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N'kisi & the N'kisi Project
N'kisi (pronounced ‘‘in-key-see’’) is a captive bred eight or nine-year-old hand raised African Grey Parrot whose owner, Aimée Morgana, thinks uses language. She doesn't think he just sounds out words. She thinks he communicates with her in language, which would in effect make N'kisi a rational parrot. For example, N'kisi utters "pretty smell medicine" when he wants to describe the aromatherapy oils that Aimée uses.* Furthermore, Aimée says her parrot has a fine sense of humor and knows how to laugh. Imagine having conversations with a humorous parrot. Think of all the things you could talk and joke about, besides aromatherapy. You could discuss the fame that would come to anyone who had a parrot that can think and converse in intelligent discourse, like pretty smell medicine and look at my pretty naked body.* And when some nasty skeptic makes fun of you, the two of you can joke about it.
I'm afraid that this story stretches the boundaries of reasonable credibility, though stories of rational parrots go back at least to the 17th century. John Locke, for example, relates a tale of a Portuguese-speaking parrot of some note in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (II.xxvii.8). These cases are more likely cases of self-deception, delusion, and gullibility than of language-using parrots. Listen to this audio clip of N'kisi, Aimée, and a toy that "talks" when a button is pushed. First listen without reading the transcript. Some of it is intelligible, especially after the fourth or fifth repetition, but it is difficult to understand the "conversation," especially with the toy making its sounds as Aimée stimulates her parrot. Some of the tape sounds like gibberish until you are told what to listen for. When you listen while reading the transcript something amazing happens: you can hear just what you're reading. Why is that? The same thing happens when you listen to audio tapes played backward. When you just listen without anyone telling you what to listen for, you usually don't understand anything intelligible. But as soon as someone shows or tells you what to listen for, you can hear the message. Such is the power of suggestion and the way of audio perception. Hearing is a constructive process, like vision, in that bits of sensory data are "filled in" by the brain to produce a visual or auditory perception that is clear and distinct, and in accord with your expectations. Consider the following from an interview with Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Morgana's inspiration, who has been studying Alex, an African Grey Parrot, for many years:
We were doing demos at the Media Lab [at MIT] for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies, "Want a nut."
Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."
Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the right track with what we were doing.*
Dr. Pepperberg thinks the bird is responding cognitively to her questions rather than simply responding to a stimulus. She thinks the bird is getting frustrated, but she has stipulated earlier in the interview:
I never claim that Alex has full-blown language; I never would. I'm not going to be able to put Alex on a "T" stand and have you interview him the way you interview me.
So, whereas you or I might say "give me the nut or this interview is over" were we parrots with intentionality and language, the parrot's movements and sounds have to be less direct and more complex, so that they have to be interpreted for us by Pepperberg. In her view, Alex is "clearly getting more frustrated" and his frustration culminates with a "very slitty-eyed" expression. But this is Pepperberg's interpretation, as is her hearing the bird sound out the letters of the word 'nut'. It could have been a stutter for all we know, but Pepperberg is facilitating Alex's communication by telling us what she hears. The final paragraph indicates that Pepperberg is having a hard time drawing the line between imagining what a parrot might be thinking and projecting those thoughts into the parrot's movements and sounds. She's also having a hard time getting grant money (NIH turned her down), so she started her own private foundation, the Alex Foundation.
When news of N'kisi broke on the pages of BBC online, there was no mention in the article by Alex Kirby of the parrot having conversations with people other than Aimée Morgana. (The story was originally told in USA Today in the February 12, 2001, edition.) Despite the headline "Parrot's oratory stuns scientists," there was no evidence given that the parrot had stunned anyone during a conversation. It seems that Aimée is to her parrot what the facilitator is to her client in facilitated communication, except that the parrot is actually providing data to interpret and is more like clever Hans, the horse that responded to unconscious movements of his master, than a disabled human who may not be providing any content or direction at all to the facilitator. It is Aimée who gives intentionality to the parrot's sounds. She is the one who attributes 'laughter' to his shrieks and conscious awareness to his responses, though those responses could be due to any one of many stimuli, consciously or unconsciously provided by Aimée or items in the immediate environment. Nevertheless, Dr. Jane Goodall, who studies chimpanzees, met N'kisi and said that he provides an "outstanding example of interspecies communication." There is some evidence, however, that much of the work with language-using primates also mistakes subjective validation by scientists for complex linguistic abilities of their animal subjects (Wallman 1992).
According to Mr. Kirby, N'kisi not only uses language but has been tested for telepathy and he passed the test with flying colors:
In an experiment, the bird and his owner were put in separate rooms and filmed as the artist opened random envelopes containing picture cards.
Analysis showed the parrot had used appropriate keywords three times more often than would be likely by chance.
Kirby doesn't provide any details about the experiment, so a reader might misinterpret this claim as implying that this parrot did about twice as well as people did in the ganzfeld telepathy experiments. In those experiments, subjects in separate rooms were monitored as one tried to telepathically send information from a picture or video to the other. Typically, there was a 20% chance of guessing what the item was but results as high as 38% were reported in some meta-analyses. If the parrot scored three times better than chance, then he would have gotten 60% correct. The odds of a parrot randomly blurting out words that match up 60% of the time with pictures being looked at simultaneously in another room are so high that there is virtually no way that this could happen by chance. However, as you might suspect, Kirby's claim is a bit misleading.
I assume that Kirby was writing about an experiment that was part of the N'kisi project, a joint effort by Morgana and Rupert Sheldrake to test not only the parrot's language-using abilities but his telepathic talents as well. Sheldrake has already validated the telepathic abilities of a dog and thinks the "findings [of this experiment] are consistent with the hypothesis that N'kisi was reacting telepathically to Aimée's mental activity."*
The full text of Sheldrake's study published in the peer reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration is available online. The title of the paper would send most journal editors to their grave, killed by laughter: "Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy." Fortunately for Sheldrake and his associates there will always be a sympathetic editor for another story like that of J. B. Rhine and the telepathic horse, "Lady Wonder." At least Sheldrake's protocols show some measure of sophistication, unlike Rhine's. Even so, as the editor at the Journal of Scientific Exploration commented: "once again, we have suggestive results, a level of statistical significance that is less than compelling, and the devout wish that further work with refined protocols will ensue."* So, we'll just have to wait and see whether further study of N'kisi supports the telepathic hypothesis.
Anyway, here is how Sheldrake set up the experiment. He first compiled a list of 30 words from the bird's vocabulary that "could be represented by visual images." A package of 167 photos from a stock supplier was used for the test. Since only 20 of the photos corresponded to words on the list, the word list was reduced to 20. The word 'camera' was removed from the list because 'N’kisi "used it so frequently to comment on the cameras used in the tests themselves." Thus, they were left with 19 words.
During the tests, N’kisi remained in his cage in Aimée’s apartment in Manhattan, New York. There was no one in the room with him. Meanwhile, Aimée went to a separate enclosed room on a different floor. N’kisi could not see or hear her, and in any case, Aimée said nothing, as confirmed by the audio track recorded on the camera that filmed her continuously. The distance between Aimée and N’kisi was about 55 feet. Aimée could hear N’kisi through a wireless baby monitor, which she used to gain ‘‘feedback’’ to help her to adjust her mental state as image sender.
Both Aimée and N’kisi were filmed continuously throughout the test sessions by two synchronized cameras on time-coded videotape. The cameras were mounted on tripods and ran continuously without interruption throughout each session. N’kisi was also recorded continuously on a separate audio tape recorder. (Sheldrake and Morgana 2003)
According to Sheldrake:
We conducted a total of 147 two-minute trials. The recordings of N’kisi during these trials were transcribed blind by three independent transcribers....He scored 23 hits: the key words he said corresponded to the target pictures....If N’kisi said a key word that did not correspond to the photograph, that was counted as a miss, and if he said a key word corresponding to the photograph, that was a hit. (Sheldrake and Morgana 2003)
However, sixty of the trials were discarded because in those trials N'kisi either was silent or uttered things that were not key words, i.e., showed no signs of telepathy. A few other trials were discarded because the transcribers did not agree on what N'kisi said. In short, Sheldrake's statistical conclusions are based on the results of 71 of the trials. I'll let the reader decide whether it was proper to omit 40% of the data because the parrot didn't utter a word on the key word list during those trials. Some might argue that those sessions should be counted as misses and that by ignoring so much data where the parrot clearly did not indicate any sign of telepathy is strong evidence that Sheldrake was more interested in confirming his biases than in getting at the truth.
N'kisi's misses were listed at 94. Ten of the 23 hits were on the picture that corresponded to the word 'flower', which N'kisi uttered 23 times during the trials. The flower image, selected randomly, was used in 17 trials. The image corresponding to water was used in 10 of the trials. The bird said 'water' in twelve trials and got 2 hits. It seems oddly biased that almost one-third of the images and more than half the hits came from just 2 of the 19 pictures.
One of the peer reviewers thought that the fact that the flower word and picture played so heavy a role in the outcome that the paper's results were distorted and that the paper should not be published. The other reviewer accepted Sheldrake's observation that even if you throw out the flower data, you still get some sort of statistical significance. This may be true. However, since the bird allegedly had a vocabulary of some 950 words at the time of the test, omitting sessions where the bird said nothing or said something not on the key list, is unjustifiable. Furthermore, there is no evidence that it is reasonable to assume that when the parrot is by itself uttering words that it is trying to communicate telepathically with Morgana. Or are we to accept Sheldrake's assumption that the parrot turns his telepathic interest off and on, and it was on only when he uttered a word on the key list? That assumption is no more valid that Morgana's belief that the telepathy doesn't work as well when she makes an effort to send a telepathic message to her parrot. In any case, I wonder why Sheldrake didn't do a baseline study, where the parrot was videotaped for two-minutes at a time while Morgana was taking an aromatherapy bath or meditating or doing something unrelated to the key word pictures. Had he made several hundred such clips, he could then have randomly selected 71 and compared them to the 71 clips he used for his analysis. If there was no significant difference between the randomly selected clips and the ones that emerged during the experiment, then the telepathy hypothesis would not be supported. On the other hand, if he found a robust statistically significant difference, then the telepathy hypothesis would be supported. I suggest he do something along these lines when he attempts to replicate his parrot telepathy test.
In some trials, N’kisi repeated a given key word. For example, in one trial N’kisi said ‘‘phone’’ three times, and in another he said ‘‘flower’’ ten times, and in the tabulation of data the numbers of times he said these words are shown in parentheses as: phone (3); flower (10). For most of the statistical analyses, repetitions were ignored, but in one analysis the numbers of words that were said more than once in a given trial were compared statistically with those said only once for both hits and misses. For each trial, the key word or words represented in the photograph were tabulated. Some images had only one key word, but others had two or more. For example, a picture of a couple hugging in a pool of water involved two key words, ‘‘water’’ and ‘‘hug.’’ (Sheldrake and Morgana 2003)
He calculated 51 hits and 126 misses when repetitions were included. I'm not going to bother with any more detail because by now the overall picture should be clear. Once the statisticians went to work on the data, they were able to provide support for the claim that the data were consistent with the telepathic hypothesis. But nowhere in Sheldrake's paper can I find a claim that the parrot did three times better than expected by chance. In any case, I have to agree with the editor who published Sheldrake's parrot paper: the results have a statistical significance that is less than compelling. However, unlike that editor, my devout wish is that when such studies as these are published in the future, responsible journalists continue to ignore them and recognize them for the rubbish they are. On the other hand, if you happen to think your parrot is psychic, drop Dr. Sheldrake a line. He's set up a page just for you.
Sheldrake has responded to this article. His comments and my responses are posted here.
books and articles
new Grey parrots use reasoning where monkeys and dogs can’t "Christian Schloegl and his team at the University of Vienna, let six parrots choose between two containers, one containing a nut. Both containers were shaken, one eliciting a rattling sound and the other nothing. The parrots preferred the container that rattled, even if only the empty container was shaken....Thus, grey parrots seem to possess ape-like reasoning skills...." [/new]
Last updated 16-Aug-2012


Can You Train Your Pet Cat?
Yes, but it won't be easy.
A border collie named Chaser has been trained to recognize and respond to 1,022 nouns, according to a New York Times profile published last Monday. The extent of Chaser's vocabulary is astonishing, but it's no surprise that a dog could be trained to sit, stay, or fetch particular objects from under the couch. What about a cat? Is it possible to train your Tabby?
Yes, but it's slightly more difficult. Cats were domesticated about 9,000 years ago, and were originally used to hunt mice. It's likely they were selected for their solitary hunting abilities, not for any particular social acuity or inclination to follow instructions. (Dogs, on the other hand, were selected for those very traits.) That doesn't mean you can't train a cat; it just means they won't always respond to the same rewards as dogs. While some dogs are content with a pat on the head and a "good boy!" in exchange for proper behavior, cats typically work for food and might be slower to pick up new tricks. Even so, both species can be trained with the same methods. (The most common are positive reinforcement, clicker training, and targeting.) Cats can be trained to use a toilet bowl instead of a litter box, follow their owners at a command, or perform a high-five.
Dogs dohave larger brains than cats, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of their bodies. That feature may have evolved to help them meet the social demands of living in a pack. And a heightened sociability could in turn make them better at reading and responding to human facial expressions and commands.
If it's possible to train cats, why don't we do it more often? Cats are less of a bother than dogs when they misbehave. While a hyperactive canine might rip up your curtains and your couch, a problematic cat tends to be disobedient in more subtle ways—like waking you up at 5 a.m. for breakfast. Cats are also quieter and less likely to drool on your belongings or jump on strangers. When cats do develop behavioral problems, their owners are more likely to accept and ignore the issue, rather than embarking on a training protocol.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer
Explainer thanks, Christine Bellezza of the Cornell Feline Health Center, Nicholas Dodman of Tufts University, Sandra Sawchuk of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, and Carlo Siracusa of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary Hospital.
Photograph of a cat by Jupiterimages/Thinkstock.


Culture has a special historical and social significance in Slovenia. It was primarily thanks to their culture and their common language of Slovene that the people of Slovenia were able to forge themselves into a nation and survive. Language and culture have for centuries compensated Slovenes for the lack of their own state and political institutions. Slovenia is one of those rare countries, if not the only country in the world, where a day of culture is a national holiday.
In honour of the poet
Slovenia’s national day of culture is 8 February, the anniversary of the death of its greatest poet, France Prešeren
, whose wonderful works from the first half of the 19th century are a supreme example of European romanticism. One such work is A Toast
, now Slovenia’s national anthem. The relevance of Prešeren’s poetry played a role in the creation of the first real national political programme, which helped to forge the Slovenian national identity. The annual Prešeren Prizes
are the highest awards for the most important and momentous achievements in culture.
Credit to the protestant
One of the most important foundations of Slovenian culture was established by another literary figure, the protestant pastor Primož Trubar
, who published the first book in Slovene in 1550. It was then that Slovene officially joined the family of European literary languages.
The power of verse and the written word
Literature also held a special place in Slovenian culture in the 20th century, when the playwright Ivan Cankar
, the poet Srečko Kosovel
, contemporary poets like Ciril Zlobec, Kajetan Kovič, Tomaž Šalamun
and Dane Zajc
and the writers Vitomil Zupan, Drago Jančar, Boris Pahor
and Lojze Kovačič
all left their mark. Many of their works have been translated into multiple European languages.
Further evidence of the importance of books in Slovenian culture is that Slovenia is ranked at the top of European countries in terms of the number of books published per head. In 2010, Ljubljana was selected by Unesco to be the World Book Capital. In 2012, Maribor was the European Capital of Culture
Pillars of culture
Slovenia has a very well-developed network of cultural institutions, organisations and associations, comparable with the wealthiest and most progressive countries in Europe. The Slovenian Philharmonic
is one of the oldest orchestras in Europe, with a history of more than 300 years.
There are professional opera and ballet companies
in Ljubljana and Maribor, and numerous professional theatre groups
, including Drama (Slovenia’s national theatre),
the Youth Theatre
and the Puppet Theatre
Cultural life is rich and varied at the museums, galleries and cultural centres, pride of place among which is taken by Cankarjev Dom
There are a host of top festivals in Slovenia, particularly in the summer: the Ljubljana Festival
at Križanke, the festival of early music in Brežice
, the Primorska Cultural Festival
and a series of cultural events under the aegis of Imago Sloveniae
. Maribor’s Lent Festival
is also a favourite.
There are 45 permanent galleries in Slovenia, and over 800 spaces where works of fine art are exhibited permanently or occasionally. The most important in Ljubljana are the Museum of Modern Art,
which focuses on modern works, and the National Gallery,
whose collection consists of older works. Impressionism
made Slovenian painting known throughout Europe in the first half of the 20th century, while the Ljubljana graphic school
was renowned after the Second World War.
There are five professional orchestras
in Slovenia, and a host of musicians who are famed outside the country. The largest concert halls are at the Cankarjev Dom
cultural and conference centre, which holds close to a thousand events each year.
Slovenia’s own brand of polka music reached its peak in the accordion and ensemble of Slavko Avsenik
, while the annual festival in Stična is a feast of choral singing
, and the France Marolt
folk group have performed their singing and dancing all over the world.
The contemporary thrill of classical music is the territory of the Slovenian Philharmonic, particularly its top musicians, flautist Irena Grafenauer
, pianist Dubravka Tomšič
and soprano Marjana Lipovšek.
Laibach have been a highly influential band in the last few decades in modern alternative music. The ethno-pop of Magnifico
has gained a rising international profile. The giants of Slovenian pop music are Vlado Kreslin
, while Slovenian DJs are welcome on global dancefloors, most notably DJ Umek.
Architecture is also a vital part of Slovenian culture. The most famous native architect, Jože Plečnik
, was a pioneer of modern Slovenian and European architecture of the 20th century. Ljubljana is famed for his work. Many of Plečnik’s students continued his legacy in the second half of the 20th century.
International cultural events
Each year Slovenia hosts a number of other events that are renowned further afield. To mention a few: the Exodos
dance festival in Ljubljana, the Ana De
setnica festival of street theatre, the PEN meeting
in Bled and the Vilenica
literary festival near Sežana.
In short, the range of cultural events, festivals, concerts and exhibitions in Slovenia is enough to satisfy the most demanding of guests.
The small size of the market means that many artistic and cultural activities in Slovenia enjoy significant support and subsidies from the government (approximately two-thirds of the requisite funding), and funding from local authorities. It is remarkable that less than 10% of cultural activities’ earnings come from the consumer, i.e. visitors to cultural events. The exception of course is the entertainment industry, notably pop and jazz, where the performers have to rely on their own ingenuity to earn their dues.


"Brainstorming is a group creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution to a problem. The method was first popularized in the late 1930s by Alex Faickney Osborn, an advertising executive and one of the founders of BBDO, in a book called Applied Imagination. Osborn proposed that groups could double their creative output by using the method of brainstorming." -Wikipedia Article on Brainstorming
Pages in category "Brainstorming"
This category contains only the following page.


A dramatic drop in the population of puffins at their main North Sea breeding site has alarmed scientists.
- Global warming blamed for decline of puffins
- Britain's oldest puffin resurfaces
- British birds face potential eco-disaster
After almost 40 years of breeding success puffin numbers on the Isle of May have plummeted by 30 per cent.
It is not known whether the sudden decline is merely a blip or whether the tiny iconic bird has joined the list of sea birds in long term decline in the North Sea.
The sudden drop in numbers was revealed in a survey carried out every five years on the island off Scotland's east coast by scientists from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.
The Isle of May is home to the largest colony of puffins in the North Sea and has been the centre of the UK science community's research into the bird for over three decades.
Numbers have increased dramatically from a handful of pairs 50 years ago to more than 69,000 pairs at the time of the last count in 2003.
Scientists had expected numbers to soar to more than 100,000 pairs this year and are baffled by the loss of almost one in three birds.
Professor Mike Harris, Emeritus Research Fellow at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who has studied puffins for 36 year, said: "Something worrying appears to have happened over last winter and probably the one before.
"Puffins appear to be joining the ranks of other seabirds in the North Sea that are suffering reduced breeding success and decline in numbers."
The puffin (Fratercula arctica) is instantly recognisable by its bright red and black eye markings and vivid orange legs and is known as the clown of seabirds. But its comical looks and endearing traits has made it one of the world's favourite birds.
Adults arrive back at their breeding colonies in the Shetland and Orkney Islands, Northumberland, Anglesey and the Isle of May in March and April and they leave again in mid-August. They nest in burrows on the cliff tops and rely mainly on sand eels to feed their young.
The disappearance of the sand eel due mainly to industrial fishing by factory ships in the North Sea is believed to be one of the main factors in the puffin's decline on May.
Bird numbers are assessed by carefully examining burrows for signs of occupation in late April after the birds have cleaned them out ready for breeding. In past surveys the occupancy rate was nearly 100 per cent, but this year it was down to only 70 per cent.
Scientists also noticed fewer birds than usual had returned to the island and those that did were underweight compared to previous years suggesting they may have had a difficult winter.
Unusually high numbers of puffins, including some ringed on the island in previous years, were washed ashore dead during the last two winters.
Professor Harris said: "We need to repeat the survey next year to check the unlikely possibility that a large numbers of puffins took a summer off from visiting the Island. We also need to widen the survey to include other colonies in the North Sea to measure to what extent the puffin population is declining in the area."


Fly ash isn't just filler in concrete. As a very fine-grained pozzolan, it reacts with the calcium hydroxide that is generated by the hydration reaction of cement and water to take on cementitious properties of its own. The reaction makes concrete stronger, less permeable, and reduces the alkalinity, which can reduce the danger of alkali-silica reactivity in the aggregate—and the need in some parts of the country to import nonreactive aggregate from distant sources.
Fly ash concrete is more workable and pumpable. It also hydrates more slowly, which reduces the heat of hydration—critical to reducing cracking in mass concrete placements. All of this makes fly ash concrete more durable than plain portland cement concrete. And concrete with fly ash costs less, because fly ash is typically less expensive than portland cement.
Due to all these advantages, fly ash is used in about half the concrete placed today. NRMCA estimates that 15% of cementitious materials in concrete are replaced by fly ash and other supplementary cementitious materials. Typically specified as a percentage replacement for portland cement, both Class C and Class F ash is used at dosages as high as 50% (although 15% is more common).
But the percentage of fly ash use has been increasing. To achieve a more sustainable concrete, producers and engineers have been increasing replacement rates. One recent study used fly ash at replacement rates up to 30% with no adverse results on a hard-troweled concrete floor (see “Adding Fly Ash to Concrete Mixes for Floor Construction” CONCRETE CONSTRUCTION Special Floors Issue, November 2007).
There is a limit to how much fly ash our industry can use. First, not all fly ash is equal. “Every power plant has its idiosyncrasies” says Morris “Skip” Huffman, former chairman of ACI Committee 232, Fly Ash, and division manager with Headwaters Resources, a marketer of fly ash. “The quality can vary, depending on exactly how the plant is being run. Some fly ashes have higher sulfur trioxide (SO3) contents and are not suitable for use in concrete. Some have problems with higher carbon content or they are too coarse. But the majority of ash, especially in the western U.S., is suitable for use in concrete and can go straight from the plant to the silo.”
And contractors often object to using fly ash concrete. These concerns include set time, air content, and strength gain. Some fly ash can retard hydration and lead to longer set times and slower strength gain. And some can lead to loss of entrained air. An experienced concrete producer can easily overcome these issues. In January 2006 CC, (Using High Volume Fly Ash Concrete), Lattimore Materials' Richard Szecsy notes that even at replacement rates as high as 50%, the set time and strength gain can be controlled using admixtures and proportioning.Why a hazardous waste?
No one argues that containment pond failures are acceptable—they are not. And no one doubts that there should be tighter regulations governing their design, construction, and maintenance. But to many proponents supporting fly ash use in concrete, regulating final disposal methods is a completely separate matter than designating fly ash as a hazardous waste under Subtitle C.
The problem is that the EPA wants more authority than the current law allows. At the September 2009 meeting of the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS), Matt Hale, director of EPA's Office of Resource Conservation & Recovery, said that while he believes that regulating fly ash under Subtitle D would be sufficient to protect public health and the environment, it doesn't provide the EPA with the authority to enforce more stringent disposal requirements.
InsideEPA.com reports that the agecy's current proposal is an unusual “hybrid” approach: designating fly ash as hazardous if it's disposed of in a containment pond or landfill but not hazardous when recycled for “beneficial uses.” This proposal could mean that producers and power plants would have to transport, store, and treat fly ash as a hazardous waste in its powder form, but not after it's incorporated into concrete.
However well-intended, a hybrid approach to fly ash classification would cause our nation significant problems.


The study involved the first-ever use on an infectious disease of a new research technique called chemical genetics. Every virus presents scientists with a new kind of genetic code—the challenge is to figure out how to decipher it to gain a fuller understanding of how the virus works and how to combat it. In the past, such research was often slow and laborious. But thanks to chemical genetics—which allows scientists to quickly test how a new virus reacts with thousands of different chemicals—viruses that might have remained indecipherable for years can now be at least partially unlocked in months or even weeks. "Instead of testing out keys in a lock one by one, it's like trying out 50,000 keys all at once," says Yuen.
The point of both chemical and classical genetic research is to figure out which genes do what—in effect, to learn to read an organism's genetic language. In classical genetics, scientists usually mutate an organism, see how its functions have changed (a mutated virus might no longer be infectious) and then work back and identify which gene mutated. If a mutated virus loses its ability to infect a cell, then that gene probably has something to do with infectivity. In chemical genetics, explains Dr. Richard Kao, the lead researcher on the HKU study, scientists try do the same by testing thousands upon thousands of chemicals on virus samples. The vast majority won't have any effect, but a handful will. Researchers can then take those virus samples and use further tests to figure out which viral gene has been affected by which chemical. "If we discover that interfering with a certain gene stops the virus from replicating, then we know that gene's function likely has to do with replication," says Kao, a biochemist who brought his passion for chemical genetics to HKU from Harvard University, where the process was first pioneered in the early 1990s.
In HKU's SARS study, Kao and his colleagues filled the tiny wells of a small, waffle-like board with samples of the coronavirus cultured in cell lines. Microscopic amounts of different chemical compounds were introduced into each separate well using a $180,000 machine called an automated high-throughput screening platform. Once the chemicals had time to interact with the virus, scientists could examine the results with an inverted microscope. The process was repeated until all 50,240 compounds in their chemical library had been tested, which took a few months. "You'd think it'd be tedious work, but it's really not that bad," says Kao. If the chemical failed to interfere with the virus, as was the case with most of them, researchers would easily see evidence of unchecked infection in the cell lines. But about 1,000 compounds seemed to slow the virus, and 104 of those all but stopped infection. It stood to reason that those compounds were hitting the viral genetic pathways that were most important for infectivity.
With help from their collaborators at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, Kao and his colleagues discovered that one of 104 compounds inhibited a kind of viral processing inside the cell, six inhibited viral replication and 18 seemed to prevent the virus from entering the cell in the first place. (Kao says further work will be needed to figure out which viral genes the remaining 78 compounds affect. One of them seems to affect both processing and replication.) A number of these compounds could form the basis for promising anti-SARS drugs, and HKU plans to begin animal-testing some of the most effective compounds soon. But the real value of the study is the clearer picture it offers of the SARS virus and the blueprint it provides for research responses to any future emerging diseases, like avian flu. "We can react more rapidly, and we can find new drugs that specifically target the disease," Kao says. "If there's a new virus, we can jump onto this."
Around HKU, that's a question of when, not if. HKU's work on SARS and bird flu has helped transform a regional university into a world player in disease research, and its staff understand that they are part of a vital bulwark. "Hong Kong is a very strategic place to be for emerging-infectious-disease work," says Yuen. And when the next would-be superbug pops up, at least scientists will have one more arrow in their quiver.


Kindergarten Puzzle Games:
K (5-6 yrs)
Alphabet Crossword is a simple puzzle and vocabulary exercise for preschoolers. The game progresses from A to Z, teaching the child some common words associated with each alphabet. Kids have to fill the crossword puzzle by clicking and dropping the words in the corresponding blank spaces. Through this puzzle game, kids will build and expand their vocabulary as they learn new words, their spellings and their pronunciations.


Lauretta Underwood, 72, said she can clearly remember the day her mother told her she was about to witness history as she was dropped off at school.
Following the landmark Supreme Court case Brown V. Board of Education, which made school segregation unconstitutional, Central High School and the state of Arkansas became a national symbol of integration resistance, according to the Arkansas Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.
The school board complied with the law and adopted a plan to integrate, beginning at the high school level and working down to the lower grades starting in 1957, according to the website.
On Sept. 2, 1957, nine African American students who volunteered to attend Central High School were stopped by the Arkansas National Guard under the direction of Gov. Orval Faubus, who asserted the students’ entrance to the school would cause violence, the website states.
President Dwight Eisenhower brought in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to ensure the students were allowed to attend the school on Sept. 25.
Mrs. Underwood said mobs of people, many of whom were mothers, were protesting and the soldiers formed a perimeter around the school, but she was not afraid as she entered.
“In a way, you felt safe because you knew they were there to keep things under control, and there were tanks and trucks everything — it was like a warzone,” she said.
She said, before the airborne division came in, students flocked to the windows as an innocent black man was beaten and dragged down the street by a mob. From her vantage point, she wasn’t exactly sure who stopped the violence, but it appeared the National Guard wasn’t doing much.
“Best I can remember, he was just an innocent guy walking down the street, and there was a mob, and they were going to take it out on him,” she said.
“The people that were protesting the most were the mothers,” she said. “The fathers were at work. (It was) not all of them, a minority were … protesting.”
Some mothers picked up their children from school that first day if they had a class with an African American student, and one of them addressed Earnest Green while he was in study hall, she said.
“Most of the mothers who came to get their kids were quiet and respectful, but one (that) came to the door when I was in study hall was not,” she said. “I won’t (repeat) what she said, but it’s still in my memory. He just put his head on his desk — never said a word.”
Mrs. Underwood said study hall was the only class she had with Earnest, and speaking was not allowed in the class. She said, although they were never friends, she considered him to be very nice, polite and intelligent.
The two also shared a lunch period and after the resistance that day, Earnest ate lunch by himself.
“Part of me wanted to get up and join him,” she said. “I knew that was the right and Christian thing to do, however, I did not have the courage to do so, and no one else at my table would go with me.”
Mrs. Underwood said after a few days, a group of boys found the courage to sit with Earnest and he gradually made friends at the school.
Despite the initial resistance, most students did not go out of their way to make the nine student’s lives difficult, she said.
“Most of the kids were pleasant to the nine, or at least ignored them, but there were some who were cruel and harassed them constantly,” she said. “They were the minority. The majority were either nice to them or left them alone.”
Mrs. Underwood said the ceremony was held outside in the school’s stadium and Earnest was booed and jeered at as he walked across the stage during rehearsal.
A strong police presence was at the actual ceremony, and Mrs. Underwood said she became anxious as Earnest’s name was called out.
“I didn’t want them to do that to him,” she said. “He was such a nice guy, so when he called his name, I was holding my breath. There wasn’t one sound, one jeer, one boo one anything — it was just quiet.”
Looking back on the historical year, Mrs. Underwood said she had one regret.
“I know as a Christian I felt really bad for not befriending Earnest, but I’m happy to see hearts have melted and race relations have improved,” she said. “I pray they will continue to get better.”


1865 Born in Bombay, where his father was a Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the Bombay School of Art.
1870 Rudyard and his younger sister are taken to England by his parents and placed in Calvinistic foster home were he is nagged, bullied and beaten.
1876 Rudyard's mother returns to England and discovers the mistreatment that her children had endured. Rudyard is removed from the foster home and he is sent to a private school called the United Services College.
1881 Schoolboy Lyrics published.
1882 Rudyard leaves school to return to India. His father, who was then the curator of the museum at Lahore, gets him a job as assistant editor of the English paper, The Civil and Military Gazette, which was published in that city.
1886 Departmental Ditties is published.
1887 After five years as sub-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, Rudyard is sent to Allahabad, several hundred miles to the south, to work on the much more important sister-paper, The Pioneer. The proprietors were starting a weekly edition for home, and he was given the editorship. He publishes Soldier Tales, Indian Tales, and Tales of the Opposite Sex. Among them were such powerful and grusome stories as The Mark of the Beast and The Return of Imray.
1888 Publishes Plain Tales from the Hills his first work which explores the psychological and moral problems of the Anglo-Indians and their relationship with the people they had colonized. Also published are: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Wee Wee Willie Winkie and Turn overs from "The Civil and Military Gazette"
1889 Rudyard leaves India for England and settles down in Villiers Street, Strand.
1890 The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories and The City of Dreadful Night are published.
1891 The Light that Failed, Letters of Marque and Life's Handicap are published.
1892 Barrack-Room Ballads, Rhymed Chapter Headings and The Naulahka are published. Rudyard marries Carolyn Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier, who is an American. Because of his health breaking down, Rudyard and his wife settle down in Brattleboro, Vermont where his wife's family had long been established.
1893 Many Inventions is published.
1894 The Jungle Book is published.
1895 The Second Jungle Book is published.
1896 The Seven Seas and Soldier Tales is published.
1897 After a violent arguement with his in-laws, Rudyard and his wife move back to England and settles on a country estate. Captains Courageous is published.
1898 An Almanac of Twelve Sports,The Day's Work and A Fleet in Being are published.
1899 Rudyard goes to South Africa, in the midst of the defeats of the Boer War. His eldest daughter Josephine dies of measles. Stalky and Co. and From Sea to Sea are published.
1900 The Kipling Reader is published.
1901 Kim and War's Brighter Side are published.
1902 Just So Stories is published.
1903 The Five Nations is published.
1904 Traffics and Discoveries is published.
1906 Puck of Pook's Hill is published.
1907 Collected Verse is published. Rudyard Kipling becomes the first English author to recieve the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1909 Actions and Reactions is published.
1910 Rewards and Fairies is published.
1911 A History of England is published.
1912 Collected Verse (British edition) and ,Songs from Books is published.
1914 Rudyard emerges from seclusion as the official writer-up of the new armed forces of the Crown.
1915 The New Army in Training and France in War are published. "Mary Postgate."
1916 Rudyard's son is killed with the Irish Guards. Sea Warfare is published.
1917 A Diversity of Creatures is published.
1919 The Graves of the Fallen and The Years Between are published.
1920 Horace Odes, Book V and Letters of Travel are published.
1923 Elected Lord Rector of St. Andrews University. The Irish Guards in the Great War and Land and Sea are published.
1924 Songs for Youth is published.
1926 Sea and Sussex and Debits and Credits are published.
1927 Songs of the Sea is published.
1928 A Book of Words is published.
1929 Poems, 1886-1929 is published.
1930 Thy Servant A Dog is published.
1932 Limits and Renewals is published.
1934 Collected Dog Stories is published.
1936 January 18th Rudyard Kipling dies of a perforated duodenum.
Last modified 1988


The California Community Colleges
Throughout the late 19th
century and early 20th century, states established public
colleges and universities, funded enrollment expansion, and launched
an experiment in social engineering. The result was a transformation
of the scope and purpose of American higher education. California
can be seen as leading this transformation. California reflected the
struggle of most other states to coordinate their respective public
institutions. Issues of governance, autonomy, funding,
and accountability gained greater importance in local and statewide
politics. As the need of higher education in American society increased,
the number of public institutions grew. The cost to taxpayers advanced
these developments, but it differed in its early development of a
coherent organizational structure for public higher education. In
the Progressive Era, California established and funded a groundbreaking,
geographically dispersed system of public colleges and a multi-campus
state university . California Progressives created a
social contract and an organizational structure that coupled the promise
of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop
institutions of high academic quality—an influential model that John
Douglass, in his book The California Idea and American Higher Education:
1850 to the 1960 Master Plans, calls “The California Idea.”
A Pivotal Role
California played a pivotal
role in the development of community colleges and districts in America.
Legislation in California produced some of the earliest community
colleges in the country. The district college soon became the model
for most public community colleges in the nation and other states
moved quickly to pass similar legislation.
Social, political, and
economic forces shaped public higher education in California. Its
major personalities include David
Starr Jordan, Benjamin
Ide Wheeler, Hiram
Warren, and Clark
The first two-year colleges
in California began with the recognition by local townspeople that
many young high school graduates, unable to take up residence at an
often distant college or university (usually for financial reasons),
might benefit from college level studies. The founders of these institutions
tended to be modest about their aspirations. They wanted to make it
clear that they were in no sense proposing to compete with four-year
Generally, these colleges
were established by an existing high school district as just one more
service offered to the community by the democratic school system.
It was not long, however, before the "post high school experience"
grew into full-fledged junior colleges. Ultimately these institutions
became today's "comprehensive" California Community Colleges.
some debate the origins of how the junior college came to California,
evidence points to William Rainey Harper, President of the University
of Chicago. Letters authored by Harper around 1900 noted that he was
working with three California Colleges on the junior college idea.
However, it was David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford College,
who became the most important figure in the junior college movement
in California. Jordan's friendship and exchanges with Harper, as well
as his tenacious persuit of the separation from the university's lower
division, made him one of the most important figures in California's
two-year college movement.
A California law adopted
in 1907 (Upward Extension Law) allowed high schools to offer "postgraduate"
classes. Many historians have described this law as the beginning
of the California junior college system. The historical record, however,
does not support this view. Both extended high schools and two-year
colleges appear to have existed before the 1907 law. There is some
historical evidence that many California high schools were already
offering post diploma courses before the law was passed. William Rainey
Harper noted in 1900 that five California colleges were already preparing
to convert to junior colleges. These institutions may have converted
before 1907 (Witt, p 53).
The first use of the Upward
Extension Law in the state was Fresno High School around 1910. With
the assistance of universities Stanford and Berkeley, a principal
and instructors were chosen for the first junior college in California.
The school provided courses primarily to prepare persons for work
in agriculture or industry. In 1913, Bakersfield, Fullerton, and Long
Beach founded junior colleges. Between 1915-1916, Azuza, Chaffey,
Riverside, Sacramento, and Santa Ana followed suit. By the end of
the decade, California had created the most extensive junior college
system in the nation (Witt, p. 53).
The Development of
Districts in California
Another piece of California
legislation passed in 1917, the Ballard Act, which provided state
and county support for junior colleges. This Act followed the state
funding formula for high schools and provided funding to community
colleges on a per-student basis. In 1921, the District Junior College
Law amended the Ballard Act. This law allowed for the creation of
community college districts to fund and administer junior colleges
in California (Witt, p. 52-53).
With the establishment
of college district boards of education, freestanding institutions
of higher education were controlled by the electorate, not by an academic
elite. This combination of local control and public funding allowed
junior colleges to adapt rapidly to the needs of their districts.
Local control also contributed to the rise of vocational education,
adult education, evening classes, and other innovations that distinguish
today's community colleges. This new law had an immediate effect as
three junior college districts formed soon after, including Modesto
College in September 1921. Eight days later Riverside Junior College
reorganized under a district plan, and two months later Sacramento
created a college district. California had thirty-one public junior
colleges, fourteen of them districts, by 1928. The
1920's and 1930's were a period of increased growth and interest in
the community college. By 1930, approximately 150,000 students were
enrolled in the community college system (Witt, p 96-113). Most of
that growth took place in Illinois, Texas, and California.
The second world war created
a demand for vocational programs. Many junior colleges participated
in the newly approved Civilian Pilot Training Program. The greatest
concentration of these programs was in California and Texas. This
defense effort provided a boon, increase in scope, and new acceptance
for junior college vocational programs. In addition, with students
facing military draft, junior colleges began offering accelerated
degree programs. For example, San Bernardino Junior College shortened
their associate degree to three semesters (Witt, p.119). Throughout
the nation, despite the fact that the Selective Service Act of 1940
exempted college and university students from the draft, enrollments
declined and small private junior colleges closed. Conversely, California's
booming defense industry provided for an establishment of ten new
colleges during the war. By 1945, the state had fifty-seven junior
colleges (Witt, p. 125-128).
Following World War II,
colleges were given a boost with the passage of the GI Bill. Under
the GI Bill, any honorably discharged veteran who had served ninety
days or was injured in the line of duty was entitled to a free college
education. The government would pay for tuition, books, and fees at
any approved institution. After the decline in enrollments nationwide,
colleges scrambled to meet the demand. Once again, California blazed
ahead of the nation with the establishment of 18 new public junior
colleges in the first five years after the GI Bill passage (Witt,
By the end of the 1950's,
as the baby boom generation was preparing to graduate from high school,
California claimed the largest two-year college enrollment in America.
Nearly 300,000 students were part time or adult education students.
About 91,000 were enrolled in full-time or certificate programs (Witt,
The history of California
public higher education from statehood to politics and economic forces
eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher
Education. This plan, formulated by a commission headed by Clark
Kerr, then president of the University of California, remains the
controversial basis of California Higher Education today. By the end
of the decade nearly half the states in the nation had adopted similar
plans. The controversial plan created a three-tiered system of higher
education and placed new restrictions on admissions to state colleges
and universities. The upper 41 percent of graduates could enter other
state colleges and universities. The remaining students would be diverted
to the state's junior colleges. Many complained that the poorest of
students were being relegated to two-year colleges. Others felt that
the two-year college provided a nurturing environment where students,
eliminated from a state university, succeeded.
During the 1970's, community
colleges nationwide faced a drop in enrollments. California's system
felt an enormous 9 percent decrease. In addition, on June 6th, 1978,
nearly two-thirds of California's voters passed Proposition 13, reducing
the property tax by about 57%. Funding control shifted to the State,
with the Legislature increasingly involved in community college operations.
A Priceless Treasure
Due in part to a national
recession, two-year colleges experienced a resurgence after nearly
four years of stagnant enrollment. In addition, between 1980 and 1990
minority groups fueled the growth in the nation and contributed to
the new wave of Americans entering colleges. Community colleges served
as the gateway to higher education for this new wave of students,which
called for the restructuring of missions and goals, shared governance,
learning styles, and faculty and staff diversity. Ironically, this
resurgence was temporarily short lived as increased military spending
and a long period of economic growth signaled another downturn in
enrollments. Community colleges looked for new ways to reach out into
untapped sections of the community (high schools, senior citizen centers,
and prisons). These efforts increased enrollments tremendously. During
the 1980's, two-year colleges gained increasing attention from the
White House, as two-year colleges served more voters and existed in
most every congressional district. During an interview with a community
college delegation, then President Ronald Reagan called community
colleges, "a priceless treasure--close to our homes and work,
providing open doors for millions of our fellow citizens...the original
higher education melting pot (Witt, p. 264)."
Tidal Wave II
In the 21st Century new
challenges face California Community Colleges. The importance, effectiveness,
and role of community college education in the competitive California
economy is growing. In March of 2000, the State of California's Little
Hoover Commission undertook a study to determine how well community
colleges were meeting state goals. The Little Hoover Commission, formally
known as the Milton Marks "Little Hoover" Commission on California
State Government Organization and Economy, is an independent state
oversight agency that was created in 1962. The Commission's mission
is to investigate state government operations and, through reports,
recommendations and legislative proposals, promote efficiency, economy
and improved service. According to the commission, the Department
of Finance projects a 25 percent increase from 1996 enrollment. Access
to and effectiveness of community colleges is under greater scrutiny
due to this projected increase.
The commission focused
on two issues: first, understanding the evolving mission of the community
colleges and the roles community colleges play in post-secondary education;
second, reviewing whether community colleges successfully realize
their mission. In short, one of the more significant commission findings
was that the success of the community colleges depends on the quality
of teaching as well as true access to the educational services that
individual students need. The commission's findings and recommendations
are presented in four sections:
- Making Teaching Count:
Quality teaching is not prioritized in hiring, professional development,
or tenure decisions.
- Ensuring Access and
Benefit for All: Colleges fail to identify the potential students
they intend to serve, the barriers that prevent those populations
from benefiting from the colleges, or how resource decisions can
best serve access goals.
- Aligning Funding
with Purpose: Community college funding is baseline and enrollment
driven. Funding structures do little to encourage individual colleges
or the colleges as a system to promote efficiency, cost effectiveness
- Reinvigorating Governance:
Community college leadership is bifurcated between state and
local decision-makers, both of them bound by procedures intended
to give all parties a seat at the table. In the absence of leadership
this muddled governance mutes responsibility and accountability
for the quality and the cost-effectiveness of services offered.
William Rainey Harper's
plan to revolutionize higher education is still alive in the ever
changing California's community colleges.The associate degree has
become an accepted standard of achievement, and millions of students
who would have otherwise been unserved find an open gateway in California's
on the Community College in America. It's History, Mission, and Management.
Ed. George A. Baker III. Greenwood Press, 1994.
Sidney W., and Myron Roberts. The California Community Colleges.
Field Educational Publications Incorporated, 1973.
J.A. The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to
the 1960 Master Plan. Stanford University Press, 2000.
Doors and Open Minds: Improving Access and Quality in California's
Community Colleges. State of California Little Hoover Commission,
March 2000. http://www.lhc.ca.gov/lhc.html
Allen A., James L. Wattenbarger, James F. Gollattscheck, and Joseph
E. Suppinger. America's Community Colleges: The First Century,
Community College Press, 1994. (p. 34).


VISAKHAPATNAM: Scores of indigenous plant species with medicinal value are vanishing from the Eastern Ghats and coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh as indiscriminate exploitation and unscientific method of extracting these plants is hampering their regeneration and resulting in escalation of costs of herbal medicines.
Biodiversity in the region is being adversely affected by untrained locals extracting medicinal plants unscientifically, without planting and seeding, at the behest of middlemen who are associated with herbal product exporters or Ayurvedic drug manufacturers, point out experts.
"Plants like Saptarangi, one of the very few herbs used in anti-diabetic medicines that is found in the marshy lands, is becoming scarce and so is Sidacordisolia that is used for arthritis and rheumatic disorders and is found in the Eastern Ghats," said ayurvedic physician K Jayakrishna.
V Susheela, an ayurvedic doctor from Sree Aurvedic Hospital, said, "Plants such as Satavari used for curing gynaecological disorders, Sariba for skin ailments, Aswagandha for curing anxiety plus neurosis and sarpagandha for treating hypertension are in need of adequate conservation. The cost of herbal medicines has risen 4 to 5 times in the last 2 to 3 years due to the limited availability of certain herbs as well as the hike in prices of gold and mercury, which are important mineral ingredients for ayurvedic preparations. Proper inspection from the AYUSH (Ayurveda Yoga Unani Sidha and Homepathy) department is required to check the indiscriminate and unscientific exploitation and trafficking of rare herbal plants."
"Deforestation and unscientific extraction are rampant in Eastern Ghats and other coastal belts of AP, which is a treasure house of medicinal plants and herbs. The local tribes are given a few bucks by the middlemen employed by Ayurvedic companies who remove all the endemic plants at the same time without enabling propagation or sowing them elsewhere. These plant collectors don't have the required knowledge of chemistry, botany and Ayurveda and hence scarcity of various species of herbs is rising due to their unscientific activities. Training of these tribals in their local language is needed for scientific extraction of herbs," said Jayakrishna.
Zoologist and plant conservationist professor M Rama Murthy also emphasised on the buy-back policy by pharma companies to encourage conservation and propagation of herbal species. While plants such as podapatri to control sugar level and pashanabedhi to remove kidney stones are almost becoming extinct due to indiscriminate exploitation, there are also other useful herbs such as multi-vitamin greens, which are available in plenty but not exploited due to lack of awareness. A scientific approach towards herb collection is the need of the hour," he said.


Five new names have been approved for Mars: Angustus Labyrinthus, Chronius Mons, Promethei Mons, Sisyphi Tholus, and Thyles Montes. The names Australis Patera, Angusta Patera, and Cavi Frigores have been marked as dropped in the database. New imagery has shown that the two paterae were named using the wrong descriptor term, and the area previously named Cavi Frigores has been incorporated into the adjacent Cavi Angusti.
The definition of the descriptor term labyrinthus has been expanded from "Complex of intersecting valleys" to "Complex of intersecting valleys or ridges."
See the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature for more information.


This is the second book wrote by Lee Lehman and presents in a very detailed manner the astrological dignities. It was published in 1989 by Whitford Press.
In Chapter 1 - Two Unsung Revolutions in Astrology the author explains how the Copernican Revolution changed the way astrologers understand dignities. At page 18 one can find a table with traditional and modern essential dignities.
Chapter 2 - Using Traditional Rulerships
Here you'll find many practical examples of charts analyzed using traditional dignities. There are presented five countries (Confederate States of America, Italy, Iran, Switzerland, USSR), five corporations (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Pepsi), five individuals (Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Doyle Arthur, Niccolo Machiavelli, Mark Twain) and one horary chart.
Of course, it is always nice to see how the theory applies in practice, but I was expecting from these examples to emphasize the different results which appears when analyzing the charts with traditional and modern dignities. Unfortunately, this is not happening, the charts are analyzed using only traditional dignities.
In Chapter 3 - The Origin of Rulerships: A Botanical Interlude you can find out which planer or sign rules every planet. You'll see that onion is ruled by Mars, beans by Venus, holly by Saturn etc. Also, there is a table with the medicinal uses of Jupiter- ruled plants. I didn't test these, but it may be helpful.
Chapter 4 - Modern “Rulerships”: Do They Work?
The author is trying to prove that modern rulerships aren't working well and to find arguments. She points out that:
“when modern astrologers discuss the modern rulerships the criterion appears to be: Which body (planet, asteroid or comet) has qualities which most resembles the sign in question?”
So, modern rulerships are assigned counting if a planet qualities are similar with the sign qualities and not looking at the planet strength in a sign. See another quotation:
“We haven't any evidence that the ancients thought that Pisces and Jupiter were synonymous. It was a question of the strength of Jupiter in Pisces, not the similarity of Jupiter and Pisces.”
Now, I think the idea is pretty clear. I must say that I totally agree with this point of view.
Then the charts of Marie Curie, Jeddu Krishnamurti, Adolf Hitler and Death of Dracula are analyzed. This time, Lee Lehman makes an analogy between the charts interpretations with modern and traditional rulerships. The results are pretty good and the lecture enjoyable.
Only one problem, from my point of view. It is analyzed the chart “Death of Dracula”, where Lee writes things like: “I have been fascinated by charts of people who are, so to speak, energy sucks”, “Scorpio Sun (life of the vampire)”, etc. Hei, I am from Romania and I tell you there is no vampire. Dracula is just a myth assigned to a Romanian prince, Vlad III of Wallachia. It is true that he was cruel and liked to kill people by impaling them on a sharp pole, but everything else is imagination.
Chapter 5 – The Meaning of Each of the Essential Dignities
In this chapter you'll find some general characteristics for the five essential dignities: ruler, exaltation, triplicity, term and face. At page 127 is a table with key words associated with these dignities. Starting from these key words Lee Lehman gives many descriptive explanations for dignities, but it just seems to much! There are the same things explained over and over again, it seemed pretty boring to me.
In Chapter 6 – A Statistical Interlude the author is trying to determine the influence of terms (both Chaldean and Egyptian) making a few tests. She selected a number of charts from different categories (suicide, scientist, sport champions) and counted the terms for each planet.
In the final, we can see that the planet that rules the category (for example, Mars for sport champions) obtained more points that usually, on a normal pattern. Even the results apparently validates the importance of terms I won't give to much credit to such a test. Why? Because I don't see terms so important to determine a person belong to a category or another. For example, more points in the term of Saturn won't drive you to suicide because can be many other (not even major) aspects that can change this influence.
Probably, I just don't believe terms are so important an if Lee Lehman is making those test it is clear that she also has doubts.
Chapter 7 – Detriment, Falls and Peregrines means several pages where you can find short descriptions for every planet detriment and fall.
In Chapter 8 – Conclusions there are the final words.
MY EVALUATION: 6
Conclusion. If I would have to say quickly, at my first impression, some words about this book I think would be: “too much noise for nothing”. But, then, if you think for a moment you realize that you can't say “for nothing” because dignities are a very important part in astrology and one could write a whole interesting book about this subject.
So, back to my reasoning, why this impression? Why “too much noise for nothing?”. Maybe, because this book presents shortly the five dignities associated with some main characteristics, ideas repeated in different chapters, but the rest of the book is somewhat near the subject.
You can read about history, botany, statistics, all connected with dignities, but the book doesn't seem to touch the essential points. It is a surface play. It doesn't have those clear, rational statements that gives you a better understanding of the subject.
If a medium astrologer reads this book I don't think will have much to learn and to integrate in his astrological system. Maybe I am a little too harsh, but it is my purpose here to criticize and to present a clear point of view about the astrological books I read. My evaluation is 6.


Food and nutrients help to form strong teeth and bones, muscles and a healthy body. A balanced diet can also help to protect your child against illness. Children’s need for energy and nutrients is high, but appetites are small and children can be fussy, so it can be a challenge to get your child’s diet right especially when feeding them organic food. But there’s quite a bit at stake because healthy eating aids early learning and childhood development.
It’s useful to know that young children can usually regulate their own intake, so remember that pre-school children normally eat the amounts they want, even if it seems they’re not taking in very much. At this age, children are often good at regulating their appetite. If they’re not hungry, insisting on larger amounts of food can create a battle, which you’re likely to lose.
Base your child’s intake on the following food groups to help ensure she’s getting all the important nutrients. Make sure your child has a balanced diet, with food from each of the key food groups every day. The food pyramid helps kids to receive all the nutrients growing children need each day from the five food groups. These are:
Protein – this includes lean meat, fish, poultry, eggs, nuts, legumes
Grains – this includes bread, cereals, rice, pasta and noodles
Dairy – this includes milk, yoghurt, and cheese
They, and you, will need to eat a number of serves from each group depending on their age and how active they are. Growing children need the following number of serves from each group. Let Mindful Eating be a guiding principle. This table shows the suggested number of serves per day by age:
Age in years
3 – 4
4 – 6
4 – 5
1 – 2
1 – 1.5
4 – 7
5 – 9
3 – 4
3 – 5
1 – 2
Sample serves from the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating.
Young children have small appetites, so fibre-rich carbohydrates can be bulky and inhibit the absorption of some minerals. A good mindful eating tip is to gradually introduce higher fibre carbohydrate foods, such as whole wheat pasta and brown rice, so that by the time children are five, they’re eating the same fibre-rich foods as the rest of the family.
Giving your baby a pure start to life really begins nine months before birth.
It’s not so surprising really, given all that rapid and miraculous cell growth and division is fuelled by you. So what to eat when pregnant is a key issue because that truly is the real baby food!
On the other side of the coin, there are some things that are definitely not good. Alcohol, nicotine and other “recreational chemicals” need to be avoided, preferably before you conceive. Enough said on that score.
There is no “magic food” to consume. As usual the answer is simple and logical. The best things to eat when you’re pregnant are simply wholesome fresh foods. Plenty of fruits and vegetables, obviously, but choose a balanced diet from each of the five food groups. Although you’re eating for two, remember its quality not quantity that you’re after. Let Mindful Eating be a guiding principle. Just think about what’s going in your mouth and eat what you should, not what you could, and make water you’re preferred drink.
The interesting thing about this approach is that you’re likely to feel a whole lot better, be healthier and possibly even shed some unwanted fat, even though that’s not the objective. And remember it’s not good to be dieting during pregnancy without the agreement and oversight of your doctor.
Make sure too, that the foods you’re eating contain enough of the key nutrients for pregnancy. Most of us get these through a balanced diet, but you might want to check out choline, usually grouped with the B-complex vitamins. Choline isn’t technically a B vitamin, but it is often included in the B-vitamin family because it does work closely with other B vitamins, especially folic acid Vitamin B9) and cobalamin (Vitamin B12), to process fat and keep the heart and brain healthy. We’ve blogged on choline recently.Pregnancy is a time when the body’s demand for choline is highest. Choline is particularly used to support the fetus’s developing nervous system. I mention it again because studies show intake is low and feedback to our previous blog shows that women don’t know this particular “vitamin”, despite it being an essential nutrient. You can get it through eggs, by the way.
Obviously, as an organic baby food company we like to keep abreast of the latest findings on organic food. The University of Barcelona has just released a study that shows that organic tomatoes contain more polyphenolic compounds than conventionally produced tomatoes.
Phenolic compounds are organic molecules found in many vegetables and have proven human health benefits. Polyphenols are natural antioxidants and are considered to be of great nutritional interest because their consumption is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular and degenerative diseases. Most interesting is the researchers view of why this might be. Organic farming doesn’t use nitrogenous fertilizers; as a result, plants respond by activating their own defense mechanisms, increasing the levels of all antioxidants. It seems that conventionally fertilised plants “don’t have to try so hard” and as a result their production of phenolic compounds is lower. Numerous scientific investigations show that the consumption of these antioxidants has a variety of health benefits. Researchers claim that more studies of clinical evidence are still needed to be able to state that organic products are truly better for our health than conventional ones.
Pregnancy is a wonderful time in any woman’s life. A bit of a roller coaster, yes, but it’s full of new feelings and new learning. Unlike many previous generations, first time mothers now have a clearer picture of what they need to know about nutrition when they’re “eating for two”. Eating for two these days is about quality, not quantity, and new research is turning up all sorts of interesting information on some of the critical nutrients first time mothers, indeed all mums, should ensure form part of their dietary intake.
The most important nutrients to support pregnancy can be summarised as follows:
Biotin • Choline
Folate • Iodine
Iron • Vitamin A
Let’s take a quick look at choline. Choline is clearly important but it appears most pregnant women don’t ingest the recommended daily dose.
Choline is a chemical similar to the B-vitamins, and is often lumped in with them, although it is not (yet) an “official” B-vitamin. Although its entire mechanism of action, particularly how it interacts with other nutrients, is not completely understood, it seems too often work in concert with folate and an amino acid called methionine. Although the human body can make some choline it is generally recognised that it is important to get dietary choline as well.
So what does choline do? It’s long been understood that choline helps in the development of the neural tube. In the developing baby, the neural tube is the embryo’s very early central nervous system that comprises the brain and spinal cord. This really is early development because by four and a half weeks portions of the brain are already forming!
Choline also has some other very important protective roles. It seems it helps in the prevention of miscarriage and stillbirth. It has been found that mothers in the bottom 25% for choline intake have a four times greater risks of having a child with neural tube defects compared with women in the highest 25% of intake.
Along with choline’s brain development function it can also impact on your child’s lifelong learning and memory capacity. But now we’re finding out it does even more.
Researchers at Cornell University, USA, found that increased choline intake during pregnancy could reduce stress levels in the child and lower the chances of it developing hypertension and diabetes later in life. Although adults may take choline, the amount of choline that one is exposed to while still in the womb has a stronger effect over time.
What can you do?
Australian dietary guidelines recommend a minimum intake of 440mg/day of choline. Many women just don’t get that much. Choline can be found in foods like eggs, beef liver and, you won’t be surprised, breast milk!
For comparison 1 large whole egg contains about 112mg, a nice 100g serving of pan-fried calf’s liver can deliver 418mg. 100gm of tofu will give about 28mg and a serve of cauliflower about twice that.
Of course, you can take a good supplement designed for pregnant women, but be careful here. The Bellamy’s team did a little checking and there is at least one very well known brand out there selling a pregnancy supplement that does not contain any choline! In fact, the only prenatal supplement we could find that contains choline is Zycia Natal Nutrients, available from pharmacies.
Use Mindful Eating here, too, and don’t take too much. You only need what’s required. More won’t help.
If you’d like to know more about Bellamy’s Organic and the certified organic baby foods we make, click on this link.
The Cornell paper on reducing stress levels can be found at:


Mali has been engrossed in civil war since January 2012, when separatists in Mali’s northern Azawad region began demanding independence from the southern, Bamako-based government. After forcing the Malian military from the north, however, the separatist forces soon became embroiled in a conflict of their own, between the original Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) and extremist Islamist splinter factions closely linked with Al-Qaeda. On 11 January 2013, France responded to Mali’s urgent request for international assistance and initiated ‘Operation Serval’ to aid the recapture of Azawad and defeat the extremist group. From the 18th, West African states began reinforcing French forces with at least 3,300 extra troops.
In a BBC ’From Our Own Correspondent’ editorial, Hugh Schofield wrote of ‘la Francafrique’, or France’s considerable interests in West Africa held over from the end of formal empire. In fits and spurts, France has sought to extract itself from la Francafrique and to seek a new relationship with the continent. But in the complex world of post-colonial relationships, such a move is difficult. France retains strong economic, political, and social links with West Africa. Paris, Marseille, and Lyon are home to large expatriate African communities. Opinions at l’Elycée Palace, too, have wildly shifted over the years. Jacques Chirac, at least according to Schofield, was ‘a dyed-in-the-wool Guallist’, and an ideological successor to a young François Mitterand who, in 1954, defiantly pronounced that ‘L’Algérie, c’est la France’. Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, dramatically distanced himself both from Chirac and from the la Francafrique role.
The problem is, at least in part, topographical in nature. West Africa’s geography is dangerous, vast, and difficult to subordinate. On the eve of much of West Africa’s independence from France in 1961, R J Harrison Church spoke of the so-called Dry Zone, the area running horizontally from southern Mauritania across central Mali and Niger, as the great “pioneer fringe” of the region’s civilization. David Hilling, in his 1969 Geographical Journal examination, added that by “taming” the Saharan interior, France gained an important strategic advantage over their British rivals in the early twentieth century, enjoying access to resources unavailable along the coast.
But, as A T Grove discussed in his 1978 review, “colonising” West Africa was much easier said than done, and the French left a West Africa mired in dispute, open to incursions, and still heavily reliant on the former imperial power. The French relationship with the region’s extreme geography was difficult at best; political boundaries were similar to those of the Arabian Peninsula and the Rub ‘al-Khali in particular: fluid, ill-defined, and not always recognised by local peoples. European-set political boundaries only exacerbated tensions between indigenous constituencies who had little or no say in the border demarcations.
French and African efforts to dam the Niger River, for instance, were hampered by high costs, arduous terrain, and political instability well into the 1960s. On independence, the French left what infrastructure they could, mostly in West Africa’s capital and port cities; the vast interiors were often left to their own devices. As a result of these events, France has maintained a large military, economic, and social presence in the region ever since. The difficulty is that such areas under weak political control, such as the Malian, Somalian, and Sudanese deserts, have become havens for individuals who wish to operate outside international and national law.
R J Harrison Church, 1961, ‘Problems and Development of the Dry Zone of West Africa‘, The Geographical Journal 127 187-99.
David Hilling, 1969, ‘The Evolution of the Major Ports of West Africa‘, The Geographical Journal 135 365-78.
A T Grove, 1978, ‘Geographical Introduction to the Sahel‘, The Geographical Journal 144 407-15.
Ieuan Griffiths, 1986, ‘The Scramble for Africa: Inherited Political Boundaries‘, The Geographical Journal 152 204-16.
‘Le Mali attend le renfort des troupes ouest-africaines‘, Radio France Internationale, 19 January 2013, accessed 19 January 2013.
Hugh Schofield, ‘France and Mali: An “ironic” relationship’, BBC News, 19 January 2013, accessed 19 January 2013.


Big Data is one of the hottest topics out there. Big data is a foundational element in IT’s quartet of Next Big Things: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. But, as the real world keeps reminding us, it is possible to make bad predictions and decisions even if you use tons of big data to make them. The 9/11 attacks showed how even highly sophisticated intelligence agencies can fail to pick out highly relevant signals amidst the mountains of data being analyzed. Our recent financial crisis showed how even the best and brightest can fail to detect an approaching catastrophic storm. The failure of so many professional forecasters to accurately predict the 2012 presidential election shows that you can find almost any answer you want in all that big data.
Big data is indeed incredibly useful in all kinds of endeavors, but only in the hands of talented professionals who know what they are doing and are aware of its pitfalls and limitations. What are some of these limitations? In thinking about this question over the last few years, I started to notice that a number of subtle, non-intuitive concepts that I learned many years ago as a physics student seem to apply to the world of big data and information-based predictions in highly complex systems. Let me explain.
Over 300 years ago, Isaac Newton laid down the foundations of classical mechanics with the publication of his Laws of Motion. The elegant mathematical models of Newtonian physics depict a world in which objects exhibit deterministic behaviors, that is, the same objects, subject to the same forces, will always yield the same results. These models make perfect predictions within the accuracy of their human-scale measurements. Classical mechanics works exceptionally well for describing the behavior of objects that are more or less observable to the naked eye. It accurately predicts the motion of planets as well as the flight of a baseball.
But, the idea of scientific determinism, which would in principle enable us to predict the future behavior of any object in the universe, began to fall apart in the early 20th century. Classical mechanics could not explain the counter-intuitive and seemingly absurd behavior of energy and matter at atomic as well as cosmological scales. Once you start dealing with atoms, molecules, exotic subatomic particles, black holes and the Big Bang, you find yourself in a whole different world, with somewhat bizarre behaviors like the tunneling effect, which are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity. The orderly, deterministic world of classical physics gives way to a world of wave functions, probability distributions, uncertainty principles, and wave-particle dualities.
Instead of a deterministic world, we now have a world based on probabilities. You cannot predict all the future states of an object or a particle based on its present state. You can map out its behavior, but only as probability distributions of all the possible states it could be at. Moreover, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells you that it is impossible to know the exact state of a particle. You cannot simultaneously determine its exact position and velocity with any great degree of accuracy no matter how good your measurement tools are. The world is intrinsically unpredictable.
In addition, there is no such thing as absolute reality. In classical mechanics something either has the properties of a particle, e.g., a planet, a baseball; or of a wave, e.g, light, sound. In quantum mechanics all objects exhibit both kinds of properties. The concept of wave-particle duality explains that reality depends on what question you are asking and what experiment you perform to answer the question. The very act of observing an object will change the object being observed. Any instruments used to measure its properties will invariable alter the properties being measured.
This transition, from a world view based on scientific determinism to one based on probability distributions, uncertainty principles and subjective reality is not intuitive and difficult to get used to. Even Albert Einstein had trouble accepting it, and famously said “God does not play dice with the universe.” Stephen Hawking, one of world’s top theoretical physicists, concluded in this brilliant lecture:
“ . . .it seems Einstein was doubly wrong when he said, God does not play dice. Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen. . . The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas. It continues to surprise us.”
But, the worlds of the very small, as well as the very large, are not the only ones that exhibit counter-intuitive, seemingly magical behaviors. So is the world of highly complex systems, especially those systems whose components and interrelationships are themselves quite complex, as is the case with systems biology and evolution.
Such is also the case with organizational and sociotechnical systems whose main components are people. Even though these chaotic systems are in principle deterministic, their dynamic, non-linear nature renders them increasingly unpredictable and accounts for their emergent behavior. New terms, like long tails, Freakonomics and black swan theory, – every bit as fanciful as quarks, charm and strangeness, – have begun to enter our lexicon.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an example of a discipline that has transitioned from its original classical, deterministic approach to an approach more suitable to a highly complex, inherently unpredictable topic like intelligence.
AI was one of the hottest areas in computer sciences , in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the AI leaders in those days were convinced that you could build a machine as intelligent as a human being based on logical deductions and the kind of step-by-step reasoning that humans use when solving puzzles or proving theorems. They obtained considerable government funding in the US, UK and Japan to implement their vision. But eventually it became clear that all these various projects had grossly underestimated the difficulties of developing any kind of AI system based on logic programming and deductive reasoning. The field went through a so-called AI winter in the 1980s.
But things started to change in the 1990s when AI switched paradigms and embraced data mining and information analytics, the precursors of today’s Big Data. Instead of trying to program computers to act intelligently, AI embraced a statistical, brute force approach based on analyzing vast amounts of information using powerful computers and sophisticated algorithms.
We discovered that such a statistical, information-based approach produced something akin to intelligence or knowledge. Moreover, unlike the earlier programming-based projects, the statistical approaches scaled very nicely. The more information you had, the more powerful the supercomputers, the more sophisticated the algorithms, the better the results. Deep Blue IBM's chess playing supercomputer, demonstrated the power of such a statistical approach by beating then reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov in a celebrated match in May of 1997.
Since that time, analyzing or searching large amounts of information has become increasingly important and commonplace in a wide variety of disciplines. Today, most of us use search engines as the primary mechanism for finding information in the World Wide Web. Researchers have been developing sophisticated question-answering systems, which can successfully analyze the nuances and context embedded in a complex, natural language question and come up with the right answer. Watson, IBM’s Question Answering computer, which in February of 2011 won the Jeopardy! Challenge against the two best human Jeopardy! players, is an example of such a system.
Economics is another discipline that has had to make the transition from a world of relatively simple mathematical models to one governed by the sophisticated analysis of real world information. During the 1960s, a number of economists, most prominently those associated with the Chicago School of Economics, based their work on what NY Times columnist David Brooks referred to as “the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on that creature.” Paul Krugman called such models, an “idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets . . . gussied up with fancy equations” in a 2009 NY Times Magazine article, How did Economists get it so Wrong?
The elegant, mathematic theories of economic scientism managed to convince a number of powerful government leaders that free markets could self-adjust to just about any problems, thus requiring a very limited, circumscribed role for government. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987-2006, for example, was one of the believers in this well-behaved, self-adjusting economic order. Even when the financial system began to show signs of the coming crisis, Greenspan continued to hold on to his beliefs that derivatives and other financial instruments were extraordinarily useful in distributing risks, thus lessening the need for regulating the increasingly complex financial markets. It wasn’t until October of 2008 that, in testimony before Congress, Greenspan finally acknowledged that perhaps he may have been partially wrong and was now in “a state of shocked disbelief.”
A whole slew of new ideas is now sweeping the field of economics. The new breed of economists are creating a field that has much more in common with empirical sciences than with pure math. Following in the best tradition of physics, chemistry, biology and the social sciences, they are grounding economics on observation and experiments. Theories arise out of empirical analysis, and must reflect the realities, and therefore the inconsistencies and messiness of the real world they aim to explain. They are trying to take into account the social, cognitive and emotional factors that go into the economic decisions that people make.
In discipline after discipline, we are beginning to learn how to deal with the very messy world of big data and complex systems, and how to best apply our learning to make good decisions and good predictions. One of the hardest parts of that learning is the need to let go of our preconceived notions of scientific determinism and get used to living in a world of probabilities, uncertainties and subjective realities. God does indeed like to play games with the universe, but He leaves enough hints around so we too can play the game and keep moving forward.
Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a former vice-president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM. He is a strategic advisor to Citigroup and is a regular contributor to CIO Journal.