$4.5 Million Disability Discrimination Verdict Against Auto Dealer Who Failed to Investigate

Florida-300x300 A federal jury in Florida has awarded $4.5 million against an auto dealer for claims of disability discrimination under the Florida Civil Rights Act (FCRA). Axel v. Fields Motorcars of Florida, Inc., No. 8:15-cv-893-17JSS (M.D. Fla. Feb. 22, 2017). The verdict consisted of $680,000 in lost wages and benefits, $600,000 for emotional pain and mental anguish, and $3,220,220 in punitive damages. The jury found the employer discriminated against Michael Fields after he returned from a medical absence for treatment of kidney cancer. The jury rejected the plaintiff’s claims of age discrimination pursuant to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Axel was employed by Fields Motorcars of Florida, Inc. for approximately 10 years. According to court records, he had not received any disciplinary or corrective action in that time. To the contrary, he had received awards for his performance. After Fields was diagnosed with kidney cancer, he underwent experimental treatment and was able to return to work where he was capable of performing all of his duties. Axel further claimed that he was on pace to have the most productive year at Fields. However, he was repeatedly passed up for promotions, and was demoted and terminated for failure to follow company policies and processes.

In its decision to terminate Axel, the employer relied upon a letter that dated back to the beginning of his employment, approximately 10 years earlier. A Vice President and General Manager claimed that Axel had forged a document that provided his son access to auto auctions without authorization. He performed no independent investigation and never spoke to Axel prior to his termination. Axel claimed that while he signed the letter, he had authorization to do so from management. There was no suggestion that Axel’s son improperly used his authority to purchase cars on behalf of Fields.

This case highlights the importance of thorough investigations by management prior terminations, especially with respect to employees with a protected status or disability and those who bring an internal complaint of discrimination. When a company lacks the expertise to conduct an investigation on its own and fails to enlist assistance, it can pay the price at trial.

Using Electronically Stored Information in Employment Trials

tablet          In employment litigation, evidence now admitted during most trials routinely includes electronically stored information (ESI), including email communications and documents the receipt of which is often acknowledged with a mouse click. Trial counsel must know how to authenticate such ESI to ensure the court will allow it into evidence. Counsel also should be aware of the pitfalls when ESI has been intentionally or unintentionally altered, thus impairing admissibility.

Unfortunately, in addition to hacking and cyberattacks, we have seen that technology can be abused by an unscrupulous litigant: Email communications can be falsified, sometimes requiring  expert testimony to uncover the wrongdoing. Similarly, audio-recorded telephone conversations can be “spoofed,” reflecting a call that was actually made by another person. This falsely misrepresents the caller’s identity in commercial transactions. Likewise, video-recorded events can be digitally-edited to portray events in a deceptive context.

In addition, ESI can be damaged in storage or mangled in transmission with inadvertent computer-generated changes in spelling, punctuation, layout, or deletion. Viruses and malware can wreak havoc with ESI by creating or transmitting bogus documents, or by altering or deleting legitimate business records.

ESI is often a crucial component of evidence that comes to light during pretrial discovery. Federal Rules of Evidence 901 and 902 provide time-tested standards for assessing authenticity that courts in recent years have applied to determine whether the proponent of ESI has produced “evidence sufficient to support a finding that the item is what the proponent claims it is.” FRE 901(a). Examples of successful authentication methods include testimony of the person who created, transmitted, or received the ESI that the contents is what it purports to be. FRE 901(b)(1).

Traditional methods of authenticating evidence are not sufficient in litigation where only forensic experts are competent to testify to issues beyond the ken of lay factfinders. Examples include whether a person or virus created or transmitted a particular document, whether a particular document was backdated, edited, or deleted, or indeed whether viruses lodged within an electronic device are capable of creating or transmitting a disputed document. United States v. Browne, 834 F.3d 403, 415-16 (3d Cir. 2016), cert. denied, 196 L.Ed.2d 572 (2017) (no reversible error due to proper authentication through extrinsic evidence from other chat participants).

Jackson Lewis attorneys are available to answer inquiries regarding trial strategy and other concerns on use of evidence in workplace litigation.

How Big Data Can Predict The Outcome of An Employment Trial

             The legal industry has turned to data analytics to keep litigation costs down. Companies can analyze litigation data on courts, judges, opposing counsel, and substantive evidentiary materials that affect liability. They are then better positioned to spot trends, predict exposure, and make strategic litigation decisions with greater efficiency.

            In the Digital Age, a company’s data footprint can provide a treasure trove of information. Employees, contractors, and vendors create data. Even more data is created in a gig economy that includes part-time, remote workers, and independent contractors. The task of mining the data will only become more challenging. Companies need to understand not only data preservation, confidentiality, and privacy, but also the effect of data that will become evidence at trial.

            This territory was pioneered by companies such as Lex Machina, https://lexmachina.com/, which focused primarily on intellectual property cases. After the company was acquired by LexisNexis in 2016, it expanded its reach to include securities and antitrust cases, with plans for employment applications. Legal analytic applications for the existing areas provide early case assessments, the prospects of success on motions, and similar analyses. Bloomberg Law has also introduced Litigation Analytics to provide insights on federal judges and law firms in the federal courts. Significantly, the ability to mine litigation dockets, e-discovery databases, and other documents through analytics can provide quick and efficient information regarding outcomes.

              With the formation of its Data Analytics Resource Group, https://www.jacksonlewis.com/practice/data-analytics, Jackson Lewis is well-positioned to provide clients with an array of analytics services. Eric Felsberg, a Principal in the firm’s Melville, Long Island office, and the National Director of the Group, leads a multidisciplinary team of lawyers, data scientists, and statisticians that offers clients many services, including compliance assessments, litigation support, and talent analytics. These services provide clients with enhanced efficiency and exposure prediction. For example, in wage and hour cases, the firm regularly provides liability assessments by mining and analyzing digital footprint data, such as GPS logs, CPU usage, and door card swipe information. Leveraging the power of detailed data analysis in a privileged and confidential process allows companies to drill down on the evidentiary issues and proofs that matter at trial.

           Such processes are regularly used to determine exposure in class actions and single plaintiff cases, providing invaluable and actionable information.


Why ear plugs are great for clubbing and concerts

Picture by Melianis at fi.wikipedia (CC BY 2.5)

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Why does music training increase intelligence?

1) Proposing the ISAML

a) music training increases sustained attention

b) sustained attention is associated with intelligence

c) music training increases intelligence

2) Evaluating the ISAML

3) Conclusion

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The curious effect of a musical rhythm on us

Do you know the feeling of a musical piece moving you? What is this feeling? One common answer by psychological researchers is that what you feel is your attention moving in sync with the music. In a new paper I show that this explanation is mistaken.

Watch the start of the following video and observe carefully what is happening in the first minute or so (you may stop it after that).

Noticed something? Nearly everyone in the audience moved to the rhythm, clapping, moving the head etc. And you? Did you move? I guess not. You probably looked carefully at what people were doing instead. Your reaction illustrates nicely how musical rhythms affect people according to psychological researchers. One very influential theory claims that your attention moves up and down in sync with the rhythm. It treats the rhythm like you treated it. It simply ignores the fact that most people love moving to the rhythm.

The theory: a rhythm moves your attention

Sometimes we have gaps of attention. Sometimes we manage to concentrate really well for a brief moment. A very influential theory, which has been supported in various experiments, claims that these fluctuations in attention are synced to the rhythm when hearing music. Attention is up at rhythmically salient moments, e.g., the first beat in each bar. And attention is down during rhythmically unimportant moments, e.g., off-beat moments.

This makes intuitive sense. Important tones, e.g., those determining the harmonic key of a music piece, tend to occur at rhythmically salient moments. Looking at language rhythm reveals a similar picture. Stressed syllables are important for understanding language and signal moments of rhythmic salience. It makes sense to attend well during moments which include important information.

The test: faster decisions and better learning?

I, together with Suzanne Jongman, asked whether attention really is up at rhythmically salient moments. If so, people should make decisions faster when a background rhythm has a moment of rhythmic importance. As if people briefly concentrated better at that moment. This is indeed what we found. People are faster at judging whether a few letters on the screen are a real word or not, if the letters are shown near a salient moment of a background rhythm, compared to another moment.

However, we went further. People should also learn new words better if they are shown near a rhythmically salient moment. This turned out not to be the case. Whether people have to memorise a new word at a moment when their attention is allegedly up or down (according to a background rhythm) does not matter. Learning is just as good.

What is more, even those people who react really strongly to the background rhythm in terms of speeding up a decision at a rhythmically salient moment (red square in Figure below), even those people do not learn new words better at the same time as they speed up.

It’s as if the speed-up of decisions is unrelated to the learning of new words. That’s weird because both tasks are known to be affected by attention. This makes us doubt that a rhythm affects attention. What could it affect instead?

Figure 1. Every dot is one of 60 participants. How much a background rhythm sped up responses is shown horizontally. How much the same rhythm, at the same time, facilitated pseudoword memorisation is shown on the vertical axis. The red square singles out the people who were most affected by the rhythm in terms of their decision speed. Notice that, at the same time, their learning is unaffected by the rhythm.

The conclusion: a rhythm does not move your attention, it moves your muscles

To our own surprise, a musical rhythm appears not to affect how your attention moves up and down, when your attentional lapses happen, or when you can concentrate well. Instead, it simply appears to affect how fast you can press a button, e.g., when indicating a decision whether a few letters form a word or not.

Thinking back to the video at the start, I guess this just means that people love moving to the rhythm because the urge to do so is a direct consequence of understanding a rhythm. Somewhere in the auditory and motor parts of the brain, rhythm processing happens. However, this has nothing to do with attention. This is why learning a new word shown on the screen – a task without an auditory or motor component – is not affected by a background rhythm.

The paper: the high point of my career

You may read all of this yourself in the paper (here). I will have to admit that in many ways this paper is how I like to see science done and, so, I will shamelessly tell you of its merits. The paper is not too long (7,500 words) but includes no less than 4 experiments with no less than 60 participants each. Each experiment tests the research question individually. However, the experiments build on each other in such a way that their combination makes the overall paper stronger than any experiment individually ever could.

In terms of analyses, we put in everything we could think of. All analyses are Bayesian (subjective Bayes factor) and frequentist (p-values). We report hypothesis testing analyses (Bayes factor, p-values) and parameter estimation analyses (effect sizes, Confidence intervals, Credible intervals). If you can think of yet another analysis, go for it. We publish the raw data and analysis code alongside the article.

The most important reason why this paper represents my favoured approach to science, though, is because it actually tests a theory. A theory I and my co-author truly believed in. A theory with a more than 30-year history. With a varied supporting literature. With a computational model implementation. With more than 800 citations for two key papers. With, in short, everything you could wish to see in a good theory.

And we falsified it! Instead of thinking of the learning task as ‘insensitive’ or as ‘a failed experiment’, we dug deeper and couldn’t help but concluding that the attention theory of rhythm perception is probably wrong. We actually learned something from our data!

PS: no-one is perfect and neither is this paper. I wish we had pre-registered at least one of the experiments. I also wish the paper was open access (see a free copy here). There is room for improvement, as always.

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How to test for music skills

In a new article I evaluate a recently developed test for music listening skills. To my great surprise the test behaves very well. This could open the path to better understand the psychology underlying music listening. Why am I surprised?

I got my first taste of how difficult it is to replicate published scientific results during my very first empirical study as an undergraduate (eventually published as Kunert & Scheepers, 2014). Back then, I used a 25 minute long dyslexia screening test to distinguish dyslexic participants from non-dyslexic participants (the Lucid Adult Dyslexia Screener). Even though previous studies had suggested an excellent sensitivity (identifying actually dyslexic readers as dyslexic) of 90% and a moderate to excellent specificity (identifying actually non-dylexic readers as non-dyslexic) of 66% – 91% (Singleton et al., 2009; Nichols et al., 2009), my own values were worse at 61% sensitivity and 65% specificity. In other words, the dyslexia test only flagged someone with an official dyslexia diagnosis in 11/18 cases and only categorised someone without known reading problems as non-dyslexic in 13/20 cases. The dyslexia screener didn’t perform exactly as suggested by the published literature and I have been suspicious of ability tests every since.

Five years later I acquired data to look at how music can influence language processing (Kunert et al., 2016) and added a newly proposed music abilitily measure called PROMS (Law & Zentner, 2012) to the experimental sessions to see how bad it is. I really thought I would see the music listening ability scores derived from the PROMS to be conflated with things which on the face of it have little to do with music (digit span, i.e. the ability to repeat increasingly longer digit sequences), because previous music ability tests had that problem. Similarly, I expected people with better music training to not have that much better PROMS scores. In other words, I expected the PROMS to perform worse than suggested by the people who developed the test, in line with my negative experience with the dylexia screener.

It then came as a surprise to see that PROMS scores were hardly associated with the ability to repeat increasingly longer digit sequences (either in the same order, i.e. forward digit span, or in reverse order, i.e. backward digit span), see Figure 1A and 1B. This makes the PROMS scores surprisingly robust against variation in working memory, as you would expect from a good music ability test.

Figure 1. How the brief PROMS (vertical axis) correlates with various validity measures (horizontal axis). Each dot is one participant. Lines are best fit lines with equal weights for each participant (dark) or downweighting unusual participants (light). Inserted correlation values reflect dark line (Pearson r) or a rank-order equivalent of it which is robust to outliers (Spearman rho). Correlation values range from -1 to +1.

The second surprise came when musical training was actually associated with better music skill scores, as one would expect for a good test of music skills, see Figures 1C, 1D, 1E, and 1H. To top it of, the PROMS score was also correlated with the music task performance in the experiment looking at how language influences music processing. This association between the PROMS and musical task accuracy was visible in two independent samples, see Figures 1F and 1G, which is truly surprising because the music task targets harmonic music perception which is not directly tested by the PROMS.

To conclude, I can honestly recommend the PROMS to music researchers. To my surprise it is a good test which could truly tell us something about where music skills actually come from. I’m glad that this time I have been proven wrong regarding my suspicions about ability tests.

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Kunert R, & Scheepers C (2014). Speed and accuracy of dyslexic versus typical word recognition: an eye-movement investigation. Frontiers in psychology, 5 PMID: 25346708

Kunert R, Willems RM, & Hagoort P (2016). Language influences music harmony perception: effects of shared syntactic integration resources beyond attention. Royal Society open science, 3 (2) PMID: 26998339

Kunert R, Willems RM, & Hagoort P (2016). An Independent Psychometric Evaluation of the PROMS Measure of Music Perception Skills. PloS one, 11 (7) PMID: 27398805

Law LN, & Zentner M (2012). Assessing musical abilities objectively: construction and validation of the profile of music perception skills. PloS one, 7 (12) PMID: 23285071

Nichols SA, McLeod JS, Holder RL, & McLeod HS (2009). Screening for dyslexia, dyspraxia and Meares-Irlen syndrome in higher education. Dyslexia, 15 (1), 42-60 PMID: 19089876

Singleton, C., Horne, J., & Simmons, F. (2009). Computerised screening for dyslexia in adults Journal of Research in Reading, 32 (1), 137-152 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2008.01386.x
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How language changes the way you hear music

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Broca’s area processes both music and language at the same time

When you read a book and listen to music, the brain doesn’t keep these two tasks nicely separated. In a new article just out, I show that there is a brain area which is busy with both tasks at the same time (Kunert et al., 2015). This brain area might tell us a lot about what music and language share.

The brain area which you see highlighted in red on this picture is called Broca’s area. Since the 19th century, many people believe it to be ‘the language production part of the brain’. However, a more modern theory proposes that this area is responsible for combining elements (e.g., words) into coherent wholes (e.g., sentences), a task which needs to be solved to understand and produce language (Hagoort, 2013). In my most recent publication, I found evidence that at the same time as combining words into sentences, this area also combines tones into melodies (Kunert et al., 2015).

What did I do with my participants in the MRI scanner?

Take for example the sentence The athlete that noticed the mistresses looked out of the window. Who did the noticing? Was it the mistresses who noticed the athlete or the athlete who noticed the mistresses? In other words, how does noticed combine with the mistresses and the athlete? There is a second version of this sentence which uses the same words in a different way: The athlete that the mistresses noticed looked out of the window. If you are completely confused now, I have achieved my aim of giving you a feeling for what a complicated task language is. Combining words is generally not easy (first version of the sentence) and sometimes really hard (second version of the sentence).

Listening to music can be thought of in similar ways. You have to combine tones or chords in order to hear actual music rather than just a random collection of sounds. It turns out that this is also generally not easy and sometimes really hard. Check out the following two little melodies. The text is just the first example sentence above, translated into Dutch (the fMRI study was carried out in The Netherlands).

If these examples don’t work, see more examples on my personal website here.

Did you notice the somewhat odd tone in the middle of the second example? Some people call this a sour note. The idea is that it is more difficult to combine such a sour note with the other tones in the melody, compared to a more expected note.

So, now we have all the ingedients to compare the combination of words into a sentence (with an easy and a difficult kind of combination) and tones in a melody (with an easy and a difficult kind of combination). My participants heard over 100 examples like the ones above. The experiment was done in an fMRI scanner and we looked at the brain area highlighted in red above: Broca’s area (under your left temple).

What did I find in the brain data?

The height of the bars represents the difference in brain activity signal between the easy and difficult versions of the sentences. As you can see, the bars are generally above zero, i.e. this brain area displays more activity for more difficult sentences (not a significant main effect in this analysis actually). I show three bars because the sentences were sung in three different music versions: easy (‘in-key’), hard (‘out-of-key’), or with an unexpected loud note (‘auditory anomaly’). As you can see the easy version of the melody (left bar) or the one with the unexpected loud note (right bar) hardly lead to an activity difference between easy and difficult sentences. It is the difficult version (middle bar) which does. In other words: when this brain area is trying to make a difficult combination of tones, it suddenly has great trouble with the combination of words in a sentence.

What does it all mean?

This indicates that Broca’s area uses the same resources for music and language. If you overwhelm this area with a difficult music task, there are less resources available for the language task. In a previous blog post, I have argued that behavioural experiments have shown a similar picture (Kunert & Slevc, 2015). This experiment shows that the music-language interactions we see in people’s behaviour might stem from the activity in this brain area.

So, this fMRI study contributes a tiny piece to the puzzle of how the brain deals with the many tasks it has to deal with. Instead of keeping everything nice and separated in different corners of the head, similar tasks appear to get bundled in specialized brain areas. Broca’s area is an interesting case. It is associated with combining a structured series of elements into a coherent whole. This is done across domains like music, language, and (who knows) beyond.

[Update 13/11/2015: added link to personal website.]

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Hagoort P (2013). MUC (Memory, Unification, Control) and beyond. Frontiers in psychology, 4 PMID: 23874313

Kunert R, Willems RM, Casasanto D, Patel AD, & Hagoort P (2015). Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca’s Area: An fMRI Study. PloS one, 10 (11) PMID: 26536026

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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this blog post are not necessarily shared by my co-authors Roel Willems, Daniel Casasan/to, Ani Patel, and Peter Hagoort.

Do music and language share brain resources?

Why does music influence language?

Why ignore the fact that music influences language?

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1 Except for one ECoG study.

The real reason why new pop music is so incredibly bad

You have probably heard that Pink Floyd recently published their new album Endless River. Will this bring back the wonderful world of good music after the endless awfulness of the popular music scene in the last 20 years or so? Is good music, as we know it from the 60s and 70s, back for good? The reasons behind the alleged endless awfulness of pop music these days suggest otherwise. We shouldn’t be throwing stones at new music but instead at our inability to like it.

Pink Floyd 1973

When we were young we learned to appreciate Pink Floyd.

Daniel Levitin was asked at a recent music psychology conference in Toronto why old music is amazing and new music is awful. He believed that modern record companies are there to make money. In the olden days, on the other hand, they were there to make music and ready to hold on to musicians which needed time to become successful. More interestingly, he reminded the public that many modern kidz would totally disagree with the implication that modern music is awful. How can it be that new music is liked by young people if so much of it is often regarded as quite bad?

Everything changes for the better after a few repetitions

The answer to the mystery has nothing to do with flaws in modern music but instead with our brain. When adults hear new music they often hate it at first. After repeated listening they tend to find it more and more beautiful. For example, Marcia Johnson and colleagues (1985) played Korean melodies to American participants and found that hearing a new melody led to low liking ratings, a melody heard once before to higher ratings and even more exposure to higher than higher ratings. Even Korsakoff patients – who could hardly remember having heard individual melodies before – showed this effect, i.e. without them realising it they probably never forget melodies.

This so-called mere exposure effect is all that matters to me: a robust, medium-strong, generally applicable, evolutionarily plausible effect (Bornstein, 1989). You can do what you like, it applies to all sorts of stimuli. However, there is one interesting exception here. Young people do not show the mere exposure effect, no relationship between ‘repeat the stimulus’ and ‘give good feeling’ (Bornstein, 1989). As a result, adults need a lot more patience before they like a new song as much as young people do. No wonder adults are only satisfied with the songs they already know from their youth in the 60s and 70s. Probably, when looking at the music scene in 2050 the current generation will equally hate it and wish the Spice Girls back (notice the gradual rise of 90’s parties already).

I listened to it –> I like it

So, when it comes to an allegedly awful present and great past, ask yourself: how deep is your love for the old music itself rather than its repeated listening? Listen repeatedly to any of a million love songs and you will end up appreciating it. Personally, I give new music a chance and sometimes it manages to relight my fire. Concerning Endless River, if it’s not love at first sight, do not worry. The new Pink Floyd album sure is good (depending on how many times you listen to it).

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Bornstein, R. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research, 1968-1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106 (2), 265-289 DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.106.2.265

Johnson MK, Kim JK, & Risse G (1985). Do alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome patients acquire affective reactions? Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 11 (1), 22-36 PMID: 3156951
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Figure: By PinkFloyd1973.jpg: TimDuncan derivative work: Mr. Frank (PinkFloyd1973.jpg) [CC-BY-3.0 (, via Wikimedia Commons

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PS: Yes, I did hide 29 Take That song titles in this blog post. Be careful, you might like 90’s pop music a little bit more due to this exposure.

Play music and you’ll see more

Check out the video. It is a short demonstration of the so-called attentional blink. Whenever you try to spot the two letters in the rapid sequence you’ll miss the second one. This effect is so robust that generations of Psychology undergraduates learned about it. And then came music and changed everything.

Test your own attentional blink

Did you see the R in the video? Probably you did, but did you see the C? The full sequence starts at 0:48, the R occurs at 0:50 and the sequence ends at 0:53. As far as I can see each letter is presented for about 130 milliseconds (a typical rate for this sort of experiment).

Judging by the youtube comments, of those who did the task properly (14 comments when I checked), only 65% saw the C. This is remarkably close to the average performance during an attentional blink (around 60% or so).

Where does the attentional blink come from?

The idea is that when the C is presented it cannot enter attention because attention is busy with the R. Another theory states that you immediately forget that you’ve seen the C. The R is less vulnerable to rapid forgetting.

What does music do with our attention?

In 2005 Christian Olivers and Sander Nieuwenhuis reported that they could simply abolish this widely known effect by playing a rhythmic tune in the background (unfortunately no more details are given). Try it out yourself. Switch on the radio and play a song with a strong beat. Now try the video again. Can you see both the R and the C? The 16 people in the music condition of Olivers and Nieuwenhuis could. Music actually let them see things which without music were invisible.

It is a bit mysterious why music would have such an effect. The article only speculates that it has something to do with music inducing a more ‘diffuse’ state of mind, greater arousal, or positive mood. I think the answer lies somewhere else. Music, especially songs with a strong beat, change how we perceive the world. On the beat (i.e. when most people would clap to the beat) one pays more attention than off the beat. What music might have done to participants is to restructure attention. Once the R occurs, it is no longer able to dominate attention because people are following the rhythmic attentional structure.

Behind my explanation is the so-called dynamic attending theory. Unfortunately, Olivers and Nieuwenhuis appear not to be familiar with it. Perhaps it is time to include some music cognition lessons in psychology undergraduate classes. After all, a bit of music let’s you see things which otherwise remain hidden to you.

Large, E., & Jones, M. (1999). The dynamics of attending: How people track time-varying events. Psychological Review, 106 (1), 119-159 DOI: 10.1037//0033-295X.106.1.119

Everything you always wanted to know about language but were too afraid to ask

MPI Nijmegen

The MPI in Nijmegen: the origin of answers to your questions.

The Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen has started a great initiative which tries nothing less than answer all your questions about language. How does it work?

1) Go to this website:
2) See whether your question has already been answered
3) If not, scroll to the bottom and ask a question yourself.
The answers are not provided by just anybody but by language researchers themselves. Before they are put on the web they get checked by another researcher and they get translated into German, Dutch and English. It’s a huge enterprise, to be sure..
As an employee of the Max Planck Institute I’ve had my own go at answering a few questions:
How does manipulating through language work?
Is it true that people who are good in music can learn a language sooner?
How do gender articles affect cognition?
.What do think of my answers? What questions would you like to see answered?

Thibodeau, P., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning PLoS ONE, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0016782

Asaridou, S., & McQueen, J. (2013). Speech and music shape the listening brain: evidence for shared domain-general mechanisms Frontiers in Psychology, 4 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00321

Segel, E., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Grammar in Art Frontiers in Psychology, 1 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00244


What's Going On with 61A?

(Update 8/11/2013)

(Introduction for non-Berkeley-CS people: CS 61A is our first course for computer science majors. The course title and curriculum come from its former textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the best computer science book ever written.)

In fall 2011 the department decided to switch 61A away from its longstanding textbook, SICP, to a new version using lecture notes partly based on SICP but rearranged and with some sections replaced by new material. The purported goal is to make the course "more modern."

I've been teaching and championing 61A (and its predecessor 60A) for 25 years. During that time, 61B (our data structures course) has gone through three programming languages and even more textbook changes; 61C (our machine organization course) has moved from the Vax architecture (CISC) to the MIPS architecture (RISC) and then had three major redesigns, most recently to put parallelism at the heart of the curriculum. That's no surprise in a fast-moving field like computer science. So how come 61A is still using, with fairly minor changes, a 27-year-old curriculum?

Well, there are two possible answers to that: (1) Certain old fogies on the faculty just aren't keeping up with the times. (2) Even though the details have changed, in very dramatic ways, the central ideas of computer science, as highlighted in SICP, remain unchanged.

To be honest, there's definitely some truth to the first one. I could never in a million years program the slick web apps that our undergraduates put together overnight at the CSUA Hackathons. But I also believe the second one. Before SICP, introductory CS courses were an unending sequence of programming language details. Instructors tried to invent entertaining program examples to illustrate these fundamentally boring details. SICP highlights the idea of abstraction as the fundamental principle of computer science, and brilliantly illustrates this principle with a series of mind-blowing examples from the functional, object-oriented, and declarative programming paradigms. Each abstraction is presented both from the user's point of view and from the implementor's, so that nothing feels like magic beyond the student's abilities.

Every six or seven years, this question has come up at a faculty meeting. The young turks propose to replace 61A with something more modern. Until now, after each discussion, the faculty has voted to keep SICP. But now I'm retiring, and there has to be a plan for how 61A will continue after that.

In fact there are two such plans, mine and the other one.

Starting with the latter, in 2011-12, 61A was taught by John DeNero (fall) and Paul Hilfinger (spring) using lecture notes based on SICP (since its text is now available on the web with a Creative Commons license that permits such use) but with the program examples recoded in Python. This is, on its face, a strange idea; Scheme and SICP build on each other's strengths and programming in Python as if it were Scheme will surely result in some of the examples looking unlike the way a native Python speaker would code them. But the long-term plan is that over time, the 61A curriculum will gradually change to include "more modern" ideas, leaving out some of the SICP ones to make room; because of its huge collection of application libraries, the new ideas will be more easily expressed in Python than in Scheme. Also, there is currently a vibrant open-source project community using Python, and 61A students can be introduced into that community.

Another reason why some EECS faculty favored changing the programming language to a more widely used one is that many students who come to Berkeley satisfying the 61A prerequisite of experience programming recursive functions have nevertheless felt the need to take CS 3L or 3S, the "zeroth" CS course recently replaced by CS 10, leading to a de facto four-course lower division CS sequence. This has been especially problematic for EECS students more interested in EE than in CS.

John and Paul assure me that they value SICP and that changes will be slow, incremental, and small enough so that the spirit of SICP will remain. Earlier in the planning process, there was a proposal to dump the 61A curriculum altogether and start from scratch, but that was rejected by the lower division task force organized by the CS Chair. So this is not an epic battle between good and evil. And the reason the Python version of the course was introduced at scale in fall 2011, rather than as a small pilot section as in past reforms, is my own decision not to teach in 2011-12.

Nevertheless, I prefer my own proposal for how to preserve 61A after my retirement: a self-paced version, CS 61AS, using SICP.

For one thing, I'm skeptical about the "more modern ideas" claim. The various faculty members who take that view don't agree about what the new ideas should be; among the more popular ones are web programming and querying large online databases. Those are important applications, but central ideas in computer science? Hardly. (This business about undergraduates coding web apps overnight cuts both ways!) They're application libraries (and, by the way, such libraries exist in Scheme, too). Also, among trendy languages, Python isn't the best choice, I think, because its version of lambda is deficient in various ways. I'd have chosen Javascript, a decent language apart from its horrible name.

But also, I wish I'd invented the self-paced structure of the course years ago, before the issue of changing 61A came up. We've always had a pretty high 61A dropout rate because students can't keep up. It turns out, from our 61AS experience, that many of those students are perfectly capable of learning the ideas if they're given more time, and a self-paced structure lets you spread the course over two semesters if necessary. Conversely, there are always a few students who find SICP pretty easy, and they can race ahead to Chapter 5, on compilers, and also do some of the example sections that we omitted from lecture-based 61A.

As I designed 61AS, we could figure out at the end of the semester how far each student had progressed, and give him or her credit for that many units (one unit per SICP chapter). But the campus administrators didn't go for that, so you now have to commit yourself to some number of units by the add/drop deadline in week 5. Also, a big administrative stumbling block has been how to deal with "Unit 0," a collection of starting-from-scratch material on recursion and on Scheme taken from my book Simply Scheme (written with Matt Wright), which was designed as an easier "prequel" to SICP. My idea was that this unit would carry no credit (since it's not the real course curriculum), but to make up for the time needed to learn it, students doing Unit 0 would be allowed to satisfy the 61A requirement with only three units. All this was supposed to be a concession to non-CS engineering faculty, to handle the complaints about the four-course de-facto CS sequence. This was adamantly rejected by College of Engineering administrators on the grounds that if some students have to take four 61A units, then all students must have to take four units. Their solution was giving a unit of 61A credit for Unit 0, so students could take either Units 0-3 or Units 1-4. Apparently it doesn't matter what you learn, just how many hours you spend warming a seat. I counterproposed giving a unit of CS 3S credit (the course, replaced by CS 10, that used Simply Scheme), but no, it has to be 61A(S) units. And I can't give anyone a fifth unit of 61AS, even an optional one, for Chapter 5.

There is a plan afoot to eliminate some of these problems by recasting 61AS as a two-semester course, for a constant four units (namely, Chapters 1-4 of SICP). Students who finish in one semester will get their final grade that semester. Students who require two semesters will get a grade of IP (In Progress) for the first semester, and a final grade in the second semester, based on all four units. Unit 0 will be offered as a separate one-unit CS 3S. Chapter 5 will be offered as a one-unit CS H61AS. All four units of 61AS will be required for all students who wish to continue in computer science, but Unit 4 can be taken in parallel with CS 61B. But it takes a long time to make administrative changes of this sort, so don't expect it until fall 2014 at the earliest.

But, despite a lot of administrative hassle, 61AS still exists and will still be offered at least in the near-term future, as part of the self-paced structure. And a bunch of students who wouldn't have succeeded at traditional 61A (or the new lecture version, which is just as fast-paced) have completed the course, including many women and members of other groups underrepresented in computer science.


Thyroid By:Emily Erman

A cancer of the thyroid, the butterfly shaped gland at the base of the neck. They thyroid gland is below the thyroid cart ledge (Adam's apple). In the front part of the part of the neck. In most people the thyroid can not be seen or felt. It is butterfly shaped with 2 lobes joined by a narrow isthmus.

Thyroid cancer is a disease that you get when abnormal cells begin to grow in you thyroid gland. Some people have no symptoms others may notice a lump in the neck. Pain is usually in the neck.
Lump in the neck, swollen lymph nodes, hoarse voice, difficulty swallowing or breathing, neck pain, and throat pain.
Cells from thyroid cancers can travel to lymph nodes in the neck and chest areas. M indicates whether the cancer has spread(metastasized) to other organs of the body. It starts in the thyroid goes to lungs then to your liver then to your bones then most likely you die!
Approximately 1.2 percent of men and women will be diagnosed with thyroid cancer at some point during their lifetime. The number of deaths was 0.5 per 10,000 men and women.
Most people with thyroid cancer have no known risk factors, so it is not possible to prevent most cases of this disease. Radiation exposure, especially in childhood, is a known thyroid cancer risk factor. Because of this, doctors no longer use radiation to treat less serious diseases.
Treatments, which are usually successful, include surgery, hormone therapy, radioactive iodine, radiation, and in some cases chemotherapy.

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Synonyms and Antonyms of configuration

  1. 1 the arrangement of parts that gives something its basic form the basic configuration of the building is that of a geodesic dome Synonyms architecture, armature, cadre, frame, edifice, fabric, framework, framing, infrastructure, shell, skeleton, structureRelated Words cage, lattice, network; contour, figure, outline, profile, shape, silhouette; chassis

  2. 2 the way in which something is sized, arranged, or organized a small business computer system in its simplest configuration Synonyms arrangement, format, conformation, formation, layout, setout, setupRelated Words design, plan, scheme; composition, constitution, getup, makeup; build, construction, structure

  3. 3 the way in which the elements of something (as a work of art) are arranged his photographs have an intentionally loose configuration, with no single object intended as the primary center of interest Synonyms arrangement, composition, constellation, design, form, format, getup, layout, makeup, ordonnance, patternRelated Words motif, theme

  4. 4 the outward appearance of something as distinguished from its substance a birthday cake in the configuration of a top hat Synonyms cast, form, conformation, fashion, figure, geometry, shapeRelated Words contour, outline, profile, silhouette; frame, framework, shell, skeleton; arrangement, design, format, layout, makeup, organization, pattern, plan, setupNear Antonyms composition, material, matter, raw material, stuff, substance

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Sociological Issues In Education Education Essay

Published: Last Edited:

Throughout history, teachers have dealt with many questions that remain unsolved today. These important queries address the nature of knowledge, education, schooling, teaching and learning. They deal with such issues as personal and group rights to participate in schooling, and how educational opportunities were often limited by gender, race, and socioeconomic class biases.

Different Ways of Learning

For many years, the special needs of children with disabilities have been neglected in the society and have been excluded from schools. Today, Federal laws and courts of law have required that their special needs be considered to ensure an adequate education (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). Most prominent is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) which requires that children with disabilities education programs be as close as possible to the mainstream programs thus inclusion. Whereas inclusion has been noted to have a positive impact on the classroom environment, it is challenging for the teacher and thus more support for the teacher is necessary.

Inclusion poses various challenges to the teacher in the classroom. First, majority of teachers are not trained to handle the needs of special students and are usually ill-prepared resulting to frustration. A study carried out by Daane and Berne-Smith (2000) report that teachers feel "â€¦ill equipped, fear and frustratedâ€¦" in inclusion. Second, as reported by Daane and Berne-Smith (2000) specialist items of equipment and the general school design does not always allow disabled access. Some disabled students will require special facilities which the ordinary schools do not normally provide or special facilities that mainstream schools did not incorporate in their design. Such tools as wheel chair access, Braille, and other special equipments may not be available for the students. Finally, teachers do not usually get the necessary support from the school administrators, the parents, and the society in general (Daane & Berne-Smith, 2000).

Whereas inclusion has received both support and criticism, one thing remains clear, that it has posed a special challenge for the teacher in the classroom. The lack of adequate training and necessary resources leaves the teacher ill-prepared to cope with the needs of the special children. It is important that necessary support is accorded to the teacher in terms of adequate resources and training to enable meet the special child in order for inclusion to achieve its full objectives. First, offering this support would create an enabling environment to enable the teacher to impart knowledge more effectively. Second this benefit extends to the students including the disabled as they will gain more knowledge. Finally, this would result to motivated teachers and better improved teacher retention, savings in recruitment and training and improved quality in education.

Student Diversity

The American society is increasingly getting diversified in terms of race, color, culture, ethnicity, language, and sex (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). The rising diversity is expected to continue in the future. In the classroom, and in order to meet the needs of the increasingly diversified population, an effective approach needs to be adopted. Thus to be responsive to the society needs, America needs to promote cultural diversity by introducing culturally responsive teaching.

The issue of Cultural diversity is relevant in the society and needs to be addressed. This is because first, there is a rising cultural diversity in the American population. It is estimated that by 2030, 50% of students in schools will be of color Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008. Second, there is need to address the growing inequality between various groups. Whites and Asians score higher on average than Hispanic and African American students. In addition, 50% of these under resourced groups drop out of school (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). This results to a rise in social crimes and a general deterioration in the society. Finally, there is likely to be a persistent increase in cultural diversity in terms of races and ethnicity.

One way of achieving the benefits of cultural diversity as suggested by Unruh and McCord (2001) is through influencing teachers' attitudes is important in order to enhance the rising diversity in American schools. Whereas existing teachers' education programs insist on multicultural sensitivity and teaching methodologies, individual dispositions and attitudes towards diversity may affect the effectiveness of the education system. To achieve effectiveness and expectations of the rising diversity trends, it is important not only to focus on fixed programs but to also focus on influencing individual teacher's attitudes. An environment that accommodates cultural diversification would result to a more conducive environment for learning. First, to the individual student, it would result to a sense of worth and thus chances for better achievement. In the general school environment, it would result to a culturally rich and complimenting environment. Finally, a culturally diversified school environment would be reflected in the society creating a condition of respect and general society well being. To meet the needs to the increasingly diversified population, it is important that proper steps are taken to promote cultural diversity in the education setting.

Financing and Governing American Schools

Governing and financing of American schools has been an issue of interest. Local and state governments have faced challenges on governing and raising adequate finances for education. In the endeavor to provide adequate and affordable education, governing of schools has been a central issue. Despite being an integral part in a school, teachers have for long been relegated to the classrooms with minimal contribution in governing their schools (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). This essay argues that for effective governing of schools, teachers need to be more involved in decision making.

This is an important issue in the society for several reasons. First, as reported by Morehead (2003) the major problems that teachers face in the school environment are "low pay, central direction and too much bureaucracy" thus undermining their active participation (86). Too much bureaucracy and central direction undermines teachers' sense of value, affects morale and increases turnover. Second, it results to less job satisfaction and a sense of low worth which results to high turnovers in the school and in the profession in general. Finally, less teacher involvement in the school management results to low creativity and untapped resources for development.

In the quest to provide adequate and affordable education, proper governing is important. Presently, teachers have little contribution to the governing in their schools despite their active involvement in the education environment. As reported by Morehead (2003), an environment that allows teachers participation in management of schools result to professionally fulfilled and dedicated staff that has positive contribution to education. Teachers need to be actively involved in order to enhance positive education outcomes. It is important that policies are designed with contributions from every stakeholder and in the education setting, it remains that for more effective governing and positive outcomes, teachers should be more involved in decision making.

Exceptional, Gifted and Talented Learners

Whereas the society may generally consider the gifted students to be the lucky ones, a closer look may reveal that they might actually be disadvantaged. Despite their endless curiosity, creativity and energy, when put into the regular classrooms, these children may suffer from negative peer pressure, boredom and may actually drop out of school (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). To enable these students to achieve their potentials in life and to tap their exceptional knowledge, it is important that special programs are put in place in order to enhance their learning.

This issue is important for the various reasons. First, failure to create an enhanced environment for these students might waste their potential. Gilson (2009) argues that learners in general need to be constantly challenged failure to which they not only become bored but they also "lose their willingness to challenge themselves to do better things" (36). Most learners need proper support in order to meet their goals and gifted students are no exception. They would experience boredom and negative pressure when placed in regular classes and this may be a recipe for dropping out instead of excelling. This would especially be remarkable if they come from minority groups. The end result is that the exceptionally bright student experience neglect and apathy and less chances of success in school. Second, deterioration of these students when put in regular classes represents is a failure by the society to tap their potential and hence a loss to the society at large. Research indicates that gifted students under such disciplines as Science, technology, Engineering, and mathematics have high chances of moving from abilities to competencies and eventually to expertise (Olszwski-Kubilius, 2010).

By providing special programs for the gifted students would result to several benefits. First, it would offer them an enabling environment that would enable them reach their individual potentials. Second, it would allow effective tapping of their skills for the potential benefits to the whole society. When the special qualities of gifted students are indentified and properly developed through appropriate programs, they can make important contributions to the society. Finally, allowing special programs would present a chance for development of; exemplary artwork, medical breakthroughs, and remarkable inventions which may otherwise be lost if they were not allowed to exploit their full potentials.

Is gender a learning style?

Generally, the society divides people into genders assigning various roles and expectations to specific gender. This has led to suggestions that females may prefer to learn one way while males may prefer a different one. Some believe that this should call for building of education institutions for the different gender (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). While some consider this stereotypic, some have advanced that this is a generalization that can be harnessed to provide improved outcomes in education. This essay argues that Gender is a learning style and should be utilized for positive learning outcomes.

This issue is important for various reasons. First, its understanding and utilization would facilitate improvements in impacting knowledge more effectively for the two genders. Second, males and females exhibit different cognitive learning styles and thus might require different approaches in order to learn effectively. Males are more intuitive learners while females were more sensing learners (Alumran, 2008). In a related study Miller et al. (as quoted in Alurman, 2008) established that males are more "kinesthetic, tactual, visual, and were more mobile whereas females where more conforming, more self, parent or teacher motivated than males" (305). Intuitive learners, who were predominantly male are more imaginative and innovative and have a better uptake at abstraction venturing into possibilities and relationships. Conversely sensing learners, who are predominantly females are good at memorizing, better uptake of facts, apply well known procedures to solve problems, emphasize on detail, and prefer routine and predictable aspects.

Females and males exhibit different preferences for social and conceptual learning styles. Females show more "concern for others", prefer hands on experience and practical aspects with more orientation towards affective and doing. Conversely, males exhibited "concern for self" prefer abstractive and reflective learning, learned better when thinking and watching and opted for abstract and sequential styles (Keri as quoted in Alarman, 2008).

Research indicates that males and females prefer different learning styles, that - gender is a learning style. Whereas advocacy may not be made for exclusive gender learning institutions, it is important that teachers in the classroom are aware of the different learning styles that specific gender prefers. Various benefits would be achieved by an understanding of this issue. First, it would allow devising appropriate programs for the genders which would enhance learning for the individual student. Further, it would act to improve the quality of education generally. It would further allow the pursuit of effective and economical approaches to learning between genders. One of the major aspects of successful universities is the ability to advance learning by understanding the way students learn.

Student Life in School and At Home

The American society has seen a gradual transition in past years. Previously there was communal involvement to bringing up of children and women were left at home to rear the children. Today's economic pressures requires cases where both parents are working, resulting to less childcare. School life greatly influences the child growth and social activities and teachers are therefore more involved in bringing up the children (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). Changing family lives are negatively impacting school life and teachers have a major role to play in ameliorating the situation.

The situation results to various negative impacts. First, there has been a dramatic change in the social and economic factors in the family unit and these have extended to affect school life. In the past communities communally took the responsibility of raising children but this has changed due to changing work patterns, less childcare facilities and economic factors (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). In the previous times, the social fabric was strong and communities approached issues communally. Today in the face of rising economic pressures, poverty, changing work patterns where a substantial proportion of children are raised by single parents or both parents go to work supervision of the child is waning. This has in great part contributed to challenges of drop outs, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, pregnancy and weight concerns.

To reduce the impacts of changing family lives to education; teachers need to create favorable classroom environments. It is only through creating a favorable environment where bias and hatred are replaced with trust, self-worth, positive relationship and informed sexuality that the situation can be improved (Abbot, 2006). Students will perform dismally in environments where negative effects are rife. These effects are damaging as they affect the psychological aspects of the student and will more often than not result to drop outs or low performances. In the classroom setting, developing curriculums need to recognize changing family life. The curriculum needs to emphasize community involvement, health issues. By student involvement in social services, reduce tracking and focusing affective developments of students, teachers can reduce the negative impacts.

Do Teachers Like Teaching?

Teaching is one of the careers that employ the largest number of people. Despite this, there have been suggestions that teachers may not be very happy in their career especially due to the relatively low pay as compared to other professions and the bureaucratic system. This might be supported by the high turn-over in this career. Some teachers have however reported that they actually do love their career mainly due to its intrinsic rewards. This essay argues that despite the high turnovers in teaching, most teachers like to teach. Understanding whether teachers like teaching has several implications. First, it would allow an understating of teacher's behaviors and perceptions this providing an explanation for their conduct. Second, an understanding would provide a framework in devising ways of influencing their behavior and conduct. It would for example explain why there are high turnover in the profession.

Most teachers are satisfied with what they do and the teaching environment. A NEA survey reported that 80% of the teachers were comfortable with their job, the job security and the related autonomy (Sadker, Sadker & Zittleman, 2008). Most teachers express their satisfaction with teaching. Teachers like their job despite reports of low pay because they are motivated by other factors apart from pay. A study by Chan (2005) reported that the most influential factors affecting motives and commitment to teaching were "altruistic motives, job conditions and influence from others" (14). Teachers state that they take up teaching positions mainly because they liked working with children and adolescents; they wanted to be of assistance to others, they perceived the work to be meaningful and challenging and it was in correspondence to their personality. Factors extrinsic factors as material rewards do not influence the choice of a teaching career as much as these other factors. It is important that the intrinsic factors that induce motivation and commitment in teachers are enhanced with extrinsic factors.

Most teachers love their career especially due to its intrinsic rewards which include satisfaction, the challenge, job security and the autonomy in the class room. The relatively low pay, bureaucracies in the system and other unfavorable conditions might explain the high turnover in the career. This understating that teachers like their career suggests that focus should be on providing better work conditions, better pay, job stability which would greatly enhance teachers' commitment and motivation resulting to better education outcomes. This will in addition promote positive learning outcomes for the students and enhance the level of education in the society in general.

Education forms an important aspect of human life by equipping the individual with necessary capability to meet future challenges and better life. The school environment has various interactions which despite the intention to achieve efficiency do not always do this. Among other issues, it important that teachers are well equipped to deal with inclusion of disabled students in the classroom, to understand how changing lifestyles are affecting the student environment, and to promote cultural diversity in the schools. In addition, it is important to; involve the teacher more in school governing, to consider the needs to gifted students, to utilize gender effectively as a learning style, and to improve on conditions that negatively impact teacher's perceptions of teaching. Such efforts may go a long way in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning and the teaching environment.


Victor Fields

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Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Victor's love for music was cultivated and shaped by his mother, a singer and a Julliard-trained pianist. After attending Bowdoin College, Victor moved to the San Francisco/Bay Area where he built a successful business and began studying voice and songwriting.

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DIY Solar Power

Do it Yourself Residential Solar Energy

Wind and Solar Power: A Quick Guide

In the current times, there are two pertinent factors which need equal and enough attention from us. These two factors are our economy and the earth as the planet we live in. Truly, we are facing challenging issues regarding these two. There has been an increasing need regarding the environment with its continuous deterioration because of pollution, just the same as there have been growing concerns about the financial crisis that we have been experiencing causing the inflation and rise in the prices of commodities.

As a vigilant citizen who is engaged with things that are happening around him or her, it is important that you take part and do your share by taking measures on how we can better cope with these highlighted concerns. One good way of taking an active role in things is to consider alternative means of energy. What this means is to resort to wind and solar power.

Wind and solar power are alternative means of energy that are renewable. Given that they are renewable means that the uses of these energies do not pose any kind of harm to the earth. Wind and solar power have also proven to provide benefits to the planet and humans as well.

Renewable form of energy thus helps preserve the environment. One very good benefit that this offers too is the fact that it will help us save on our expensive electrical bills since we will be resorting to wind and solar power as an alternative and not the current electric companies that we have. Since they are free, then this ultimately translates to savings right away.

If you aspire to build your own wind and power system, then know that the process is relatively straightforward. Below are steps that you can take in putting up this system.

The first thing that needs to be done is to purchase a home installation power kit. There are several do it yourself wind and solar power kits which can be easily purchased in hardware stores and shops. As you choose which one to get, go for that which provides you with easy instructions to follow. Check out the prices too and make sure it fits well within your budget.

The second step that you will have to do as you have purchased the kit is to open it and look for the instructions right away. Make sure that you read this first before you even attempt to set it up. This ensures that you have truly understood the steps that need to be taken and that you are well guided in the process of the installation. Dont worry because do it yourself kits which are purchased are guaranteed to have instructions included with them.

Thirdly, be patient as you build your wind and solar power systems. It is important that you do so as it involves you really understanding what needs to be done. Dont get easily frustrated and keep your objective in mind ” which is to build a system that will help you lower the cost of your electrical bill.

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How to Accommodate Guests With Food Allergies

Consider these tips before developing the menu for meetings or events.

By Mitra Sorrells June 17, 2014, 7:45 AM EDT

A frittata is a gluten-free, wheat-free, paleo-diet alternative to a quiche for a breakfast meal.

Photo: Tracy Stuckrath

Planners need to educate themselves and ask the right questions regarding menus at their events to address the needs of attendees’ with food allergies and dietary restrictions. That was the message from Tracy Stuckrath, founder of Thrive Meetings and Events in Atlanta, who presented at A.I.B.T.M., the Americas Incentive, Business Travel & Meetings Exhibition, June 10 at the Orange County Convention Center.

According to the Convention Industry Council, more than $54 billion is spent every year on food and beverage at corporate meetings and events. In the United States, more than 15 million people have food allergies and 27 million follow a vegetarian diet; globally, about one-third of the population follows a religious-based diet, according to Stuckrath. So planners should respect and learn how to accommodate those needs.

“We are welcoming people into our events, which to me is like our home,“ she says. “We value the events we plan. So how can you make them feel more comfortable at your table? If you don’t learn how to serve them correctly, they will skip out on your meeting to go off site to eat and maybe not come back.”

Stuckrath suggests planners ask about food allergies, diets, and religious preferences in the registration process. By asking specific questions, planners can save money and limit the amount of food that is wasted. Stuckrath shared an example of a planner who ordered Kosher meals for some of her attendees, only to find out later that they were not picked up because those people found items on the regular menu that met their needs. Some religious diets also vary based on the calendar and the time of day. “Ask, ‘Do you need the certified Hallal or Kosher meal or would you be okay with a vegan or vegetarian meal?’ That’s a legitimate question. And if they are able to eat that way you will save yourself a heck of a lot of money,” she said.

Food allergies can create a serious health risk, so planners need to understand what is in the foods they are serving and where allergy-causing foods may be hidden. For example, tree nuts are a common allergen and are used in pesto. Ninety percent of all allergic reactions are caused by eight foods: peanuts, eggs, shellfish, soy, fish, milk, wheat, and tree nuts. Stuckrath suggests planners list those items in registration materials and then leave space for an attendee to add any other foods they need to avoid. For people who are particularly sensitive, an allergic reaction can occur even if they don’t eat the food. “Food allergic reaction can happen from touching, ingesting, and smelling. So that action station where someone is sautéing shrimp with garlic can cause a reaction, because the protein from the shrimp and garlic will get into the air and inhaling it can cause an allergic reaction,” she says. Planners should also be aware of the risk of cross-contact, such as a display where wheat-based flour tortillas are near corn tortillas.

Accommodating attendees’ dietary needs is no longer just a matter of good guest relations. The Americans With Disabilities Act now covers people with food allergies, celiac disease, and other conditions that affect their ability to eat. “That means if you have an event that is a requirement or benefit of employment, you cannot discriminate against an employee for their disability,” Stuckrath says. That protection also extends to any events held in places of public accommodation, such as hotels, restaurants, and convention centers.

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protozoa, Biology

habitat of protozoa

Posted Date: 10/14/2012 9:36:49 AM | Location : United States

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Trouble In The Kitchen?

Trouble In The Kitchen? Try These Great Ideas

How often do you enjoy cooking? If you’re like most people, cooking can start to get boring after a while. Why? Because you are likely doing it multiple times a day. It’s not hard to fall into a rut where you’re eating the same things and cooking the same things. Here are a few tips by restaurant kristiansand to help you spice up your cooking.

A good tip when cooking with oil is to put it on the sides of the pan so it’s already hot when it slides down into the food. This will enhance the flavors of the food when you’re done cooking.

Use these tips to rekindle your love of cooking. utdrikningslag kristiansand Cooking is done every day, but that means that every day you have a new opportunity to make something great out of an everyday occurrence. Fall in love with cooking again, or for the first time, and make meals great again.


Sentence Examples with the word Expressing

Only some unwritten rule forbade men from expressing their feelings with a flood of tears.

Instead of expressing the amounts of gold and silver in percentages of the weight of ore, they are expressed in ounces to the ton, the ounce being the troy ounce and the ton that of 2000 avoirdupois pounds.

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Investigation soon showed that certain integrals expressing relations between the motions not only of three but of any number of bodies could be found.

He glanced at the empty table and then at her, the dark eyes expressing concern.

R 1.2 r1.3 r2.3 The theorems of motion just cited are expressed by seven integrals, or equations expressing a law that certain functions of the variables and of the time remain constant.

Later still he engaged in the study of the relations between chemical constitution and rotation of the plane of polarization in a magnetic field, and enunciated a law expressing the variation of such rotation in bodies belonging to homologous series.

The latter, after expressing an opinion favourable to Athanasius, adroitly invited both parties to lay the case before a synod to be presided over by himself.


Capt Amarinder concerned over unabated sacrilege incidents

Chandigarh, February 17

Expressing grave concern over the latest incident of religious sacrilege in the state, Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh has asked the police to crack down heavily on anti-social elements while urging the people to maintain peace and harmony at all costs.

Referring to the reported defilement of the Sikh religious text in Amritsar, Captain Amarinder called upon the district police to ensure that the culprits are arrested and brought to book without delay in order to prevent aggravation of the tension sparked off by the incident.

The growing incidence of desecration in the state is a cause of serious distress and a sign of the increasing polarization on communal lines, which the Badal-led Akalis had tried to fan in the run-up to assembly polls in a desperate, though unsuccessful, bid to consolidate the electorate in their favour, said the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president.

In a statement issued here on Friday, the Congress chief ministerial candidate reiterated his pre-poll promise to throw behind the bars every single person found involved in all such incidents, beginning with the Bargari sacrilege of 2015, which had led to two innocent people being killed in unprovoked police firing.

Captain Amarinder vowed that, once elected, he would ensure that not a single person found implicated in such cases is spared. He promised to take stringent action against anyone found guilty of involvement, including Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) supremo Parkash Singh Badal, who is known to have manipulated religious sentiment for political gains even on earlier occasions.

The PPCC chief asserted his commitment to maintain communal harmony and amity in the state, and exhorted the people not to get provoked by these deliberate acts of violence being perpetrated by vested interests seeking to rip apart the strongly woven social fabric of Punjab.

Lashing out at the attempts of the Badal-led SAD and the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to create unrest in the state to promote their personal agendas, Captain Amarinder warned that anti-Punjab forces were trying to raise their head and exploit the state’s weakened administrative as well as law & order systems.

The Punjab Congress president also expressed concern over the continuously deteriorating law and order situation, as evidenced in brazen killings and shootouts being reported from various parts of the state almost every day.

He called upon the people of Punjab not to succumb to the fear psychosis being generated by hostile forces and to maintain their calm under all circumstances. Let us not play into the hands of inimical elements that are out to destroy the secular and democratic structures that have nurtured Punjab’s progress in the past, and will continue to do so again in the future, Captain Amarinder added.

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Exploding Dots

2.4 Some Irrational Thoughts

Lesson materials located below the video overview.

We’ve seen that fractions can possess finitely long decimal expansions (for example, \(\frac{1}{8} = 0.125\) or \(\frac{1}{2} = 0.5\)) and can possess infinitely long decimal expansion (for example,  \(\frac{1}{3} = 0.3333\cdots\) and \(\frac{6}{7} = 0.857142857142857241\cdots\).)

Have you noticed that for all the examples we’ve seen thus far of fractions with infinitely long decimal expansions those expansions fell into a repeating pattern?

We can even say that our finite examples fall into a repeating pattern too, a repeating pattern of zeros (after an initial non-repeating start):

\(\dfrac{1}{8}  = 0.1250000000\cdots = 0.125\bar{0}\)

\(\dfrac{1}{2} = 0.500000\cdots = 0.5\bar{0}\)

\(\dfrac{1}{3} = 0.\bar{3}\)

\(\dfrac{6}{7} = 0.\overline{854271}\)

Does every fraction have a decimal representation that eventually repeats?

The answer to this question is YES and our method of division explains why!

Let’s go through the division process again, slowly, first with a familiar example. Let’s compute the decimal expansion of \(\frac{1}{3}\) again in a \(1 \leftarrow 10\) machine. We need to find groups of three within the following diagram:

Unexplode the single dot to make ten dots in the tenths position. There we find three groups of three leaving a remainder of \(1\) in that box.

Now we can unexploded the single dot in the tenths box and write ten dots in the hundredths box. There we find three more groups of three, leaving a single dot behind:

And so on. We are caught in a cycle of having the same remainder of one dot from cell to cell, meaning that the same pattern repeats. Thus we conclude:

\(\dfrac{1}{3} = 0.3333\cdots\).

A more complicated example: Let’s compute the decimal expansion of \(\frac{4}{7}\) in the \(1 \leftarrow 10\) machine.

We start by unexploding the four dots and writing “\(40\)” in the tenths cell. There we find \(5\) groups of seven, leaving five dots left over.

Now unexplode those five dots to make \(50\) dots in the hundreds position. There we find \(7\) groups of seven, leaving one dot over.

Unexplode this single dot. This yields one group of seven leaving three remainder.

Unexplode these three dots. This finds us \(4\) groups of seven with \(2\) remainder.

Unexplode the two dots. This finds us \(2\) groups of seven with \(6\) remainder:

Unexplode the six dots. This finds us \(8\) groups of seven with \(4\) remainder:

But this is predicament we started with: FOUR dots in a box. We are now going to repeat the pattern and produce a cycle in the decimal representation.

We have: \(\dfrac{4}{7} = 0.571428  571428  571428  \cdots\).

Stepping back from the specifics of this problem, it is clear now that one must be forced into a repeating pattern. In dividing a quantity by seven, there are only seven possible numbers for a remainder number of dots in a cell – 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 – and there is no option but to eventually repeat a remainder and so enter a cycle.

In the same way, the decimal expansion of \(\dfrac{18}{37}\) must also cycle. In doing the division, there are only thirty-seven possible remainders for dots in a cell (0, 1, 2, …, 36). As we complete the division computation, we must eventually repeat a remainder and again cycle.

This establishes:

EXERCISE:  Conduct the division procedure for the fraction \(\frac{1}{8}\). Make sure to understand where the cycle of repeated remainders commences.

This now opens up a curious idea:

A quantity given by a decimal expansion that does not repeat cannot be a fraction!

For example, the quantity:

\(0.10 1100 111000 111100000 11111000000 \cdots\)

designed not to repeat (though there is a pattern to this decimal expansion) represents a number that is not a fraction.

Definition: A number that is the ratio of two whole numbers (i.e. a fraction) is called a rational number. A number that cannot be represented this way is called an irrational number.

It looks like we have established the existence of irrational numbers.

In fact, we can now invent all sorts of numbers that can’t be fractions! For example:

are irrational numbers.

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Thursday, April 18, 2013

Are Heroes Born or Made? A Story of Courage

I was delighted to be quoted in this ABC News article on acts of heroism following the Boston marathon bombing. When people answer evil deeds with compassion and courage, our faith in human nature is restored. We gain mastery of our fear and recommit to the values of compassion and mutual responsibility that are the basis of a civilized society. The article references my Psychology Today blog post on The Six Attributes of Courage.

The article poses the age old question that is especially relevant in light of the events in Boston. Without a second thought, brave men and women rushed in to help the victims of the bombing - taking the risk that another bomb could detonate and hurt them. What makes a hero?  Is it a matter of "brave genes' or "doing what the situation calls for," or perhaps a bit of both?  The article argues that the essence of heroism is a commitment to 'something larger than oneself"  This could be a set of values and principles we hold dear, a national identity, or acts of love and compassion that transcend self-interest.

Here's a link to the full article:

And to the blog post  that got their attention:

Here is a quote from the ABC News article:

Dr. Melanie Greenberg, a psychologist who specializes in stress and overcoming trauma, said cultural and personal ethics play a role in courage.
"One of the key things about heroism is that it's not the absence of fear, but feeling fear and choosing to act anyway," she said. "Something is more important than fear and survival. It's certain values you have that drive your life and make it meaningful."
She was hesitant to describe cowardice: "Sometimes, you freeze like a deer in the headlights. That's the primitive lizard in us, when the social compassion switches off."
Greenberg, who blogged about the qualities of courage for Psychology Today, cited "empathy, kindness and compassion" as the motivators for heroism.
Training for emergencies gives responders courage, according to Greenberg.
Others draw it from "a sense community and compassion," she said. "The culture of being together, that you are brothers and doing it for your buddy -- that inspires heroism. The support group means more than the individual life."
Standing up for what is right, "following your heart, doing what the situation calls for," is another motivator for heroism.
"It brings out the best in people to stand up to terrorism and not let the bad guys win," said Greenberg. "You are part of something larger than yourself."

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Thursday, April 4, 2013

What Psychotherapy or Counseling Can Do For You

When you first enter psychotherapy, you may not know what to expect. Perhaps you think that if you tell the therapist about your day to day stresses and worries, the therapist will tell you what to do Most people don't realize that psychologists aren't like doctors and don't "cure" you of unhappiness. It is not possible to take all the suffering out of life. Psychologists are like doctors in that they can provide a diagnosis for your mental health problems and "prescribe" interventions to address them. But they do not "cure" you in the way that a pill or surgery takes away your symptoms. You are the one who actually has to carry out the behavior changes. So, you aren't just a passive "patient" in psychotherapy, but an active participant.

While therapy cannot remove all of your distress, it can help you to make positive changes in your life that lead to greater life satisfaction and self-esteem:

Psychotherapy can help you in the following ways:

(1)  To view your problems in more hopeful or realistic ways,

(2)  To understand the roots of distress in childhood learning, biology, relationships, etc.

(3) To experience and express difficult emotions, so as to increase self-awareness

(4)  To speak up for yourself and set healthier boundaries with others

(5) To face and try to solve problems, rather than avoiding them

(6) To make deliberate choices about how to act, rather than reacting passively

(7) To focus energy on what you can control and come to terms with what you cannot

(8) To live in the present and be less controlled by expectations or fears from the past

(9) To manage fear and anxiety so they don't immobilize you

(10) To invest your time and energy in people and activities that add to your life satisfaction

(11) To cope more effectively with depression and anxiety

(12) To replace criticism and judgment of yourself with compassion

(13) To realistically assess your personal responsibility for events

(14) To tolerate risk and uncertainty that are inherent in life

(15) To learn healthier habits and improve motivation and self-control in a non-punitive way

(16) To be vulnerable and build closeness and trust with others

(17) To understand your internal & external triggers for negative reactions or behaviors

(18) To cope better with or learn to decrease difficult emotions or physical pain

(19) To replace shame and guilt with self-forgiveness and accountability

(20) To learn how to be on your own side - encouraging and guiding yourself

Despite these potential benefits, therapists are not allowed to guarantee results because each person and situation is different. For therapy to succeed, you should make a commitment to attend sessions regularly (typically once a week), do homework exercises (if prescribed by the therapist), be willing to tolerate distress and uncertainty, remember painful memories, and  look deeply inside yourself. You should be willing to speak up if the therapist does not seem to understand your problem, seems inattentive or judgmental, or suggests an approach that doesn't seem to be working for you. If speaking up doesn't work, you may want to find somebody who is a better fit for you. Approaching therapy with honesty, commitment, and courage can maximize your chances of success.

The end result of therapy is that you don't need the therapist anymore because you have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to deal with what life's challenges. Although you may still be distressed at times, you are less likely to feel, overwhelmed and helpless, or  want to run away from your problems. You should better understand and accept both your strengths and weaknesses, respect and collaborate with others, and continue learning and growing so as to live a fuller and more meaningful life.

Indeed, good psychotherapy can be the best investment you will ever make!

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This is the third part in a mini-series on code that is hard to test (and therefore hard to develop using TDD).Part 1: Test-Resistant Code and the battle for TDD, Part 2: Test-Resistant Code – Markup is Code Too

You may have seen Uncle Bob solve the prime factors kata using TDD. It is a great demonstration of the power of TDD to allow you to think through an algorithm in small steps. In a recent talk at NDC2011 entitled, “The Transformation Priority Premise” he gave some guidelines to help prevent creating bad algorithms. In other words, following the right rules you can use TDD to make quick sort, instead of bubble sort (I tried this briefly and failed miserably). It seems likely that all sorts of algorithms can be teased out with TDD (although I did read of someone trying to create a Sudoku solver this way and finding it got them nowhere).

However suitable or not TDD is for tackling those three problems (prime factors, list sorting, sudoku), they share one common attribute: they are easily verifiablealgorithms. I know the expected outputs for all my test cases.

Not all algorithms are like that – we don’t always know what the correct output is. And as clever as the transformation priority premise might be for iterating towards optimal algorithms, I am not convinced that it is an appropriate attack vector for many of the algorithms we typically require in real-world projects. Let me explain with a few simple examples of algorithms I have needed for various projects.

Example 1 – Shuffle

My first example is a really basic one. I needed to shuffle a list. Can this be done with TDD? The first two cases are easy enough – we know what the result should be if we shuffle an empty list, or shuffle a list containing one item. But when I shuffle a list with two items, what should happen? Maybe I could have a unit test that kept going until it got both possibilities. I could even shuffle my list of two items 100 times and check that the number of times I got each combination was within a couple of standard deviations of the expected answer of 50. Then when I pass my list of three items in, I can do the same again, checking that all 6 possible results can occur, followed by more tests checking that the distribution of shuffles is evenly spread.

So it isTDDable then. But really, is that a sensible way to approach a task like this? The statistical analysis required to prove the algorithm requires more development effort than writing the algorithm in the first place.

But there is a deeper problem. Most sensible programmers know that the best approach to this type of problem is to use someone else’s solution. There’s a great answer on stackoverflow that I used. But that violates the principles of TDD: instead of writing small bits of code to pass simple tests, I jumped straight to the solution. Now we have a chunk of code that doesn’t have unit tests. Should we retro-fit them? We’ll come back to that.

Example 2 – Low Pass Filter

Here’s another real-world example. I needed a low pass filter that could cut all audio frequencies above 4kHz out of an audio file sampled at 16kHz. The ideal low pass filter has unity gain for all frequencies below the cut-off frequency, and completely removes all frequencies above. The only trouble is, such a filter is impossible to create – you have to compromise.

A bit of research revealed that I probably wanted a Chebyshev filter with a low pass-band ripple and a fairly steep roll-off of 18dB per octave or more. Now, can TDD help me out making this thing? Not really. First of all, it’s even harder than the shuffle algorithm to verify in code. I’d need to make various signal generators such as sine wave and white noise generators, and then create Fast Fourier Transforms to measure the frequencies of audio that had been passed through the filter. Again, far more work than actually creating the filter.

But again, what is the sane approach to a problem like this? It is to port someone else’s solution (in my case I found some C code I could use) and then perform manualtesting to prove the correctness of the code.

Example 3 – Fixture Scheduler

My third example is of an algorithm I have attempted a few times. It is to generate fixture lists. In many sports leagues, each team must play each other team twice a season – once home, once away. Ideally each team should normally alternate between playing at home and then away. Two home or away games in a row is OK from time to time, three is bad, and four in a row is not acceptable. In addition it is best if the two games between the same teams are separated by at least a month or two. Finally, there may be some additional constraints. Arsenal and Tottenham cannot both play at home in the same week. Same for Liverpool and Everton, and for Man Utd and Man City.

What you end up with is a problem that has multiple validsolutions, but not all solutions are equally good. For example, it would not go down too well if one team’s fixtures went HAHAHAHA while another’s went HHAAHHAAHHAA.

So we could (and should) certainly write unit tests that check that the generated fixtures meet the requirements without breaking any of the constraints. But fine tuning this algorithm is likely to at least be a partially manual process, as we tweak various aspects of it and then compare results to see if we have improved things or not. In fact, I can imagine the final solution to this containing some randomness, and you might run the fixture generator a few times, assigning a “score” to each solution and pick the best.

Should you use TDD for algorithms?

When you can borrow a ready-made and reliable algorithm, then retro-fitting a comprehensive unit test suite to it may actually be a waste of time better spent elsewhere.

Having said that, if you can write unit tests for an algorithm you need to develop yourself, then do so. One of TDD’s key benefits is simply that of helping you come up with a good public API, so even if you can’t work out how to thoroughly validate the output, it can still help you design the interface better. Of course, a test without an assert isn’t usually much of a test at all, it’s more like a code sample. But at the very least running it assures that it doesn’t crash, and there is usually something you can check about its output. For example, the filtered audio should be the same duration as the input, and not be entirely silent.

So we could end up with tests for our algorithm that don’t fully prove that our code is correct. It means that the refactoring safety net that a thorough unit test suite offers isn’t there for us. But certain classes of algorithms (such as my shuffle and low pass filter examples) are inherently unlikely to change. Once they work, we are done. Business rules and customer specific requirements on the other hand, can change repeatedly through the life of a system. Focus on testing those thoroughly and don’t worry too much if some of your algorithms cannot be verified automatically.

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Roads Riots and Rebecca – Pembrokeshire Community Heritage Meetings

Community heritage meetings took place across Pembrokeshire to uncover the history of the Rebecca Riots across the county.

3rd March 2005 & 12th May 2005

The main subject of these meetings was the history of Thomas Rees more commonly known as Twm Carnabwth, the first Rebecca. Through the course of two meetings members of the community provided information on his character, his family, his later involvement with Bethel Baptist Church, information from his gravestone and from his birth certificate. It was discovered that there is a discrepancy between the gravestone and his death certificate as to exactly when he died and what age he was upon his death. His gravestone states that he died on 17th September 1876 age 70, where as his death certificate states that he died on 19th October 1876 age 72. Both accounts differ from the census details of 1851, 1861 and 1871 where he is listed as 43, 54 and 64, which would mean that in 1876 he would have actually been 69. It is difficult to know which account is correct as poor levels of literacy meant that many people didn’t actually know their birthdays or true age. Although it is likely that the census details are more accurate as the information would have been given by Twm himself rather than gathered second hand after his death.

In memory of
Thomas Rees
Resident of this parish
Who died September 17, 1876
‘Twm Carnabwth’

A very interesting story came to light during the meetings. The story ‘Sword in the Wall’ was included in a channel 4 television programme called ‘Revealing Secrets’. A local stone mason had been renovating a house in the area when he discovered a sword buried in the front wall. He took the sword to the museum at Haverfordwest where they established that it was a Victorian Infantry Officers sword and from the detail of the hilt and the pattern could be dated to the years between 1837 and 1845 the same period as the Rebecca Riots. The person who lived in the house at the time was also found to be a stone mason called John Johns. It was decided that the sword had most likely been either taken from the officer or dropped during one of the Rebecca skirmishes and picked up by John Johns and taken home as a trophy. Fearing the sword would link him to the riots the stone mason may have built the sword into the wall so that it would not be found.