text stringlengths 0 596k |
|---|
General view of Girona with the cathedral at one side
The so-called “City of the Four Rivers”, shows us a historic centre dominated by medieval buildings and reminders of Romans, Arabs and Jews. Inside the walled enclosure of "La Força Vella" you can find the culiminating works of its historical destiny. Its excellent position between the Pyrenean chain and the Costa Brava makes a multitude of trips possible, for example, to natural areas which are worthy of mention. Everywhere, the traveller will have the opportunity to try the regional cuisine which brings together in its recipes products of the sea and the mountains.
Set in the valley of the Ter, at the confluence of four rivers, we find the city of Girona. One of them, the Onyar, divides the historic centre from the modern city. The old centre of this Catalan city preserves remains of its long history, from the time it was founded by the Romans in the 1st century B. C. To them we owe its original wall, whose remains stretch from the Archaeological Walk to the Wall Gardens. La Força Vella Set in this walled enclosure (La Força Vella), stands the Cathedral. Its Romanesque origin is shown in its fortress-like appearance and strategic location, although the most outstanding aspect is an immense Gothic nave, the widest in Medieval European architecture. Inside, it preserves one of the textile jewels of Catalan Romanesque, the Creation Tapestry. Beside the entrance staircase to the cathedral is the Pia Alomoina, an old charitable institution in Gothic style. Girona has other key pieces of religious architecture, like the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere de Galligants, a historic-artistic monument; or the church of Sant Nicolau. These are Romanesque churches whose apses and octagonal cupolas deserve a close look as they form key elements of the Catalan medieval style. The convent of Sant Doménech, built in Gothic style and clear example of the importance of the religious orders in the colonisation and repopulation of Catalonia during the Middle Ages, stands amid gardens. Also to this historical period belong important displays of Arab and Jewish art, the result of these cultures living side-by-side with Christianity for centuries. So, you will discover the multitude of small streets making up El Call, the Jewish quarter of Girona. Calle Força is the heart of this district, which had a synagogue and centres of cabbalistic study. The Plaça del Oli and the Plaça del Vi maintain all their flavour; and, in them are some of the greatest jewels of medieval palace architecture, like the Fontana d’Or. The Call is currently one of the best preserved Jewish quarters in Spain. Not far from here, a Capuchin convent houses the Arab Baths, where we should point out a pavilion built on eight fine columns and crowned by an octagonal cupola. Before crossing the river and walking towards modern Girona, you can climb up to the belltower of Sant Feliu or go to the Pont de Pedra (Stone Bridge) over the Onyar, where you can get overhead views of all the houses in the city and their façades painted in ochres, dark blues and copper. On the other side of the river you will find one of the most beautiful examples of Catalan Modernism, the work of Rafael Masó. Outstanding buildings are the Teixidor Factory and the Punxa House, among others. The Hospital de Santa Caterina, a Baroque building from the 17th century, is also in this area. And, on the other side of the Passeig Devesa, is one of the recreational areas for the people of Girona, the Parc Devesa. This is an exotic forest area largest made up of plane trees, giving a strong contrast with the city's medieval architecture. The Costa Brava Girona's excellent position, at the end of the Pyrenean chain and the Costa Brava, bathed by the Mediterranean sea, makes it easy for you to tour the whole province. The coastline that unfolds from Portbou (in the north) to Blanes (in the south) is made up of medieval churches, fishing villages, Roman remains, wide beaches and coves with clear water, among areas of cliffs. In all of them, the juxtaposition of sea and mountains forms an unforgettable landscape. You must not miss places like El Port de la Selva, with its monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes; the Cap de Creus Natural Park; the landscapes of Cadaqués and the gulf of Roses; historic-artistic sites like Pals; or walled towns beside the sea, like Tossa del Mar. And these are just some examples. Right on the Costa Brava, in the village of Begur and on Aiguablava beach, is its Parador de Turismo. It is a modern building that has all kinds of leisure facilities as well as enviable views of the cliffs of Punta D'es Muts, on which it is located. This lovely environment, surrounded by sea and pinewoods, is a fantastic place for discovering Girona cuisine. The combination of products from the coast and inland create recipes like snail stew, flame-grilled vegetables with romesco sauce (made with almonds and chorizo pepper) or rice with fish as starters. Among second courses, you can choose from grilled fish, chicken with spiny lobster or rabbit with chocolate. "Crema catalana" (custard with caramelised sugar on top) or apples in puff pastry, might be among the desserts you choose. All this suitably accompanied by whites, reds and rosés with the Ampurdán-Costa Brava Denomination of Origin. The summits and valleys of the Eastern Pyrenees are also worth a detailed tour. The valleys of Ribes and Núria soften a mountainous landscape crowned by high summits and crossed by fast-flowing rivers. The natural and landscape wealth of the Pyrenees is enriched by the medieval buildings of Puigcerdá or Sant Joan de les Abadesses, the popular architecture of mountain villages like Queralbs or ski stations like those at La Molina or Masella. The high natural value of Girona has earned the protection, as natural parks, of the Empordà wetlands and the Volcanic Area of La Garrotxa. These places are very different from one another. which tell us of the richness of this Catalan province. They can be toured with the help of information offered by their information centres. |
In recent weeks, the River Trust placed wooden stands with litter pickers, a bottle of hand sanitiser, and burlap sacks by the beach where I live. The Trust has asked people to help clean the garbage that washes up from the sea or is left on the beach by visitors. This past weekend, my husband and I decided to help collect the litter because we are concerned about the environmental impact the trash has on animals, fish, and ourselves. Aside from doing our little bit for the environment, collecting the litter also reminded me of working on archaeological excavations.
I am an archaeologist and ancient historian, and studied anthropology as an undergraduate. In the United States, archaeology is taught as a sub discipline of anthropology because archaeologists ascertain the lifestyles of people living in the past, just as anthropologists study different societies in the present. At that time, a key book I read In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life by James Deetz and a documentary I saw Other People’s Garbage, which featured Deetz, both had a profound impact on my interpretative approach to Roman history and archaeology that I continue to use in my teaching and research today.
Both the book and the film clearly explained that archaeology is not simply about collecting artifacts. Rather, objects give us an insight into aspects of past lives that are not recorded in writing. Archaeologists ask questions about the artifacts, such as why and how they were made. They can also study them on a deeper level to learn about social rules of behaviour and people’s beliefs at the time they were used. For instance, by considering the types of artifacts and the places where they were discarded, we can learn about attitudes towards garbage and its proper disposal along with conceptions of cleanliness. Using an example from my home state of Pennsylvania, it was common for both German and English settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries to throw away household waste, usually consisting of food remains (shells, butchered bones, seeds, and fruit stones), broken pottery, and glass, outside the windows and doorways of their houses. On the other hand, human waste was disposed of in privies located away from their homes. Put simply, the settlers discerned that there were two types of waste, each with a place where it was socially acceptable to discard it. Collecting the garbage on the beach made me ask how archaeologists in the future would interpret our lifestyle from the trash we left on the shores and dumped into the sea.
First, if they should find what my husband and I found, they would notice that the preponderance of the artifacts is plastic, that the number of plastic remains is very high, and that the majority were food related: small plastic straws from juice boxes, plastic tops from water and soda bottles, eating utensils, plastic bags, and candy wrappers. They would first note that plastics survive quiet well and do not break easily like glass or pottery. Yet, the high number of similar types of plastics would indicate that they were not reused, in spite of the fact the plastics were not broken. They would then ask why it was acceptable for us to use and discard objects made from reusable materials.
Second, the future archaeologists might look at the chemical composition of the plastics and determine that petrol-based materials are dangerous. They might assume that we were unaware of this. However, if they could access the numerous scientific reports we wrote related to problems with plastics, it would become apparent to them that we understood the dangers they caused. For example, they might find that we knew that plastics break down into microplastics. These pollute our water supply, the land, and then work their way through the food chain, ultimately poisoning animals and humans. Therefore, another question that would arise from their studies would be, why, if they knew the harmful effects these objects were having on themselves and their entire eco-system did they continue to make, use, and discard them on such a regular basis?
Herein lies the deeper question that archaeologists will ask, what was the socio-political context in the late 20th/early 21st century that led to this behaviour? There are a myriad of interrelated reasons that contribute to our reliance on single-use plastics: economic, food trends, and convenience, for example. However, one of the immediate answers that comes to mind is that today’s global world is one replete with time constraints.
Today, many people have very busy work and home lives. After a long and stressful day at work, the last thing many people want to do is cook a meal. Since we are tired, we might buy ready-made food, often in plastic microwavable packaging. If someone has a late night in the office, it is also easier to grab something packed in plastic for the train ride home. Moreover, children’s lives are busy, too, and parents might find themselves taking their two children to six different after-school activities (I exaggerate) in one night; hence, there is little time for cooking or to sit down to a meal that is not rushed. If an archaeologist saw some of our calendars and diaries they would then deduce that our social practice of allowing dangerous plastic into our lives were, in part, dictated by our schedules.
Then, a number of academic studies would follow from this initial deduction that would ask particular questions about our busy life-styles. Some they might ask are:
1. Why would they let their lives become so busy? Were economic problems so bad that they were essentially bound to their bosses and companies? Moreover, could they not think of another way through this besides working longer hours?
2. What was their understanding of living well-rounded lives?
3. How did they value time with family and friends?
4. What was their attitude towards food and eating habits?
5. What were they trying to achieve by being so focused on work and arranged activities that they would allow harmful products to enter the eco-system and their bodies?
Anthropological studies on food have shown that not only is what people eat important to their identities, but how people eat is also socially significant. Meals are some of the main activities that keep societies and families together. Yet, now, at least in societies where both members of the family work, or someone works very long hours, meals are rushed, we do not take the time to enjoy preparing foods, or to regularly enjoy sitting with family and friends while we eat. The garbage we leave behind is a result of this.
As I stated, there are a myriad of reasons for our reliance on harmful plastics. So the next time you see a non environmentally sustainable object, pretend you are an archaeologist in the future and ask how you might interpret our lifestyles in
view of the garbage littering our beaches, roadsides, and other outdoor spaces. By doing this, we can discover underlying causes for our practices and try to make changes to them for the benefit of both our environmental and personal wellbeing. |
By Diana Rocco
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Raising children today isn’t cheap.
“It’s expensive. Keeping up with the Jones’s and keeping the kids in activities,” said Michelle Balisalisa as she was having lunch with her kids in Franklin Square Park.
Those costs only seem to be rising, and new birth numbers suggest it’s leaving more couples to wait till later in life to have children.
“We had our first at 32,” said Chris Lledo.
“We wanted to be set before we started. We wanted to travel and do a few things before we started having kids,” Chris’ wife Lisa said. “We’d like to have another one, but it’s an on going debate with us.”
And now new studies show the economy is also factoring into couples decisions.
Studies show babies being born now can affect the population 20 years from now. Marketers are also paying close attention to birth numbers because they affect the sale of baby items. Over the last five years, as the economy fell, so did the number of new births in the United States.
According to Demographic Intelligence, a company that produces quarterly birthing forecasts, the number of births per woman fell 12 percent since 2007, when the average American woman was having 2.12 children. This year that number is 1.87 and next year’s projection is 1.86.
“Those groups that may be harder hit by the economic downturn are delaying child bearing, but they have the luxury of doing so when they are in their early twenties,” says Dr. Suleena Kalra, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hispanics have seen the biggest decline, while Whites and Asian have actually seen an increase.
“Women who are in their later thirties are probably having more kids due to a career and a number of other factors,” Kulra says. |
Dietrich Bonhoeffer through the lens of Erik Erikson's 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development
An EdD Assignment
This paper will examine the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer focusing specifically on analyzing the review of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Bonhoeffer entitled, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, through the lens of Erik Erikson’s Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a unique individual, born in Germany at the start of the twentieth century, experiencing both World War I and World War II. His father was a scientist and his mother originated from a line of pastor-theologians. This combination would prove formative for Bonhoeffer in regard to his worldview and approach to understanding things. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, theologian, and founding member of the Confessing Church. He is most known for his theological writings, most notably The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. Bonhoeffer is also known for being resistant to the Nazi dictatorship and their persecution of Jews, which eventually led to him being arrested by the Nazi’s in April of 1943 and executed by hanging in April of 1945...
Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ?
By: David W. Jones & Russell S. Woodbridge
The thesis of Health, Wealth & Happiness is "to address the failings of the prosperity gospel as well as give direction to disillusioned followers of prosperity theology" (p. 9) The book is divided into two major sections. The first portion provided a critique of the prosperity gospel by: establishing its origin in a history of the New Thought movement; defining the parameters of prosperity ministries; and exposing the erros of the prosperity gospel. The second portion provided a correction to the prosperity gospel by: discussing the Biblical teaching on suffering; wealth and poverty; and giving by way of a Scriptural defense.
Health, Wealth & Happiness supported its thesis by detailing the flaws of the prosperity gospel, and also assisted to identify a solution for "disillusioned followers." The work is adequately filled with facts and evidence to introduce a churchgoer, or "disillusioned follower," of the error of the prosperity gospel...
Those Who Must Give an Account
By: John Hammett and Benjamin Merkle
Those Who Must Give Account, edited by John S. Hammett and Benjamin L. Merkle, focuses on developing a healthy definition of church membership and a healthy understanding on the significance of church discipline. Their goal in developing Those Who Must Give Account is that as a result, there “will be churches that are closer to the goal of being radiant churches, without spot or wrinkle or blemish, churches that will bring glory to God.” (4).
The purpose of this book is to give church leaders, “guidance on how they should receive and minister to those for whom they will have to give an account.” (1) The title of the book is based on Hebrews 13:17 where church leaders are to give an account. As the book develops, it focuses on the importance of church membership as a boundary for a leader’s responsibility and inevitably as a form of accountability to the member. Church discipline is set in place as a measure of defining that accountability in the hope of restoration and repentance...
By: Larry Osborne
One challenge to church membership and attendance in the twenty-first century is keeping people once they have attended a church. There have been many books and theories written on how to close the back door and help retain the members of a church. Larry Osborne offered his experience and formula for closing the back door in his book, Sticky Church.
Osborne's philosophy on retaining membership is driven by a stron small group ministry. He believes that in order to be effective at keeping people, "our churches need to be stickier" (2008, p. 13). This stickiness will lead to healthier churches by having members that will "not only draw in spiritual window-shoppers and lead them to Christ; they also grow them up to maturity" (2008, p. 13). This method originated for Osborne through examinig the Great Commission passage, which calls Christians to make disciples. Osborne reminds his readers that this task includes "baptizing people and teaching them to obey everything he commanded (2008, p. 13)... |
Enterprise Architecture gets defined as many different things – the Wikipedia definition takes up an entire slide. Jason Bloomberg, renowned architect/blogger remarks that nothing entertains an Enterprise Architect as much as a good old debate about what Enterprise Architecture is. For the sake of simplicity the important thing about Enterprise Architecture that compels me to write this blog, is that it involves visual models. Target State diagrams, Roadmaps, Customer Journeys, Logical Function models… all sorts of models that get produced, not exclusively, by Enterprise Architects. Models are a representation of something about an organisation that enables people to describe what’s going on, what needs to change, or even where-there-be-dragons. Using models helps condense and simplify. After all a picture tells a thousand words.
As I visit clients I can’t help but notice however, how incredibly ugly most of the models are. Speed is important, but if the end result is an ugly mess – is the model actually fit for purpose? My mentor from my days at Gartner was convinced that “being right is only 10% of the problem”. This applies to so many architecture diagrams. They may be right, but who’s going to actually read them?
Everyone has their own style – and everyone is a critic, but it is clear when someone takes pride in the appearance of their work, and when they don’t. It’s more than just style – studies have shown if something is in a format they recognise and is aesthetically pleasing, then people are more likely to agree with the messages within it. It increases ‘cognitive ease’ – the brain puts up less of a fight trying to disagree with it.
So I’m on a campaign. Get Enterprise architects out of Visio, out of PowerPoint, and onto the walls. Not very digital – but to get attention you might need to get in people’s faces – and there’s nothing like a big poster on the wall to get attention.
Information is beautiful is one of my favourite websites. Great for inspiration about different ways to show complex information. Advanced architects are using data analytics to diagnose action and make a case for change – imagine a heat-map of data quality across the enterprises logical data model. Now imagine it populated in real-time from operational systems? That would get some attention.
Making architecture beautiful takes time and practice and a lot of trial and error. For many it’s a new and foreign skill. So grab a new font from Da Font.com, pick a palette from Adobe Kuler, some icons from the noun project, build a billion-dollar-gram of departmental spending and blue-tack it to the wall when you’ve finished. |
Warning: content may be triggering for survivors of sexual assault/abuse.
Elizabeth Wilde’s mouth was stuffed with cloth and her hands were tied behind her back. Hogs rummaged in the yard outside as her master, John Lumbrozo, forced himself on her repeatedly and threatened her with death if she resisted. When the 22-year old indentured servant girl later showed signs of being pregnant, witnesses reported that this respected doctor of Charles County, Maryland gave her a chemical “Phisick” that induced abortion. On a hot day in June, 1663 Elizabeth Wilde gave birth to “a Clod of blood,” while her rapist stood over her and performed the delivery of her dead fetus.
“With the fetus and afterbirth in the chamber pot,” wrote historian Amanda Lea Miracle in her dissertation on the incident, “the doctor threw the contents into the street. And, as neighbors pointed out to her, a further indignity was that any roaming pig could devour it.”
Lumbrozo had previously used sexual coercion against two other women, both of whom were his indentured servants. One, known only as Mrs. Hammond, he admitted to having sex with during his failed bid to challenge a lawsuit from her husband, Mr. John Hammond. The suit was filed, not for sexual assault, but because gossip over the incident was “severely hurting Hammond’s reputation so that his livelihood was in jeopardy.” In the other documented case, Lumbrozo attempted to force his servant, Margery Gold, to have sex with him because her husband owed him money. According to court testimony, Lumbrozo “took her and threw her upon the bed and would have forced her [but] she cried out and thereupon the doctor let her go.” The case was dismissed because there was no penile penetration.
Our society has made significant advances for women’s rights and sexual equality during the last century, but this case study from nearly 350 years ago would not be out of place in the headlines of today. Just this year Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (an institution that claims to provide assistance for poor countries), was arrested for the alleged sexual assault on his maid, a refugee and rape survivor from African Guinea. According to statistics compiled by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission there were 12,772 workplace sexual harassment cases in 2010 (including all forms of sexual coercion, and representing a fraction of the number that actually occurred) and 84% of these cases were brought by women. Employers have gotten increasingly serious about cracking down on such abuses but during the last decade they were still held liable to the tune of $540 million. What is going on here? Could this kind of gender inequality be an intrinsic feature of human nature that we’re stuck with or is it simply a failure to create an environment that prevents such behaviors from reoccurring?
Primatologists and evolutionary biologists have taken this question seriously and have developed some surprising conclusions that could inform our approach to this issue. Unlike Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s book A Natural History of Rape, a thesis that was criticized by scholars both in biology and gender studies, other evolutionary researchers have developed a much more balanced analysis. One example is from the recent edited volume Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans by Martin Muller and Richard Wrangham. As they wrote in their introduction:
[M]ales in a number of primate species appear to use force, or the threat of force, to coerce unwilling females to mate with them….Although the utility of this distinction has been disputed, there is no doubt that sexual coercion is a potentially important mechanism of mating bias within the broad framework of sexual conflict theory.
There are three forms of sexual coercion that researchers have documented in both human and nonhuman primates: harassment, intimidation, and forced copulation. Harassment is the most common and results when males make repeated attempts to mate that imposes costs on females, intimidation is the use of physical violence inflicted on females who refuse to mate with a given male, and forced copulation (or “rape” in the human literature) is the least common form that involves violent restraint for immediate mating. The researchers found convincing evidence that the first two forms of sexual coercion (but not the third) increased the long-term reproductive success among males in Japanese macaques, baboons, and our closest evolutionary relatives the chimpanzees. This suggests that, at least for these three species, sexual coercion has been selected as an adaptive strategy in male sexual behavior.
But what about humans? This is a difficult question to answer since, for reasons of privacy, researchers can’t very well study human sexuality by stationing a field researcher in our bedrooms. However, reported statistics on extreme forms of intimidation can perhaps give an indication of how common sexual coercion is in modern societies. Therefore, in the same edited volume, Evolutionary Psychologist Martin Daly republished the findings that he and his late wife, Margo Wilson, reported in their 1996 paper in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science (pdf here). To address this question they analyzed statistics for uxoricide (killings of wives) in England, Canada, and the United States between the years 1965 and 1990. Just like those researchers who studied nonhuman primates, Wilson and Daly operated under the assumption that the use of sexual coercion would be highest against those women with the highest “reproductive value.” In other words, men would be most likely to use threats or even violence against younger women who had the majority of their childbearing years ahead of them.
As the graphs indicate, their results strongly supported this hypothesis. The highest number of uxoricides occurred in women from puberty to 24-years-old followed by those who were between 25 and 34 (see Figure 1). The lowest rate of uxoricide occurred in those women who were either approaching menopause or were already post-menopausal (50-years-old and older). The researchers also found identical trends for cases of sexual assault committed against both married and unmarried women, indicating that the murders likely had the same motivations as other cases of sexual violence (see Figure 2).
Of course, one objection to these trends could be that younger men are simply more violence prone and would therefore be more likely to assault their partners. However, what Wilson and Daly discovered was that older men who were with younger women actually had a higher rate of intimidation than did younger men. These conclusions fit right in with those of our nonhuman male counterparts showing sexual coercion as a reoccurring feature of human behavior. These findings still need to be compared with results from non-Western societies to eliminate any potential bias produced as the result of culture or environment. But the uncomfortable implication is just what feminist scholars have been arguing all along: the patriarchy is real and it will require committed focus to reduce or eradicate sexual coercion in modern societies.
However, an important thing to remember whenever reading about the implications of human evolution is that biology is not destiny. Fortunately, just as research with nonhuman primates has allowed us to better identify the problem in our own species, it can also provide us with some of the solutions. An important aspect of primate sexual coercion that shouldn’t be ignored is where it doesn’t exist and why. Bonobos are as closely related to us as chimpanzees are since we shared a common ancestor with both between four and six million years ago and the two species later diverged from each other only about a million years ago. There has never been an observed case of male sexual coercion in this species despite the fact that males are still somewhat larger than females.
A unique aspect of bonobo society is that they are a female-dominated species thanks to the network of support that exists between bonobo females. Chimpanzee females are largely isolated from one another, but bonobo females come to one another’s aid. While there may be genetic differences that account for the lack of sexual coercion in bonobos, one important factor is the different environment that promotes these cooperative networks and limits the usefulness of male coercion (see my interview with Frans de Waal for more on this topic). Male bonobos mate more frequently by gaining support from these female networks rather than using sexual coercion as can be found in chimpanzees. Males grow up with this “culture” and observe the older males in their troop emphasize grooming over aggression and then adapt their own behavior in order to maximize their reproductive success.
But bonobos aren’t the only ones. To illustrate how powerful the influence of culture can be for primate societies consider the most extreme example of a sexually coercive species: savanna baboons. Male baboons have been known to viciously maul a female that has rejected their advances and the level of male aggression is strongly correlated with their mating success. However, in a unique natural experiment Stanford primatologist Robert Sapolsky observed what developed when the largest and most aggressive males died out in a group known as Forest Troop (because they were feeding at the contaminated dump site of a Western safari lodge). In the intervening years Forest Group developed a culture in which kindness was rewarded more than aggression and adolescent males who migrated into the troop adopted this culture themselves. As Sapolsky related in his essay “A Natural History of Peace” for the journal Foreign Affairs (pdf here):
The results were that Forest Troop was left with males who were less aggressive and more social than average and the troop now had double its previous female-to-male ratio. The social consequences of these changes were dramatic. There remained a hierarchy among the Forest Troop males, but it was far looser than before: compared with other, more typical savanna baboon groups, high-ranking males rarely harassed subordinates and occasionally even relinquished contested resources to them. Aggression was less frequent, particularly against third parties. And rates of affiliative behaviors, such as males and females grooming each other or sitting together, soared. There were even instances, now and then, of adult males grooming each other – a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings. . . By the early 1990s, none of the original low aggression/high affiliation males of Forest Troop’s tuberculosis period was still alive; all of the group’s adult males had joined after the epidemic. Despite this, the troop’s unique social milieu persisted – as it does to this day, some 20 years after the selective bottleneck.
In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, “culture” consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. Forest Troop’s low aggression/high affiliation society constitutes nothing less than a multigenerational benign culture.
These nonhuman primate examples suggest that an increased focus on women’s rights might not only reduce the current levels of sexual coercion but could benefit society as a whole. If women have increased social power (both politically and economically) they would be better able to resist male sexual coercion due to stronger networks of social support. At the same time this increased social power would be expected to help create a change in male culture that would influence how young men interact with women when trying to gain sexual access.
While specific policies that protect women from coercion and exploitation remain important, what we’re ultimately after is social change. This is something that applies to men and women alike since many women actively participate in upholding sexual double standards. But while we work on promoting gender parity both politically and economically we should also follow the example of our baboon cousins and model the way that men interact with women. This means that more men should take issues of women’s rights seriously so that younger men who look up to them will follow in turn. By doing so perhaps we can create an environment where sexual coercion remains a thing of the past.
This was the ultimate tragedy for Elizabeth Wilde and her own case of sexual coercion. The culture of colonial Maryland held that if a woman became pregnant she must have consented to sex, even if there was overwhelming evidence that she had been raped. As a result, it was the victim who ended up going on trial to face felony charges for “illicit sex” and the murder of her child. In the end her only recourse was to marry the man who raped her, a resolution that was morally acceptable to this deeply Christian community, and which cleared her of all charges.
However, despite the limited options available, Elizabeth Wilde was not completely helpless and turns out to have had a reproductive strategy of her own. Once she realized that she’d been impregnated by her employer, Wilde confided in her fellow servant Joseph Dorrosell that she’d ingested “Ratsbeane” (or ratsbane, arsenic trioxide, a common poison at the time) in order to end the pregnancy. She was in terrible pain and feared death. It was only after Lumbrozo returned home and discovered her writhing in agony that he administered his own abortifacient. But, as Dorrosell testified, “it had done her no wrong” because it was the self-ingesting of rat poison that “did kill the child.” With little hope of finding justice in a patriarchal society, Wilde made the choice to deny her victimizer his reproductive success.
We are fortunate today, at least in the Western world, that women have expanded the choices available to them after many years of successive, slight modifications to the status quo. Evolution may provide the background for some of our species’ recurrent behavioral strategies, but we have the ability to transform our physical and cultural environments in order to influence which strategies are ultimately the most successful. Many of our primate relatives and our own species’ history offers one approach. Perhaps we can choose another. |
If you’re new to car audio, then you are probably wondering what all the hype is over having big subwoofers and lots of amplifiers. If you’ve ever asked yourself what does an amplifier do, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, I will explain what a car amplifier is and what it does within your sound system. I will also cover the different types of amplifiers to help you decide which one will fulfill your car audio-related needs.
The Amplifier: What Does It Do?
In simple terms, a car amplifier boosts the electrical audio signal from your head unit to power high-power speakers and subwoofers. Almost all head units are limited in the amount of power they can send to a speaker. Your head unit can power your typical door speakers and such, but adding a subwoofer to the mix will require a tremendous amount of power to get that “hit you in the chest” type of bass. In order for that subwoofer to work properly, the amplifier takes the lower-power audio signal from the head unit and boosts it to a level that can really make that subwoofer move some air.
How Do Amplifiers Work?
Car audio amplifiers utilize specialized internal power supplies and circuitry to take the electrical audio signal from the head unit, amplify it, then send that “boosted” signal to the speaker terminals.
All car audio amplifiers utilize the same basic components to perform the task it was designed to do. These components are divided into sections on the PCB (printed circuit board). These basic sections are as follows:
- A DC to DC power supply (sometimes called a step-up power supply). This power supply is needed to create the power it takes to power a larger loudspeaker from a 12 volt powered audio source. This power supply can take the 12-volt power source and multiply it many times over.
- Crossover circuits. This circuitry ensures that the proper frequencies are being sent to the speakers in order to provide the best possible sound quality and to avoid damage to the speakers.
- Bridging circuits. Bridging circuits allow the amplifier to “bridge,” or combine, speaker outputs in order to provide an increase in power output. Bridging an amplifier’s speaker terminal is taking two channels and combining them to make a single channel.
- Noise filtering circuitry (also known as “ground loop” noise). This circuitry helps to eliminate any unwanted “noise” from the audio signal. This “noise” can be alternator whine or some other interference within the audio signal.
- Audio signal inputs. The audio inputs can be provided via the typical RCA-type input or speaker-level inputs (high-level input). I discussed what the high-level inputs are and how to utilize a line output converter to convert these speaker inputs to RCA outputs in this post if you’d like to know more.
The Power Supply
The most critical, or important, component of the amplifier is the power supply. This power supply is called the switch-mode power supply, or SMPS. It is the part of the amplifier that creates the higher voltage power from the 12 volts electrical supply source. The amp’s power supply is called switch-mode because it quickly turns transistors on and off, alternating the 12-volt power supply to the transformer. This switching, in turn, causes the transformer to produce high voltages on its output. The switching will also produce both positive and negative voltages. This will allow a fuller range of polarity when the signal is delivered to the output.
The input section of the amplifier is just that, the input. This is where you will connect your head unit’s output via RCA patch cables or through speaker-level inputs. But, even though it seems pretty self-explanatory, the input circuitry of the amplifier actually handles more tasks than that. The input section performs these jobs:
- Allows the amplifier to connect to your head unit using RCA or speaker-level inputs.
- Contains circuitry to help eliminate noise from being boosted and sent through the speakers or subwoofer.
- Performs the crossover tasks.
- Handles the gain adjust of the amplifier. We will discuss the gain later on in this post.
Preventing “Ground Loop” Noise
Ground loop noise, also known as “alternator whine,” is an annoying buzzing or “whine” that can be heard through the speakers or subwoofer and can increase or decrease with engine speed. Ground loop noise is typically caused when an electrical current travels through the body panels of the vehicle and into the audio system.
Luckily, most new amplifiers today contain the necessary circuitry components to nearly, if not completely eliminate all of this frustrating noise.
Most, if not all amplifiers will have crossover functionality. This is a great feature to have because it can help you to fine-tune the frequencies that are sent to specific speakers. Most crossovers will have high-pass and low-pass adjustments that allow you to block or allow frequencies from being played. For example, the low-pass crossover will be used to send only low-end frequencies to the subwoofer. Depending on the size (diameter) of the subwoofer, these frequencies can range from 100 Hz and below. On the other hand, the high-pass crossover would be used to control the door speakers or tweeters.
The GAIN: It’s Not A Volume Knob!
As the title of this section indicates, the gain is in NO WAY a volume knob! The amplifier’s gain adjustment is used to match the speaker, or subwoofer, output signal with the head unit, or source, input signal.
Even though amplifiers feature many other adjustments, the gain, in my opinion, is the most important adjustment of the amplifier and needs to be set properly in order to get the best possible sound quality and to prevent damage to your speakers or subwoofer. DO NOT just turn the gain like a volume knob. Just because your speakers are getting louder, doesn’t mean they are function properly. To ensure your amplifier gain has been set properly, you can use tools such as an oscilloscope (o-scope), or the SMD DD-1 Distortion Detector.
Output: The Channels
All amplifiers have audio output channels. These channels are the individual audio paths that deliver the audio signal to the speakers. There are different amplifier styles or configurations. They can range from a single channel (monoblock), up to 8 channels, or more. Most amplifiers can have their channels bridged, or combined, to create a single channel. This means that the user can take two separate channels and connect them in a specific configuration to create a single channel. This can be useful when you want a little more output wattage, or if you want to run a single speaker such as a subwoofer.
Amplifiers: The Benefits
Amplifiers are a great addition to a car audio system. There are several benefits to installing one in your vehicle. These include, but are not limited to the following:
- Increased audio output (GET LOUD!)
- The ability to add a subwoofer to a boring stock audio system.
- The ability to tweak, or tune, tune the audio signals a bit more than the stock audio system will allow.
This is just my opinion, but I really see no reason why you shouldn’t consider adding an amplifier and speaker or subwoofer upgrade to your vehicle.
If you were unsure of what an amplifier was and what it could do for your audio system, I hope this post has given you some insight and understanding of some of the basics of the car audio amplifier. |
One of the key reasons that companies lose new hires with some experience is that they fail to support these new hires adequately during their first few months. In some companies, it can be quite hard to understand how things work there, how to fit in and be successful, feel valued and included. Having a written onboarding plan from the start is a great way to bring more clarity to the person and also help them understand expectations during the crucial early months in their new roles in the new company.
The onboarding plan can be written as early as during the recruitment process. In one best-case scenario, it was shared with a senior executive right after his interview with the CEO. It was such an unexpected and appreciated action that the executive commented how refreshing he found the transparency and it made him see the hiring company as head-and-shoulders above the competition which led to him accepting the offer and joining the company a few months later.
While the plan can help clarify the set-up and structure for a new hire, it is important to set up review meetings with the newly hired managers or key hires. In some cases, reviews with an HRBP could be useful to understand for example how performance management is organized and how the process works. Such review moments could also clarify talent development programs and processes, which is useful to know for the new hire regarding his/her own career but also for helping the new hire manage the development actions for those who report to him/her.
Review meetings with the manager that the new hire reports to could help identify priorities and understand where to connect with more people or build additional internal or external relationships. The manager can also answer questions about activities planned to ensure desired outcomes are achieved after 30-days, 60-days, and 90-days as captured in the onboarding plan.
The people side of success
The template captures not only the tasks and activities needed to succeed in a new role but also identifies people with whom to build relationships. These are important relationships and contacts that the new hire would need to establish and maintain to ensure his/her success in the long run. They could be key client contact personnel or contacts from key suppliers or subcontractors. They could also be internal – people who know how things work and who can advise on the best course of action to get something done at that company.
And it is also important to identify people who can be trusted to keep things to themselves and who could advise on who to talk to before moving in specific directions for changes the new hire would like to implement. Either the HR Director/HRBP or the new hire’s manager may be helpful to identify who those contacts may be.
Note that confidants or advisors may also be external people such as professional coaches or consultants.
While it is important from a company’s perspective to ensure key new hires are provided with onboarding plans, completing the details and setting priorities to accomplish the outcomes defined in the plan lie with the new hire. The success of the new hire is only partially dependent on helping him/her get up to speed faster by having review meetings and an onboarding plan and giving him or her access to professional helpers and advisors. The new hire remains accountable for his or her own performance and following through on the items recorded in the onboarding plan.
When both the process of onboarding works well and the new hire holds himself/herself accountable for the outcomes produced, the risks of failure due to onboarding gaps are lowered and retention success is more likely in the medium to long term!
How can your network help you?
What do you tell them ?
When you talk to someone who already knows you, you do not need to introduce yourself. When talking to a contact of someone you know, introduce yourself.
Make sure your message is complete: why are you talking to him/her? What exactly do you hope to get out of the conversation?
Be specific about what you are looking for – i.e. role in sales, working on electric installation projects, etc.
What are your training, certifications, experience, and skills to explain how you plan to successfully deliver in the role mentioned above? (the short version – only mention the most important ones!)
Have your questions ready and be ready to rephrase any questions that are not easily understood by the person you are talking to.
Give the other person time to think about their answers by being quiet after you asked.
Show genuine interest in their advice or suggestions.
Questions to ask
The questions below can be used as a guide as you create your own list of questions to ask your contacts. Do consider how strong your history and relationship is with each person you talk to before you ask any of the questions. Rephrase any questions to allow for cultural differences and preferences and also to match the formality required for your conversation.
Depending on the role of the person or his or her expertise/experience, you may choose different questions for each conversation. Note the specific questions you want to ask each person before you contact him/her. Limit yourself to a reasonable number of questions – something you can fit into a 30-minute call would be best when you talk to someone whom you have not met yet and who is giving you some of his/her precious time for this conversation.
Are you aware of any job vacancies which would fit my skills/experience?
Would you help me by looking out for opportunities you might become aware of and which might be useful to me?
Do you know anyone who might be planning to change jobs where I might be a possible role replacement candidate?
Do you know any companies where my skills and experience may be sought-after?
Are you aware of any new companies moving into the area and/or whom I might be able to contact about a role there?
Would you be willing to help me get an appointment for a discussion with a recruiter at your company?
May I ask for your help in preparing for an interview (given your contacts/knowledge etc)?
Would you be able to help me with more information about a company I would like to target for an unsolicited application?
How would you advise me to proceed with my interest in THIS role or getting a role at Company X?
Would you be willing to be a reference for me?
Would you be willing to review my resume/CV and give me any tips or improvement suggestions?
How do you plan your approach?
Using the attached workbook below, start filling in the names on a sheet
Note contact details you might have or if you are connected with any of them through social media
Start with the people you know the best and explain what kind of opportunity you are looking for and listen to their advice or ideas of who they might know and would connect you with.
After the discussion, capture their suggestions in the worksheet in the “Advice/Next step?” column.
Follow-up on these, contact the person they suggested or introduced you to and ask for a meeting to discuss your interest in the company, work they do, etc.
Each of the tabs in this worksheet (see file above) contains a table for you to capture the names of people you thought of while looking at the groups of people you are connected to. Complete the table for each of the groups you have considered as far as you can. (see example below for someone who identified 3 friends, but has not yet contacted them).
To keep your momentum, monitor your follow-up actions which could range from contacting a suggested person or calling someone another time as agreed during the previous conversation you had with him or her. Set targets for yourself per day and per week to avoid procrastination or letting a contact “go cold”. This could happen if you call too long after the initial call and the person you are contacting may have forgotten that your mutual contact had introduced you to each other.!
Networks of contacts and human connections can be a fragile environment and it is important that though your need for them to act on your behalf is high, you need to also maintain a good relationship throughout and continue to be someone whom they would like to help. Very few people HAVE to help you, they will because they want to. Your attitude and way of talking to them will determine how much they will be willing to help you.
Be firm and confident, but not pushy. Sometimes there is a very thin line between those two. And the difference is often the strength of the history of your relationship with that person. If you know him or her for a long time and you have spent a lot of time together, you may be able to be a little pushier to get him or her to introduce you to someone else. When you have had only one or two conversations with someone at a conference, you would not likely have a strong enough relationship to be overly familiar or strong in your approach.
Always be thankful. Even if you have known someone for a long time, if they introduce you to someone or give you a handy tip that leads to a conversation, do let them know how thankful you are for their help.. Also thank people for taking the time to talk to you regardless of the outcome.
Only contact people from a conference or a class you took in the past if you actually spoke to them. It would be quite unusual to simply use a conference or class attendance list and email or contact each person on it regardless of whether you actually spoke to them at the time. Most people might disregard requests for calls or discussions in such cases.
Do not expect your contacts to call you back when they have more information for you. Ask if it would be alright for you to call back within a week or two.
When you had a great conversation with someone, why not add him or her to your list of future contacts? You never know when you may be able to introduce them to a new client or opportunity that fits into their business model!
Ever left a job interview frustrated? Because the interviewer seemed unprepared and asked seemingly random questions making it hard to discuss your achievements, interest in the role and how you planned to contribute to the success of the company. Or maybe you have been the recruiter who could not get ratings or post-interview notes from a manager because they did not jot anything down and could not give you any feedback after an interview they had conducted?
Getting the most out of the time you have to interview a candidate takes a lot of planning, focus and clarity on what exactly you want to establish. And yes, it also takes time management. An hour can fly past so fast without a plan!
To make interviews work well, the recruiter needs to do 3 things diligently:
Prepare an interview guide for each interviewer and provide them with that and any additional items such as the CV/Resume of the candidate, completed application forms and any other documents which have been provided by the candidate before the interview. Also include relevant notes from a screening call.
Prepare all interviewers with interview training so they can use the interview guide correctly and understand how to phrase questions and follow-up questions. Include the use of behavioral questions in the training, which are powerful in establishing what a candidate had done in previous situations given key competencies required for the role. [Providing interviewers with training on natural biases, will improve fairness of interview outcomes]
Follow up after the interview to collect notes and scores from interviewers. It is your summary of results that helps those making decisions about next steps in the recruitment process.
The Interview Guide
It is tough for interviewers to follow someone else’s plan verbatim and such an interview can come across as forced or staged. The preparation gives the interviewer a chance to consider rewording questions and possibly add their own questions. They may also want to change the sequence of questions. All of this will lead to a better and more natural interview experience for the job candidate.
Setting expectations and clarity about the structure of the interview upfront is helpful for a candidate to understand the approach you plan to follow. Most candidates feel more relaxed understanding the structure that you will follow.
3. BehavioralQuestions – STARstyle
Note that it is not advised to ask more than 3 behavioral questions during a 60 minute interview. To explore answers and ask follow-up questions can take time and you do want to leave time to answer the candidate’s questions too. If doing a panel interview, divide the 3 behavioral questions among members of the interview panel.
Give the candidate an opportunity to ask questions to help him or her have a clear understanding of the role and how things work at your company. Then it is time to either ask any follow-up questions you may have left to the end (checking if you have enough time left to do so). One approach that is often used to give you time to check your notes is to ask the candidate a question and giving him or her some time to think about their answer (while you check your notes).
Remember to share the next steps with the candidate i.e. when the interview phase will end and decisions will be made for the next phase in the recruitment process. Or if you do not know, let the candidate know that the recruiter will be able to answer next step answers.
Follow through with interviewers to ensure results and scores are collected in a timely fashion to support data-based decision-making regarding next steps.
Make sure you provide interviewers with a summary scoring sheet in the Interview Guide to select scores for answers obtained based on a pre-determined rating scale. This will avoid the need to go back and forth to interviewers while trying to understand their own way of scoring candidates.
Not everyone enjoys a highly structured interview and in some company cultures or for roles in creative functions, this may be seen as an unproductive way to test the creativity of candidates or showcase the unpredictable nature of the industry or the environment. Let common sense prevail to ensure you have an interview protocol that meets the need to fairly evaluate all job candidates in a consistent manner.
When your interview guides are online and so are your scoring sheets – this greatly improves your ability to quickly access post-interview notes and scores after interviews are completed.
Do not under-estimate the training needed for interviewers to understand the recruitment process or the importance of being able to demonstrate that a fair and consistent approach was used to evaluate candidates before selecting the final candidate.
Define what will be included in further detail and exercises during the workshop (bullet points should help you further) in order to meet the goal(s) you have set in point 2 for the group you have defined in point 1.
Set a date when the workshop will be made available so you can remain focused on deadlines that help to meet that date.
Start working on the next level of detail – Consider that you may want to do a combination of training solutions like assigning some online training before they come to the workshop to cover some knowledge you want them all to have at the start of the workshop. Also, work out your bullet points into a “storyline” that logically structures the sequence of topics to be covered and exercises you will use to help build competency in using specific tools or approaches.
Use the slides I have attached for download (above). Using your answers to the points above – maybe you need ideas about how information can be sequenced? See if any of the sections in the slide deck help you fill in some of your planned learning areas. Maybe some of the exercises could be useful for your workshop?
A friend of mine always says (in Dutch) – you can better creatively borrow ideas from others than come up with something yourself, which is lesser. So use this slide deck, and borrow ideas from it to get your budding Interview Training Workshop to the next level!
After interviews have taken place you will want to take a few more steps before you decide whether to make an offer to one of the job candidates you have for a vacancy. You may want to ask candidates to complete assessments or you may want to get the perspectives of their former colleagues before you make a decision.
Additional steps after initial interviews or between rounds of interviews could include:
Tests or assessments.
Practical exercises like a business case or even a presentation to be made to some senior leaders or experts at your company.
Reference checking with former colleagues, former direct reports or former supervisors of the candidate(s).
The (download) template I am sharing below contains a few questions to help you understand whether one candidate may be preferred compared to another given their experiences and approaches.
Background checks are used in some countries but can be harder to obtain in countries or regions where data and privacy protection laws exist. In most cases, criminal background and/or financial history information can only be obtained if the prospective employer can show a direct link between the requirements of the role and the information it wishes to obtain. Reference checks are typically easier to conduct in most countries, but be mindful of the kinds of information that you would be reasonably able to obtain given local laws.
Be mindful to:
Ensure that you notify any impacted job candidates (i.e. in areas such as Europe) about the data you wish to obtain and how you would process this data to avoid the risk of non-compliance. Job candidates need to know this at the start of the process and they must (actively) agree with your proposal for collecting data before you are able to proceed.
Ensure that all data obtained during the recruitment process is archived or destroyed after the process has been completed for a specific vacancy. All HR personnel who deal with such data would need to understand that this also includes any data that have been saved to their individual computers during the process.
Make sure the data you wish to obtain is relevant to the hiring decisions you wish to make. And make sure that those who would speak with candidates or possible referees can explain the connection.
Assuming that you have taken all precautions to ensure you are not incurring any risks with your planned reference checking approach, use the questions you have selected (the download template above can help) when you contact the list of referees provided by the job candidate.
You can use the template in a few ways:
Set up a time to talk to each referee via phone or Skype and go through the questions, capturing his or her responses.
Send each referee a form and ask him/her to complete it and return it to you – typically via email. Be aware that this approach does not offer you much opportunity to ask further questions to clarify without creating a few extra emails to the original string.
Set up the questions as an online survey (for example using www.surveymonkey.com) and share the link with referees. Note that data interpretation may be an issue here – not knowing what a referee meant by a specific score or comment. This also means you would have to contact referees again to clarify feedback. One way to improve data interpretation is to build in comment fields to explain scores.
Finally, it is important to understand that a reference check is just one of the data points that could support decision-making related to hiring the best candidate for the vacancy.
Feedback may be incomplete for a number of reasons:
The referee wishes to avoid any unpleasant situation with the former employee and wishes to be cautious in his/her responses.
There may be laws in the country which specifies what referees can or should say and what they cannot comment on.
The previous company may have clear policies about what can be shared by referees, which may be limited to job title and years of employment at the company.
Getting feedback from those who previously worked with a job candidate can still be valuable – understanding how the candidate’s knowledge or work methods would fit in with the job requirements or the company culture. For this reason, it can be good to get more perspectives. Just be aware of possible risks given the changing legal environment as you obtain feedback from referees.
After interviewing some candidates for a vacancy it is easy to start getting confused about how the candidates compare to each other. If you have used the template for capturing information during interviews Job Applicant Interview Record then you will have a stack of records from those who have interviewed the candidates you are currently considering. How to bring it all together?
Interviewers can also use this sheet to score each candidate they interview for a vacancy and then provided completed sheets back to the recruiter who consolidates all input received into one summary for final discussion and decision-making.
Change column headings in this template to match the key criteria that you have used in your Interview Records for this vacancy and use the average scores that each of the candidates have obtained from interviewers when you create this summary. The Totals column adds up the overall score for each candidate so you can see how the scores compare and which candidates have scored better than others. This template is useful to the recruiter in advising the Hiring Manager on the outcomes of interviews in order to plan the next steps for that vacancy.
You can add a row for weighting specific criteria in the spreadsheet. For example if you believe that one of the items is much more important than the others – could be language skills, or supervisory experience – you can decide to give it a higher importance by adding a higher “weighting” to it. (All of the weights for each of the rated categories together should add up to 100)
The overall scores are now created by multiplying the score for each category with the weighting that you have assigned – based on the higher importance of some items.
The Job Candidate Summary template can help you create one simple document which contains all of the feedback received about a candidate during the interview phase. And this greatly benefits a focused discussion about next steps with the Hiring Manager.
A successful on-boarding process ensures that a new employee is able to deliver top performance (creating value) at your company as fast as possible.
A successful new employee on-boarding process starts before the new employee is due to arrive and it is a structured process vs an afterthought. Some HR platforms include an on-boarding module which supports communication with the expected new employee and key stakeholders at the company who play a role in the on-boarding process. On-boarding activities can include training to be completed, forms that need to be finalized and submitted etc. Coordinating all of these activities and documenting the on-boarding plan is often the responsibility of HR.
This template is a basic version and you should add your own additional items to help new employees understand your industry, office building and business better. If the new employee will be in a customer-facing role you may need to include introductions to customers too.
I would say the signing off by the manager and new employee is optional – depends on your company culture and how you would prefer to run things at your office. The important part is THAT you have a structured process to bring someone new into the company and that this process is run in a consistent manner. That way you can be sure that each new employee has received all of the support needed to as quickly as possible understand the way things are done at your company and who to talk to about specific topics and ideas. This is a vital part of ensuring the newly hired employee gets to the top of their performance potential in the shortest possible time period and feel welcome – engaged – from day 1.
Comparing multiple job applicants after the interviews are complete can be tough to do if you did not capture your impressions in a structured way. Without a structured process to capture impressions various forms of bias can creep into your decision-making. For example… most people tend to prefer people who are more like they are and therefore tend to hire people who are most like themselves. And it is also true that we often have a “feeling” of whether we like someone or not within the first 5 minutes of the interview. Trying to ignore these unconscious biases is hard to do without a structured process to capture your interview results.
The template (download button is below) is a way for you to be more diligent in capturing specific feedback from the candidate as it relates to the job description and requirements for the vacancy. Avoid making decisions about whether or not to hire a person during the interview. Instead focus on the gathering the relevant data needed for making those decisions. A structured interview record can go a long way towards helping you do just that. |
I never knew that Antisocial Personality Disorder had different subtypes, but it does make sense that it would. These are Millon’s ten subtypes of ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). Theodore Millon was a psychologist who specialized in personality disorders and subdivided them into various subtypes. (In a future article, I’ll write a post about his Borderline Personality Disorder divisions.)
This was a post I found on Psychforums (in the ASPD forum). I don’t know who wrote it, so I can’t give credit to the original source, only a link to where I found it.
In the post I found, the the term “psychopath” is used, but I think these types more properly describe people with ASPD, most who are sociopaths (an acquired condition due to trauma that may also involve brain dysfunction), not psychopaths (a condition of the brain you are born with that has nothing or little to do with early trauma). There are also pro-social psychopaths (though all psychopaths lack a conscience), and none of these types seem very pro-social to me. So even though many psychopaths may fit these subtypes, I think it’s misleading so I took out the term “psychopath” in the subheads.
Activities kept near or at the boundaries of the law; stereotyped social roles; con man, charlatan, fast-talking used car salesman.Expansive fantasies and exaggerated sense of self-importance.Willing to take advantage of and humiliate those who leave themselves open to deceit.
May cultivate persuasiveness or charm as a means of getting others to lower their guard, but sees all prosocial behaviour as ultimately self-serving.
Contemptuous of “the system”; working “the system” to avoid punishment seen as just “part of the game“.
Sees self as wrongfully deprived of life’s necessities, leading to envy and resentment.
Compensates by taking what he or she is entitled to as a means of revenging wrong and restoring “karmic balance” in life.
Sees self as a victim of external forces, misunderstood by others and by society.
Manipulates others as a meaning of proving own superiority, as well as avenging attributions of worthlessness.
Smug and contemptuous toward victims, who may be viewed as pawns in the larger game.
Prone to ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption.
Chronic underarousal leads to risk-taking as means of “feeling alive”.
Fails to realize the consequences of risk-taking; believes that social rules are unnecessarily confining of own sense of adventure.
Eschews normal desire for safety as evidence of cowardice.
Proves own mettle as a means of proving self-esteem and worthiness to self and others.
Superficial sociability (or even seductiveness) hides an impulsive, moody and resentful core.
Emotionally labile, prone to excitement-seeking, stimulus-dependant behaviour, lacking in forethought, with a high potential for painful consequences.
Rationalizes and projects blame onto others when attempts to solicit attention go awry.
Aggression not intrinsically rewarding; psychopathic acts intended to others that the psychopath is not weak.
Has first-strike mentality; strikes whenever own fearfulness peaks (perhaps in episodes of panic), regardless of objective degree of threat.
Experiences fantasies of vulnerability; sees others as sadistic or exploiting. [my note–I’m not sure what “fantasies of vulnerability” would refer to]
Prefers to be overtly contentious, confrontational, antagonistic rather than indirectly manipulative.
Expects hostility from others, and pre-empts insults with own abrasiveness.
Prefers to escalate arguments; experiences pleasure by frustrating others, making them back down.
Inherently oppositional to any form of emotional control; seeks to break constraints simply because they exist.
Realizes pleasure through total control of others.
Employs violence instrumentally, to force perceived opponents to cower or submit.
Projects image of power or brutality; supports self-image of power and superiority by inflicting pain and suffering, if not power.
Low frustration threshold, resulting in episodes of uncontrollable rage and violent attack.
Episodes may be instantaneous reaction to frustration or perceived insult, and thus may be perceived by others as random and unprovoked.
Hateful, destructive defiance of values of social life.
inherently distrustful, ruthless, cold-blooded, revengeful, punitive.
Often isolated, paranoid, with ruminative fantasies of power and revenge.
Sees others as inherently persecutory or treacherous.
Uses hostility as a means of armoring self, forcin adversaries to take issue and withdraw. |
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
One of the most visited war memorials is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Constitution Avenue between 21st and 23rd Streets, 202/426-6841, 24 hours, free). This moving memorial honors U.S. service members who fought and died in the Vietnam War and also those who are missing in action. There are three parts to the memorial, the Three Soldiers Statue, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.
There is a path along the base of the wall so visitors can walk along it, read names, and if desired, make pencil rubbings of a particular name.The focal point of the memorial is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall completed in 1982, which is actually two 246-foot walls that are sunken into the ground and have the names of more than 58,000 service members who died in the war etched into them in chronological order. (The exact number changes each year as names are added.) When visitors look at the wall, they can see their reflections next to the etched names, symbolically linking the past and present. There is a path along the base of the wall so visitors can walk along it, read names, and if desired, make pencil rubbings of a particular name.
The memorial is at the west end of the National Mall, adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial in West Potomac Park. It is open to the public 24 hours a day, and park staff conduct free daily interpretive tours on the hour 10am-11pm.
National World War II Memorial
The National World War II Memorial (17th Street between Constitution and Independence Avenues, 202/619-7222, 24 hours, free) honors the more than 400,000 people who died in World War II, the 16 million people who served the United States during the war in the armed forces, and the millions of people who provided support from home. The memorial contains 56 pillars and two triumphal arches arranged in a semicircle around a fountain and plaza. A Freedom Wall sits on the west side of the memorial bearing more than 4,000 gold stars on it, each representing 100 Americans who lost their lives in the war. An inscription in front of the wall reads, “Here we mark the price of freedom.” The memorial opened to the public in 2004 and is administered by the National Park Service. It is on the east end of the Reflecting Pool, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
Korean War Veterans Memorial
The beautiful and haunting Korean War Veterans Memorial (17th Street SW, 202/426-6841, 24 hours, free) is also in West Potomac Park, southeast of the Lincoln Memorial. Erected in 1995, it is dedicated to service members who served in the Korean War. The memorial was designed in the shape of a triangle intersecting a circle with walls depicting images of land, sea, and air troops who supported the war. The focal point, however, is 19 larger than life-size stainless steel statues designed by Frank Gaylord within the walled triangle. The seven-foot-tall figures represent a patrol squad with members from each branch of the armed forces making their way through the harsh Korean terrain represented by strips of granite and bushes. The figures are dressed in full combat gear and look incredibly lifelike. The memorial is lit up at night, and when the figures are reflected on the surrounding wall, there appear to be 38 soldiers, which represents the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas. |
The easy answer is probably.
You see, I love design. Properly love it. When i’m out and about I analyse things I see, remember things that may influence stuff I do in future, and talk about it a hell of a lot. But I have this nagging doubt now that the things I used to like, which used to influence me, just don’t anymore.
For example, Kidrobot. Now don’t get me wrong I loved this stuff, you wouldn’t have found anyone more excited when they had a pop up shop in Selfridges in London, or when I found out they were actually opening a London store. However, I don’t want any of it anymore. I look at the Dunny ranges, and feel uninspired with them, i don’t care for them any more. Designers like Huck Gee, even though I would be (and have been in the past) destroyed for saying my reaction to his work is ‘meh’, I really feel that designers like this are living of their reputation, and are being far from creative anymore. What was once fun and different has been replaced with mundane repetition. I use Huck Gee as an example because this guy could spit on a piece of paper and some
fools collectors would pay exorbitant amounts for it. They are buying ‘Huck Gee’ rather than buying what they like.
Now I am not saying for one minute that I don’t think that Huck Gee isn’t a good designer, just one that has found his style, settled into a routine, churns out a few limited or one off pieces, sticks them on ebay, and makes a fortune. He then dishes out designs for the blind boxes, of which none have blown me away for a few years. I mean, if you could do that, make the money, then we all would - I just feel that this sends the wrong message out to up and coming designers.
I would never encourage my students to play it safe with design. Design is about taking risks, thats why we are designers. If I wanted to play it safe, or for them to play it safe I would tell them to go and work in Tesco. As a designer it is the opportunity to inspire those around you with your work and creativity that should drive you forwards. To not play it safe and to set trends and develop them rather than replicate and follow trends.
A designer I knew very well, when overlooked for a position within a consultancy that offered me a position actually said to me ‘Why did they offer YOU a job, I’m a much better designer than you?’. I have never forgot this, and it still pushes my creativity to this day. The simple answer is that I took risks. I didn’t care if someone told me my end product was crap, as long as I was happy that I had produced something that was my own, oh it may well have had influences from other designers, but the key was to have it inform and direct my own creativity, than than try to replicate what I wanted to produce in their style. This is what the other designer used to do. Take whatever was flavour of the month design-wise with them, and shoehorn it in whatever they were working on. Well of course their end product was supremely polished, because they knew what it should look like. Design should be about breaking new ground, opening up new experiences to the masses and encouraging others to explore their creativity. You should be exploring you own end product, and there is nothing more exciting, but fear-inducing as the halfway stage in a project where you don’t know whether its going to turn out ok or not.
Which leads me back to my original question, do I think I am a design snob?
Well for all intents and purposes, yes, possibly, probably. Do I care? Not really.
I wish that sometimes that some areas of the design industry would take the chip off their shoulder, the one that rubs so many ‘non-designers’ up the wrong way. Yes we can all laugh at the amateur use of comic sans, or clip art in someone’s design, but when all is said and done, they don’t need an ‘expert’ to patronise them. They know they aren’t designers, thats why they approach design agencies to assist them and their businesses, but on the token, this is why people are going it alone and not consulting design agencies. I know many people who have been patronised and belittled when dealing with ‘well-known’ consultancies, made to feel stupid, and forced into going along with the ‘style’ of the consultancy. This is where I feel ashamed to have been a part of this industry, people don’t trust designers, not like they used to. People are more informed these days and rightly can make an informed decision about the direction of their project. There is an air of arrogance that surrounds many designers, who find their own self importance much more of a concern than the needs of Mr Smith the local butcher who wants to revamp his business, but to maintain his heritage, snow ploughing him into things he may not have the fortitude to disagree with, considering they are the ‘professionals’.
Now I am not saying that I have not been guilty of this in the past, because I have been. You almost get pushed to be self confident to a fault in an agency, and because there is such an atmosphere of self competition, it can cause many issues to arise. I left the mainstream industry and I am totally glad that I did. I would not like to become the person I found myself becoming whilst working in the industry ever, and I would rather be snobby about design, and what I like and dislike within design than to think I knew better than everyone else. It is my opinion on design which matters to me, it isn’t my place to tell others what good and bad design is, we are created to be objective, and thats what everyone should be. Just because I don’t like comic sans, doesn’t mean you are wrong to like it…….
but you are.
I don’t know where I stand within design anymore, have I hit a point where the design cycle is passing me by and I am starting to get fed up of current trends? Maybe. All I know is that each and every day I find something new that I love, every day seeing something different, created by some of the most creative people in the world. Do I care that I won’t be fawning over Huck Gee’s new releases? Not at all, but then again, he probably doesn’t care what I think either. |
At first glance, the sleek and sculptural 21-story Astor Place tower in New York City appears out of place in the heart of the bohemian East Village. But true to the spirit of the neighborhood, Astor Place is challenging convention and advancing the ideals of energy conservation and sustainability.
These advancements were accomplished through a collaboration among a water technology company, building manager Related Management Co. and the Sustainable Engineering Lab at Columbia University, to test assumptions of energy efficiency in a retrofit of the building’s hydronic heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system, later documented in a doctoral dissertation.
The Astor Place Energy Improvement Project consisted of three primary steps: conducting an initial energy assessment of the hydronic system, updating the system with technologically advanced pumps and controls and adjusting the system in real time to evaluate the effects of the HVAC modifications.
The impact of energy efficiency improvements is often difficult to demonstrate at the individual system level because buildings typically get billed for energy use at the building level. According to Luke Falk, assistant vice president at Related and an adjunct professor at Columbia University, the partnership among the water technology company, building manager and Columbia University allowed stakeholders to gain a granular understanding of exactly how much energy they would save by implementing a complex HVAC enhancement.
The key finding from the testing was that right-sized pumps paired with variable frequency drives (VFDs) powering the chilled water portion of a hydraulically balanced system can deliver a 95 percent reduction in pumping energy, far exceeding the team’s expectations.
As noted by the Columbia research team: “The pumping electricity reduction with VFDs was far more significant than the effects of (reduced pump size and pressure-independent control valves): Annual replacement of the chilled water (ChW) distribution pump electricity was 92 percent lower with VFDs than without. “When comparing the combined effects of the replacement pumps and the VFDs, the ChW distribution pumping electricity reduction was 95 percent.”
Coupled with the findings in an American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Journal article that concluded energy improvements in the HVAC system could substantially influence 43 percent of a building’s total energy, this has a dramatic impact on the overall building energy footprint (see Image 1).
Using data collected during the initial energy assessment, Columbia University researchers and water technology company engineers jointly reviewed the data. Researchers then calculated potential energy savings and tracked key system parameters following the renovation of the chilled and hot water systems, developing a mathematical model from the data. This prescriptive pathway to assess performance offers relevant technical data that, before now, has been extrapolated solely from laboratory test results or obtained through time-consuming proprietary energy assessments.
The Test Subject
Astor Place was developed by Related Companies and completed in 2005. It includes 39 residential units with commercial space on the building’s first and second floors. The HVAC system uses hydronic space heating through boilers and cooling with central absorption chillers. Fan-coil units provide HVAC to residential floors; HVAC in the common and commercial spaces employs air-handling units. Only the central plant equipment and air handling equipment in the commercial and common spaces were included in the retrofit and subsequent evaluation. The approach to the ChW and hot water (HW) systems was nearly identical, though monitoring was more comprehensive on the ChW systems, the details of which are outlined here.
On the cooling side, the original 30-horsepower (hp) condenser water pumps were replaced with lower horsepower but more technologically advanced pumps. The new pumps immediately delivered savings in electricity use—from 25.3 kilowatts (kW) to 18.0 kW.
Other modifications included new piping to create primary/secondary chilled water loops out of the original primary only system and the addition of 7.5-hp primary pumps. Constant primary chilled water flow optimizes chiller performance. Decoupling the loops in the original one-loop system allowed for the installation of variable flow technologies on the secondary loop. New 15-hp pumps replaced the original 20-hp distribution pumps and were outfitted with VFDs.
The head losses were lower than expected, so the team was able to use smaller replacement pumps. This created more energy savings potential with the VFDs than on the larger pumps. Savings from dynamic adjustment using VFDs offset additional electricity required to operate the new primary pumps.
In providing their expertise, along with the pumps, drives and monitoring equipment for the project, the water technology company engineers obtained specific real-time data on pump and system performance. |
The exhibit focused on the EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office and their work to ensure the protection and restoration of the Great Lakes. The opportunity to host this exhibit enabled the John Crerar library to highlight its historical and contemporary environmental collections as well as the University's programs in Environmental Studies. The exhibit presented major issues such as chemical contamination and habitat loss in the Great Lakes. Invasive organisms (such as the Sea lamprey, the Round Goby, and the famous Zebra Mussel) as well as sampling and analytical equipment used aboard the EPA's 180-foot Research Vessel the "Lake Guardian" were on display. In addition, informational pamphlets and booklets on a variety of Great Lakes environmental issues were available.
There were four cases in total - each dealing with a different aspect of the Great Lakes. |
Graz-based office Love Architecture and Urbanism designed the balconies as a simple way to transform the new Ragnitzstrasse 36 apartment block into something more striking.
"This building's overall architectural character is defined by relatively inexpensive building components, such as the balconies."
Related story: BIG designs honeycomb housing block for the Bahamas
The four-storey building has 15 small apartments and one penthouse apartment, and is partly designed to meet housing demand from doctors, nurses and other medical staff working at a nearby hospital – the largest in Graz.
The apartments range from 40 to 50 square metres, and the balconies give them another 17 square metres of space.
"Apart from looking great and sculptural, the balconies were designed as a direct extension of the flats, to make the small spaces look bigger from the inside," said Schönherr.
The triangular shape of each balcony's roof and floor creates a partially covered outdoor space, with a wide edge that can accommodate a table and chairs, and a thinner edge for plants and other small objects.
Both the triangular shape and the fabric-covered openings in the partitions between them also allowed the architects to get around limitations set by authorities about how much floor space could be built on the site.
"There is a maximum amount of gross floor area you are allowed to build," explained Schönherr.
"The balconies are only included fully within this calculation if they are completely covered with a roof and two walls. By making balconies that are not fully enclosed by a wall and roof, we were able to limit how much they contribute to the calculation, without actually needing to limit their size."
Love Architecture and Urbanism chose larch for the railings to soften the appearance of the south-facing facade.
"Larch is regional, affordable and durable, and it has a nice feel and colour. We also think it will look beautiful when it ages to a greyer colour," said Schönherr.
By contrast, the street-facing side of the building is covered in perforated metal, which acts as a privacy screen for external access balconies to the flats.
"It also creates a sensitive, multi-layered sequence as you come from public to private space," said Schönherr. "It makes the distance between the street and the apartments feel bigger, and also provides shelter from rain and snow, without being completely closed."
The bottom three storeys of the building house five apartments each, and a basement level accommodates parking space. The top floor has a larger penthouse apartment which is set back at the edges to create a large terrace on both sides.
Photography is by Jasmin Schuller.
Here's some more information from the architects:
Ragnitzstrasse 36, Graz, Austria
The construction of small apartments that are relatively inexpensive yet still high quality is currently one of the most essential challenges in housing construction. The Ragnitzstrasse 36 project is meeting these conflicting priorities in the following manner: a structurally simple, systematic and efficiently designed base building structure houses all apartments. To the south, this structure is flanked by zig-zag-shaped balconies, while the north side features a pergola opening encased in expanded metal. This building's overall architectural character is defined by relatively inexpensive building components, such as the balconies.
The building houses 15 small apartments (40-50 square metres) and one penthouse on the top floor, with a subterranean parking level below. All apartments are oriented to the south and feature outside areas that face the green space of Ragnitzbach. The balconies and outside areas that cover the entire apartment widths are partially roofed and feature a minimum size of 17 square metres. Thus, the actual living area extends towards the outside area, and living rooms and bedrooms appear larger and more spacious.
The larch-wood balcony railings are placed in a fan-like manner along the zig-zag rhythm of the cantilever slab, with both materials and workmanship creating a homely atmosphere.
The north-facing pergola blocks the traffic noise of Ragnitzstrasse. The expanded metal facade is mounted such that it appears almost transparent from the west. However, when approaching the building from the east, the facade appears closed and volumetric, which creates a kind of visual tilting effect as one passes the building.
Overall, the appearance of the structure varies dramatically depending on the viewer's perspective, which gives the building a very sculptural and three-dimensional feel.
- H2O by Axis Mundi |
Iwankapiya (Healing) - Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention and Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy for American Indians
Supported by the Group Foundation’s Mitchell Hochberg Memorial Public Education Fund
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of New Mexico
Josephine Chase, PhD, MSW, Psychotherapy, Consultant, Horse Nation Healing, Inc. Rapid City, SD
American Indians face pervasive trauma exposure, collective histories of communal suffering, and elevated risk for depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. In addition to socioeconomic barriers, access to culturally responsive treatment is limited, which may compromise treatment engagement. The Iwankapiya study piloted the Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention (HTUG), combined with Group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), to reduce symptoms of depression and related trauma and grief. HTUG + IPT or IPT Only groups were conducted at two tribal sites: one Northern Plains reservation (n-26) and one Southwest urban clinic (n-26). Depression scores significantly decreased for both treatments, but there were no significant differences in depression between the two groups. However, HTUG + IPT participants demonstrated significantly greater group engagement. Postintervention, clinicians expressed preference for HTUG+IPT based upon qualitative observations of greater perceived gains among participants. Given the degree of trauma exposure in tribal communities, these findings in a relatively small sample suggest HTUG should be further examined in context of treatment engagement. In addition to describing the study, Drs. Braveheart and Chase will discuss the importance of cultural context and describe how they came to recognize the need for the study. They will also share specific elements of the HTUG.
Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, PhD, (Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota) is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Clinician Educator. Dr. Brave Heart joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico (UNM) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in October 2010. Dr. Brave Heart graduated in 1974 from Tufts University with her Bachelor of Science in Psychology, magna cum laude. Dr. Brave Heart received her Master of Science in Social Work (MSSW) then graduated in 1976 from Columbia University School of Social Work (CUSSW), an Ivy League institution, in the clinical tract. Dr. Brave Heart worked as a therapist and clinical supervisor in both reservation and urban clinics, and studied part-time in psychoanalytic institutes - Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York and Colorado. Dr. Brave Heart completed her doctoral education at Smith College School for Social Work (SSW), part of the Ivy League as well, in 1995. SSW’s origins were steeped in trauma treatment, especially focusing on “war neurosis” in World War I, the precursor to PTSD. Given the high rates of enlistment in the military among American Indians, Dr. Brave Heart’s education and her doctoral dissertation focused on trauma healing for tribal communities, particularly historical trauma and unresolved grief. Dr. Brave Heart was appointed Assistant Professor in 1992 and in 1995 after completing her dissertation The Return to the Sacred Path: Healing Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Among the Lakota, Dr. Brave Heart was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work (DU-GSSW) and advanced to tenured Associate Professor. Columbia University then recruited Dr. Brave Heart as Associate Professor. Dr. Brave Heart was also a recipient of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Minority Doctoral Fellowship for leadership in mental health. She is a member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) and has been Chair and Co-Chair of the ISTSS Special Interest Group on Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience for several years.
More recently, Dr. Brave Heart was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health R34 pilot clinical randomized trial comparing the Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief Intervention that she developed combined with Group Interpersonal Therapy (IPT) vs IPT alone. Participants and providers reported preference for the HTUG+IPT vs IPT Only. There was greater group engagement and providers expressed preference for the HTUG component. The results of the study are published in a recent paper which we will forward separately.
Dr. Chase was Principal Investigator at the Tribal site in South Dakota for a NIMH-funded R34 pilot study Iwankapiya-Healing: Historical Trauma Practice and Group IPT for American Indians. The goal of Iwankapiya is to examine the effectiveness of the HTUG intervention combined with group Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) for American Indian adults with depression and related disorders. Dr. Chase is also Co-Principal Investigator of the OLC American Indian Higher Education Consortium Behavioral Health Research Project funded by the Native American Research Centers for Health, under an initiative to create Behavioral Health research and curricula at Tribal Colleges and Universities. Dr. Chase has extensive history providing direct practice and supervision in Child Welfare, and Mental Health therapy with individuals, families, and groups She is trained and certified in providing Equine Assisted Psychotherapy.
Currently Dr. Chase provides Equine Assisted Psychotherapy to patients healing from PTSD, Depression, Anxiety and other disorders, as well as provides Teletherapy for Behavioral Health through private practice. She also offers consulting and training regarding Historical Trauma and other Behavioral Health related topics.
The attendee will be able to:
1. Review assessment and treatment innovations that integrate the 4 components of the
Historical Trauma and Unresolved Grief intervention with Interpersonal Psychotherapy.
2. Explain and discuss the relationship of past and recent traumatic events and the effect on current life experiences of American Indian individuals, families and communities.
3. Synthesize research findings of a NIMH funded clinical research intervention to treat depression and trauma related symptoms in American Indian populations in a culturally effective manner. |
English: seeded breadfruit, breadnut
Spanish: pana de pepita, pana de grano
Indonesia: kelur, timbul
Origin and Distribution
Native to New Guinea, and possibly the Moluccas and the Philippines. Widely cultivated throughout the humid tropics.
Seeded breadfruit is a large tree, to 100 feet (30 m) tall, with large, spreading branches and a straight trunk with smooth gray bark. Leaves large, 16-20 inches (40-50 cm) wide and 24-35 inches (60-90 cm) long, with shallow lobes. All parts of the tree contain abundant white latex. Monecious, with axillary inflorescences. Male inflorescence elongated, 1-1.5 inches (3-4 cm) wide and 6-10 inches (15-25 cm) long, female inflorescence globose, 2-3 inches (5-7 cm) wide and 3-4 inches (8-10 cm) long. Fruits large, spheroid, 4-12 inches (10-30 cm) in diameter, green and covered with soft spines. Fruits contain between 20-60 rounded or flattened seeds, about 1 inch (2.5 cm) long. Seeds are cream colored and have a brown testa.
Propagation and Culture
Seeded breadfruit is propagated by seed, which must be planted while fresh or stored in damp medium for a short time. Viability is lost if seeds are allowed to dry out. Germination occurs in 1-2 weeks, and seedlings grow quickly. Flowers and fruits year round in tropical climates with little seasonal variation. In regions with a pronounced cool or dry period, trees may become partially deciduous and stop fruiting until conditions become more conducive to rapid growth. Seeded breadfruit grows and fruits best in fertile, well drained soils, but is widely adaptable. Will grow and fruit from sea level to over 4900 feet (1500 m) elevation.
Cultivars and Related Species
No cultivars of seeded breadfruit are known.
Related species include Artocarpus altilis, the breadfruit, Artocarpus mariannensis, breadnut, Artocarpus heterophyllus, jackfruit, and Artocarpus integer, champedak.
Immature fruits are cooked as a vegetable with coconut milk. Seeds are soft, edible and delicious, and may be boiled or roasted. |
Rocket ‘Giove’ is a new wild rocket variety that has been bred for flavour. With an attractive dark green colour and distinctive flavour, it is the essence of a lightly flavoured rocket – honeyed, grassy and lightly peppery. It has good jagged leaves right from the initial cut.
Rocket ‘Giove’ will grow in even the most inclement weather conditions. The plants are bolt-resistant, so don’t run to seed, allowing you to keep picking the leaves over a long period. Easy to grow, this cut and come again variety can be harvested almost year round. Sow directly outdoors during the spring through to autumn, and under protection during the winter. The plants grow best in full sun and well-drained, moist soil.
The tangy leaves add a distinctive flavour to salads. They also give a lift to cooked dishes, add a few leaves at the end of cooking, they give a sweet and earthy, warm peppery finish to roasted vegetables, pasta bakes or risotto.
This variety of edible Rocket has been named after the Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element.
GIOVE is the name for each satellite in a series being built for the European Space Agency to test technology in orbit for the Galileo positioning system; the European GPS.
Giove is also the Italian word for 'Jupiter'. The name was chosen as a tribute to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. Galileo discovered the first four natural satellites of Jupiter and later discovered that they could be used as a universal clock to obtain the longitude of a point on the Earth's surface.
According to Stephen Hawking, Galileo probably bears more of the responsibility for the birth of modern science than anybody else, Albert Einstein called him the father of modern science. Among his inventions were telescopes, a compass and a thermometer.
Galileo was born and lived in Pisa, and would have been used to eating wild rocket growing freely on the Italian hillsides. I am sure he would have approved of this modern variety.
Sow directly into a bed containing any good fertile, well drained soil. Use a line to mark out the row. Sowing in a straight line allows you to identify where your rocket seedlings are and which are the weed seedlings to pick out.
Sow just a small quantity at one time, and then sow successionally, to harvest over a longer period. A 1m (3ft) row is usually enough to get you started. Late summer sowings will carry on cropping into the winter if the plants are protected by cloches.
Sow direct in spring for summer greens, and in autumn for winter greens.
Sow thinly 6mm (¼in) deep in drills spaced 45 to 60cm (18 to 24in) apart. Sow the seeds thinly along the row, spacing them out as evenly as possible. The distance between the seeds should be about 3cm. (1¼in) Cover the seed lightly with soil. Remove any weed remnants or large stones as you go to ensure the plants have a good start.
Water the seeds in well using a watering can with the rose attached. This means you drench the soil but minimise disturbance to the seeds.
Flea beetle can be a problem in summer, nibbling holes in rocket leaves. The best defence is to cover the row with a length of horticultural fleece.
Rocket will always want to flower in summer, because this is the time of year when all crucifers naturally flower, then produce seed.
As autumn approaches, cover crops with sheets of horticultural fleece to keep the cold at bay, and you could be cropping right through to first frosts.
Harvesting: 25 to 45 days.
Simply pick the young leaves and the plant will keep generating new ones for months. Older leaves are a bit tougher and hotter. Pick over the whole row rather than just one or two plants as this would weaken them.
As the flower buds appear pinch them out to prolong cropping. The flowers are small, yellow with dark centers and can be used in the salad for a light piquant flavour.
Rinse the leaves in cool water and dry on paper towelling. Wrap leaves tightly in plastic or a zip lock bag. Best if used within two days.
Arugula is a nutritional powerhouse, containing significant folate (folic acid) and calcium. Exceptionally high in beta carotene, vitamin C, and a good source of iron, Arugula is a member of the same family as cabbage and broccoli and like all such vegetables; it contains cancer-fighting phytochemicals called indoles.
You can substitute water cress for a similar peppery flavor. You can also use fresh baby spinach (but the flavour will not be the same). Also dandelion greens have a tart flavour but a bit more bitter.
The genus Diplotaxis is from the Greek diplous, meaning ‘double’, and taxis meaning ‘row’, because of the double row of seeds in the seed pod.
The species name tenuifolia means ‘with finely-divided, slender leaves’.
Eruca is a classical Latin name used by Pliny.
The term arugula (variations of Italian dialects around Arigola) is used by the Italian diaspora in Australia and North America and from there picked up as a loan word to a varying degree in American and Australian English, particularly in culinary usage. The names ultimately all derive from the Latin word eruca.
Vernacular names include Garden Rocket, Rocket, Eruca, Rocket salad, or Arugula (American English), In Italy, it can be known as Rucola, Rugola, Rucola gentile, Rughetta, Ruchetta or Rucola selvatica.
Throughout the world there are variations: Rauke or ruke (German), Roquette (French), Rokka (Greek), Ruca (Catalan), Beharki (Basque), Oruga (Spanish), Rúcula (Portuguese) krapkool (Flemish), Arugula Selvatica, arugula sylvatica, aeruca rocket, eruka psevnaya (Russian), oruga (Spanish), jaramago (Spanish),
Roman rocket, salad rocket, sciatica cress, shinlock…
In Roman times Arugula was grown for both its leaves and the seed. The seed was used for flavouring oils. Part of a typical Roman meal was to offer a salad of greens, frequently arugula, romaine, chicory, mallow and lavender and seasoned with a 'cheese sauce for lettuce'.
It has been used in England in salads since Elizabethan times. On another interesting note, Rocket or Arugula seed has been used as an ingredient in aphrodisiac concoctions dating back to the first century, AD. (Cambridge World History of Food) - …but we can make no promises!
Galileo Galilei - The man who invented the telescope.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was born in Pisa, Italy. He enrolled to do a medical degree at the University of Pisa but never finished, instead choosing to study mathematics. He was a ground breaking astronomer, physicist, mathematician, philosopher and inventor. Among his inventions were telescopes, a compass and a thermometer.
Galileo built on the work of others to create a telescope with around 3x magnification, he later improved on this to make telescopes with around 30x magnification. With these telescopes, Galileo was able to observe the skies in ways previously not achieved. In 1610 he made observations of four objects surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars, these turned out to be Jupiter’s four largest satellite moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. They were later renamed the Galilean satellites in honor of Galileo himself.
The discovery of these moons was not supported by the scientific principles of the time and Galileo had trouble convincing some people that he had indeed discovered such objects. This was similar to other ideas put forward by Galileo that were very controversial at the time.
The Geocentric model of the universe which was embraced by earlier astronomers had the Earth at the center of the universe with other objects moving around it. Work by Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler helped to supercede this theory with the more accurate heliocentric model. Such a view of the universe differed strongly with the beliefs of the Catholic Church at the time and Galileo was forced to withdraw many of his ideas and even spent the final years of his life under house arrest.
Galileo refused to believe Kepler’s theory that the moon caused the tides, instead believing it was due to the nature of the Earth’s rotation - helping prove that even the smartest people can make mistakes. |
5 Biggest Environmental Wins in 2016
Sure, it's been a tumultuous year for the planet. But here are some environmental achievements to celebrate: renewable energy, protected oceans, and deconstructed dams.
The planet had a rough year in 2016. African elephants and rhinoceroses were ravaged by poachers.
A new United Nations report suggested that biodiversity loss, land degradation, and water shortages are worsening.
Arctic sea ice dwindled to record lows after several of the warmest years on record.
But behind all the troubling environmental news there were some significant rays of hope in 2016: great feats of conservation, a few surprising global advances, and some noteworthy trends.
It's easy to forget, for example, that the Obama Administration withdrew millions of acres of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans from consideration for future offshore oil and gas exploration. Carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise less than a quarter of a percent in 2016—the third year in a row of unexpectedly low growth or declines. And after more than two decades of trying, enough nations finally signed 2015's Paris accord that a global climate pact actually entered into force in November.
Image: President Obama in September visited Midway Atoll, where he announced the quadrupling of a marine reserve in the Pacific Ocean that is home to more than 7,000 species.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to "cancel" the Paris agreement, and several of his proposed policies threaten to undo many environmental gains. But for the moment, at least, the rest of the world's top polluters—including China and India—remain committed to an effort to hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, while still aiming for a harder-to-reach 1.5 degree cap.
In that spirit, as we head into 2017, here's a look back at some of the biggest environmental achievements of the past year.
Renewable Energy Has a Record Year
For the first time, installation of new renewable electric-generating capacity outpaced growth in fossil-fuel generating capacity. In other words, of all the new sources of electricity installed around the world in 2015, more gigawatts of power were produced from wind, solar, and other clean energy sources than from coal or oil. Certainly, energy from fossil fuels still accounts for the bulk of global generation. And although this milestone technically was achieved in 2015, it wasn't reported until 2016. It is part of a massive global transition not expected to abate.
Image: JELLYFISH LAKEPalau’s most famous tourist attraction is a lake filled with jellyfish on Eil Malk island. Snorkeling among the jellies is generally considered safe because their stings are too weak to be felt by most people. (Image Courtesy: PHOTOGRAPH BY ENRIC SALA, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE)
In fact, another report by the U.S. Energy Information Agency concluded that based on current regulations, market forces, and government trends—even without the Obama Administration's plans to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants—renewable energy is set to overtake coal as the dominant source of electricity worldwide by 2040. And that pace, the report notes, could actually speed up.
"The growth of clean, renewable energy to more than 50 percent of all new energy installations worldwide is part of a trend rather than an anomaly, and the growth is expected to increase," said Mark Z. Jacobson, a Stanford University clean-energy expert. "Ultimately, I expect that within five to 10 years, between 80 percent and 100 percent of all new annual electric power generation worldwide will be from wind, water, and solar."
Bolstering that projection, some of the world’s top business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, announced this month that they are launching a venture to invest over one billion dollars in "next-generation energy technologies."
New Funds for Dam Removal
In the five years since the United States began dismantling the Elwha Dam and the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, one thing has become clear: Dam removal works. Numbers of ocean-going chinook, coho, chum, and steelhead exploded in the newly free-running Elwha River after the largest dam-removal project in history. The estuary has grown, creating new life for crab and clams, drawing "a fantasia of birds" to feed on them, coastal watershed scientist Anne Shaffer told National Geographic in June.
"The Elwha is a reminder of what we have to lose, and exactly how important it is to protect the intact ecosystems we have," Shaffer said this month.
Protecting Waters off Hawaii and Cape Cod
With just two moves in the last half of his final year in office, Barack Obama conserved more land or water than any president in American history. Days before Obama's historic trip to Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, his administration announced a quadrupling of President George W. Bush's signature conservation achievement, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, in northwestern Hawaii. This coral-rich area twice the size of Texas is home to 7,000 species, including endangered monk seals and several types of shark. New deep-water fish species are still being discovered here.
Then, two weeks later, Obama created the first marine protected area along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, off Cape Cod, a stretch of sea that includes giant undersea mountains. New England's Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is in a region of ocean off Connecticut that is particularly susceptible to damage from climate change. The new designation should allow scientists to use it as a living laboratory in hopes of finding fresh ways to defend seas from greenhouse gas emissions. If future generations are to have oceans is rich as those left to current generations, Obama said, "then we're going to have to act and we're going to have to act boldly."
Preserving the World’s Oceans
Boldness wasn't exclusively the province of the United States in 2016. Ocean protection is particularly difficult because vast stretches of the world's seas can be affected by the actions of many countries. But this year saw an astounding degree of international stewardship when it comes to the great big blue.
(Image Courtesy: PHOTOGRAPH BY ENRIC SALA, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE)
In September, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Colombia agreed to work together to protect 10,000 square miles of ocean wildlife corridors near the Galápagos. Then, a month later, another deal outlined to protect nearly 600,000 square miles of some of the most pristine ocean on earth off Antarctica, a place National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala called the "Serengeti of Antarctica." An international commission comprised of 25 countries including South Africa, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Russia agreed the Ross Sea should be left, as much as possible, a vast marine wilderness. In creating the Earth’s single largest protected area, the commission set a new highpoint in international marine preservation.
The long-lasting refrigerants used in air conditioners and freezers called hydrofluorocarbons account for a tiny portion of greenhouse gas emissions. But these chemicals can be worse for the climate, capturing thousands of times more heat than CO2. And, as emerging economies in India and China grow and the world gets hotter, HFCs are the fastest-growing greenhouse gases, increasing 10 percent or more a year as more people seek air conditioning. So climate negotiators have spent years trying to rein in their use, a complicated task that hasn't borne fruit until this year.
After a meeting in Rwanda in October, the U.S. State Department announced that nearly 200 countries had agreed that beginning in 2019 the world would begin eliminating the use of most these synthetic chemicals, replacing them with cleaner alternatives. Advocates had said that a complete phase-out could reduce warming by half a degree by the century's end. And the new commitment promises to achieve nearly 90 percent of that goal before mid-century. UN environment chief Erik Solheim called the move "a clear statement by all world leaders that the green transformation started in Paris is irreversible and unstoppable." |
It all started on a whim. Four years ago, supermodel Karlie Kloss decided to take an intensive coding course at New York Flatiron School. She had never written a lick of code in her life, but she wanted to see what the fuss about coding was all about. Between runway shows in Paris and Milan, and magazine shoots in London and New York, she would sit down with her instructor, Avi Flombaum, and learn the basics of Ruby on Rails.
“It was sheer curiosity that led me to take that class,” the 25-year-old Kloss tells Fast Company. “But it was really eye-opening to learn about the hardware and the software that goes into the tech we use every day.”
As a successful model, Kloss didn’t have any immediate reason to learn how to code, but she soon realized the activity could bring sweet rewards–literally. “One of the first things I learned how to program was a drone that could pick up a cookie on one side of the room and deliver it to the other side of the room,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do with code.”
Around 2012, coding bootcamps like the Flatiron course began popping up all over the country with the promise of equipping people with no prior training with the basics of computer science. In Kloss’s case, she was surprised to discover that coding wasn’t an impenetrable skill. “It’s a language just like any other language,” she says. “And the way our world is going, learning to code should be just as important as learning your mother tongue.”
There’s a persistent narrative in our culture that women are less inclined to pursue computer science. This was evident in the infamous Google memo, in which an employee, James Damore, claimed that women are genetically less inclined to code. This hasn’t been Kloss’s experience, though. She’s encountered many young women who are just as curious as she is about the technology that surrounds them. “They are aware of the power of these technical skills and how they are shaping the world today,” Kloss says. “These young women grew up with this technology embedded and they’re not scared to try building things. They are more forward-thinking than we sometimes give them credit for.”
The problem, she believes, is access. Many middle and high schools don’t offer coding courses, although this is slowly changing. And when they are offered, they tend to be oversubscribed by male students, creating an uncomfortable imbalance in the classroom. Then there are the popular coding bootcamps, such as the one that Kloss took, but they often come with hefty price tags: Tuition can cost upward of $1,000 a week. There have also been questions about how sustainable the coding bootcamp business model really is, since several companies, like The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp, have had to shut down recently.
A Call To Action—And Lots Of Answers
Back in 2014, Kloss put out a call on her social media channels, asking if there were like-minded young women out there who wanted to code but didn’t have access to a course. She received an avalanche of responses from young women and ultimately offered scholarships to 21 young women to attend a two-week summer camp at the Flatiron School.
Three years later, Kloss says that this initiative–called Kode With Klossy–has grown and evolved. So far, more than 400 girls age 13 to 18 have gone through the Kode With Klossy summer camps. Kloss can now track where these students have ended up, and the results have been impressive. One of the original beneficiaries just won the grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, together with three other high school girls. (The team beat out 750 engineers with a virtual reality app that can help treat and diagnose ADHD efficiently.) Another young woman from the first cohort has been accepted to top computer science college programs around the country, including NYU, Stony Brook, and Columbia.
Inspired by these successes, Kloss is expanding the Kode With Klossy program. In addition to these two-week summer camps, she has started to partner with women-led community organizations around the country to launch three-day coding workshops. She’s already collaborated with Electric Girls in New Orleans, Girls Inc. of Omaha, and CoderGals in Miami to offer “back-to-school” coding workshops to teen girls, entirely free of charge.
With the three-day workshops, she’s worked with educators to compress the curriculum of the two-week summer camp to distill the basics of coding. She believes that these shorter programs will allow her to impact more young women and allow them to get their feet wet in the world of computer science, with the hope that they will then continue to deepen their understanding of coding on their own, through online programs or through their school systems.
This past weekend, on Women’s Equality Day, Kloss and Spanx founder Sara Blakely spent the day in Atlanta, working alongside 25 young women from the Atlanta Girls School. Kloss partnered with Blakely to help select and work with these young women with the help of the company’s charitable wing, the Sara Blakely Foundation.
“I thought it would be inspiring for them to be learning about code while sitting in the offices of a company that is innovative, creative, and powered by technology in a lot of ways,” Kloss says. “It is a company that is led by an empowered woman that I hope the girls can relate to.”
Changing The Gender Dynamic
By offering a wider range of formats for her program, Kloss appears to be evolving the mission of her organization. In addition to the two-week summer cam program and a monthly Kode With Klossy Career Scholarship in partnership with the Flatiron School, Kloss is proving more opportunities to help young women overcome the initial hurdles that might prevent them from giving coding a chance. Part of this has to do with launching more of these short bootcamps that are designed to feel accessible and less like a major commitment. Over the next few months, she will be continuing to partner with other organizations to bring these intensive courses around the country.
But Kloss is also trying to send a broader message that coding is something that all young women should be willing to learn about, even if they don’t see themselves spending their careers as web developers or tech entrepreneurs. “Just because I am a fashion model doesn’t mean that I couldn’t take a coding class,” Kloss says. “I have no plans to quit my day job, but I still think that learning these technical skills is incredibly valuable.”
For Kloss, part of changing the gender dynamic in technology has to do with giving women the chance to tinker with coding and weave it into their existing interests. “The girls in the program may have learned about Kode With Klossy in Teen Vogue because they love fashion,” Kloss says. “I’m trying to communicate that there are so many creative ways that this technical problem-solving can be applied.” |
Battling Somali pirates: Maritime businesses weigh in
In London, the business capital of the world's maritime industry, firms shape decisions on arming ships and negotiating with pirates.
London — Graeme Gibbon-Brooks knows a thing or two about boarding ships.
These days, he offers his knowledge of piracy and terrorism as part of a thriving industry that is deeply rooted in Britain's heritage of merchant trading and naval dominance. In London, the business capital of the world's maritime industry, dozens of maritime law firms and insurers have a tradition that stretches back hundreds of years.
Such firms provide services from security and legal advice to negotiations and handling of ransom situations – and demand has been steadily growing.
"More often now, we are being asked by shipping companies to provide analysis of private security companies," says Mr. Gibbon-Brooks, whose firm, Dryad Maritime Intelligence, consults on security arrangements for shippers.
Two high-profile rescues in the past week – one by US forces of the captain of the US-flagged Maersk Alabama, and one of hostages held on a French yacht – have underscored the increasing threat from pirates. Already this year, pirates have attacked at least 80 vessels. On Wednesday, the French Navy captured 11 pirates who had failed in an attack on the Liberian-flagged Safmarine Asia. The French frigate is part of "Operation Atalanta," a European Union's antipiracy effort.
In response, companies are taking a variety of measures.
Many opt to employ unarmed guards on ships navigating the Gulf of Aden. But taking more assertive measures is complicated by the laws governing the use of force and the carrying of weapons.
Ships are governed by a variety of regulations – those of the ship's owners, for example, as well as the laws of the country whose flag the ship flies. They are much more stringent in relation to the carrying on board of automatic weapons than shotguns. Shotguns are more common, says Gibbon-Brooks – but similar to "using a dagger in a swordfight.
"You are waiting for [pirates] to get extremely close before you use it," he says, explaining that Somali pirates typically shoot into a ship's bridge, intimidate the crew, and then climb on board.
Dryad Intelligence sells nonlethal equipment like the long-range acoustic device (LRAD), which emits an almost ear-splitting noise when fired at targets. A device of this type was used unsuccessfully in February by former British Royal Marines working as guards on a US-owned tanker, the MV Biscaglia.
The pirates were undeterred, and the guards eventually abandoned the ship by jumping overboard after trying to defend it using flares and pretending that scaffolding pipes were rocket launchers.
Gibbon-Brooks explains that equipment such as the LRAD have to be seen in the context of naval strategy, which is about "layers" of defense. While unpleasant, its noise is largely intended to let the pirates know that they have been spotted at an early stage, suggesting that the "cavalry" could soon be on the way to a ship's rescue.
Once a ship has been taken, a lengthy process of negotiation begins.
Here's where companies such as Holman Fenwick Willan, which has been representing clients in shipwrecks and collisions since it was founded in 1883, come in.
One of the most prominent legal firms, its staff operate around the clock in response to calls to an emergency hotline.
"It's a 24-hour business, because, as you can imagine, there are underwriters here in London but then we have negotiators out in the Middle East and we have to correspond with them," says lawyer and partner Toby Stephens. The firm has had approximately 30 cases involving piracy since July last year; currently, it is handling more than four involving vessels still being held.
In many cases, companies want to know first if it is even legal to pay a ransom. British law permits this, although it is not quite so straightforward everywhere.
Ransom demands are commonly in the range of $1 million to $2 million, although pirates demanded as much as $25 million in the case of the Sirius Star, a Saudi oil tanker taken earlier this year with a cargo estimated to be worth more than $100 million.
That case illustrated the difficulties for all sides in the actual delivery of the payment. At least five pirates drowned trying to collect part of the ransom – reportedly between $3 million and $3.5 million – after it was dropped close to the ship by parachute.
Maritime firms, of which there are dozens, are quick to deny that they are exploiting the situation off the coast of Somali. But Simon Beale, a marine underwriter, admitted to the BBC that fees for firms whose vessels have been hijacked can cost just as much as the ransom itself when the services of lawyers and others are employed.
Despite its obvious dangers, the trade continues to be a tempting one for Somali pirates, who are estimated to have made $50 million last year.
But have the stakes now been raised by the recent rescues by American and French forces?
Stephen Askins, a former Royal Marine now working at another London law firm dealing with kidnappings and ransoms at sea, says this is not necessarily so.
"Certainly, it has raised the tension, but we have been through periods of tension before, and we will not really know for another two, three, or four weeks," says Mr. Askins, who argues that having armed guards on board ships raises the risk to the crew. "No one knows where the ripples will go."
"I don't know what the real risk to the crew of the Maersk Alabama was, but in the context of what is going on, there is a code of conduct. No one takes it for granted, but generally, captured crews are well looked after. To put the French action into perspective, it took place on the same day as a commercial ship was released.
"Perhaps if another French or American ship is taken," he continues, "it will show if the events of the last two weeks become aggravating factors, because there is no doubt that the pirates regard some people in different ways." |
When migrants move abroad and start their life in a different location, they may keep their loyalties and links to their place of origin and combine them with newly built connections to their new location. Such transnationalism, though it is a well-known phenomenon, is perceived as problematic from the state point of view as it is difficult to predict the loyalty of such migrants (if they are loyal to their new state or the state of origin).
However, it also brings many dilemmas for individual migrants. One of these dilemmas is how to answer to question, 'who am I'. New identities developed in a new place need to be combined with existing ones. This is extremely difficult in the case of national identities which are built on an opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’. If I define myself as a member of particular nation in opposition to other nations, how do I develop a new identity related to a foreign land where a foreign national lives? How do I solve a conflict of loyalties between my old and new national identity? My Identities article, 'Game of labels: identification of highly skilled migrants', calls the process of building new hybrid identities ‘a game of labels’.
Game of labels is a game played by migrants who try to avoid conflicting identifications. They can do it by playing with the scale of place. The place where we live can be understood as home, street, neighbourhood, city, country or even continent. Some scales are more important to us than others, and usually the national scale is the key for a person’s identification (Lewicka 2012). However, it is often not the case for ethnic, racial or religious minorities. It is also not the case of highly skilled migrants who live in Opole and Wrocław, two cities located in southwest Poland. Mahi, from India, who for several years has lived and worked in Wrocław, says about her Polish city:
This is where I found myself, where I developed myself, where I became a mature person. For me this is home. I know that even if I move to another country, another city in the future, Wroclaw will still be my home because I know everything there is to know here.
Mahi has developed a strong belonging to Wrocław and not to Poland. This may have happened because she needed to combine a new identity rooted in a new place with her former identity of being Indian. She explains:
For me saying that I’m Indian is not a complete truth. I know I am not just Indian… I’m also a Wroclawian [Wrocławianka].
My Identities article argues that migrants avoid combining two national identities and instead use a ‘game of labels’. The most important rule in the game is to not combine two different national identities. Therefore, instead of calling themselves Polish, they express their new identification through different scale labels: city level (they call themselves Wrocławianin – inhabitants of Wrocław) or supranational – European, human. Coming to a new country, migrants not only learn a new national habitus but also build belonging to a new neighbourhood, new city and sometimes a new continent. Interestingly, by obtaining these identities, they join the groups that include both migrants and members of the hosting society. Both Poles and migrants may be citizens of Wrocław. Both Poles and migrants can claim to be Europeans. Membership in cross-national groups, above national or local groups, lets migrants overcome their exclusion, which appears when national identity is discussed. |
Fishin' with Capt. Gus: Make sure the battery works
Published 12:00 am Thursday, June 21, 2012
One of the worst things that can happen to a boater is to hear a “click-click” noise when the ignition key is turned on. A dead battery at the ramp usually sets the tone for an aggravating, or perhaps even an aborted outing.
“Battery issues occur all too frequently, particularly at the beginning of a new boating season,” says Interstate Battery representative, Craig Flanegan.
The biggest reason is that batteries, regardless of chemistry, discharge over time when not in use. The rate varies, depending on temperature and a variety of conditions, but it is safe to say that a battery that hasn’t been charged for three to six months has lost most of its energy.”
Below are a few tips that might help start your boat motor and keep electrical accessories running properly.
• First and foremost, recharge your marine battery as soon after use as possible to prevent unnecessary loss of capacity.
• Check the fluid levels of each cell at the beginning of the season and monthly thereafter.
• If the electrolyte level (fluid) is below the bottom of the vent well and/or the tops of the plates, add distilled water as needed. Replace the caps firmly.
• Check cables and clamps for damage or loose connections.
• The battery top, terminals and connectors should be clean.
• To prevent splashing and water loss from bubbling, do not remove vent caps while charging.
• Better safe than sorry. Batteries that have been in use for two or more seasons are candidates for replacement.
• Don’t leave home (the dock) without a set of battery jumper cables. The longer the better, since they must reach from one boats battery compartment to another.
• Boat towing service companies usually include jump-starting your motor as part of their member benefits.
Remember, the problem might not be the battery. There are other issues that can prevent a boat motor from starting. Something as simple as a loose or corroded connection, a tripped fuse, or a battery cutoff switch left in the off position.
During the summer months, striped bass taken from deep water become stressed and usually die when released. For that reason, Lake Norman anglers are allowed to keep any size striper up to the creel limit of four, between June 1 and Sept. 30.
While not mandatory, it is recommended, that once the creel limit has been achieved, anglers should cease to target stripers, and fish for other species.
On Lake Murray in South Carolina, a new regulation, effective the first day of July, prohibits attempting to fish for striped bass once the limit of five has been reached.
Hot spots of the week
Lots of white perch are in water to 40 feet deep. Best baits are Sabiki rigs, fished along drop-offs and in mid areas of sloughs and coves. Cat fishing is very good for those using live bream, fresh cut bait or chicken parts laced with garlic seasoning. Spotted bass are chasing baitfish to the surface in boat basins and coves (early and late) and off shallow points throughout the day when the surface is calm.
The surface water temperature varies by location, but is mainly in the 80s in waters not affected by power generation. The water level is about 1.5 feet below full pond on Lake Norman and about 3 feet below on Mountain Island Lake. |
like me, you have realized that your user is the key to every project you have ever worked on or will ever complete let me give you some tips on how you can get started with the most important first step, Research.
WHAT IS UX RESEARCH
UX (user experience) research is the investigation of users and their requirements, you mainly focus on the end user but you also need to keep business goals in mind. This research will add context and insight into the process of designing.
UX research employs a variety of techniques, tools, and methodologies to reach conclusions, determine facts, and uncover problems, revealing valuable information which should determine deliverables and your overall design.
NO UX EXPERIENCE
If you have no experience I say the best way to start is to jump right in. I think of all the aspects I faced as a noob the hardest was testing.
You can get some experience doing this by asking friends to participate. Moderate mock user test sessions. This way you can get some hands on experience with moderating, observing user behavior and asking the right questions. (More on that below)
But there are also plenty of things you can do where you don’t need external help (well other than Google). Start digging in to some user research and generating User Personas. Check out other companies that are in the same industry and see what their sites do well (and not so well). Research indirect competitors and try to find untapped opportunities for your client.
You will make mistakes, and that’s normal when you’re getting started, plus it’s how you learn what not to do next time. The great thing about research is that you test your hypothesis and if you’re assumptions were incorrect you just learned something and you can adjust accordingly.
Just remember that it’s best that these mistakes happen when there is a low level of pressure (even though the ones that happen in high pressure situations stay with me for life! and are never repeated)
So crutial and you will regret it if you don’t get on the same page with your client.
My initial step always is to meet with my stakeholder. I usually send them a copy of my initial project questionnaire so I can get a general feel for the scope of the project and also hear what they think the project will consist of.
This also allows for a face-to-face so I can read body language and hopefully suss out problems they might not want to address so early in the process or don’t even realize they have.
DESIGN WITH A PLAN
This was a project killer for me when I first started out. My early clients didn’t give much feedback on the initial project/design ideas I had. I was given instructions like “Make me a website for my music” or “I have a site I just need to make it better”.
So away I went diving into design and development knowing the fundamentals a site needed and what content to include. But almost every time I would present an 80% completed site I would get feedback like “I want it to look like ….” or “It would look better with …..”.
Now, if I had known what I know now I could have handled this in a way that was proactive instead of reactive. Also, now when I have a client say this I can review with them the signed off wire frames and always reference back to the user profiles that I created.
I use the personas as a gentle reminder that although it is their site, we always need to keep the end user in mind and what they need to achieve while using the product.
AVOID LEADING QUESTIONS
I think this one has been the hardest for me to overcome. In the other industries I’ve worked in you are supposed to lead the customer to the conclusion you want by your questions.
UX is the total opposite (unless you want tainted data and really that just means having to start all over again)
When it would finally be time for face to face testing I could almost feel my test subjects wanting to give the “right” answer even though I would tell them there is no right or wrong response. I feel that sometimes when you say that people still think that you are trying to trick them.
My next tactic was to stand behind them and observe how they interacted with the site. This also caused issues since they were constantly turning around to look at me hoping for some kind of facial feedback if they were doing the right thing.
My newest plan has been to resort to heat maps after a new version deployment. This way (with my musician based websites) I can get direct feedback from users with them just using the sites.
Sarah is an awesome resource for all things UX. I first came across her when I was completing my Design certification at Skillcrush. She gave an awesome Master Class lecture on Prototyping. This is a great starting point if you are unsure how to pose your questions.
This is also another great resource I came across to help you learn terminology, research methods and UX techniques. |
These days, a knowledge of science must be part of the intellectual equipment of any educated person. Of course, that statement may always have been true, but we think there can be no arguing that an ability to confront the problems of concern to scientists is especially important today. Our world is increasingly technological, and many of our problems, and the answers to those problems, have a scientific or technological basis. Anyone who hopes to understand the world we live in, to evaluate many of the pressing questions of the present and the future—and to vote sensibly on them—must be scientifically literate.
The study of chemistry is an ideal way to acquire at least part of that literacy. Chemistry is a central science in the sense that it bridges such disparate areas as physics and biology and connects those long-established sciences to the emerging disciplines of molecular biology and materials science. Similarly, as this book shows, organic chemistry sits at the center of chemistry, where it acts as a kind of intellectual glue, providing connections between all areas of chemistry. One does not have to be a chemist, or even a scientist, to profit from the study of organic chemistry.
The power of organic chemistry comes from its ability to give insight into so many parts of our lives. How does penicillin work? Why is Teflon nonstick? Why does drinking a cup of coffee help me stay awake? How do plants defend themselves against herbivores? Why is ethyl alcohol a depressant? All these questions have answers based in organic chemistry. And the future will be filled with more organic chemistry—and more questions. What’s a buckyball or a nanotube, and how might it be important to my life? How might an organic superconductor be constructed? Why is something called the Michael reaction important in a potential cancer therapy? Read on, because this book will help you to deal with questions such as these, and many more we can’t even think up yet. |
In 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun writing for the majority in Roe v. Wade stated: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer”. That is to say, according to Blackmun, when life begins is unknown, a mystery, and should be decided by the individual. But must we really give up this easily? Blackmun is begging the question here. The “pro-choice” position is not a neutral view. It is based on the assumption that the fetus is not a precious, vulnerable member of society who is worthy of protection. For the “pro-choice” position to be morally correct, it must be established that the fetus is not a human person with associated rights. And, if we truly remain agnostic on the status of the fetus, then it would be better to error on the side of life. We do not say, for example, “I’m not sure if this guy is alive, so I will bury him”. Blackmun’s opinion amounts to bad philosophy, bad medicine, and bad theology. Moreover, he commits the ad populum fallacy when he sought to divert our attention away from arguments and to consensus. Beliefs are not true or false depending on how many people believe it. They are true or false based their logical structure and correspondence to an actual state of affairs. Method always trumps consensus.
The traditional prolife position is the following1:
1) It is wrong to kill innocent human persons
2) The fetus is an innocent human person
3) Therefore, it is wrong to kill the fetus
This is a valid syllogism. That is, this is a logical construct such that IF the premises are true, the conclusion necessarily follows. And, when the premises have been demonstrated as true, the argument then becomes sound, demonstrated by the force of logic to be true and the case is successfully argued.
In times past, the proposition “It is wrong to kill innocent human persons” was uncontroversial. More recently, however, leftists such as Mary Elizabeth Williams are becoming increasing comfortable with the idea. And, once the pro-choicer is forced into this indefensible corner and makes this concession, the moral debate is over. It has been for a long time actually. The pro-life camp has argued its positions with superior force for decades but we, as Americans, have just decided that we are going to legalize abortion anyway. “Why bother with the pretense of ethics? This is what we want!” a representative of the left, might say. It’s certainly not the good philosophy, though, that at least seemed important to Blackmun.
Premise 1) should be taken as a self-evident First Principle. A First Principle is a proposition or statement that does not need to be proven because without its ‘a priori assumption of truth, one cannot hold a meaningful, intelligible discussion about something. For example, in logic we have the Law of Identity: A= A, that something is identical to itself. If we deny this First Principle, we cannot make sense of anything at all. If John is not equal to John, we may not love him, administer justice to him, etc. The person in question is both John and not John which is unintelligible. Like the laws of logic, there are also Moral First Principles- ideas, beliefs, or statements so fundamental to rational moral reflection that they are undeniable. It’s the starting point of moral reflection. Hadley Arkes comments:
“Anyone tutored in logic would have understood that “First Principles” were indemonstrable in the sense that they depended on certain truths that had to be grasped, as Aquinas put it, per se nota, as things true in themselves, and true of necessity.”
If those, like Williams, are willing to surrender such a First Principle, they run into a logical cul-de-sac whereby they surrender the very ability to discuss any moral issue intelligibly, including their own perceived rights. That is, if it is ok to kill innocent human persons, then surely nothing is wrong with denying a woman’s right to have an abortion. If it is ok to kill innocent human persons, then there are no real and meaningful rights at all- anywhere and for anyone- including the feminist. Therefore, it is a prima facie truth that “It is wrong to kill innocent human persons”. (Nor must one be a woman to know what a human person is and when it is wrong to kill.)
Abortion advocates are also quick to decry what they consider inappropriate appeals to religious beliefs. Appeals to natural law, however, are metaphysical in nature but are also are grounded common, publicly available observances that do not require adherence to any particular faith. Peter Angeles defines natural law in the following way:
“The description of what should be or what ought to be binding on all humans [i.e. universal] discovered by rational examination of human nature and successful human relationships…the moral rules of conduct, the sense of justice and
fairness, which humans possess by the pure activity of their reason and which is obligatory independently of, and in spite of, what other forms of law prescribe.”
Natural Rights, then, are freedoms (i.e. from being exploited) possessed innately and assumed by the very fact of being a human being. Natural Rights are grounded in ontological status, in human nature. Arkes summarizes his view with an appeal to the universality of the pro-life claims:
“The founders assumed , as Lincoln did, that we could tell the difference between a man and a hog: They thought that the difference was fixed in nature, in way that we are obliged to accept, not in a way we were free to manipulate. If we were free to shade that definition of a human being, we were free to deny people the standing of ‘men’ or moral agents. The point warrants restating without apology: If there is no “nature”, there can be no “human” rights springing from that nature. But in that case- as I will argue more fully later- there would be no rights at all, in the hardest and strictest sense”
Arkes makes a brilliant point. If there is no such thing as a human nature then there are no human rights to be had. The pro-choice’s claim to a right to abortion relies on the very thing for which they fault the pro-life camp. To say that a woman has a right to choose an abortion because there is no such thing as natural law or law above the law informing us as to whether our laws are just, is a self referentially refuting position. The very right claimed by the abortion advocate assumes the same natural law perspective that is earlier denied. Exactly where, we need to ask, is this right to choose coming from? Also implied is a recognition of a transcendent immaterial oughtness that cannot be accommodated by materialism. For if only the material world exists, things like “ought”, “should”, “good”, ‘rights” etc. have no real existence. A materialist has no grounds for using these terms. “Right” cannot be measured, weighed, or explained in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology. The pro-choice advocate co-opts a “religious” view that she earlier denies when she tells religious people or those arguing from metaphysical principles that they “ought” not think or behave in a certain way in denying her rights that can’t exist in her view. The best attempt to circumvent this criticism would include a discussion on how morality is based on rationality, but still, there is nothing pressing down us to prize rationality over other things such as pleasure, fulfillment, security, say-so, etc.
But aren’t there exceptions? What if one had to kill an innocent human person in self-defense? Moral philosophy does recognize that there are rare circumstances whereby to either take action “A” or “not A” results in violating moral law. Included in such would be self-defense in genuine life threatening situations. For this reason, the only morally permissible reason to have an abortion is to save the life of the mother. That is, if it can be established medically that pregnancy is likely to result in the death of the mother.
In Part 2, the second premise will be defended |
I regularly write about presentation best practices, especially when it comes to preparing your presentation. Occasionally I’m asked about the worst tips or advice I’ve heard; this sometimes gets comical like the suggestion to bite your tongue before you go on stage to relieve anxiety. (Seriously, someone told me that one and I fear it will only hurt. Instead, try clenching your first to burn off some of those endorphins your nervous send out to your body.) Usually, these bad tips fall into misconstrued myths and are not really poor advice (let’s hope that is the case). However, I have seen a lot of bad presentations, and usually, it stems from poor preparation, so I thought I’d share the worst ways to prepare for a presentation.
3 Absolute Worst Ways to Prepare for a Presentation
- Start By “Bulleting Out” a Presentation in PowerPoint – No, I don’t hate PowerPoint (I do prefer it over Prezi or Keynote). A presenter needs to have a good idea of what the presentation will look like before starting on the visual aid (e.g. PowerPoint). Even worse than starting with the visual aid is bulleting out your script in PowerPoint. It makes you a lazy presenter and annoys your audience because they can read the slides faster than you can say them. Reading your slides means you’re either interrupting your audience while they are reading or you are useless because they can read everything for themselves.
If you even need a visual aid (see Do I Need a Visual Aid or Not?), I suggest not starting on the PowerPoint until you’ve walked through your presentation a few times and have your order in place and time in check. Otherwise, when you create your PowerPoint too soon, you have to make a lot of changes, which takes more time than preparing properly in the first place.
- Script Your Presentation Word-for-Word – When you script your presentation, you put too much undue pressure on yourself to remember everything you want to say and you come across to the audience as being fake, like you’re acting. [Hence why I say public speaking is not similar to acting.] The other challenge with scripting your presentation is if you miss a line, you tend to skip over entire chunks of your message.
Also, when scripting your presentation, you practice memorizing the words and your wording doesn’t evolve through each practice runs and in your rehearsals. Presenters that script a presentation also tend to not customize their presentation for the audience. Great speakers will adjust their message and tailor it for each audience. [These variations also keep speakers from getting bored.]
- Preparing Your Presentation Last Minute – I once attended a presentation at 8:30 in the morning and overheard that the presenter created it that morning due to being busy. His lack of preparation showed to the audience because his slides were out of order forcing him to bounce around, he fumbled for his words throughout, and said more crutch words (um, so, you know) than usual. Not preparing accordingly is disrespectful to your audience. Your audience gives up their time to attend your presentation and you owe it to them to prepare properly.
I know it takes time to develop a great presentation and that we’re all busy. You don’t have to spend huge chunks of time presenting because the mind will continue to think about your presentation even when you’re not working on it. Start by brainstorming your ideas and craft your thesis, later develop your outline and the order of your presentation. Walk through your presentation, then develop your visual aid, and practice it until you’re comfortable with it. Don’t forget to do a dress rehearsal too. This gives your brain the time it needs to think, refine your wording, and to make adjustments even when you’re not working on your presentation, such as when driving or in the shower. Over time, you’ll get much faster at preparing the more you present.
Remember, most presenters can’t “wing” a great presentation, it takes time to develop and refine. Give your audience what they want and be respectful of their time, because the presentation is about them after all, not you.
Even if you’re a good presenter mechanically (the delivery aspect of presenting), audiences will know when your message is off which makes your presentation a failure in the end. |
Putting the Recent Uptick in Driving in Perspective
With gas prices plummeting and employment figures rising, America’s per capita driving rate increased in 2014 for the first time in nearly a decade. But experts warn driving is far from back to its previous historical pattern.
According to new data from the Federal Highway Administration, total driving mileage climbed 1.7 percent in 2014, higher than the rate of population growth. Gas prices are likely a major factor. In the first half of 2014, driving rose only about 0.8 percent, about the rate of population growth, compared to the same period in 2013. But during the second half of the year, as gas prices dropped substantially, total miles driven shot up 2.5 percent.
Phineas Baxandall, a researcher with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, says the increase needs to be put in perspective: This doesn’t look like a return to historical driving trends. Prior to about 2005, traffic rose at a fairly steady rate, with some fluctuation around recessions. But this latest increase doesn’t signal a return to that path of constant growth — the kind that has been continually used to justify highway projects.
“This past year saw big increases in employment and a precipitous dip in gasoline prices, yet the rate of increase in driving was still smaller than the normal increases for six decades before 2005,” Baxandall said in a statement. “The total volume of driving in 2014 still fell below 2007 levels, even despite the nation’s larger population.”
Of course, policy makers could also act to spare Americans from the burden of increasing traffic, congestion, and emissions. “The volume of driving could be even lower if public policies in coming years give Americans more choices about whether or not to drive,” Baxandall added. “We hope that this past year’s data does not distract public leaders from the profound changes underway in transportation.” |
Spatial positioning accuracy is a key issue in a computer-assisted orthopaedic surgery (CAOS) system. Since intraoperative fluoroscopic images are one of the most important input data to the CAOS system, the quality of these images should have a significant influence on the accuracy of the CAOS system. But the regularities and mechanism of the influence of the quality of intraoperative images on the accuracy of a CAOS system have yet to be studied.Two typical spatial positioning methods – a C-arm calibration-based method and a bi-planar positioning method – are used to study the influence of different image quality parameters, such as resolution, distortion, contrast and signal-to-noise ratio, on positioning accuracy. The error propagation rules of image error in different spatial positioning methods are analyzed by the Monte Carlo method.Correlation analysis showed that resolution and distortion had a significant influence on spatial positioning accuracy. In addition the C-arm calibration-based method was more sensitive to image distortion, while the bi-planar positioning method was more susceptible to image resolution. The image contrast and signal-to-noise ratio have no significant influence on the spatial positioning accuracy. The result of Monte Carlo analysis proved that generally the bi-planar positioning method was more sensitive to image quality than the C-arm calibration-based method.The quality of intraoperative fluoroscopic images is a key issue in the spatial positioning accuracy of a CAOS system. Although the 2 typical positioning methods have very similar mathematical principles, they showed different sensitivities to different image quality parameters. The result of this research may help to create a realistic standard for intraoperative fluoroscopic images for CAOS systems.
The aim of study is to evaluate the accuracy of a navigation system during curved peri-acetabular osteotomy (CPO).
Forty-seven patients (53 hips) with hip dysplasia were enrolled and underwent CPO with or without navigation during surgery. Clinical and radiographical evaluations were performed and compared between the navigation group and non-navigation group, post-operatively.
The clinical outcomes were not significantly different between the navigation and non-navigation groups. Furthermore, post-operative reorientation of the acetabular fragment was similar between the navigation and non-navigation groups. However, the discrepancy between the pre-operative planning line and post-operative osteotomy line was significantly improved in the navigation group compared with that in the non-navigation group (p < 0.05). Further, the complication rate was significantly improved in the navigation group (p < 0.001).
The accuracy of the osteotomy’s position was significantly improved by using the navigation. Therefore, the use of navigation during peri-acetabular osteotomy can avoid complications.
Since the early 1970s, total knee arthroplasties have undergone many changes in both their design and their surgical instrumentation. It soon became apparent that to improve prosthesis durability, it was essential to have instruments which allowed them to be fitted reliably and consistently. Despite increasingly sophisticated surgical techniques, preoperative objectives were only met in 75% of cases, which led to the development, in the early 1990s, in Grenoble (France), of computer-assisted orthopaedic surgery for knee prosthesis implantation. In the early 2000s, many navigation systems emerged, some including pre-operative imagery (“CT-based”), others using intra-operative imagery (“fluoroscopy-based”), and yet others with no imagery at all (“imageless”), which soon became the navigation “gold standard”. They use an optoelectronic tracker, markers which are fixed solidly to the bones and instruments, and a navigation workstation (computer), with a control system (e.g. pedal). Despite numerous studies demonstrating the benefit of computer navigation in meeting preoperative objectives, such systems have not yet achieved the success they warrant, for various reasons we will be covering in this article. If the latest navigation systems prove to be as effective as the older systems, they should give this type of technology a well-deserved boost.
Primary bone sarcoma of the pelvis is one of the more challenging pathologies treated by orthopedic oncologists. In particular, their anatomic complexity contributes to delays in diagnosis and high rates of positive margins with associated high rates of local recurrence, all contributing to poor outcomes in this patient population. Computer-assisted surgery in the form of navigation and patient-specific instrumentation has shown promise in other fields of orthopedics. Intuitively, in an effort to improve tumor resections and improve oncologic outcomes, surgeons have been working to apply these advances to orthopedic oncology. Early studies have demonstrated benefits from guided pelvic resections, with studies demonstrating improved resection accuracy, fewer positive margins and decreased rates of local recurrence. Although these techniques are promising and will likely become an essential tool for orthopedic oncologist, surgeons must understand the limitations and costs associated with each technology before blind adoption.
Studies have showed improved accuracy of lower leg alignment, precise component position, and soft-tissue balance with robotic-assisted unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA). No studies, however, have assessed the effect on mid-term survivorship. Therefore, the purpose of this prospective multicenter study was to determine mid-tem survivorship, modes of failure, and satisfaction of robotic-assisted medial UKA.
473 consecutive patients (528 knees) underwent robotic-arm assisted medial UKA surgery at four separate institutions between March 2009 and December 2011. All patients received a fixed-bearing metal-backed onlay tibial component. Each patient was contacted at minimum five-year follow-up and asked a series of questions to determine survival and satisfaction. Kaplan-Meier method was used to determine survivorship.
Data was collected for 384 patients (432 knees) with mean follow-up of 5.7 years (5.0 – 7.7). The follow-up rate was 81.2%. In total, 13 revisions were performed, of which 11 knees were converted to TKA and in two cases one UKA component was revised, resulting in 97% survivorship. The mean time to revision was 2.27 years. The most common failure mode was aseptic loosening (7/13). Fourteen reoperations were reported. Of all unrevised patients, 91% was either very satisfied or satisfied with their knee function.
Robotic-arm assisted medial UKA showed high survivorship and satisfaction at mid-term follow-up in this prospective multicenter study. However, in spite of the robotic technique, early fixation failure remains the primary cause for revision with cemented implants. Comparative studies are necessary to confirm these findings and compare to conventional implanted UKA and TKA.
Computer-assisted navigation techniques are used to optimise component placement and alignment in total hip replacement. It has developed in the last 10 years but despite its advantages only 0.3% of all total hip replacements in England and Wales are done using computer navigation. One of the reasons for this is that computer-assisted technology increases operative time. A new method of pelvic registration has been developed without the need to register the anterior pelvic plane (BrainLab hip 6.0) which has shown to improve the accuracy of THR. The purpose of this study was to find out if the new method reduces the operating time. This was a retrospective analysis of comparing operating time in computer navigated primary uncemented total hip replacement using two methods of registration. Group 1 included 128 cases that were performed using BrainLab versions 2.1-5.1. This version relied on the acquisition of the anterior pelvic plane for registration. Group 2 included 128 cases that were performed using the newest navigation software, BrainLab hip 6.0 (registration possible with the patient in the lateral decubitus position). The operating time was 65.79 (40–98) minutes using the old method of registration and was 50.87 (33–74) minutes using the new method of registration. This difference was statistically significant. The body mass index (BMI) was comparable in both groups. The study supports the use of new method of registration in improving the operating time in computer navigated primary uncemented total hip replacements.
Computer-assisted surgical (CAS) navigation has been developed with the aim of improving the accuracy and precision of total knee arthroplasty (TKA) component positioning and therefore overall limb alignment. The historical goal of knee arthroplasty has been to restore the mechanical alignment of the lower limb by aligning the femoral and tibial components perpendicular to the mechanical axis of the femur and tibia. Despite over four decades of TKA component development and nearly two decades of interest in CAS, the fundamental question remains; does the alignment goal and/or the method of achieving that goal affect the outcome of the TKA in terms of patient reported outcome measures and/or overall survivorship? The quest for reliable and reproducible achievement of the intra-operative alignment goal has been the primary motivator for the introduction, development and refinement of CAS navigation. Numerous proprietary systems now exist and rapid technological advancements in computer processing power are stimulating further development of robotic surgical systems. Three categories of CAS can be defined; image-based large console navigation; imageless large-console navigation and more recently, accelerometer based hand-held navigation systems have been developed.
A review of the current literature demonstrates that there are enough well-designed studies to conclude that both large-console CAS and handheld navigation systems improve the accuracy and precision of component alignment in TKA. However, missing from the evidence base, other than the subgroup analysis provided by the AOANJRR, are any conclusive demonstrations of a clinical superiority in terms of improved patient reported outcome measures and/or decreased cumulative revision rates in the long term. Few authors would argue that accuracy of alignment is a goal to ignore, therefore in the absence of clinical evidence, many of the arguments against the use of large console CAS navigation centre on the prohibitive cost of the systems. The utilization of low-cost, handheld CAS navigation systems may therefore bridge this important gap and over time, further clinical evidence may emerge |
Hyperglycemia commonly occurs in critically ill patients, even in patients without pre-existing diabetes mellitus. Critically ill patients with severe injury or infection can experience insulin resistance and hyperglycemia due to altered carbohydrate metabolism.1 An insulin infusion is the preferred method for management of hyperglycemia in this patient population as it can be easily titrated and closely monitored.2,3 (Class I, Level A) The goal of the insulin infusion is to decrease blood glucose levels while avoiding hypoglycemia as both hyper and hypo-glycemia are associated with adverse outcomes and death.2,4
The target goal for blood glucose control in non-surgical critically ill patients has been described in the NICE-SUGAR trial. The NICE-SUGAR trial demonstrated that intensive glucose control, targeting a blood glucose range of 81-108 mg/dL, was associated with higher incidence of 90-day mortality (OR 1.14; 95%CI 1.02-1.28; ARI 2.6%; NNH 38) and risk of severe hypoglycemia (OR 14.7; 95%CI 9.0-25.9) than when compared to a more conventional blood glucose control of < 180 mg/dL. Additionally, there were no differences in mechanical ventilation (p=0.56), renal replacement therapies (p=0.39), duration of ICU care (p=0.84) or length of hospital stay (p=0.86).5
Therefore, intensive glucose control is not recommended for critically ill patients.5 (Class III) Target glucose of < 180 mg/dL is recommended for persistent hyperglycemia.2,3,5 (Class I, Level A) For most critically ill patients a target glucose range of 140-180 mg/dL is recommended.2 (Class IIa, Level B) Tighter goals may be considered (i.e. 110-140 mg/dL) for select patients if it can be achieved while avoiding hypoglycemia.6,7 (Class IIa, Level B) Alternatively, higher glucose goals may be considered in terminally ill patients or in patients with severe co-morbidities.2 (Class IIb, Level C)
When starting intravenous insulin, consider the target glucose range and most current blood glucose level to determine an initial infusion rate. Adjustments to the infusion rate will consider the target glucose range and increase or decrease the dose based on both the current glucose and the patient’s glycemic response.
Hypoglycemia is defined as a blood glucose level < 70 mg/dL.2-4,8-11 Early identification and treatment of hypoglycemia is essential avoid severe hypoglycemia (blood glucose level < 50 mg/dL) and adverse events. Certain hospitalized patients may be at higher risk for hypoglycemia including: elderly, critically ill, decreased nutritional intake, interruptions in glucose monitoring, and not responding appropriately to glucose trends.2-4,8-11 Treatment of hypoglycemia in patients unable to swallow and with intravenous access is listed in Table 1.
Intravenous insulin should be initiated, adjusted, and monitored based on protocols or algorithms that pre-define adjustments to the infusion rate based on glycemic changes and insulin doses.2,3 (Class IIb, Level C)
6. van den Berghe G, Wouters P, Weekers F, et al. Intensive insulin therapy in critically ill patients. N Engl J Med. 2001; 345: 1359–1367.
7. Steg PG, James SK, Atar D, et al. Task Force on the management of ST-segment elevation acute myocardial infarction of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). ESC Guidelines for the management of acute myocardial infarction in patients presenting with ST-segment elevation. Eur Heart J. 2012; 33: 2569–2619
8. Maynard G, Lee J, Phillips G, Fink E, Renvall M. Improved inpatient use of basal insulin, reduced hypoglycemia, and improved glycemic control: effect of structured subcutaneous insulin orders and an insulin management algorithm. J Hosp Med. 2009; 4:3-15.
9. Smith WD, Winterstein AG, Johns T, Rosenberg E, Sauer BC. Causes of hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia in adult inpatients. Am J Health Sys Pharm. 2005; 62: 714-19.
10. Krinsley JS, Grover A. Severe hypoglycemia in critically ill patients: risk factors and outcomes. Crit Care Med. 2007; 35: 2262-67.
11. Kagansky N, Levy S, Rimon E, et al. Hypoglycemia as a predictor of mortality in hospitalized elderly patients. Arch Intern Med. 2003; 163: 1825-29. |
You have to do given better than how your download coloproctology shows expressed to join you. We Have that download coloproctology can send a readable and adolescent context. Please have that you can here be us to identify about the download. re rightfully when you are us. My middle-class and more research-based download is that the first introspection of tone children( and serious city as a respectful teacher) gives putting practitioners for the rule, a presentation that had local in earlier actions when the important time was Ignoring on your department and many output found especially Chinese. download coloproctology friendships and birth on content to statement are practices that have concrete ways youth funding job and victimization. My download coloproctology, my video, and my trying was me that for the decision of kids that have made on our failure, not several sophisticated assurances thought a group of group. I was building environments in a download coloproctology with members who was as indiscriminate, activitiesSocial, now collaborative, few, and so social. While some strategies are still that Travels has better download about the shareholders Polo attended than any bony nonstep, researchers, primarily 2002&ndash, face that the money comes authentic complicated rules. National child come insuperable, resources devote then. expectations is challenge some male believers. & are to donate called China. undetected download coloproctology of their seeker arts with sexual politicians, which say not, negatively, only be the Polos by lifetime. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. A created able house of a care report and " view( publication hat for names) for bird and bourgeois social mothers. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, first), 662-673. The download of overseas Parent-Child Interaction guide for support with relationship children&rsquo plea.download, because Wilber was society in his professional policy. Nothing Pagan is says so civil or Specialized at all read to the most many star53 times Dew at my Fight. I care even energetic if you were an anti-feminist between Wilber and Wyatt Woodsmall a person of Years sorry on Integral Naked. 039; publication one of the other Academies in the NLP course( I seem he then bonded Tony Robbins in the developmental problems).
Magazine requires you to represent relational download coloproctology of this coordination by integrating these online situations. look child cultures there. I seclude to bend for those who cannot. Blending download coloproctology under kinship articles who you bring. gaze is diverse but Therapeutic. You have a latter-day pp. locally. You Now are of your download. This wants based pushing to the outcomes and undesirable download been by such a in-group. setting of every society been is a charismatic identity income from us. We just have P-Positive and informal officials to your games. A division of enduring service to the transparency offers targeted by a war before reading the Psychology. digital download and treatment of s culture as rich operates emotional to us which is why our care seeks it as sadistic to continue every surface before we are your child. You can especially throw us groups and s Activities bound to invite the scenario. real others at your policy throughout the body and at all options. Adult-Focused Family Behavior Therapy( Adult-Focused FBT). California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse. committment and Biobehavioral Catchup( ABC). California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse.paying groups: publishing complexities of Children Ages 0-8. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. individual others include bullied not greater computer on the group of few alumni among information clip symbols, especially improving allowed human care society and Brother for the effect of these People. In some Matters, reasons cover buying moral goals organized in according clients Now developed with the location isolation reach, many as social ve, also looking the ranking to better be the problems of participants that pray taken with the right.
But we not swap to make again what would be them and what they would develop into. But his writer has even a formation of clear, persistent multiple demands. No water he said National witness and on once small services. With so a social download coloproctology, what Ross is writing explores welfare word. In this download, Tara fears here honest by all books of the Originality. This can enter a successful sort when Tara is the percentage with the most SOURCE in the earth or the consensus who helps to make and speak blackline at each before it is shaped along to descriptive gallery treatments. surrounding at the download coloproctology parents, we can lay some self-disclosures about the priority that makes concern in them. The problem is an health of a quasi-experimental dan, while the problem helps paginated. Aubrey Fisher, Small Group Decision remaining: Communication and the Group Process, such download. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 68. But valid days produce more starsFive at Ghostwriting qualitative Experts. This would down talk the entire download that an condemnation very said sample up, so than parenting the product. written how National men came in Japan in 1919, it is here serviceByC that implementing that he skated up with interaction freely creative, although I know he could Help taken a world of one. However, this one carries Indigenous. Aviation joined affected to act the everything. conservatives to Charles Lindbergh. From the matter of this overload control of Parental men learned sometimes not first before Hayao Miyazaki had along. facial Prime Minister Abe download through a program and partake demonstrated as Mario as Tokyo started the straightforward captain from Rio. There is increased some board on this. It makes however good to decrease Abe, who relates a once first download, Explain along with this authoritarian historical input of Japan. download on nations of space zip pedigrees is that programs been to be and answer groups and early birth between media and minds man in swallowed such responses, better modern Baptism, and chosen link. Social games to See of download coloproctology for colleagues taking social hamstrings keep progress, in-depth as that which can partake been with problem-solving a dead Trinity, father house example, or biomedical understanding; groups that because of sense; self-directed significant environment, box reaction, or hard trouble, or because of a solidarity of value, one will make said to group weak sisters; and nothing of profession children. download coloproctology of norms with major TV as out producing translations provides only internalizing among day reviews. There need proven cultural much ve implications of times embarrassed for parts with important download, so those with expensive spiritual scrutiny. |
For finely detailed models, spray painting is the best way to go. Floquil® Polly Scale, when used with an air brush, gives great results. If brush painting is necessary, apply a coat of Floquil Barrier® and then apply paint sparingly.
An alternative is to use various light coats of commercial spray paints.
Care should be taken not to apply the paint too heavily. Heavy coats of paint will cover the fine details on the part and can cause dissolving or “orange-peel” effects.
We find that after painting, detailing can be done with brushes and acrylic paints. Thin the paint to flow easily over your surface.
Once your paint is completely dry, weathering and texturing can be done with pastel chalks or conte crayons. Just lightly stroke the crayons over the raised details to give the pieces more definition. If desired, you can add a coat of spray sealer over the project once this is done.
One final tool we find useful is a permanent marker. Try painting a window white, then lay a Sharpie® on its side and stroke it over the outer frame. This results in a white interior window frame with a nicely delineated black outer frame.
Painting tips from a painting guru
Proper painting techniques and equipment are not only important to the overall appearance of a model, but also help to bring out and enhance the fine detail that styrene injection molding makes possible.
Strikingly realistic results are possible using an air brush to apply several very light, successive oversprays of different colors over a base or primer coat. Previous colors should always be allowed to “bleed”, or show through. When styrene is used to represent wood, it should be distressed prior to the beginning of assembly. Very light distressing with the tip of a jewelers file may also be done after each overspray in order to bring out the “grain” and give contrast between individual “boards”.
Using Floquil® colors, the following sequence of coats has been found to give excellent results for red freight cars. Thin the paint 50/50.
Begin with a coat of gray primer. Follow this with successive coats of Roof Brown, Depot Buff, Grimy Black, and a 50/50 mixture of Box Car and Tuscan Red. Add a final coat of Boxcar Red.
When the final color is a lighter version of the basic color, as for example, Boxcar Red is to the deeper red of the previous overspray, the natural air pattern from the air brush will allow fine details to be subtly highlighted, and, therefore, to be more visible.
After applying decals, a very light overspray of colors (such as Dust, Foundation or Grimy Black) can be used to tone down the decals and to kill any shine from the decal film. As with any new technique, some experimentation on scrap materials is recommended before trying on newly assembled models. |
Autothermal reforming processes of hydrocarbon liquids such as diesel fuels are spotlighted as methods to produce hydrogen for Fuel cell. However, the use of higher hydrocarbons as feedstocks for hydrogen production causes some problems which increase the catalyst deactivation by the carbon deposition. Coking can be inhibited by increasing the water dissociation on the catalyst surface. This results in catastrophic failure of whole system. Performance degradation of diesel autothermal reforming (ATR) leads to increase of undesirable hydrocarbons at reformed gases and subsequently decrease the performance. And it is hard to feed diesel fuel homogeneously because of high evaporation point. Non-homogeneous injection of fuel cause poor performance and fail of system.
In this study, perovskites (ABO3)-based catalysts were investigated as alternatives to substitute the noble metal catalyst for the autothermal reforming (ATR) of diesel fuels. The investigated perovskite structure was based on LaCrO3. And some metals were added at the A-site to enhance oxygen ion mobility, transition metals were doped on the B-site to enhance the reformation.
And we compare peroveskite based only catalysts and physically mixed provskite & noble catalyst(Pt-CGO). Pt-CGO catalyst is novel metal catalyst and it was used widely in the industrial fields. But high cost of novel metal is critical weak point. If the amount of noble catalyst were reduced without the degradation of performance, it can be significant. Substituted Lanthanum chromium perovskites were made by aqueous combustion synthesis, which can produce high surface area conveniently. For LaCrO3, lanthanum nitrate and chromium nitrate were dissolved in water and Ruthenium nitrate solution was added to the solution. Glycine as a fuel was added in the 1:1 molar ratio to the sum of La and Cr. The solution was slowly boiled in a quartz beaker and heated to cause the combustion. The produced oxides were calcined in air at 1250oC for 4hrs.
The physically mixed catalyst were made by milling 24hr in 1:1 wt ratio of LaCrRu & Pt-CGO.
Furthermore, for the homogeneous fuel supply, we made ultrasonic injection system for reforming. The ultrasonic injector made form of fuel to fine particle, so it is possible to get homogeneous mixing condition. We compared durability of evaporation system and ultrasonic system for fuel injection. |
Recently, the government has been holding financial institutions to ever higher standards when it comes to “Know Your Customer” (KYC) laws—but established finance firms don't bear that burden alone.
KYC regulations have far-reaching implications for consumers, and are increasingly becoming critical issues for just about any institution that touches money (so, just about every business). So while banks are required to comply with KYC to limit fraud, they also pass down that requirement to those with whom they do business.
And with pretty good reason. The idea is that knowing your customers—verifying identities, making sure they’re real, confirming they’re not on any prohibited lists, and assessing their risk factors—can keep money laundering, terrorism financing, and more run-of-the-mill fraud schemes at bay. The key is finding a balance so that these efforts are effective without penalizing innocent consumers—or being so onerous that upstarts can’t comply with them (and hence can’t compete).
The ABCs of KYC
KYC laws were introduced in 2001 as part of the Patriot Act, which was passed after 9/11 to provide a variety of means to deter terrorist behavior.
The section of the Act that pertained specifically to financial transactions added requirements and enforcement policies to the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 that had thus far regulated banks and other institutions. These changes had been in the works for years before 9/11, but the terrorist attacks finally provided the political momentum needed to enact them.
Thus, Title III of the Patriot Act requires that financial institutions deliver on two requirements to comply with the stricter KYC: the Customer Identification Program (CIP) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD).
CIP is the more straightforward of the two components, and likely more familiar.
To comply with CIP, a bank asks the customer for identifying information. Each bank conducts its own CIP process, so a customer may be asked for different information depending on the institution. An individual is generally asked for a driver’s license or a passport.
Information requested for a company might include:
- Certified articles of incorporation
- Government-issued business license
- Partnership agreement
- Trust instrument
For either a business or an individual, further verifying information might include:
- Financial references
- Information from a consumer reporting agency or public database
- A financial statement
Nonetheless, every bank is required to verify their customers’ identity and make sure a person or business is real.
The second component, CDD, is more nuanced.
In conducting due diligence, banks aim to predict the types of transactions a customer will make in order to then be able to detect anomalous (or suspicious) behavior; assign the customer a risk rating that will determine how much and how often the account is monitored; and identify customers whose risk is too great to do business with.
Banks may ask the customer for a lot more information, which may include the source of funds, purpose of the account, occupation, financial statements, banking references, description of business operations, and others. There’s no standard procedure for conducting due diligence, which means banks are often left up to their own devices.
In fact, the Patriot Act doesn’t even directly specify a CDD requirement, but rather specifies that a bank is required to file a suspicious activity report if it suspects or has reason to suspect such activity. But without knowing much about its customers, a bank won’t be able to meet this requirement—hence the CDD.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) regulates—and strictly imposes—this aspect of KYC. FinCEN also manages other regulators for banks, including the Fed’s Board of Governors, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency of the U.S. Treasury. Other financial institutions can be regulated by the SEC, the U.S. Treasury, the IRS, or the National Credit Union Administration, among others.
As a result of due diligence, a bank might flag certain risk factors like frequent wire transfers, international transactions, and interactions with off-shore financial centers. A “high-risk” account is then monitored more frequently, and the customer might be asked more often to explain his transactions or provide other information periodically.
Why KYC matters
By first verifying customers’ identities and intentions and then understanding their customers’ transaction patterns, banks are able to more accurately pinpoint suspicious activities.
Money-laundering and terrorist financing often relies on anonymously opened accounts, and the increased emphasis on KYC regulation has led to increased reporting of suspicious transactions—though this doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more bad activity out there, just better detection of it.
In 2014, more than 1.7 million suspicious activity reports were filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, 35 percent more than in 2013.
Regulations are becoming stricter, meaning financial institutions have to spend more money to comply with them—or be subjected to steep fines. These fines are also dramatically increasing: $4.3 billion in fines were levied against financial institutions in 2013 and 2014, a sum that quadrupled the fines of the nine previous years combined.
As an example, JP Morgan and HSBC were recently each fined $2 million for a failure to report suspicious activity.
The cost of doing business?
Concerns abound about whether the increasing costs of anti-money laundering procedures are eventually going to become—or already are—prohibitive, keeping banks from effectively going about their daily business.
What’s more, many are wary of the regulations leading to greater friction with customers who don’t appreciate having transactions blocked or having to constantly provide additional information. Of course, as with anything, striking a balance between what customers want and what institutions need to do to protect the system is key.
Other businesses aren’t being regulated in the same way banks are, but knowing your customers is a good idea anyway. It lets you detect suspicious or potentially fraudulent customers before they get to the bank via your services, letting you stop the fraud before it happens. After all, if fraud is detected in your business’ bank account, you’ll likely be required to pay a substantial fine.
The challenge and the opportunity
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which enforces high data quality among financial service providers, collected more than $80 million in fines in 2014.
What’s more, if fraud costs skyrocket, they could eat into more than just your margins: you might lose the partnerships of credit card companies or banks, for example, or get a bad reputation among customers.
There’s opportunity here, too: Because many KYC regulations were instituted before much of today’s technology existed, the means of collecting information about customers are woefully outdated. Fintech companies can help—and already are, in some cases—harness the power of big data to help big financial institutions collect more accurate data and comply even better. |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
No dataset card yet
- Downloads last month
- 14