Squirrel Highway

Update on Kale

Myke with kale

[Photo by Margy Dowzer]

Herbal Gifts

St. John's Wort drying

St. John’s Wort plant freshly cut, hung to dry.

What We Give to Each Other

Yesterday I met a Passamaquoddy woman, S—, who talked about how she is trying to remove herself as much as possible from the money economy, to live with the values of a gift economy.  One way she does it is to volunteer a lot in her community.  I was moved by the conversation, and it stirred up questions in me about its application in my own life.  We were part of a gathering hosted by Maine-Wabanaki REACH for Wabanaki and Maine residents to explore together the topic of decolonization.  (If that term is unfamiliar, take a look at my earlier post called Living into History.)

Dish with One Spoon Wampum

Photo from IndianTime.net

Colonization brought the capitalist economy to this continent.  Another Wabanaki participant told us about the One Dish with One Spoon Wampum belt, which was a covenant acknowledging mutual care, first between the Haudenosaunee and then with other Indigenous communities prior to settlement.

The Great Law of Peace speaks of it:

We will have one dish, which means that we will all have equal shares of the game roaming about in the hunting grounds and fields, and then everything will become peaceful among all of the people;

We also heard about how in the Passamaquoddy nation, they are creating a community garden with an orchard of fruit trees, and teaching people how to cultivate them.  As people learn to provide for their community’s own food, true sovereignty becomes possible.

I was thinking about how back at my own home, we are also creating an orchard, but it is a difficult process to undo the individualistic capitalist systems.  To be connected to this land we have to “own” it in the capitalist manner.  We can share it with our friend who has a garden here with us, and we’ve also been blessed by the permaculture community’s support through our Permablitz work party last June.  And we received many of our companion plants in the plant swap last spring.  So we are trying to imagine community as a part of our relationship to this land.  But there is so much further to go.

I had brought flyers with me to the gathering about my book, not sure if it felt like the right place to share.  (Our invitation had mentioned we could bring materials about our related work if we wanted.) The content of the book is so much about how we journey into earth community–how we restore that spiritual relationship with the land and with our neighbors on this land.  How we acknowledge and heal the harm caused by the history of this place. But the book is also a product that I sell. So I was torn.

After our conversation about gift economy, I was moved to give a copy of the book as a gift to S—. I had so appreciated her sharing, and it felt to me like this would be a way to plant a seed–to shift something within me that might grow the possibility of a gift economy in this world, and in my life.  I was surprised when she responded by giving me a gift of her beadwork–beautiful turtles. There is magic in this. May it be blessed.

The Layers of Community

Before-marked for fruit tree beds

[Before–Growing beds marked with flour and flags]

On Saturday, we hosted our Permablitz! (See “more before” photos here.)  Over 20 people came to our yard and worked together on projects such as installing rain barrels, building a composting system from pallets, building a fire circle, and creating five more  growing beds for future fruit trees, raspberry bushes, & hazelnut bushes, and one bed for flowers & herbs.  We also got the first shovelfulls dug for a pond.

Opening Circle-Sylvia, Cathleen, Ali

[Opening Circle]

At the end of the day, I got teary-eyed with the sense of Gift.  The generosity of so many individuals coming together and creating something so beautiful and full, helping us to realize our dreams for this piece of land was deeply moving.  There is something about this giving and receiving of human attention and wisdom and care, that feeds our hearts. Much of our lives are shaped by transactions—we pay a certain amount of money, and receive a product. Or, we put in so many hours and receive a paycheck.  But giving and receiving freely and generously touches something much deeper. Giving and receiving must trigger deep neurotransmitters in our internal chemistry, sparking a profound sense of well-being and belonging.

I also realized how many layers of community are involved in such a project.  One layer is this community of people who care about the earth, and who come together to give and receive, to learn, to share, to grow, to get to know each other.  People connections are made.

Another layer is the community of the soil.  During the blitz I was mostly working with several others on the project for creating new growing beds.  We were adding nutrients through sheet mulching so that the soil could create a thriving fertile community.  I have learned so much about the variations in soil communities from the book The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips.

What a food forest needs, what fruit trees need, is soil whose fungal community is stronger than its bacterial community.  In contrast, annual vegetables and flowers and grasses prefer soil with a stronger bacterial community.  A bacterial community is enhanced by tilling the soil and incorporating organic matter by turning it into the soil.  A fungal community is enhanced by no tilling, but rather adding organic matter on the top of the soil to decompose, as it happens in the forest. (Similarly, compost that is left unturned will generate a stronger fungal community.)

Forking the beds Cathleen

[Cathleen forking the soil]

We prepared the soil by aerating it with garden forks–since it had been rather compacted.  We added some granite dust for mineral enhancement, then put down a layer of cardboard to kill grasses and weeds.

Raspberry Bed-manure & chaff Mihku & Heather

[Mihku & Heather adding manure and chaff]

Then, we added chicken manure, coffee chaff, seaweed, leaves, grass clippings, composted manure, and a really thick layer of deciduous wood chips.  We were able to get a delivery of 8 yards of wonderful ramial deciduous wood chips–these are chips which include lots of thin branches, which have more lignin content that is not yet woody.  The wood chips are the most important part of enhancing the fungal community.

We also made several pathways with cardboard and wood chips, and I will complete those bit by bit in the next days.  Now, the process works on its own–I add some water or it gets rained on–and the microbes will work together over the next several months (and years) to create a thriving soil community.  We will plant trees and bushes next spring.  My friend Roger Paul said that the Wabanaki word for “soil” means giver of life.After-Fruit Tree & Flower/Herb Beds

Questions to Ask Ourselves

img_0448I have been asking myself and others, what does the change in our country mean for our personal activities and commitments?  Every day I receive dozens of emails asking me to sign this petition or donate to that organization working on behalf of immigrants, or women’s reproductive health care, or the environment, and on and on. Invitations to March on Washington, or Boston, or Augusta. Invitations to lobby my senator or call my congressperson. I can feel overwhelmed by trying to make decisions on what to choose, what to ignore, what to do with the same amount of time in each day, in each week as I have always had.

How are we meant to respond to the current challenges in our world, to the pain and suffering we see? On the one hand, we can say simply—follow our values, care for the vulnerable, fight for justice. But Quaker educator Parker Palmer, in his book, Let Your Life Speak, asks us to take a step back, to look more deeply at what we are being called to do. Palmer says, “Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be… True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Beuchner asserts when he defines vocation as ‘the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’”

So one question we might be asking ourselves is, What is our own deep gladness? What sparks in us a sense of joy, because it taps into the very essence of our gift, our personality, our being? Another way to think of this might be, What are we good at doing? The influential African-American theologian, Howard Thurman, puts it, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

But is it really okay to pay attention to our own hearts, to our own deep gladness, to what makes us come alive? Shouldn’t we be mobilizing, organizing and lobbying every day to support our values in a society where they are under attack? I think what Palmer and Beuchner and Thurman are reminding us is that we can’t give what we don’t have. Not that we can’t learn new skills and rise to challenging occasions—but we can’t sustain a commitment if it goes counter to our nature.

For example, some people might be very at home with organizing a protest rally—making phone calls, posting on social media, renting sound equipment, contacting the right speakers, giving a stirring speech, and so forth. Some one else might be very good at going door to door, talking to neighbors and strangers of all political persuasions, making a connection and bridging the divide. Someone else might be good at strategizing behind the scenes, mapping out goals and objectives, and a course of action to take to get there. Someone else might be very good at bringing coffee and cookies to the meeting, and making sure that each new person is welcomed and brought into the conversation, and leaves feeling a sense of connection and involvement. Even in organizing and mobilizing, we each bring our particular gifts to the table.

And by that same token, we each have limits. Parker Palmer points out that he learned as much about understanding his calling from his limits as from his talents and gifts. He said, “Lacking insight into my own limits and potentials, I had allowed ego and ethics to lead me into a situation that my soul could not abide.”

He isn’t referring to the external limits that society places on people because of our gender, or the color of our skin, or the country of our origin. Rather, he means the limits that arise from our personalities, from our natural way of being in the world, from who we are at our core. We are encouraged to be tender with our natural way of being in the world, and not ask our souls to bear what they cannot abide.

For example, if someone is a complete introvert, they would not best serve their soul by forcing themselves to go to a march or a meeting. Rather, they might be happier to write letters to the editor or to their congressperson. Another person might not be able to go door to door, talking to neighbors, but they are really good at tutoring asylum seekers one-on-one to help them learn to speak English more quickly and feel at home in this country. Our limits and our strengths are mirrors to each other. We need to ask ourselves about our gifts and our limits.

I want to mention something about external limits. Parker Palmer admits that he holds a lot of privilege as an educated white male. Even to ask ourselves about “our soul’s calling” assumes that we have the privilege to ponder the question. Many people work overtime in jobs that do nothing to provide gladness, and barely enough to support a home and food. Another important question to ask ourselves is about our areas of privilege or areas of marginalization. What we can offer the community is dependent upon our social location—and that goes both ways. As a woman, I would not be welcome to share a gift for leading worship in the Catholic community. This is an area of marginalization for me. On the other hand, as someone currently with a steady income, it would be inappropriate for me to try to teach people in poverty how to save their money. It would be intrusive and disrespectful.

We must understand our position in a social fabric, the powers we hold and the challenges we face just by who our people are, where we live, the color of our skin. I am reminded of the advice given to budding writers—write what you know.

So we must ask, What are our gifts, what gives us joy, what are our limits, what is our location? Palmer says, “Is the life I am living, the same as the life that wants to live in me?” It is from this place of understanding our own essence that we can best respond to the great needs of our world.


Ruben Palomares (Former Corrupt Cop)

Manage episode 206443788 series 1857695

Here is a SPECIAL EPISODE for my listeners.

Though Season 2 of Burner Phone Podcast is still in the works, I've collaborated with Pretend Radio to release a story about Ruben Palomares, a former corrupt LAPD officer.

Officer Palomares’ story begins with his first undercover assignment. In the late 1980s there was this show called 21 Jump Street. Johnny Depp starred in it. It was about undercover cops, who pretended to be students, in order to bust drug dealers in schools.

But did you know that back in the 1994, the Los Angeles police department juvenile narcotics unit actually recruited young officers to infiltrate classrooms in order to investigate drug dealers? They couldn’t just get any cop to fill this undercover role. They needed a fresh face who could blend in with the students. So, they approached officer Ruben Palomares.

In 1995, Ruben Palomares got transferred to LAPD’s Rampart Division where he continued to work undercover cases. He was specifically assigned to the anti-gang unit called CRASH. CRASH is an acronym for the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. This is when Ruben’s fate will be decided.

For the first four years, during his time at the Rampart Division, his superiors described him as a leader with a reputation for excellence. But Ruben was committed to cleaning up his neighborhood—and he was willing to use his authority to do so.

That’s when the suspicious shootings started to happen, then the robberies, and before anyone even noticed, he was wrapped up with the same officers suspected of orchestrating the assassination of The Notorious B.I.G.

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Marine Conservation Service-Learning Course: Challenges at Sea

Introduction to marine conservation biology emphasizing community outreach at local middle schools. Material focuses on issues in marine conservation and how they are addressed. Lectures cover principles of conservation, biodiversity, extinction risks, genetic tools, fishery by-catch, over-exploitation, habitat degradation, invasive species, climate change, and marine protected areas. Based on class discussions, students will develop and teach activities that address local conservation topics for middle school students. Taught in Beaufort. Prerequisite: introductory biology. Instructor: Johnston and Schultz


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Level 3

Amending from MFJ to MFS Paid tax due What to do if over paid

Filed jointly and paid taxes due for tax year 2018 using my SS# as the primary.  The spouse was responsible for all of the taxes due because payroll withholding was too low.  I want to amend the return to MFS.  The 2018 tax due on my SS# was $0.  Can I request or will the IRS reimburse or refund that over payment with an amended return?
Basically looking to start over as we both want to file MFS.

Level 11

96% of couples file joint.... there are a number of deductions and credits that are lost if you file separately

if your incomes are similar it MIGHT makes sense

Explain why you want to file separately.... how much was withheld on the w-2’a should have NOTHING to do with it
Level 9

Sorry, but amending a joint tax return to married filing separately is not allowed after the tax filing deadline.  That is the tax law.  Even if you think filing separate returns would be better, it probably would not have been better anyhow.  You lose a lot of credits when you file MFS.

Level 9

In addition to the response I gave you yesterday,  I just want to add that going forward, your spouse should adjust the amount of tax being withheld from her paycheck by changing the W-4 at work to avoid this problem for your 2019 tax return.

When the tax laws changed for 2018, employers lowered the amounts they were withholding from paychecks, resulting in more take-home pay, but often not withholding enough to avoid owing at tax time.


I’ve been doing analytics, data science and statistics for a long time, and I remember when analytics was just called “math.” I walked around the RSA Conference show floor this year, and I would like to apologize on behalf of the entire analytics industry for all the noise out there on the subject. There’s no doubt that AI and analytics are revolutionizing many industries — especially the cybersecurity industry. But it’s not a silver bullet, because there are limitations to what math can actually accomplish. Let’s look at three, in the hopes that it will help you navigate the noise.

1. There is no One Algorithm to rule them all

There is no such thing as a single algorithm that will work in all cases. It’s true that some algorithms are fantastic and new and exciting, but you should be wary of solutions that focus on a single algorithm. The most recent example of this is deep learning. Deep learning is a legitimately exciting technique, and I am absolutely a fan of its potential, but that still doesn’t mean it is the right algorithm for everything.

Deep learning, a class of machine learning algorithms that learns by using large, layered collections of connected processes that rely on labels or examples, is often touted as the way of the future. But it is surprisingly easy to trick deep neural networks. It’s certainly not a silver bullet, but the reality is that there is no silver bullet in mathematical analytics. Deep learning — or any AI technique, for that matter — doesn’t work for every use case. It’s important to understand the strengths and limitations for every technique and choose the right tool for the problem at hand. Don’t get distracted by buzzwords or marketing spin that try to make everything look like the hammer for any and all nails. Just as there is a distinction between a hammer, a mallet and a sledgehammer, there are important differences between different algorithms.

For example, deep learning is pretty good at malware detection, primarily because these use cases involve large datasets of labels: decades’ worth of malware binaries. Most major antivirus and antimalware vendors tout the use of deep learning for their specific objectives, which is largely why it’s become such a prolific topic in our industry. But if your problem is not malware, deep learning may be less effective. When it comes to insider threat detection, for example, deep learning falls surprisingly short. Insider threat scenarios typically deal with limited, labelless datasets — deep learning cannot effectively make sense of this. Imagine trying to break up concrete with a mallet or hanging a picture frame on the wall with a sledgehammer. The right tool can lead to inadequate — or worse, disastrous — results.

Ultimately, it’s wise to be skeptical of any vendor that focuses on a single algorithm — it’s not a good way to define the problems you are trying to solve.

2. Math cannot predict for the future anything it hasn’t seen before

Predictive analytics depends on models that infer from existing information. This is similar to the human brain, which learns by observing and experience. If you have never experienced something before, you can’t know what to expect. At best, you may recognize that something new and unprecedented is happening, but something truly novel is unlikely to be something you would have predicted.

Similarly, math cannot predict anything it hasn’t seen before. For example, math would not have predicted speculative execution side-channel attacks, like Spectre, the first time it happened. It’s possible for math to predict it now because we now know what to look for and can potentially create models that can predict the next occurrence. The same is true for the very first instance of ransomware. At best, anomaly detection models would have detected unusual behaviors and alerted security teams to something strangely amiss. It would not, however, have identified the specific problem.

Note that this limitation does not mean predicting a zero-day attack is not possible. It can be done because nearly all zero days are variations on a theme that was seen before in the past, and this past experience makes it predictable.

3. Math cannot read your mind

Math cannot read your mind or infer anything that is not in the data. Ultimately, math is only as good as the data that you feed it. If there is business context that’s in your head or in the heads of your teams that would improve your results, that’s a dataset that needs to be provided and integrated. For example, if your behavioral analytics system detects an employee account who has VPN-ed in from China, takes an unusually large amount of data, and accesses file shares that that employee has never accessed before, the math is pointing out a legitimately concerning set of behaviors. But if you say it is a false positive because this employee took a vacation in China, changed job roles, and is downloading a new set of project files, there is no way for the math to figure that out without, for example, getting access to the HR database, vacation and job role information. The best math in the world is irrelevant without the right data, and the more comprehensive data you can feed a cybersecurity machine learning algorithm, the better it can provide you intelligence.

It’s important to understand what math can’t do so that you can take advantage of what it can do..

Math is magical, but it’s not magic.

Stephan Jou is CTO of Interset.


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Animal Body Organ Systems

Animal Body Organ Systems

Animal body organ Systems:

For performing various physiological functions, such as digestion, respiration, excretion, reproduction etc. several organs together form the organ systems in animal body. These are:

Digestive System: This system is associated with ingestion, digestion, absorption of food and removal of undigested residues. Digestive system has two principal parts as:

  • Digestive Canal: This canal consists of mouth opening, mouth cavity, pharynx, oesophagus, stomach, duodenum, ileum, rectum and anus.
  • Digestive Glands: In man salivary glands, liver and Panereas work as digestive glands.

Respiratory System: This system with the help of oxygen taken from the environment produces energy by the oxidation of food present in the body cells to help the body to do every days work. In man the respiratory system .consists of nasal aperture, pharynx, larynx, trachea, bronchus, bronchiole and a pair of lungs made of alveoli.

Nervous System: The purpose of this organism is to obtain external and internal stimuli of the body and to create proper sensation. Nerve system is formed of brain spinal cord and cranial nerves and spinal nerves. Besides, the nerve system has also a part named Autonomous Nervous system. This division of the nerve system controls the involuntary works of the body.

Excretory System: Due to various physiological metabolic activities some waste materials are produced within the body as by products. These materials are usually toxic to the body, so they need to be removed. The procedure of removing unnecessary waste materials from the body is called excretion. The system by which the excretion is performed is called excretory system. The excretory system of human beings consists of a pair of kidney, a pair of ureter, one urinary bladder and one urethra.

Reproductive System: Through this system an animal produces one or more offsprings of its type to maintain the contiriuation of the species. On the maturity, the child becomes capable to reproduce. Man is unisexual. Both males and females have individual reproductive system of their own.

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Nydegger UE. Sturzenegger M., Adverse effects of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy. Drug Safety. 21(3):171-85, 1999.
A growing body of literature documents that intravenous immunoglobulin prophylaxis and therapy is becoming applied to a steadily growing list of new indications. Some of these new indications have led to the use of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy in doctors offices, far from the hospital environment. Being stable products purified from blood or plasma donations, intravenous immunoglobulins must be considered as biological products in addition to their status as pharmaceutical products. This makes the study of adverse reactions reach beyond a mere drug safety surveillance program into the realms of good manufacturing procedures guaranteeing not only intravenous tolerance but also sterility with regard to transfusion transmitted agents. The initially perceived adverse effects, stemming from complement activating aggregated immunoglobulin G, had the effect of slowing down widespread introduction of intravenous immunoglobulin therapy in the late 1970s. These adverse effects have now been eliminated with amendment of the appropriate manufacturing steps. However, new adverse effects, such as hyperviscosity, aseptic meningitis or renal insufficiency, have been observed which can be assigned to certain compounds of intravenous immunoglobulin, to administration regimens or to special patient characteristics. Adverse effects can be divided into 3 types: immediate adverse effects (those that occur during the infusion, e.g. anaphylactoid reactions); delayed adverse effects (those that occur hours to days after initiation of the infusion, e.g. renal, pulmonary, dermatological adverse effects, hyperviscosity, aseptic meningitis, arthritis, cerebral infarction, hemolysis and leucopenia) and; late adverse effects (e.g. transmission of infectious agents). We conclude from our analysis, that in general, intravenous immunoglobulin may be considered a well tolerated medical agent provided the indication for use is chosen carefully and use is monitored by a physician familiar with contraindications, risks, adverse effects and their appropriate management.


Fierce Buddhist Goddess

Cave #130
Beishan Grottoes, Dazu

This fierce Chinese Buddhist goddess carries a variety of weapons that are characteristic of Hindu Durga: Shiva's spear, Vishnu's chakra, bow and arrow, and even an aegis. By this time, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism had incorporated a great deal of Hindu iconography into its pantheon. For example, the Hindu chakra (weapon and sun symbol) became the Buddhist dharmachakra (Wheel of the Law).

This sculpture is often (as of 2013) identified as Marici on Chinese-language websites1; but lacking Marici's boar vahana, and with other iconographic difficulties, it seems more likely to me that it actually represents a fierce form of Tara2.

1I thank correspondent David McBride for kindly pointing this out.
2Not only iconographically better, but consistent with the site context - Guanyin/Avalokiteshvara is the principal female deity at Beishan.


English for Specific Purposes for Students of Education

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English for Specific Purposes

for Students of Education

Course Material

Selected by Vera Savic
University of Kragujevac

Faculty of Education in Jagodina

Academic year 2007/2008
Selecting the material for the Course of English for Specific Purposes for Students of Education, I had in mind two main objectives:

  • to provide linguistically challenging texts that will foster real development of my students’ English language skills and knowledge, and thus prepare them to use English widely as a tool in developing their professional competences;

  • to provide texts that will develop my students’ critical thinking and thus shape the way they think about teaching and learning and about their classroom practices.

The texts cover authentic educational material taken from professional literature and downloaded from Internet sites.

I am excited about this possibility to provide the course material in electronic form as I believe that an ESP course in the field of education should have a dynamic form and thus be ready to respond to changes and innovative ideas.
I am grateful to a friend of mine, a great teacher and educational expert, for inspiring my professional thinking (hence the choice of course material) by sharing with me some of his thoughts on education. And many thanks to the Embassy of Finland in Belgrade for supporting the purchase of wonderful professional literature in English and making it available to all students and teachers of the Faculty of Education in Jagodina through the Faculty Library – most of the texts have been taken from those books.

Vera Savic

What is different about teaching children?

It is interesting that the term leamer-centred, meaning that children's needs and interests are placed at the centre of planning and teaching, is no longer as commonly used as before. It was often interpreted in the wider EFL world as simply putting fun into learning, whereas what was often necessary was ensuring there was some learning in all the fun! In line with current thinking we shall use the term learning-centred to highlight a greater emphasis on the need to maximize learning and provide both support and challenge in learning. If we want to focus on learning centred teaching it is vital that we are well-informed about the physical, emotional, conceptual and educational characteristics of children and how theory has shaped our views on how children think and learn.

If we learn a foreign language as adults, we often have a long-term goal, such as wanting to get a job where bilingual skills are important, or wanting to study further in the country of the target language. These purposes are highly motivating and greatly increase our willingness to spend the long hours it takes to master another language. Young children, on the other hand, are not yet in control of their lives and still have a great deal to learn in their own language, as well as learn another one.

Young children are different from older learners because children:

  • have a lot of physical energy and often need to be physically active

  • have a wide range of emotional needs

  • are emotionally excitable

  • are developing conceptually and are at an early stage of their schooling

  • learn more slowly and forget things quickly

  • tend to be self-oriented and preoccupied with their own world

  • get bored easily

  • are excellent mimics

  • can concentrate for a surprisingly long time if they are interested

  • can be easily distracted but also very enthusiastic

Of course we must remember that chronological age is not always the same as developmental age. Individual differences in learners, both within and across age bands, is especially marked at primary level.

Parental support and interest is a key factor in children's learning. With good parental support some young children may start school with good concentration and memorization skills, having been introduced to action songs, counting rhymes, bedtime stories, computer games, and so on. They may know the alphabet and how to handle a book, recognize print, use a counting line, and so on. Others will not, and as research shows, such pupils are already at a disadvantage, although some will easily catch up.

(Taken from The Primary English Teacher’s Guide by J. Brewster & G.Ellis, 2004)
How children think and learn

Behaviourism heavily influenced our views on how children learn languages. This view was shaped by the way behaviourists thought about children's learning in general, where children were seen as a 'blank slate' who learned by reacting passively to different kinds of stimuli and the positive or negative feedback they received. This view holds that teaching equals learning. This is known as the transmission model of learning. By contrast, Piaget presented the child as actively constructing his or her own thinking by acting upon the physical and social environment. All children were seen to go through a series of clearly defined stages of intellectual development. For example, most children between four to eight years are at the concrete-operational stage, where all learning develops only where it is heavily contextualized in concrete situations. By eleven, some pupils may move into the stage of formal operations, where they are capable of more abstract thought and can learn in a more decontextualized way. This was widely interpreted as meaning that it is not possible to teach young children some things until they are 'ready'. It is now widely accepted that Piaget underestimated the role of language and the role of adults in helping children to learn while over-estimating the role of play. However, his work triggered enormous interest in exploring how young children think and learn through observing children's behaviour in relation to tasks they were given.

Bruner (1983) investigated why children find school learning so difficult.

He discovered that this was because children experienced it as very separate from their real lives. His theory of learning is essentially constructivist, a model of learning in which the child is seen as an active agent in his or her own learning, selecting, retaining and transforming information to construct knowledge which is shaped by his or her unique way of seeing and interpreting the world. This, he called scaffolding. If we think of building a house we may see some similarities to the ways in which a child learns. In house-building scaffolding is put up to support the building process. This is broken up into stages: first the foundations, then the walls and ceilings (the building blocks), then the systems - plumbing and electrics - which connect everything together. The links and networks between these different stages build up internal strengths so that by the time the scaffolding is removed, the house supports itself. In this way Bruner thought that the child's learning is a process, not merely a product, which can be accelerated or enhanced by breaking learning into stages and providing the building blocks and systems which connect these together. He saw children's learning as moving through three modes of representation, knowing something through doing it, through working with a picture or image of it and through using some symbolic means, such as language. Studies of how very young children consolidate their learning experiences reveal interesting patterns which reflect these three modes.

The work of Vygotsky (1978) is also very important since he emphasised the role of the adult and of language in children's learning. He saw the process of mental development as working on two levels, the present actual level and the future, potential level of development. The difference between the views of Piaget and Vygotsky are that the first believes the child learns through his or her own individual actions and exploratiol1, whereas the second believes that adults/teachers work actively to improve children's level of development. Another major difference between Piaget and Vygotsky is their view of the role of language in learning. Vygotsky held the view that speech precedes thinking, so that very young children find it helpful to speak out loud about what they are doing. From the ages of three to seven children's private speech changes to include conversational speech with others. A major legacy of Vygotsky's work is the importance placed upon developing opportunities to allow young children to talk in order to develop their thinking. His model of learning, social-constructivist, sees children as constructing their understandings from the social interaction of their learning contexts, with all its possibilities and limitations. Anning (1991) suggests that children are unique in what they bring to the learning experience but tend to draw on the same kinds of learning strategy. This means that we can think of learners as having individual differences but who learn using similar strategies to other children. The notion of metacognition, which is concerned with how children learn to think, plan and remember, has become increasingly important over the last fifteen years. Ellis and others believe that helping children to gain insights on how they think, plan and remember aids them in developing the confidence to tackle similar and new tasks. The role of the teacher here is to provide a model of the kinds of strategies that are useful.

We have so far considered some of the most important psychological theories about learning, but many teachers find it difficult to apply these kinds of psychological theory to their actual classroom practice. According to Gipps 'it is now more widely accepted that we need to generate educational theory out of good educational practice'. This can be seen in the way teachers pick out aspects of theories which fit in with their 'common-sense' view, based on classroom experience, of how learning seems to take place.
The Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget places great emphasis on the child's ability actively to make sense of the world. Children do not passively soak up information, but select and interpret what they see, hear and feel in the world around them. From his observation of children, and the numerous experiments he conducted into their ways of thinking, he concluded that human beings go through several distinct stages of cognitive development, i.e. learning to think about themselves, and their environment. Each stage involves the acquisition of new skills and depends on the successful completion of the preceding one.

The first stage is the sensorimotor, which lasts from birth up to about age two. Until aged about four months, an infant cannot differentiate itself from the environment. For example, the child will not realize that its own movements cause the sides of its crib to rattle. Objects are not differentiated from persons, and the infant is unaware that anything exists outside the range of his vision. Infants gradually learn to distinguish people from objects, coming to see that both have an existence independent of their immediate perception. Piaget calls this early stage sensorimotor because infants learn mainly by touching objects, manipulating them and physically exploring their environment. The main accomplishment of this stage is that by its close the child understands its environment to have distinctive and stable properties.

The next phase, called the pre-operational stage, is the one to which Piaget devoted the bulk of his research. This stage lasts from ages two to seven, when children acquire a mastery of language and become able to use words to represent objects and images in a symbolic fashion. A four-year-old might use a sweeping hand, for example, to represent the concept "aeroplane". Piaget terms the stage pre-operational because children are not yet able to use their developing, mental capabilities systematically. Children at this stage are egocetric. As Piaget uses it, this concept does not refer to selfishness, but to the tendency of the child to interpret the world exclusively in terms of its own position. She or he does not understand, for instance, that others see objects from a different perspective to his or her own. Holding a book upright, the child may ask about a picture in it, not realizing that the person sitting opposite can only see the back of the book.

Moreover, children at the pre-operational stage are not able to hold connected conversations with another. In egocentric speech, what each child says is more or less unrelated to what the previous speakers said. Children talk together, but not to one another in the same sense as adults. During this phase of development, children have no general understanding of categories of thought that adults tend to take for granted: concepts such as causality, speed, weight or number. Even if the child sees water poured from a tall, thin container into a shorter, wider one, he or she will not understand that the volume of the water remains the same - concluding there is less water, because the water level is lower.

The third stage, the concrete operational period, lasts from ages seven to eleven. During this phase, children master abstract, logical notions. They are able to handle ideas such as causality without much difficulty. She or he becomes capable carrying out the mathematical operations of multiplying, dividing and subtracting. Children by this stage are much less egocentric.

Finally, the years from eleven to fifteen cover what Piaget calls the formal operational period. During adolescence, the developing child becomes able to grasp highly abstract and hypothetical ideas. When faced with a problem, children at this stage are able to review all the possible ways of solving it and go through them theoretically in order to reach a solution. The young person at the formal operational stage is able to understand why some sorts of questions are trick ones. To the question "What creatures are both poodles and dogs?", the child might or might not be able to give the correct reply (the answer is "poodles"), but he or she will understand why this answer is right and appreciate the humour in it.

And to conclude, according to Piaget, the first three stages of development are universal; but not all adults reach the formal operational stage. The development of formal operational thought depends in part upon processes of schooling. Furthermore, adults of limited educational attainment tend to continue to think in more concrete terms and retain large traces of egocentrism.

(Taken from English for Students of Psychology and Education,by M. Prica, 1996)
Multiple Intelligences Theory

In the past, intelligence was a fixed, static entity at birth which was defined operationally as the ability to answer items on IQ tests. Even since the publication of his Frames of Mind (1983), Dr. Howard Gardner has postulated an alternative definition of intelligence based on a radically different view of intelligence. According to him, an intelligence entails the ability to solve problems or fashion products that are of consequence in a particular cultural setting or community. There are many, not just one, different but autonomous intelligence capacities that result in many different ways of knowing, understanding, and learning about our world. Up to the present, he has proposed a schema of eight intelligences and suggests that there are probably many others that we have not yet been able to test (Gardner, 1995). A summary of Gardner's eight intelligences is given as follows:

Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence is the ability to use language effectively and creatively both orally and in writing. It describes the learner with a good vocabulary, a good reader, who learns well from stories and likes doing crosswords. This intelligence can be seen in such people as poets, playwrights, storytellers, novelists, public speakers, and comedians.

Logical/Mathematical Intelligence is the ability to use numbers effectively, to recognize abstract patterns, to discern relationships and to reason well. It describes the learner who is good at or likes using computers, is good at problem-solving and likes classifying, sequencing and ranking activities. The intelligence can be seen in such people as scientists, computer programmers, accountant, lawyers, bankers, and, of course, mathematicians.

The logical/mathematical and verbal/linguistic intelligences form the basis for most systems of education, as well as for all forms of currently existing standardized testing programs.

Visual/Spatial Intelligence involves the ability to sense form, space, color, line, and shape including the ability to graphically represent visual or spatial ideas. It describes the learner who enjoys drawing, who learns well from using pictures, charts, maps, diagrams, etc. This intelligence can be seen in such people as architects, graphic artists, cartographers, industrial design draftspersons, and, of course, visual artists (painters and sculptors).

Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence is the ability to use one's body to express oneself and to solve problems. It describes the learner who learns through manipulating and moving objects and lively activities – action rhymes and games. This intelligence can be seen in such people as actors, athletes, mimes, dancers, and inventors.

Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence involves the ability to recognize tonal patterns and a sensibility to rhythm, pitch, melody, etc. It describes the learner who learns well through the use of chants, rhymes and songs. This intelligence can be seen in advertising professionals (those who write catchy jungles to sell a product), performance musicians, rock musicians, dance bands and composers.

Interpersonal Intelligence involves the ability to understand people's moods, feelings, motivations and intentions. It includes the ability to work cooperatively with others in a group and to communicate, verbally and nonverbally, with other people. It describes the learner who learns well from pair- or group-work activities such as interviews, games, surveys, etc. This form of intelligence is usually highly developed in such people as counselors, teachers, therapists, politicians, and religions leaders.

Intrapersonal Intelligence involves the ability to understand the internal aspects of the self and to practice self-discipline. It describes the learners who is good self-evaluator and likes to reflect, as well as doing self-assessment exercises, learning diaries, etc.; someone who likes independent learning, such as project work and presentations; someone who likes creative writing. This intelligence can be seen in such people as philosophers, psychiatrists, spiritual counselors, and cognitive pattern researchers.

Naturalist Intelligence involves the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals, and animals, including rocks, grass, and all variety of flora and fauna. It also includes the ability to recognize cultural artifacts like cars, sneakers, etc. It describes the learner who is good at recognizing patterns in things; someone who notices similarities and differences between things, who is good at classifying and organizing things into groups. This kind of intelligence enriches the other seven intelligences. The intelligence can be seen in such people as farmers, hunters, zookeepers, gardeners, cooks, veterinarians, nature guide, and forest rangers.

Armed with this knowledge, teachers can ensure they provide enough variety in the activities they use so that as much of their pupils’ learning potential can be tapped as possible.

(Adapted from The Primary English Teacher’s Guide by J. Brewster & G.Ellis, 2004)

Obstacles and Misconceptions in Teaching for Thinking

Disagreements over the proper psychological approach

Obviously, among psychologists there are a great many disputes, such as those over the nature of learning, the role of memory and concept formation, and the nature of intelligence and of affective factors, that have been followed keenly by educators because of the bearing these issues can be expected to have on education. Much hangs, therefore, upon the psychological approach that educators suppose to be correct when they begin the planning that will make their schools more reflective. We must not confuse

1. Attempting to understand children’s cognitive development by studying what children can’t do without intervention

Attempting to understand the cognitive development of children by studying what children can do with intervention
Comment. This is, in part, the issue between Piaget and Vygotsky. Since virtually all educational situations involve adult mediation between the culture and the child, and since such mediation comes in a variety of styles, each has its own impact on children’s learning. It is hazardous to accept Piagetian approach as a norm for curriculum construction or for the devising of pedagogies. Piaget is so interested in showing what children cannot do unaided at a given stage that he is unable to focus on how they can be helped to do it.
2. Stressing all the varieties of human intelligences (mathematical, musical, linguistic, etc.) so as to aim at the cultivation of all varieties

Emphasizing only certain varieties of human intelligence
Comment. In the long run, Howard Gardner’s emphasis on the variety of human intelligence is both correct and just, for it provides a fair and humane goal for the educational process. But it is of little consolidation to those who are language-deficient and who discover that language and mathematics, rightly or wrongly, are the established currencies of the classroom. All of the child’s potential modes of intelligence deserve to be developed, and the schools should develop literacy in each of these modes.
(Taken from Thinking in Education (2003) by Matthew Lipman)

Social-interactionist views of language acquisition

In the late 1970s and 1980s developmental psychologists emphasised the importance of social factors, which leads us on to the current view, 'social-interactionist'. This emphasises the importance of human social interactions, and the role of adult and child relationships in learning. A crucial element in this view is the way language is modified to suit the level of the learner. As a result, many studies were made of the way the chief caregiver, often the mother, talked to the child. Bruner (1983) showed how an innate device, such as Chomsky's LAD, was not able to function without the help given by an adult. They called this kind of help the Language Acquisition Support System or LASS. Bruner said there needed to be a child component, incorporating an innate tendency for active social interaction and language learning (LAD), and a social support component provided by other speakers, especially adults (LASS).

The partner with whom the child interacts provides a structure or framework, which Bruncr referred to as 'scaffolding'. The work of Vygotsky in the 1930s (not published in the West until the 1960s) was significant in terms of emphasising the way in which human thinking is dominated by mental processes arising from language. He coined the phrase 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) to explain the fact that children can do much more with the help of someone more knowledgeable or skilled than themselves than they can do alone. This highlights the importance of social interaction and learning from working with others. Vygotsky then described how the child is able to move away from learning with others to more independent thought and behaviour. The notion of the ZDP has provided us with insights into how teachers can both support and yet challenge learners through the careful design and staging of tasks.

It seems that the final picture is very complex. Imitation and practice are important in language learning although children are also immensely creative. No doubt in the future more research will develop other insights and views on the child language acquisition process.

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Achieving New Goals: Maximize Uptime With an Enhanced Electrical Safety Program

Downtime is a killer to the bottom line. Whether planned or unplanned, downtime idles the workforce, slows production numbers, and can create downstream effects that may cause major disruptions to the supply chain.

How does the electrical safety program in your facility maximize uptime?

First, it’s important to bear in mind that although scheduled maintenance will create some amount of downtime, when maintenance is planned downtime can be minimized. Planned maintenance allows adequate time for pre-work safety assessments to be completed without the stressful time pressures that are commonly associated with unplanned downtime.

Taking time to plan for maintenance work creates opportunities to identify hazards, perform risk assessments, incorporate any mitigation techniques, review procedures and areas where training may need to be refreshed, and think about emergency response before work is underway. Thoroughly planning the work from start to end, as well as to complete any prerequisite job briefings and communicating planned actions to affected individuals, helps ensure the work goes safely and smoothly. Uptime is effectively maximized because safety inevitably achieves a decrease in incidents and thus scheduled work and production work can continue unabated.

Manufacturing facility floorplan

How does the electrical safety program in your facility maximize uptime?

In industrial facilities, it’s also important to remember that maintaining electrical equipment is fundamental to optimizing equipment performance that will prevent unplanned downtime. Reliability and safety are closely linked. In terms of electrical safety, reliable equipment requires less maintenance. Because reliable equipment is not being accessed as frequently, there are fewer occasions for workers to be exposed to hazards.

Panduit’s new VeriSafe Absence of Voltage Tester (AVT) can be used as a method of testing and verifying the absence of voltage once equipment has been de-energized. This product utilizes technology that reduces procedure testing time and reduces complexity in a way that improves productivity and maximizes uptime. In addition, because it is installed and mounted permanently on the outside of electrical equipment, it reduces the risk of exposure to electrical hazards for improved worker safety.

Schedule regularly, avoid spontaneity.

Don’t overlook the obvious.

The Electrical System Can’t Always Speak for Itself.

Plan for maintenance.


Many people worry that 3D printers will usher in an epidemic of untraceable “ghost guns,” particularly guns that might evade some notional future gun control regime that emerges out of the current movement to put sensible, minimal curbs on guns, particularly anti-personnel guns.

Certainly, it’s possible to 3D print a gun specifically designed to kill people (as opposed to target shooting or hunting). It’s also possible to have such a gun machined in pieces by stores that will overnight the components to you for on-site, simple assembly, but 3D printers make that process simpler and may eventually make it cheaper.

Enter “C3PO,” a notional solution to this problem proposed by a group of researchers based at U Syracuse and Buffalo U. In a preprint on Arxiv, the C3PO team proposes that 3D printers could come pre-installed with a database of hundreds of thousands of images that they would attempt to match to print-jobs to determine whether they were being asked to make a gun (or any other unlawful object) so they could reject jobs that seemed to match the prohibition list.

It’s DRM for 3D printers, in other words, and it has all the problems of DRM and then some.

First, for this to work, it has to be impossible for the user to alter the configuration of the printer. To make that practical, the printer has to obfuscate its operations from the user, lock down its bootloader, and generally treat the user as an adversary (the paper explicitly describes the printer being an adversary of its owner).

Then, the manufacturer will have to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA, as well as CFAA and other censoring rules to suppress bug-reports, because any defect in a printer could be exploited to overrule the preloaded prohibition on printing objects on the banned list.

So now you’ve got a printer that can run on free/open source software (because this is intrinsically user-modifiable). It has a “Ring -1” in which code executes without the ability of users to inspect or terminate processes. Any malware that runs in that zone — anything that leverages a bug like the the ones AMD is contending with right now — is, by definition, undetectable to the user and can do anything from staging attacks on the rest of the user’s network to tampering with the user’s printouts to introduce subtle (and since we’re talking about high-performance materials, potentially lethal) flaws into them, etc.

And what’s more, it won’t stop 3D printed guns. The burgeoning body of research on adversarial examples reveals the inadequacy of this kind of fuzzy matching. The tldr is that if the fact that you can train your printer to recognize models of guns generated by people who weren’t trying to fool it tells you nothing about whether it’s possible to fool it. Think of how Google was once able to use inbound links as an incredibly reliable signal of page-relevance, and how quickly and easily attackers were able to generate spurious inbound links to fool Google’s Pagerank algorithm.

What’s more, the intrinsic secrecy of the DRM model means that legit security researchers who discover defects in the gun-detection system won’t be able to publish (since they’ll face legal retaliation under DMCA 1201, etc) while people who want to make guns will be able to freely develop and productize systems to bypass the gun-detector, because those people are already doing something illegal and have already demonstrated their indifference to the law.

Finally, these secret blacklists are an invitation to mischief and a moral hazard. The “special purpose,” “narrowly constrained” blacklists of child sexual abuse imagery developed by governments in Europe, Australia and elsewhere were first stuffed with material that powerful people just wanted to block (information about online gambling or assisted suicide, for example) and then used as justification to expand national censorship regimes to block copyright infringement, then trademark infringement, then “extremist content” and so on.

Once you equip a 3D printer with a blocklist of things that they notionally can’t print, everyone will want to add to that list: Erdogan and the King of Thailand will demand that satirical statuettes depicting them in caricature be banned; Disney and the copyright lobby will demand that models matching their proprietary characters and objects be banned; Ikea will want to ban third-party connectors; patent holders will want to ban third-party dinguses; the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice will demand a ban on depictions of Muhammad, and so on, and so on.

So this is an idea that neatly encapsulates virtually every terrible idea from the last 30 years of computing, learning none of its hard-earned lessons.

For the record, I believe in gun control and am mildly alarmed at the implications for gun control from 3D printing. But this won’t solve the problem, and will make it worse, and it’s precisely because gun control is an important issue that we can’t surrender to the security syllogism of “Something must be done; there, I’ve done something.”

The abuse of 3D printing technology to produce illegal weapons requires an intelligent 3D printer with early stage malicious activity detection. The 3D printer should identify the objects to be printed, so that the manufacturing procedure of an illegal weapon can be terminated at early stage. The lack of large-scale dataset obstructs the development of the intelligent 3D printer equipped with deep learning techniques. The construction of 3D printing image database in such scale with the recognition benchmarks has not been addressed until this work. We attempt to design two working scenarios for an intelligent 3D printer and provides corresponding image datasets (tens of hundreds and tens of thousands images). We also conduct quantitative performance benchmarking on ten 3D object recognition given single images and image sequences using C3PO database. This work brings the new thought of designing an object-aware 3D printing system. The main goal is to initiate the fusion of 3D printing technology and deep learning techniques in the computer vision domain enabling the secure use of 3D printing technology. As the 3D models are highly customized and diverse, building a robust recognition system remains a tough task. For the future work, C3PO will include more common 3D models especially for firearms. Re

C3PO: Database and Benchmark for Early-stage Malicious Activity Detection in 3D Printing [Zhe Li, Xiaolong Ma, Hongjia Li, Qiyuan An, Aditya Singh Rathore, Qinru Qiu, Wenyao Xu and Yanzhi Wang/Arxiv]

(via 4 Short Links)

(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY)


The cradle of Russians, an obvious Finno-Volgaic genetic hotspot

Interesting excerpts:

A really hard choice between equally plausible models.

Aquitanians and Iberians of haplogroup R1b are exactly like Indo-Iranians and Balto-Slavs of haplogroup R1a

The final paper on Indo-Iranian peoples, by Narasimhan and Patterson (see preprint), is soon to be published, according to the first author’s Twitter account.

One of the interesting details of the development of Bronze Age Iberian ethnolinguistic landscape was the making of Proto-Iberian and Proto-Basque communities, which we already knew were going to show R1b-P312 lineages, a haplogroup clearly associated during the Bell Beaker period with expanding North-West Indo-Europeans:

From the Bronze Age (~2200–900 BCE), we increase the available dataset from 7 to 60 individuals and show how ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (Steppe ancestry) appeared throughout Iberia in this period, albeit with less impact in the south. The earliest evidence is in 14 individuals dated to ~2500–2000 BCE who coexisted with local people without Steppe ancestry. These groups lived in close proximity and admixed to form the Bronze Age population after 2000 BCE with ~40% ancestry from incoming groups. Y-chromosome turnover was even more pronounced, as the lineages common in Copper Age Iberia (I2, G2, and H) were almost completely replaced by one lineage, R1b-M269.

The arrival of East Bell Beakers speaking Indo-European languages involved, nevertheless, the survival of the two non-IE communities isolated from each other – likely stemming from south-western France and south-eastern Iberia – thanks to a long-lasting process of migration and admixture. There are some common misconceptions about ancient languages in Iberia which may have caused some wrong interpretations of the data in the paper and elsewhere:

NOTE. A simple reading of Iberian prehistory would be enough to correct these. Two recent books on this subject are Villar’s Indoeuropeos, iberos, vascos y otros parientes and Vascos, celtas e indoeuropeos. Genes y lenguas.

Iberian languages were spoken at least in the Mediterranean and the south (ca. “1/3 of Iberia“) during the Bronze Age.

Nope, we only know the approximate location of Iberian culture and inscriptions from the Late Iron Age, and they occupy the south-eastern and eastern coastal areas, but before that it is unclear where they were spoken. In fact, it seems evident now that the arrival of Urnfield groups from the north marks the arrival of Celtic-speaking peoples, as we can infer from the increase in Central European admixture, while the expansion of anthropomorphic stelae from the north-west must have marked the expansion of Lusitanian.

Vasconic was spoken in both sides of the Pyrenees, as it was in the Middle Ages.

Wrong. One of the worst mistakes I am seeing in many comments since the paper was published, although admittedly the paper goes around this problem talking about “Modern Basques”. Vasconic toponyms appear south of the Pyrenees only after the Roman conquests, and tribes of the south-western Pyrenees and Cantabrian regions were likely Celtic-speaking peoples. Aquitanians (north of the western Pyrenees) are the only known ancient Vasconic-speaking population in proto-historic times, ergo the arrival of Bell Beakers in Iberia was most likely accompanied by Indo-European languages which were later replaced by Celtic expanding from Central Europe, and Iberian expanding from south-east Iberia, and only later with Latin and Vasconic.

Ligurian is non-Indo-European, and Lusitanian is Celtic-like, so Iberia must have been mostly non-Indo-European-speaking.

The fragmentary material available on Ligurian is enough to show that phonetically it is a NWIE dialect of non-Celtic, non-Italic nature, much like Lusitanian; that is, unless you follow laryngeals up to Celtic or Italic, in which case you can argue anything about this or any other IE language, as people who reconstruct laryngeals for Baltic in the common era do.

EDIT (19 Mar 2019): It was not clear enough from this paragraph, because Ligurian-like languages in NE Iberia is just a hypothesis based on the archaeological connection of the whole southern France Bell Beaker region. My aim was to repeat the idea that Old European topo-hydronymy is older in NE Iberia (as almost anywhere in Iberia) than Iberian toponymy, so the initial hypothesis is that:

  1. a Palaeo-European language (as Villar puts it) expanded into most regions of Iberia in ancient times (he considered at some point the Mesolithic, but that is obviously wrong, as we know now); then
  2. Celts expanded at least to the Ebro River Basin; then
  3. Iberians expanded to the north and replaced these in NE Iberia; and only then
  4. after the Roman invasion, around the start of the Common Era, appear Vasconic toponyms south of the Pyrenees.

Lusitanian obviously does not qualify as Celtic, lacking the most essential traits that define Celticness…Unless you define “(Para-)Celtic” as Pre-Proto-Celtic-like, or anything of the sort to support some Atlantic continuity, in which case you can also argue that Pre-Italic or Pre-Germanic are Celtic, because you would be essentially describing North-West Indo-European

If Basques have R1b, it’s because of a culture of “matrilocality” as opposed to the “patrilocality” of Indo-Europeans

So wrong it hurts my eyes every time I read this. Not only does matrilocality in a regional group have few known effects in genetics, but there are many well-documented cases of population replacement (with either ancestry or Y-DNA haplogroups, or both) without language replacement, without a need to resort to “matrilineality” or “matrilocality” or any other cultural difference in any of these cases.

In fact, it seems quite likely now that isolated ancient peoples north of the Pyrenees will show a gradual replacement of surviving I2a lineages by neighbouring R1b, while early Iberian R1b-DF27 lineages are associated with Lusitanians, and later incoming R1b-DF27 lineages (apart from other haplogroups) are most likely associated with incoming Celts, which must have remained in north-central and central-east European groups.

NOTE. Notice how R1a is fully absent from all known early Indo-European peoples to date, whether Iberian IE, British IE, Italic, or Greek. The absence of R1a in Iberia after the arrival of Celts is even more telling of the origin of expanding Celts in Central Europe.

I haven’t had enough time to add Iberian samples to my spreadsheet, and hence neither to the ASoSaH texts nor maps/PCAs (and I don’t plan to, because it’s more efficient for me to add both, Asian and Iberian samples, at the same time), but luckily Maciamo has summed it up on Eupedia. Or, graphically depicted in the paper for the southeast:

Y chromosome haplogroup composition of individuals from southeast Iberia during the past 2000 years. The general Iberian Bronze and Iron Age population is included for comparison. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

Does this continued influx of Y-DNA haplogroups in Iberia with different cultures represent permanent changes in language? Are, therefore, modern Iberian languages derived from Lusitanian, Sorothaptic/Celtic, Greek, Phoenician, East or West Germanic, Hebrew, Berber, or Arabic languages? Obviously not. Same with Italy (see the recent preprint on modern Italians by Raveane et al. 2018), with France, with Germany, or with Greece.

If that happens in European regions with a known ancient history, why would the recent expansions and bottlenecks of R1b in modern Basques (or N1c around the Baltic, or R1a in Slavs) in the Middle Ages represent an ancestral language surviving into modern times?

If something is clear from Narasimhan, Patterson, et al. (2018), is that we know finally the timing of the introduction and expansion of R1a-Z645 lineages among Indo-Iranians.

We could already propose since 2015 that a slow admixture happened in the steppes, based on archaeological finds, due to settlement elites dominating over common peoples, coupled with the known Uralic linguistic traits of Indo-Iranian (and known Indo-Iranian influence on Finno-Ugric) – as I did in the first version of the Indo-European demic diffusion model.

The new huge sampling of Sintashta – combined with that of Catacomb, Poltavka, Potapovka, Andronovo, and Srubna – shows quite clearly how this long-term admixture process between Uralic peoples and Indo-Iranians happened between forest-steppe CWC (mainly Abashevo) and steppe groups. The situation is not different from that of Iberia ca. 2500-2000 BC; from Narasimhan, Patterson, et al. (2018):

We combined the newly reported data from Kamennyi Ambar 5 with previously reported data from the Sintashta 5 individuals (10). We observed a main cluster of Sintashta individuals that was similar to Srubnaya, Potapovka, and Andronovo in being well modeled as a mixture of Yamnaya-related and Anatolian Neolithic (European agriculturalist-related) ancestry.

Even with such few words referring to one of the most important data in the paper about what happened in the steppes, Wang et al. (2018) help us understand what really happened with this simplistic concept of “steppe ancestry” regarding Yamna vs. Corded Ware differences:

Image modified from Wang et al. (2018). Marked are: in red, approximate limit of Anatolia_Neolithic ancestry found in Yamna populations; in blue, Corded Ware-related groups. “Modelling results for the Steppe and Caucasus 1128 cluster. Admixture proportions based on (temporally and geographically) distal and proximal models, showing additional Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in Steppe groups as well as additional gene flow from the south in some of the Steppe groups as well as the Caucasus groups (see also Supplementary Tables 10, 14 and 20).”

As with Iberia (or any prehistoric region), the details of how exactly this language change happened are not evident, but we only need a plausible explanation coupled with archaeology and linguistics. Poltavka, Potapovka, and Sintashta samples – like the few available Iberian ones ca. 2500-2000 BC – offer a good picture of the cohabitation of R1b-L23 (mainly Z2103) and R1a-Z645 (mainly Z93+): a glimpse at the likely presence of R1a-Z93 within settlements – which must have evolved as the dominant elites – in a society where the majority of the population was initially formed by nomad herders (probably most R1b-Z2103), who were usually buried outside of the main settlements.

Will the upcoming Narasimhan, Patterson et al. (2019) deal with this problem of how R1a-M417 replaced R1b-M269, and how the so-called “Steppe_MLBA” (i.e. Corded Ware) ancestry admixed with “Steppe_EMBA” (i.e. Yamnaya) ancestry in the steppes, and which one of their languages survived in the region (that is, the same the Reich Lab has done with Iberia)? Not likely. The ‘genetic wars’ in Iberia deal with haplogroup R1b-P312, and how it was neither ‘native’ nor associated with Basques and non-Indo-European peoples in general. The ‘genetic wars’ in South Asia are concerned with the steppe origin of R1a, to prove that it is not a ‘native’ haplogroup to India, and thus neither are Indo-Aryan languages. To each region a politically correct account of genetic finds, with enough care not to fully dismiss national myths, it seems.

NOTE. Funnily enough, these ‘genetic wars’ are the making of geneticists since the 1990s and 2000s, so we are still in the midst of mostly internal wars caused by what they write. Just as genetic papers of the 2020s will most likely be a reaction to what they are writing right now about “steppe ancestry” and R1a. You won’t find much change to the linguistic reconstruction in this whole period, except for the most multicolored glottochronological proposals…

The first author of the paper has engaged, as far as I could see in Twitter, in dialogue with Hindu nationalists who try to dismiss the arrival of steppe ancestry and R1a into South Asia as inconclusive (to support the potential origin of Sanskrit millennia ago in the Indus Valley Civilization). How can geneticists deal with the real problem here (the original ethnolinguistic group expanding with Corded Ware), when they have to fend off anti-steppists from Europe and Asia? How can they do it, when they themselves are part of the same societies that demand a politically correct presentation of data?

This is how the data on the most likely Indo-Iranian-speaking region should be presented in an ideal world, where – as in the Iberia paper – geneticists would look closely to the Volga-Ural region to discover what happened with Proto-Indo-Iranians from their earliest to their latest stage, instead of constantly looking for sites close to the Indus Valley to demonstrate who knows what about modern Indian culture:

Tentative map of the Late PIE and Indo-Iranian community in the Volga-Ural steppes since the Eneolithic. Proportion of ancestry derived from central European Corded Ware peoples. Colors indicate the Y-chromosome haplogroup for each male. Red lines represent period of admixture. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

Now try and tell Hindu nationalists that Sanskrit expanded from an Early Bronze Age steppe community of R1b-rich nomadic herders that spoke Pre-Indo-Iranian, which was dominated and eventually (genetically) mostly replaced by elite Uralic-speaking R1a peoples from the Russian forest, hence the known phonetic (and some morphological) traits that remained. Good luck with the Europhobic shitstorm ahead..

Iberian cultures, already with a majority of R1b lineages, show a clear northward expansion over previously Urnfield-like groups of north-east Iberia and Mediterranean France (which we now know probably represent the migration of Celts from central Europe). Similarly, Eastern Balts already under a majority of R1a lineages expanded likely into the Baltic region at the same time as the outlier from Turlojiškė (ca. 1075 BC), which represents the first obvious contacts of central-east Europe with the Baltic.

Iberia shows a more recent influx of central and eastern Mediterranean peoples, one of which eventually succeeded in imposing their language in Western Europe: Romans were possibly associated mainly with R1b-U152, apart from many other lineages. Proto-Slavs probably expanded later than Celts, too, connected to the disintegration of the Lusatian culture, and they were at some point associated with R1a-M458 and R1a-Z280(xZ92) lineages, apart from others already found in Early Slavs.

PCA of central-eastern European groups which may have formed the Balto-Slavic-speaking community derived from Bell Beaker, evident from the position ‘westwards’ of CWC in the PCA, and surrounding cultures. Left: Early Bronze Age. Right: Tollense Valley samples.

This parallel between Iberia and eastern Europe is no coincidence: as Europe entered the Bronze Age, chiefdom-based systems became common, and thus the connection of ancestry or haplogroups with ethnolinguistic groups became weaker.

What happened earlier (and who may represent the Pre-Balto-Slavic community) will be clearer when we have enough eastern European samples, but basically we will be able to depict this admixture of NWIE-speaking BBC-derived peoples with Uralic-speaking CWC-derived groups (since Uralic is known to have strongly influenced Balto-Slavic), similar to the admixture found in Indo-Iranians, more or less like this:

Tentative map of the North-West Indo-European and Balto-Slavic community in central-eastern Europe since the East Bell Beaker expansion. Proportion of ancestry derived from Corded Ware peoples. Colors indicate the Y-chromosome haplogroup for each male. Red lines represent period of admixture. Modified from Olalde et al. (2019).

The Early Scythian period marked a still stronger chiefdom-based system which promoted the creation of alliances and federation-like groups, with an earlier representation of the system expanding from north-eastern Europe around the Baltic Sea, precisely during the spread of Akozino warrior-traders (in turn related to the Scythian influence in the forest-steppes), who are the most likely ancestors of most N1c-V29 lineages among modern Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Volga-Finnic peoples.

Modern haplogroup+language = ancient ones?

It is not difficult to realize, then, that the complex modern genetic picture in Eastern Europe and around the Urals, and also in South Asia (like that of the Aegean or Anatolia) is similar to the Iron Age / medieval Iberian one, and that following modern R1a as an Indo-European marker just because some modern Indo-European-speaking groups showed it was always a flawed methodology; as flawed as following R1b for ancient Vasconic groups, or N1c for ancient Uralic groups.

Why people would argue that haplogroups mean continuity (e.g. R1b with Basques, N1c with Finns, R1a with Slavs, etc.) may be understood, if one lives still in the 2000s. Just like why one would argue that Corded Ware is Indo-European, because of Gimbutas’ huge influence since the 1960s with her myth of “Kurgan peoples”. Not many denied these haplogroup associations, because there was no reason to do it, and those who did usually aligned with a defense of descriptive archaeology.

However, it is a growing paradox that some people interested in genetics today would now, after the Iberian paper, need to:

  • accept that ancient Iberians and probably Aquitanians (each from different regions, and probably from different “Basque-Iberian dialects” in the Chalcolithic, if both were actually related) show eventually expansions with R1b-L23, the haplogroup most obviously associated with expanding Indo-Europeans;
  • acknowledge that modern Iberians have many different lineages derived from prehistoric or historic peoples (Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Jews, Goths, Berbers, Arabs), which have undergone different bottlenecks, the last ones during the Reconquista, but none of their languages have survived;
  • realize that a similar picture is to be found everywhere in central and western Europe since the first proto-historic records, with language replacement in spite of genetic continuity, such as the British Isles (and R1b-L21 continuity) after the arrival of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, or Normans;
  • but, at the same time, continue blindly asserting that haplogroup R1a + “steppe ancestry” represent some kind of supernatural combination which must show continuity with their modern Indo-Iranian or Balto-Slavic language from time immemorial.
Replacement of R1b-L23 lineages during the Early Bronze Age in eastern Europe and in the Eurasian steppes: emergence of R1a in previous Yamnaya and Bell Beaker territories. Modified from EBA Y-DNA map.

Behave, pretty please

The ‘conservative’ message espoused by some geneticists and amateur genealogists here is basically as follows:

  • Let’s not rush to new theories that contradict the 2000s, lest some people get offended by granddaddy not being these pure whatever wherever as they believed, and let’s wait some 5, 10, or 20 years, as long as necessary – to see if some corner of the Yamna culture shows R1a, or some region in north-eastern Europe shows N1c, or some Atlantic Chalcolithic sample shows R1b – to challenge our preferred theories, if we actually need to challenge anything at all, because it hurts too much.
  • Just don’t let many of these genetic genealogists or academics of our time be unhappy, pretty please with sugar on top, and let them slowly adapt to reality with more and more pet theories to fit everything together (past theories + present data), so maybe when all of them are gone, within 50 or 70 years, society can smoothly begin to move on and propose something closer to reality, but always as politically correct as possible for the next generations.
  • For starters, let’s discuss now (yet again) that Bell Beakers may not have been Indo-European at all, despite showing (unlike Corded Ware) clearly Yamna male lineages and ancestry, because then Corded Ware and R1a could not have been Indo-European and that’s terrible, so maybe Bell Beakers are too brachycephalic to speak Indo-European or something, or they were stopped by the Fearsome Tisza River, or they are not pure Dutch Single Grave in The South hence not Indo-European, or whatever, and that’s why Iron Age Iberians or Etruscans show non-Indo-European languages. That’s not disrespectful to the history of certain peoples, of course not, but talking about the evident R1a-Uralic connection is, because this is The South, not The North, and respect works differently there.
  • Just don’t talk about how Slavs and Balts enter history more than 1,500 years later than Indo-European peoples in Western and Southern Europe, including Iberia, and assume a heroic continuity of Balts and Slavs as pure R1a ‘steppe-like’ peoples dominating over thousands of kms. in the Baltic, Fennoscandia, eastern Europe, and northern Asia for 5,000 years, with multiple Balto-Slavs-over-Balto-Slavs migrations, because these absolute units of Indo-European peoples were a trip and a half. They are the Asterix and Obelix of white Indo-European prehistory.
  • Perhaps in the meantime we can also invent some new glottochronological dialectal scheme that fits the expansion of Sredni Stog/Corded Ware with (Germano-?)Indo-Slavonic separated earlier than any other Late PIE dialect; and Finno-Volgaic later than any other Uralic dialect, in the Middle Ages, with N1c.
Genetic structure of the Balto-Slavic populations within a European context according to the three genetic systems, from Kushniarevich et al. (2015). Pure Balto-Slavs from…hmm…yeah this…ancient…region…or people…cluster…Whatever, very very steppe-like peoples, the True Indo-Europeans™, so close to Yamna…almost as close as Finno-Ugrians.

To sum up: Iberia, Italy, France, the British Isles, central Europe, the Balkans, the Aegean, or Anatolia, all these territories can have a complex history of periodic admixture and language replacement everywhere, but some peoples appearing later than all others in the historical record (viz. Basques or Slavs) apparently cannot, because that would be shameful for their national or ethnic myths, and these should be respected.

Ignorance of the own past as a blank canvas to be filled in with stupid ethnolinguistic continuity, turned into something valuable that should not be challenged. Ethnonationalist-like reasoning proper of the 19th century. How can our times be called ‘modern’ when this kind of magical thinking is still prevalent, even among supposedly well-educated people?

Genetic landscape and past admixture of modern Slovenians

Open access Genetic Landscape of Slovenians: Past Admixture and Natural Selection Pattern, by Maisano Delser et al. Front. Genet. (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine):

Overall, 96 samples ranging from Slovenian littoral to Lower Styria were genotyped for 713,599 markers using the OmniExpress 24-V1 BeadChips (Figure 1), genetic data were obtained from Esko et al. (2013). After removing related individuals, 92 samples were left. The Slovenian dataset has been subsequently merged with the Human Origin dataset (Lazaridis et al., 2016) for a total of 2163 individuals.

Y chromosome

First, Y chromosome genetic diversity was assessed. A total of 52 Y chromosomes were analyzed for 195 SNPs. The majority of individuals (25, 48.1%) belong to the haplogroup R1a1a1a (R-M417) while the second major haplogroup is represented by R1b (R-M343) including 15 individuals (28.8%). Twelve samples are assigned to haplogroup I (I M170): five and two samples belong to haplogroup I2a (I L460) and I1 (I M253), respectively, while the remaining five samples did not have enough information to be further assigned.

PCA of Slovenian samples with European populations (Slovenian_HO_EU dataset). For details regarding the populations included, see Supplementary Table 1.

Considering the unbalanced sample size of the Slovenian population compared to the other populations included in the dataset, a subset of 20 Slovenian individuals randomly sampled was used.

All Slovenian samples group together with Hungarians, Czechs, and some Croatians (“Central-Eastern European” cluster) as also suggested by the PCA. All Basque individuals with few French and Spanish cluster together (“Basque” cluster) while a “Northern-European” cluster is made of the majority of French, English, Icelanders, Norwegians, and Orcadians. Five populations contributed to the “Eastern-European” cluster including Belarusians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Mordovians, and Russians. Western and South Europe is split into two cluster: the first (“Western European” cluster) includes all Spanish individuals, few French, and some Italians (North Italy) while the second (“Southern-European” cluster) groups Sicilians, Greeks, some Croatians, Romanians, and some Italians (North Italy).

Admixture Pattern and Migration

Modified image, from the paper (Central-East Europeans marked). Unsupervised admixture analysis of Slovenians. Results for K = 5 are showed as it represents the lowest cross-validation error. Slovenian samples show an admixture pattern similar to the neighboring populations such as Croatians and Hungarians. The major ancestral components are: the blue one which is shared with Lithuanians and Russians, followed by the dark green one that is mostly present in Greek samples and the light blue which characterizes Orcadians and English. For population acronyms see Supplementary Table 1.

All Slovenian individuals share common pattern of genetic ancestry, as revealed by ADMIXTURE analysis. The three major ancestry components are the North East and North West European ones (light blue and dark blue, respectively, Figure 3), followed by a South European one (dark green, Figure 3). Contribution from the Sardinians and Basque are present in negligible amount. The admixture pattern of Slovenians mimics the one suggested by the neighboring Eastern European populations, but it is different from the pattern suggested by North Italian populations even though they are geographically close.

Using ALDER, the most significant admixture event was obtained with Russians and Sardinians as source populations and it happened 135 ± 9.31 generations ago (Z-score = 11.54). (…) When tested for multiple admixture events (MALDER), we obtained evidence for one admixture event 165.391 ± 17.1918 generations ago corresponding to ∼2620 BCE (CI: 3101–2139) considering a generation time of 28 years (Figure 4), with Kalmyk and Sardinians as sources.

We then modeled the Slovenian population as target of admixture of ancient individuals from Haak et al. (2015) while computing the f3(Ancient 1, Ancient 2, Slovenian) statistic. The most significant signal was obtained with Yamnaya and HungaryGamba_EN (Z-score = -10.66), followed by MA1 with LBK_EN (Z-score -9.7) and Yamnaya with Stuttgart (Z-score = -8.6) used as possible source populations (Supplementary Figure 5).

We found a significant signal of admixture by using both pairs as ancient sources. Specifically, for the pair Yamnaya and Hungary_EN the admixture event is dated at 134.38 ± 23.69 generations ago (Z-score = 5.26, p-value of 1.5e-07) while for Yamnaya and LBK_EN at 153.65 ± 22.19 generations ago (Z-score = 6.92, p-value 4.4e-12). Outgroup f3 with Yamnaya put Slovenian population close to Hungarians, Czechs, and English, indicating a similar shared drift between these population with the Steppe populations (Supplementary Figure 6).

Admixture events identified with ALDER and MALDER. The gray dots represent significant admixture events detected with ALDER using Slovenians as target, the solid line represents the single admixture event detected using MALDER, dashed lines represent the confidence interval. Only the significant results after multiple testing correction are plotted. For ALDER results see Supplementary Table 5.

Not that any of this would come as a surprise, but:

  • R1a-M458 and some R1a-Z280 (xR1a-Z92) lineages (found among Slovenes) were associated with the Slavic expansion, likely with the Prague-Korchak culture, originally stemming probably from peoples of the Lusatian culture. Other R1a-Z280 lineages remained associated with Uralic peoples, and some became Slavicized only recently.
  • PCA keeps supporting the common cluster of certain West, South, and East Slavs in a “Central-Eastern European” cluster, distinct from the “North-Eastern European” cluster formed by modern Finno-Ugrians, as well as ancient Finno-Ugrians of north-eastern Europe who were only recently Slavicized.
  • Admixture supports the same ancient ‘western’ (a core West+South+East Slavic) cluster, and the admixture event with Yamna + Hungary_EN is logically a proxy for Yamna Hungary being at the core of ancestral Central-East population movements related to Bell Beakers in the mid- to late 3rd millennium.

The theory that East Slavs are at the core of the Slavic expansion makes no sense, in terms of archaeology (see Florin Curta’s dismissal of those recent eastern ‘Slavic’ finds, his commentary on 19th century Pan-Slavic crap, or his book on Slavic migrations), in terms of ancient DNA (the earliest Slavs sampled cluster with modern West Slavs, distant from the steppe cluster, unlike Finno-Ugrians), or in terms of modern DNA.

I don’t know where exactly this impulse for the theory of Russia being the cradle of Slavs comes from today (although there are some obvious political trends to revive 19th c. ideas), but it was always clear for everyone, including Russians, that East Slavs had migrated to the east and north and assimilated indigenous Finno-Ugrians, apart from Turkic-, Iranian-, and Caucasian-speaking peoples to the east. Genetics is only confirming what was clear from other disciplines long ago.


Polymorphism in C# Without Classes

Imagine all the benefits you’d experience if you could somehow apply polymorphism in C# without classes and methods. First of all, there would be far less dependencies in your code, no abstract base classes or interfaces that could potentially break your code in the future, no method signatures that could potentially break in the future, and no static types that could potentially break in the future. Sounds too good to be true? Read on my friend, and I’ll show you the glory.
Believe it or not, but the above is actually a functioning piece of computer code. It is an invocation to an “Active Event" who’s name if "foo.bar", and it takes two arguments; arg1 and arg2. Its C# implementation might look like the following.

Link: https://dzone.com/articles/polymorphism-in-c-without-classes-and-methods?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dzone%2Fwebdev


Rep. Tim Holden, D-PA., lost his primary reelection battle in April after Republicans eviscerated his congressional district. The victor was a liberal, self-funding trial lawyer, who will almost certainly be elected in November.

So what, you ask?

Actually, it’s a big deal. Holden is a former insurance broker who has always been attuned to the often complicated and obscure insurance regulatory agenda. Angering many in his Democratic base, he opposed President Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s healthcare reform effort at every step, and he articulated his fear that the Affordable Care Act would undermine the employer-sponsored health insurance marketplace and brokers’ role in it.

As The Council’s lobbyist, my job is to knock on doors, build relationships and ask for help. I get a lot of calls from members of Congress, the overwhelming majority seeking campaign contributions. Holden is one of the rare members who picked up the phone to call me not for fundraising, but to ask my help in organizing opposition to provisions moving through the House that would have stuck it to brokers.

In his nearly 20 years in Congress, Holden has been a big part of the vanishing breed of Blue Dog Democrats. Not so long ago, the Blue Dogs balanced out many of the liberal impulses of the Democratic Congress. Not only were the Blue Dogs generally sympathetic to the business community, they were especially cognizant of the legislative concerns of the insurance industry, and a bunch of them—like Holden—had a background in our industry.

Holden’s eastern Pennsylvania district was classic Rust Belt blue collar, and he was a bridge between business interests and organized labor. When Republicans took control of Pennsylvania state government after the 2010 elections, they were faced with losing a House seat due to declining population. Holden’s seat was carved to bits to free up Republican votes for neighboring officeholders.

Holden chose to run in a district where three quarters of his constituents were new. His opponent, Matt Cartwright, made Holden’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act a centerpiece of his campaign. But it really wasn’t a campaign about the issues. It was about the ability of Cartwright to self-fund from his riches as a plaintiffs attorney, combined with partisan demographics.

It didn’t help that the anti-incumbent “super PAC” Campaign for Primary Accountability targeted Holden. Funded by a group of Texas millionaires, this super PAC is the most irrational political effort I may have ever witnessed. Its premise is that all incumbents are bad and that the country can get back on track only with fresh faces. By aiming at incumbents of all stripes, the group substitutes stupidity for ideology. The same group tried to defeat Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., the chairman of the Financial Services Committee and a rock-ribbed conservative. Fortunately for the republic, in both of those instances the “super PAC” failed. With the defeat of their target, Holden, this group now gets an establishment liberal trial lawyer. Some accomplishment.

My disappointment in the Holden election is a broader reflection of my fears that Washington has become today what Sacramento became more than a decade ago—occupied by both the right and the left, with a disappearing middle. The Cook Political Report, the nation’s best and most granular political handicapper, assesses races on a scale—safe Republican, likely Republican, leaning Republican, tossup, leaning Democrat, likely Democrat and safe Democrat. Even in a highly combustible political 2012 environment, congressional district lines across the country have overwhelmingly been drawn in an uncompetitive way. Almost everybody in Congress is “safe” or “likely.”

As a Republican, I’m pleased to note that Democrats would have to win almost every single “lean” or “tossup” seat to regain control of the House. As a citizen, the consequences of this polarization (and sophisticated partisan mapmaking) are troubling.

Greece’s recent parliamentary elections increased the power of both the far right and the far left. There’s a lesson there.

Meanwhile, there is precisely one remaining Blue Dog Democrat left in the Deep South—Rep. John Barrow of Georgia—who happens to be the Democratic co-author of the legislation that would exclude broker compensation from the Affordable Care Act’s minimum medical loss ratio. He, too, put his party second and his country first on all the House votes on healthcare reform. Republicans in the Georgia legislature drew the maps this year to make Barrow much more vulnerable in November. Everybody I know in the D.C. business lobbying community thinks that losing Barrow would be awful.

Congressman Holden, never flashy or ego-driven, will make a whole lot more money when he’s out of Congress.

His life will be much more sane without the constant push-and-pull from the left and the right. But with the loss of legislators like him, Congress will be diminished.


Exfo (EXF) Given a C$4.50 Price Target by BMO Capital Markets Analysts

Exfo (TSE:EXF) (NASDAQ:EXFO) has been assigned a C$4.50 target price by BMO Capital Markets in a research report issued on Wednesday, April 3rd, Stock Target Advisor reports. BMO Capital Markets’ price target would indicate a potential downside of 27.77% from the company’s current price.

EXF traded down C$0.09 during midday trading on Wednesday, reaching C$6.23. 81,743 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 12,652. Exfo has a one year low of C$3.51 and a one year high of C$6.70. The company has a current ratio of 1.42, a quick ratio of 0.88 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 9.33. The stock has a market cap of $314.08 million and a P/E ratio of -28.19.

Exfo Company Profile

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