects with hybrid rendering.
More on dynamic raytracing:
Dynamic Acceleration Structures for Interactive Ray Tracing, Reinhard, E., Smits, B., and Hansen, C., in Proc. Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, pp. 299-306, June 2000. Summary: This system uses a grid data structure, allowing dynamic objects to be easily inserted or removed. The grid is tiled in space (i.e. it wraps around) to avoid problems with fixed boundaries. They also implement a hiearchical grid with data in both internal and leaf nodes; objects are inserted into the optimal level.
Towards Rapid Reconstruction for Animated Ray Tracing, Lext and Akenine-Moller, Eurographics 2001. Summary: Each rigid dynamic object gets its own grid acceleration structure, and rays are transformed into this local coordinate system. Surprisingly, they show that this scheme is not a big win for simple scenes, because in simple scenes it is possible to completely rebuild the grid each frame using only about a quarter of the runtime. But, this would probably not be true for a k-d or BSP tree.
Distributed Interactive Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes, Wald, Benthin, and Slusallek, Proc. IEEE Symp. on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics (PVG), 2003. Summary: This system uses ray transformation (into object coordinate system) for rigid movement, and BSP rebuild for unstructured movement. A top-level BSP tree is rebuilt every frame to hold bounding volumes for the moving objects. Performance is still an issue for unstructured movement.
Interactive Space Deformation with Hardware Assisted Rendering, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol 17, no 6, 1997, pp. 66-77. Summary: Instead of deforming objects directly, this system deforms the space in which they reside (using 1-to-1 deformations). During raytracing, the rays are deformed into the object space instead of deforming the objects into the ray space. However, the resulting deformed rays are no longer straight, so they must be discretized into short line segments to perform the actual ray-object intersection tests.
Ray casting free-form deformed-volume objects, Haixin Chen, Jürgen Hesser, Reinhard Männer A collection of techniques is developed in this paper for ray casting free-form deformed-volume objects with high quality and efficiency. The known inverse ray deformation approach is combined with free-form deformation to bend the rays to the opposite direction of the deformation, producing an image of the deformed volume without generating a really deformed intermediate volume. The local curvature is estimated and used for the adaptive selection of the length of polyline segments, which approximate the inversely deformed ray trajectories; thus longer polyline segments can be automatically selected in regions with small curvature, reducing deformation calculation without losing the spatial continuity of the simulated deformation. We developed an efficient method for the estimation of the local deformation function. The Jacobian of the local deformation function is used for adjustments of the opacity values and normal vectors computed from the original volume, guaranteeing that the deformed spatial structures are correctly rendered. The popular ray casting acceleration techniques, like early ray termination and space leaping, are incorporated into the deformation procedure, providing a speed-up factor of 2.34-6.56 compared to the non-optimized case.
More info on id Tech 6 and voxel ray casting in the ompf thread


Two-Toed Sloths are native to the rain forests in Costa Rica, we are the slowest animals on the planet and lots of people want to know if we're nocturnal (awake at night) or diurnal (awake during the day) but we're really neither. We're only awake for 4-6 hours a day and that can be at any time.
We eat lots and lots of leaves and plants but have a very slow metabolism so we only go to the bathroom about once/week! Our bodies are made of mostly retractor muscles so we can't walk or sit upright but we're sure good at hanging around. In the wild we even grow a green moss that covers our fur and if we're hungry we can always nibble on that! Another cool fact is that we have the lowest and more variable body temperature of any mammal we can be comfortable anywhere between 72 and 94 degrees!


How Not To Insult The Prophet Mohammed
How to honor the Prophet:
- Promote and engage in violence on global scale.
- Denigrate and heap scorn upon other religions.
- Make certain that the majority of victims of violence are other Muslims.
- Encourage and endorse violent and vicious regimes.
- Resist free and democratic principles at all costs.
- Make sure that Muslims in the Middle East are denied decent education.
- Never object to or criticize FGM, honor killings, gang rapes or acid attacks on women.
- Encourage religious sermons that preach hate.
- Make sure parishoners leave sabbath prayer services enraged and ready to kill.
- Deny the Holocaust
- Agree that the Holocaust was a wonderful idea.
- Encourage and reward racist and bigoted ideology.
- Intimidate anyone who disagrees.
- Finally....always be the aggrieved victim, resisting, fighting and killing anyone you please.


This tutorial shows how to send modifications of code in the right way: by using patches.
The word developer is used here for someone having a KDE SVN account.
We suppose that you have modified some code in KDE and that you are ready to share it. First a few important points:
Now you have the modification as a source file. Sending the source file will not be helpful, as probably someone else has done other modifications to the original file in the meantime. So your modified file could not replace it.
That is why patches exist. Patches list the modifications, the line numbers and a few other useful information to be able to put that patch back into the existing code. (This process is called "patching" or also "applying a patch.")
The main tool for creating patches is a tool called diff, which makes the difference between two files. This tool has a mode called unified diff, which KDE developers use. Unified diffs have not just the difference between the file but also the neighborhood around the differences. That allows to patch even if the line numbers are not the same anymore.
The most simple patch is created between the modified file (here called source.cpp) and the non-modified version of the file (here called source.cpp.orig.)
diff -u -p source.cpp.orig source.cpp
That lists the difference between the two files in the unified diff format (and with function name information if possible.) However it only displays it to screen, which is of course not the goal. So you need to redirect the output.
diff -u -p source.cpp.orig source.cpp > ~/patch.diff
~/patch.diff is here an example and you can create the file where you prefer with the name that you prefer. (You will soon find out that it is probably not a good idea to create a patch where the source is.)
But normally, you do not just change one file and you do not keep the original version around to be able to make the difference later. But here too, there is a solution.
The program svn, which is used on the command line interact with the SVN server, has a diff function too: svn diff.
You can run it like this and it will give you the difference of the current directory and all sub-directories below it. Of course, here too, you want to redirect the output.
svn diff > ~/patch.diff
There are useful variants too (shown here without redirection)
Note: even if svn can make the difference of another directory (svn diff mydirectory), it is not recommended to do it for a patch that should be applied again. (The problem is that the person that will apply the patch will have to be more careful about how he applies it.)
Note: for simple diff, like those shown in the examples above, svn diff can be used offline, therefore without an active connection to the KDE SVN server. This is possible, as svn keeps a copy of the original files locally. (This feature is part of the design of SVN.)
By default, svn diff does not have a feature like the -p parameter of diff. But svn allows that an external diff program is called, so you can call diff:
svn diff --diff-cmd diff --extensions "-u -p"
The procedures described above work very well with text files, for example C++ source code. However they do not work with binary files, as diff is not made to handle them. And even if SVN can internally store binary differences, svn diff is not prepared to do anything similar yet, mainly because it currently uses the unified diff format only, which is not meant for binary data.
Therefore, unfortunately, there is little choice but to attach binary files separately from the patch, of course attached in the same email.
First, you need to make svn aware of files you have added.
svn add path/to/new/file /path/to/another/new/file
Then run svn diff as before.
Note that if you do svn revert, for example, the files you created will NOT be deleted by svn - but svn will no longer care about them (so they won't show up when you do svn diff, for example). You will have to rm them manually.
(TODO: are there any other issues with adding new files if you don't have commit access?)
Now you are ready to share the patch. If your patch fixes a bug from KDE Bugs, then the easiest way is to attach it there, see next section.
The main way of sharing a patch is to email to a mailing list. But be careful not to send big patches to a mailing list, a few 10KB is the limit.
If you find that the patch is too big to send to a mailing list, the best is to create a bug report in KDE Bugs and to attach the patch there, after having created the bug report.
Another possibility, however seldom used, is to post the patch on a public Web server (be it by HTTP or FTP) and to send an email to the mailing list, telling that the patch is waiting there.
Another variant is to ask on the mailing list which developer is ready to get a big patch. (Try to give its size and ask if you should send it compressed, for example by bzip2.)
A last variant, if you know exactly which developer will process the patch and that you know or that you suppose that he currently has time, is to send the patch to a developer directly. (But here too, be careful if your patch is big. Some KDE developers have still analog modems.)
In this section we assume that you have chosen to add your patch to an existing KDE bug or that you have created a bug report just for your patch.
Even if this tutorial is more meant to send patches to a mailing list, most of it can be applied to adding a patch to KDE Bugs.
You have two ways to do it:
To send an email to a bug report, you can use an email address of the form firstname.lastname@example.org where 12345 is the bug number. Please be sure to attach your patch and not to have it inlined in your text. (If it is inlined, it would be corrupted by KDE Bugs, as HTML does not respect spaces.)
Note: if you send an email to KDE Bugs, be careful to use as sender the same email address as your login email address in KDE Bugs. Otherwise KDE Bugs will reject your email.
Note: if you create a new bug report just for your patch, be careful that you cannot attach a patch directly when creating a new bug. However as soon as the new bug is created, you can then attach files, one-by-one, therefore also patches.
Warning: sometimes your patch will be forgotten because the developers do not always closely monitor the bug database. In this case, try sending your patch by email as described below. If that also does not help, you can always talk to the developers on IRC
Assuming that you have chosen to send the patch to a mailing list, you might ask yourself: to which one?
The best destination for patches is the corresponding developer mailing list.
In case of doubt, you can send any patch for KDE to the kde-devel mailing list. (However with an increased risk that you would miss the right developer.)
Of course, if you know exactly which developer will process the patch and that you know or that you suppose that he currently has time, then you can send the patch to him directly.
Now you have a patch redirected into a file (for this example called patch.diff), you are ready to send it by email. But the first question: where?
Now that you have entered an email address, a good practice is to attach the patch to your file before writing anything else in the email. So you will not forget to attach it.
A little note here: yes, in KDE (unlike for the Linux Kernel for example), we prefer to have the patches sent as attachments.
Now you are ready to write the rest of the email. Please think of a title that matches your patch. (Think of having to find it again in the archives in a few months or even years.) A good habit is to precede the title by [PATCH]. So for example a title could be [PATCH] Fix backup files.
As for the body of the email, please tell to which file or directory your patch applies. For example for a file: The attached patch applies to the file koffice/kword/kwdoc.cpp or for a directory: The attached patch applies to the directory koffice/kword. This help the developers to have an overview of which code has been modified. Also tell for which branch it is meant, for example for trunk.
Then tell what your patch does. If it fixes a bug, then please give the bug number too. If the bug was not registered in KDE Bugs, then please describe instead the bug that is fixed. Similarly, if you know that the patch fixes a bug introduced from a precise SVN revision, please add the revision number.
Tell also what could be useful to the developers, for example if you could not completely test the patch (and why), if you need help to finish fixing the code or if it is a quick&dirty solution that should be fixed better in long-term.
Now check the email again to see if you have not forgotten anything (especially to attach the patch) and you can send the email.
One popular way of submitting patches is KDE's reviewboard. A big advantage over using the bugtracker of KDE is that the patches are less likely to be forgotten here. Also, the reviewboard allows inline review of diffs and other gimmicks.
First you need to check if the project you've created the patch for is actually using reviewboard. For this, go to the groups section and see if the project's group is listed there. If it is listed there, you should use the reviewboard, otherwise send the patch by other means.
For sending a patch, you first need to register. Then simply click New Review Request and fill out the form. The most important parts of the form are:
After you completed the form, a notification mail will be sent to the developers and they will answer you.
Now you have to wait that a developer reacts on your patch. (If you are not subscribed to the mailing lists where you have sent the patch, then monitor the mailing list archives] for such a message.)
The reaction is normally one of the following:
The first case is when nobody has answered. That perhaps means that you have chosen the wrong mailing list. Perhaps you have not explained correctly what the patch fixes or you have given a title that is not precise enough. If this happens, the developer might have overlooked the patch. Perhaps the developer that should have answered has not any time currently. (That too happens unfortunately.) The best is to try to work a little more on the patch, make a better description and try again a second time, perhaps to another mailing list or to use KDE Bugs instead.
If the developer tells you that your patch conflicts with changes that he is currently doing, you could probably not do much against it. Maybe you can discuss with him how you can effectively work with him on this piece of code.
If your patch was not accepted, you could work further on it. Probably you should discuss the problem on the mailing list to know in which direction you should work further.
If a developer wants a few changes, then work on the code to make the changes according to the critic. If you need help because you do not understand how to do the needed change, then ask it on the mailing list.
If your patch was accepted, congratulations! :)


Neurons that can multitask greatly enhance the brain’s computational power, study finds.
The movie "21," a fictional work loosely based on the story of the MIT blackjack team that won millions of dollars from casinos across the country, opens in theaters Friday.
Throughout the 1990s, several MIT students were part of a team that used advanced card-counting techniques to improve their chances of winning at blackjack. Their story became Ben Mezrich's book "Bringing Down the House," which served as the basis for the fictional "21."
Most notably, the character played by Kevin Spacey, portrayed as an MIT professor, is entirely fictional. While his irresponsible acts may enliven the Hollywood script, they are entirely unrepresentative of the Institute.
Those familiar with MIT should not be surprised that its students are capable of the calculations and observations necessary to outsmart casinos. In addition to its global leadership in science and engineering, MIT remains a mathematics powerhouse. As just one example, the MIT math team recently finished third at the prestigious William Lowell Putnam intercollegiate mathematics competition, garnering 21 out of the top 74 scores.
And while shots of Killian Court and other MIT exteriors dot "21," the movie was actually filmed at Boston University, at the Christian Science Center in Boston and in Las Vegas.
The careful MIT observer will notice several alumni also have small credited roles in the film, including iRobot co-founder Colin Angle '89, SM '91, who provided the movie robot; Jeffrey Ma '94; and Henry Houh '89, '90, SM '91, PhD '98.


Saving water for the Mujib Reserve, Jordan
Together with the Royal Society for Conservation of Nature (RSCN) we worked in Jordan to reduce the impact of the dam upstream on the Mujib reserve, involve the local population in agricultural activities to save water and preserve water quality, and make sure that the Mujib reserve water needs are fulfilled in water management plans and decisions of the government.
More Action Details
Jordan is among the water poorest countries in the world. Population growth and unsustainable use such as pumping water for economic development since eighties of the past century have caused increase in the already high water stress. Nevertheless, Jordan does not have an integrated approach to water resource management.
Drivers of the current situation of water overexploitation are: conflict of use between different sectors (drinking water, agriculture, industries, tourism), poverty and sanitation problems; disappearance of wetlands (Azraq) and huge impact on ecosystems such as Mujib National Reserve.
Read more on our work in the Mujib Reserve, Jordan
Read the announcement of the workshop on December 2011
Royal Society for Conservation of Nature (RSCN)


January 12, 2013
'Singing penis' sets noise record for water insect
Ella Davies at the BBC:
Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal "singing" at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.
The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as "stridulation".
Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.
Micronecta scholtzi are freshwater insects measuring just 2mm that are common across Europe.
The team of biologists and engineering experts recorded the insects using specialist underwater microphones.
On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:15 PM | Permalink


- Historic Sites
America’s First Iraq
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN WE DELIVERED THE PHILIPPINES FROM TYRANNY A CENTURY AGO
August/September 2003 | Volume 54, Issue 4
If all of this sounds eerily like a precursor to Vietnam, nothing appears more familiar than the seeming ambivalence of American troops and administrators toward the people whose land they were occupying. U.S. soldiers cursed the Filipinos continually as deceitful, lazy, “brainless monkeys,” “niggers,” and “gugus” and longed to go home. At the same time, they threw themselves into every sort of effort to improve life in the country they were occupying, building sewers, distributing food, vaccinating people against smallpox, and even reforming the Spanish judiciary by appointing Filipino judges. American soldiers started and taught in makeshift schools throughout the islands, bringing formal education to many rural areas for the first time.
It was, as one observer put it, “a harsh and philanthropic war at the same time.” By the time President Theodore Roosevelt declared the conflict officially over, on July 4, 1902, it had ended up costing the United States 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded, not including thousands more who later died at home of diseases they had caught in the islands. Some 20,000 Filipino soldiers and at least 250,000 civilians had also died, out of a population estimated at 7.6 million.
Even before the war was over, though, our occupation had taken a philanthropic turn when a federal judge named William Howard Taft arrived to serve as the islands’ first civilian governor. Taft considered most of the rebels no better than murderers and referred to his new subjects as his “little brown brothers.” Yet he was also a highly competent administrator, imbued with a strict sense of public duty. From the start it was clear that America’s role in the Philippines was to prepare the country for independence.
“We hold the Philippines for the benefit of the Filipinos, and we are not entitled to pass a single act or to approve a single measure that has not that as its chief purpose,” Taft declared on arriving in the islands, and in his considerable wake came thousands of American volunteers, who would quickly transform our first colonial possession. They would build roads and ports, sewers, water systems, and railroads everywhere. They would reform the archaic law and tax codes left over from the Spanish, stimulate industry and finance, break up the old monastic estates and distribute their land to rural villagers. Before long Filipinos would enjoy the highest literacy rate in Southeast Asia. And vast improvements in public hygiene and health care would go a long way toward doubling the islands’ population by 1920.
“Compared to European colonialism, the United States was indeed a model of enlightenment,” the journalist Stanley Karnow writes in his seminal work on the subject, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. In 1916 an act of Congress pledged eventual independence to the Philippines; the islands were made a semiautonomous commonwealth in 1935, and full independence, delayed by World War II, became a reality in 1946.
Yet in Karnow’s assessment, the Americans’ performance in the Philippines “was neither as brilliant as their publicists claimed nor as bleak as their critics contended.” The Americans tried to make the country over into another America but also made clear they considered the Filipinos their racial inferiors. They preached democracy but dispersed patronage to those Filipino politicians who supported U.S. policies. They fought side by side with their “little brown brothers” against the Japanese, during some of the most ferocious combat in World War II, and against Southeast Asian communism during the Cold War, but also felt free to suborn the Philippines’ nascent democracy for years. Since the Reagan administration’s tardy but decisive support for Cory Aquino’s People Power movement in the 1980s, U.S.-Filipino relations have gotten on a more even keel, but not even enough to have kept the country from closing key American military bases for eight years in the 1990s.
Of course, Iraq presents its own unique challenges and possibilities. Among other differences, the United States does not view it as a colony at all and certainly not as a possession. But if we can learn anything from our long adventure into the Philippines, it is that we need a policy that will be consistent not only in deed but in word and attitude as well, one that will avoid condescension and be directed toward making a restored, democratic Iraq truly independent.