Questions for the P&C about School Closure, Takeover

The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) has taken an editorial stand in favor of closing a high-poverty, majority-minority school and a private takeover of public schools in Charleston (see a history of the debate here).

Now, a P&C editorial asks more questions:

How many classes of children should come up through the school’s failing system before the district makes some big changes?

Another question: Don’t those children deserve to try an educational approach that has proven to be far more successful?

Since turn about is fair play, let’s investigate those questions and ask a few in return.

At the very least, these questions are loaded, and as a result, misleading.

Burns Elementary (to be closed) is framed again as “failing,” and the Meeting Street Academy, “successful.”

As I have documented, many problems exist with the “good”/”bad” school labeling.

But in this case, we must be extra skeptical because all of the praise for the “successful” and the promises of even more success in “closing the achievement gap” for poor and mostly black students rest on the claims of the private entities invested in this process.

So there are actually some very important questions that the editors at the P&C are failing to ask:

  • Why have some students been allowed ever to languish in school conditions that are subpar when compared to vibrant schools and opportunities for other students in the same city? Burns Elementary with a poverty index of 96 is but one school that represents a long history in SC of how negligent we have been as a state in terms of providing anything close to equity in the opportunities poor and racial minority children are afforded.
  • Why does any public school board need a private partnership to do what is needed to offer these students the sort of school all children deserve? If what is needed is so obvious, and so easy to do (which is a subtext of the editorial), the truth is that the school board simply does not have the political will to do what is right for some children.
  • And this is very important: What third party, not invested in the Meeting Street Academy, has examined the claims of academic success in the so-called “successful” schools that are being promised as fixes for Burns? I cannot find any data on test scores (setting aside that test scores aren’t even that good for making these claims), but I have analyzed claims of “miracle” charter schools in SC—finding that these claims are always false. Always. I do not trust that Meeting Street is going to prove to be the first actual miracle school in a long line of those that have been unmasked before.

This last question cannot be overemphasized because the political process has proven time and again that political leadership can be easily bamboozled by glitzy claims but routinely fail to examine the evidence that would guide well our educational policy, as Christopher Lubienski, Elizabeth Debray, and Janelle Scott have revealed:

But what was perhaps most interesting was the degree to which research played virtually no part in decision making for policymakers, despite their frequent rhetorical embrace of the value of research. While many interviewees spoke of the importance of research evidence, nearly all were unable to point to an instance where research evidence shaped their position on an instrumentalist issue.

SC political leaders have pushed for school choice, charter schools, VAM evaluations of teachers, ever-new standards and high-stakes testing, exit exams, third-grade retention, and now takeover policies for so-called “failing schools”—yet all of these have no basis for policy in the body of research refuting the effectiveness of each one.

For the editors of the P&C, as well as our political leaders and the public, the real questions are why do we persist in ignoring the stark realities of our inequitable society, why do we then continue to play politics with our schools that are just as inequitable as our society, and then why do we refuse to consider the evidence about addressing social and educational inequity directly in our policies?

Again, as I have stated many times, the answer is that the people with the power to change things simply do not really care about change because any change can threaten their perches of power.

Closing schools, renaming schools, shuffling students—these are the practices of those who are invested in the status quo regardless of the consequences for “other people’s children.”

Outliers Never Evidence of Normal in Education

In Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares, the NYT, like most of mainstream media, is begrudgingly coming to admit that race and class inequity in the U.S. has a profound impact on the education of children—and that simply tinkering (badly) with school policy is not enough to change that reality:

We’ve long known of the persistent and troublesome academic gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in public schools.

We’ve long understood the primary reason, too: A higher proportion of black and Hispanic children come from poor families. A new analysis of reading and math test score data from across the country confirms just how much socioeconomic conditions matter.

But then there is this:

The data was [sic] not uniformly grim. A few poor districts — like Bremen City, Ga. and Union City, N.J. — posted higher-than-average scores. They suggest the possibility that strong schools could help children from low-income families succeed.

“There are some outliers, and trying to figure out what’s making them more successful is worth looking at,” said Mr. Reardon, a professor of education and lead author of the analysis.

Well, no, if we find outliers—and virtually all data have outliers in research—we should not waste our time trying to figure out how we can make outliers the norm.

The norm is where we should put our efforts in order to confront what is, in fact, not “puzzling” (used earlier in the article) at all; the data are very clear:

What emerges clearly in the data is the extent to which race and class are inextricably linked, and how that connection is exacerbated in school settings.

Not only are black and Hispanic children more likely to grow up in poor families, but middle-class black and Hispanic children are also much more likely than poor white children to live in neighborhoods and attend schools with high concentrations of poor students.

Our great education reform failure is one of failing to rethink our questions and our goals.

Let’s stop trying to find the “miracle” in a rare few schools where vulnerable students appear to succeed despite the odds against them. With time and careful consideration, we must admit, those appearances almost always are mirages.

Let’s instead put our energy in eradicating the poverty, racism, and sexism that disadvantages some students, vulnerable populations easily identified by race and social class, so that we can educate all students well.

And while we are making efforts at social policy, let’s end the in-school policies that we know “exacerbate” inequity: tracking, teacher assignments (and TFA), high-stakes testing, grade retention, discipline policies grounded in zero tolerance and “no excuses,” and segregation through school choice (including charter schools).

Education reform, as was highlighted in the original court case examined in the South Carolina documentary The Corridor of Shame, is obsessed with playing the hero by seeing who can pull the most babies out of the river.

And then examining the ones who survive the potential drowning in order to “make” all babies survive the trauma of being cast down stream.

But no one seems interested in walking upstream to stop babies being thrown in.

Life and learning do not need to be something children survive—and we must confront that we have decided that this is exactly what we are willing to accept for “other people’s children.”

It would not be so if we believed and acted upon that “they’re all our children.”

The Allegory of the River

How Good Is the Best Edujournalism?

Dear EWA:

We both can and should do better.

Are Racially Inequitable Outcomes Racist?

Among what may seem to be marginally related policies and conditions, these all have one startling thing in common—grade retention, school discipline, NCAA athletics, incarceration, “grit,” “no excuses,” zero-tolerance, high-stakes testing (such as the SAT and ACT), charter schools and school choice—and that commonality is observable racially inequitable outcomes that are significantly negative for blacks.

My own experiences with exploring and confronting race and racism through my public writing has shown that many people vigorously resist acknowledging racism and will contort themselves in unbelievable ways to avoid accepting facts and data that show racism exists.

Common responses include “I am not a racist,” “I am sure the people who started X didn’t intend to be racist,” “White people experience racism too,” and “Everyone has the same opportunities in this country.”

And while I continue to compile a stunning list of ways in which racial inequity and racism profoundly impact negatively black people, resistance to terms such as “white privilege” and “racism” remain robust.

In the wake of the NCAA Final Four, Patrick Hruby has attempted a similar tactic I have used in order to unmask the racial inequity in college athletics by carefully working readers through the evidence in order to come to an uncomfortable conclusion about the financial exploitation of college athletes (money-making sports being disproportionately black) by the NCAA and colleges/universities (leadership and those profiting being overwhelmingly white) along racial lines:

Understand this: there’s nothing inherently racist about amateurism itself. And there’s no reason to believe that its defenders and proponents—including current NCAA president Mark Emmert—are motivated by racial animus….

And yet, while the NCAA’s intent is color-blind, the impact of amateurism is anything but. In American law, there is a concept called adverse impact, in which, essentially, some facially neutral rules that have an unjustified adverse impact on a particular group can be challenged as discriminatory….Similarly, sociologists speak of structural racism when analyzing public policies that have a disproportionately negative impact on minority individuals, families, and communities. State lottery systems that essentially move money from predominantly lower-class African-American ticket buyers to predominantly middle-and-upper-class white school districts fit the bill; so does a War on Drugs that disproportionately incarcerates young black men; so does a recent decision by officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, to drastically cut the number of presidential primary polling stations in and around Phoenix, which unnecessarily made voting far more difficult for the residents of a non-white majority city.

Big-time college sports fall under the same conceptual umbrella. Amateurism rules restrain campus athletes—and only campus athletes, not campus musicians or campus writers—from earning a free-market income, accepting whatever money, goods, or services someone else wants to give them. And guess what? In the revenue sports of Division I football and men’s basketball, where most of the fan interest and television dollars are, the athletes are disproportionately black.

And herein lies the problem with refusing to equate racially inequitable outcomes with racism.

Hruby’s detailed unmasking of the NCAA comes also during the troubling rise of Trump in presidential politics—another marker for how many scramble to find any cause other than racism.

Trump’s rise is not exclusively the result of overt and unexamined racism, but a significant amount of his success is easily traced to a wide spectrum of racism.

However, from the rise of Trump to the so-called popularity of charter schools to the school-to-prison pipeline and to the spread of third-grade retention policies, all of these and more are fueled by racism because racism, we must acknowledge, is most insidious when it isn’t overt, when the racist person or the racist act is unconscious, unacknowledged.

The impact of racism in NCAA sports, as Hruby details, is the elegant racism Ta-Nahisi Coates unpacked when Donald Sterling became the NBA’s face for oafish racism (along with Clive Bundy in popular culture).

What has occurred in the U.S. since the mid-1960s is an end to placard racism, the end of “White Only” signs on bathroom and restaurant doors.

What has not occurred in the U.S. yet is an end to seeing black boys as significantly older than their biological ages, an end to tracking black children into segregated schools and reductive courses, an end to incarcerating black men—and this is a list that could go on for several pages.

Racial (and class) equity will never occur in the U.S. until the white power structure admits that racially inequitable outcomes are in fact racist.

White privilege is a powerful narcotic that numbs white elites to the harm that privilege causes black and brown people, but it is also a powerful narcotic that pits poor whites against black and brown people because poor whites believe their whiteness gives them the chance at great wealth held by only a few.

That the NCAA maintains a structure within which black athletes produce wealth enjoyed almost exclusively by white elites is an undeniable fact and a startling example of the elegant racism eroding the soul of a free people—an elegant racism eating at the roots of public education, the judicial system, the economic system, and nearly ever aspect of the country.

Racially inequitable outcomes are racist, and this must be admitted in order to be confronted and then to be eliminated.

Today in “Don’t Believe It”

See the full review here.

Dear Florida: Mean People Suck

Dear Florida:

I know it is impolite to use harsh language and teachers often discourage students from resorting to cliches, but I am hard-pressed to find anything better suited to my concern about education policy in Florida (and Mississippi, and South Carolina, along with another 10+ states) than reminding political leaders and the public in your state: Mean people suck.

And as disturbing as it is when adults are mean to adults, there simply is no way to justify adults being mean to children—or in the case of misguided and uninformed education policy in Florida (and Mississippi, and South Carolina), adults being mean to some children (mostly black, brown, and poor).

I take this opportunity to reach out to you, Florida, because there is a way out of this mean streak: Fewer 3rd-graders could be held back this year.

First, let me note that the avenue to a kind and equitable education system is not examining whether or not your (yet again) new high-stakes tests are valid, but recognizing that grade retention is discredited by a large body of research and grade retention is not a credible form of literacy policy.

Notably, the National Council of Teachers of English, the largest organization of English teachers in the U.S., has a clear position statement against grade retention based on high-stakes testing:

Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English strongly oppose legislation mandating that children, in any grade level, who do not meet criteria in reading be retained.

And be it further resolved that NCTE strongly oppose the use of high-stakes test performance in reading as the criterion for student retention.

As well, education policies such as grade retention linked to high-stakes testing disproportionately and negatively impact black, brown, and poor children.

Simply put, grade retention as a policy must be acknowledged as punishing children for the sake of punishing children.

None the less, Florida has become a flawed model for educational accountability across the U.S.

So, as a life-long educator in SC, where that model is now turning my home state into yet another place where mean people suck, I ask that Florida end grade retention and use your ill-got influence to start a new trend in education reform—one that rejects punitive education policy and chooses instead to treat all children with dignity, to provide all children an equitable opportunity to learn.

Confirmed: SC Implementing Retain to Impede

Residents of South Carolina have yet more evidence of the state’s inept history with education reform: The rush to model SC’s reading legislation on Florida’s failed policies has begun to fulfill my warning that Read to Succeed is better labeled Retain to Impede.

Nathaniel Clary, reporting for The Greenville News, has detailed, Read to Succeed fails its 1st test. What are the failures?

Clary ticks off the list:

And while communication lapses, missing training programs and a flubbed statewide test marked the first few months of the statewide Read to Succeed program championed by Gov. Nikki Haley last year, the threat still looms that third-graders could be held back starting in the 2017-2018 school year if they don’t measure up to the state’s reading standards.

These first failures include flawed implementation on top of the essential failures of replicating the discredited Florida model as well as ignoring a powerful body of research refuting grade retention.

Since SC passed reading legislation built on grade retention, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest organization of English teachers in the U.S., has taken a strong policy stand against the use of retention and high-stake testing in reading legislation:

The evidence, then, is mounting that Read to Succeed is being implemented badly, but that does not justify this nod to optimism about the intent of the legislation and the election of a new state superintendent of education, Molly Spearman:

The intent of Read to Succeed is good, said Burke Royster, Greenville County Schools superintendent.

The tenor of Read to Succeed has changed significantly since Molly Spearman replaced Mick Zais as state superintendent of education, Royster said.

“I feel very positive that they’re going to address many of those issues,” he said.

We should all know the wise warning about good intentions, and at best, Spearman can oversee doing the wrong thing the right way—and that does not serve students or the state well.

Here, we are facing watershed moments, lessons that must be heeded if we are to shift directions in education policy. Those lessons include:

  • Education policy must be divorced from political compromise (a compromise between partisan political ideology and evidence-based policy is corrupted policy). Reading legislation built on grade retention and high-stakes tests is a testament to the failure of partisan politics in forming education policy, but SC’s legislation (as well as Florida’s) is also a story of how compromise cannot work since many sincerely supporting good literacy practice in the state simply relinquished on the grade retention element in order to secure more funding for reading. We must ask: How many children’s lives are we willing to ruin to gain more state funding of programs?
  • Intent behind education policy and even the details of education policy are irrelevant when that policy is actually implemented. This debacle with Read to Succeed is just a small version of the larger Common Core train wreck. To ask Superintendent Spearmen to right the implementation ship of this policy is falling well short of the need to scrap it, and then draft genuinely effective and credible reading policy for the state of SC.
  • Professional educators must stop sitting on the sidelines, stop hiding behind resisting being political, and then start flexing our professional muscle. There is no excuse for professionals to implement harmful policy that is not supported by research. Literacy educators need to stand up for best practice in literacy and their students.

Retaining children impedes their possibilities.

Decades of research on literacy and grade retention have shown us that fact, but partisan politics trumps evidence in education policy.

With these facts before us, what will we do?


Four wayfinding towers have been installed around the Central City to help people find the places they want to visit.

Christchurch's Central City has lost many of its landmark buildings that people relied on to navigate their way around.
A need was identified by local businesses and tourism operators that residents and visitors have been finding it difficult to navigate around the Central City - the towers were developed to meet that need.

The wayfinding towers will help people to work out where they want to go and how to get there - they provide a visual reference, highlight key points of interest and indicate walking times between them to allow people to find the best route. This benefits locals, visitors and businesses alike.

The towers have been designed to be seen easily from a distance, informative, multi-purpose and durable.

The wayfinding towers are a part of the Council's Transitional City programme which is important as it provides an opportunity to trial new ideas and ways of doing things, helping to improve the pedestrian environment and connect recovering business areas

The Towers are being installed in four places (see map for details), in car parks on the corners of:wayfinding tower map

Oxford Terrace and Worcester Street
Armagh and Colombo streets
Cashel and Manchester streets
Colombo and Lichfield streets

Facts about the wayfinding towers:

  1. The towers are approximately eight metres high to be easily identifiable from a distance.
  2. They are modular in nature and can be reconfigured. In this way the panels are designed to be changed out and the towers have the opportunity to be used for artworks or events.
  3. Each tower will initially be a different colour with local images printed on to the cladding to provide context.
  4. Each of the towers will have the street names (one on each of the four faces) and will point to a number of key destinations. Panels also include a calendar of events and a map indicating walking times.
  5. The Towers have been designed to resist graffiti and inhibit climbing.


Eliminate Stress, Anxiety and Sleep problems.

The Deepak Chopra Dream Weaver uses light and sound pulses at specified frequencies to help the user reach a variety of interesting and beneficial states of consciousness. The effect is very much like the relaxed and focused effects one gets from meditation, biofeedback / neurofeedback, Hindu Kirtan, Gregorian chanting, Hebrew davening, Tibetan prayer bowls, Native American drum circles and rain chants, Sufi chants and Whirling dervishes, and African trance dancing.

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These powerful tools can help you reduce stress and anxiety, relax or fall asleep quickly as well as reach trance states for a variety of experiences, aid in lucid dreaming or bring your meditation practices to a whole new level! Behind your closed eyelids you will see a complex kaleidoscope of color, multidimensional layers of fractals and a variety of dream-like imagery.


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Newborn Jaundice

Newborn jaundice is a common condition observed in about 60% of the newborn infants. It is a condition that shows presence of high levels of bilirubin in the infants’ blood. Due to increased bilirubin, infants’ skin and the white part of the eyes, the sclera, looks yellow. Physiological jaundice is considered as the most common form of jaundice among the newborns.

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In the newborn, jaundice basically occurs due to the fact that their lives are not mature enough to remove yellow pigment, bilirubin, from the blood. Because of the fact, most of the newborn babies are affected by the condition. An undeniable fact is jaundice can also be caused due to a number of medical conditions. And, if the watchful attitude is adopted by parents and professionals, the condition can be treated successfully and it leaves no long term effect on the child lives.

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Signs & Symptoms

Yellow colour of the skin is considered as main symptom of the condition. Yellow color presents in the skin and eyes and can be visibly seen after pressing the skin with fingers. Primarily, yellow color is observed in the skin, but other body parts like chest, legs, belly area and soles of the feet also get affected by it. Symptoms like poor feeding and extreme tiredness in the newborn also signify presence of jaundice.

In order to detect the presence of jaundice in the newborn babies, skin or blood test is performed by the health professionals. Other tests, likely recommend by health professionals, include Coomb’s test, complete blood count, Reticulocyte count, etc. Fortunately, condition is easy to treat by taking certain precautions.

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Normally, it is found that some degree of jaundice is present in newborn that is considered as normal as well as inevitable condition. However, newborn jaundice can be avoided by feeding babies frequently for first several days. Careful monitoring for the first few days of life further aids in preventing any sort of complications of jaundice. Careful monitoring can be taken by checking bilirubin level at regular intervals in the first few days, etc.

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Phototherapy Modern Medicine

It is believed that any specific treatment is not required in order to treat the condition. Certain steps like keeping baby well-hydrated with breast-feeding, etc aid in curing the condition to a significant level. Moreover, frequent feedings are advised as frequent feeding encourages bowel movements at a fast pace, that eventually help in removing bilirubin through the stools.

If the level of bilirubin is very high, then treatment called phototherapy is performed by specialists. In this treatment, child is being placed under special kind of blue light. For curing mild newborn jaundice, child is being placed under well-lit window for a few minutes, say 10 minutes twice in a day. If the bilirubin level is very high in the body, then it is necessary to take treatment otherwise serious complications like deafness, cerebral palsy may arise.

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Archive for Science & Space

A new glass electrolyte-based solid-state battery has been developed by the researchers at UT Austin. Led by the Li-ion battery inventor John Goodenough, the team demonstrated that their battery is better than Li-ion. It can hold an almost 3x charge, has more charging cycles, supports fast charging, and isn’t prone to catch fire.

Full article:

Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

Source: Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe

We just got the first real evidence of a strange quantum distortion in empty space

For the first time, astronomers have observed a strange quantum phenomenon in action, where a neutron star is surrounded by a magnetic field so intense, it’s given rise to a region in empty space where matter spontaneously pops in and out of existence.

Called vacuum birefringence, this bizarre phenomenon was first predicted back in the 1930s, but had only ever been observed on the atomic scale. Now scientists have finally seen it occur in nature, and it goes against everything that Newton and Einstein had mapped out.

“This is a macroscopic manifestation of quantum field,” Jeremy Heyl from the University of British Columbia in Canada, who was not involved in the research, told Science“It’s manifest on the scale of a neutron star.”

An international team of astronomers led by Roberto Mignani from INAF Milan in Italy made the discovery while observing a neutron star called RX J1856.5-3754 that’s 400 light-years from Earth.

Neutron stars are the crushed cores of massive stars that collapsed under their own weight when they ran out of fuel, and exploded as a supernova.

They’re made of some of the most dense material in the Universe – just 1 teaspoon of the stuff would weigh 1 billion tons on Earth – and their crust is 10 billion times stronger than steel.

Neutron stars also have the strongest magnetic fields in the known Universe – astronomers predict that the strongest neutron star magnetic fields are nearly 100 trillion times stronger than Earth’s.

These magnetic fields are so ridiculous, they’re thought to affect the properties of the empty space surrounding a neutron star.

In the classical physics of Newton and Einstein, the vacuum of space is entirely empty, but the theory of quantum mechanics assumes something very different.

According to quantum electrodynamics (QED) – a quantum theory that describes how light and matter interact – it’s predicted that space is actually full of ‘virtual particles’ that pop in and out of existence and mess with the activity of light particles (photons) as they zip around the Universe.

These virtual particles aren’t like regular physical particles like electrons and photons, but are fluctuations in quantum fields that have similar properties to a regular particle – the big difference being that they can appear and vanish at any point in space and time.

In regular empty space, photons aren’t affected by these virtual particles, and travel without interference.

But in the empty space near the incredibly intense magnetic field of a neutron star, these virtual particles are ‘excited’, and they have a dramatic effect on any photons passing through.

“According to QED, a highly magnetised vacuum behaves as a prism for the propagation of light, an effect known as vacuum birefringence,” Mignani explains in a press release.

“This effect can be detected only in the presence of enormously strong magnetic fields, such as those around neutron stars,” adds team member Roberto Turolla from the University of Padua in Italy.

As Jay Bennett reports for Popular Mechanics, the researchers directed the world’s most advanced ground-based telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), at their neutron star, and observed linear polarisation – the alignment of light waves influenced by electromagnetic forced – in the empty space around the star.

“This is rather odd, because conventional relativity says that light should pass freely through a vacuum, such as space, without being altered,” says Bennett.

“The linear polarisation was to such a degree (16 degrees, to be precise) that the only known explanations are theories of QED and the influence of virtual particles.”

You can see an illustration of this at the top of the page, where light coming from the surface of a neutron star (on the left) becomes linearly polarised as it travels through the vacuum of space on its way to the observer on Earth (on the right).

The next step now is for the observations to be replicated in another scenario to know for sure that vacuum birefringence is what we’re looking at here, and if that’s the case, we’ve got a whole new phenomenon to investigate in the field of quantum mechanics.

The research has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and you can access it for free at

Source: We just got the first real evidence of a strange quantum distortion in empty space – ScienceAlert

According to Shawyer’s calculations, the EM Drive could be so efficient that it could power us to Mars in just 70 days.

But, there’s a not-small problem with the system. It defies Newton’s third law, which states that everything must have an equal and opposite reaction.

According to the law, for a system to produce thrust, it has to push something out the other way. The EM Drive doesn’t do this.

Yet in test after test it continues to work. Last year, NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratory team got their hands on an EM Drive to try to figure out once and for all what was going on.

And now we finally have those results.

The new peer-reviewed paper is titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum“, and has been published online as an open access ‘article in advance’ in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power. It’ll appear in the December print edition.

But is the first peer-reviewed research ever published on the EM Drive, which firmly takes it out of the realm of pseudoscience into a technology that’s worth taking skeptically, but seriously.

read full article:

Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged.

“We made the smallest transistor reported to date,” said Javey, a lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor. We demonstrated a 1-nanometer-gate transistor, showing that with the choice of proper materials, there is a lot more room to shrink our electronics.”

The development could be key to keeping alive Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s prediction that the density of transistors on would double every two years, enabling the increased performance of our laptops, mobile phones, televisions, and other electronics.

“The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn’t work, so anything below that was not even considered,” said study lead author Sujay Desai, a graduate student in Javey’s lab. “This research shows that sub-5-nanometer should not be discounted. Industry has been squeezing every last bit of capability out of silicon. By changing the material from silicon to MoS2, we can make a transistor with a gate that is just 1 nanometer in length, and operate it like a switch.”

Source: Researchers use novel materials to build smallest transistor with 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate

Hubble detects giant ‘cannonballs’ shooting from star

Great balls of fire! NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon. This stellar “cannon fire” has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years, astronomers estimate.

The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, called V Hydrae. The star is a bloated red giant, residing 1,200 light-years away, which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes. Red giants are dying in the late stages of life that are exhausting their nuclear fuel that makes them shine. They have expanded in size and are shedding their outer layers into space.

The researchers compiled a detailed map of the blobs’ location, allowing them to trace the first behemoth clumps back to 1986. “The observations show the blobs moving over time,” Sahai said. “The STIS data show blobs that have just been ejected, blobs that have moved a little farther away, and blobs that are even farther away.” STIS detected the giant structures as far away as 37 billion miles away from V Hydrae, more than eight times farther away than the Kuiper Belt of icy debris at the edge of our solar system is from the sun.

The blobs expand and cool as they move farther away, and are then not detectable in visible light. But observations taken at longer sub-millimeter wavelengths in 2004, by the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, revealed fuzzy, knotty structures that may be blobs launched 400 years ago, the researchers said.

Based on the observations, Sahai and his colleagues Mark Morris of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Samantha Scibelli of the State University of New York at Stony Brook developed a model of a companion star with an to explain the ejection process.

“This model provides the most plausible explanation because we know that the engines that produce jets are accretion disks,” Sahai explained. “Red giants don’t have accretion disks, but many most likely have companion stars, which presumably have lower masses because they are evolving more slowly. The model we propose can help explain the presence of bipolar planetary nebulae, the presence of knotty jet-like structures in many of these objects, and even multipolar planetary nebulae. We think this model has very wide applicability.”

A surprise from the STIS observation was that the disk does not fire the monster clumps in exactly the same direction every 8.5 years. The direction flip-flops slightly from side-to-side to back-and-forth due to a possible wobble in the accretion disk. “This discovery was quite surprising, but it is very pleasing as well because it helped explain some other mysterious things that had been observed about this star by others,” Sahai said.

Astronomers have noted that V Hydrae is obscured every 17 years, as if something is blocking its light. Sahai and his colleagues suggest that due to the back-and-forth wobble of the jet direction, the blobs alternate between passing behind and in front of V Hydrae. When a blob passes in front of V Hydrae, it shields the red giant from view.

“This accretion disk engine is very stable because it has been able to launch these structures for hundreds of years without falling apart,” Sahai said. “In many of these systems, the gravitational attraction can cause the companion to actually spiral into the core of the red giant star. Eventually, though, the orbit of V Hydrae’s companion will continue to decay because it is losing energy in this frictional interaction. However, we do not know the ultimate fate of this companion.”

Read more at:

Source: Hubble detects giant ‘cannonballs’ shooting from star

Time crystals might exist after all

Although spontaneously broken time-translation symmetry has never been observed before, almost every other type of spontaneous symmetry breaking has been. One very common example of a spontaneously broken symmetry occurs in magnets. The laws of nature do not impose which side of a magnet will be the north pole and which will be the south pole. The distinguishing feature of any magnetic material, however, is that it spontaneously breaks this symmetry and chooses one side to be the north pole. Another example is ordinary crystals. Although the laws of nature are invariant under rotating or shifting (translating) space, crystals spontaneously break these spatial symmetries because they look different when viewed from different angles and when shifted a little bit in space.

In their new study, the physicists specifically define what it would take to spontaneously break time-translation symmetry, and then use simulations to predict that this broken symmetry should occur in a large class of quantum systems called “Floquet-many-body-localized driven systems.” The scientists explain that the key aspect of these systems is that they remain far from thermal equilibrium at all times, so the system never heats up.

The new definition of broken time-translation symmetry is similar to the definitions of other broken symmetries. Basically, when the size of a system (such as a crystal) grows, the time taken for a symmetry-breaking state to decay into a symmetry-respecting state increases, and in an infinite system the symmetry-respecting state can never be reached. As a result, symmetry for the entire system is broken.

“The significance of our work is two-fold: on one hand, it demonstrates that time-translation symmetry is not immune to being spontaneously broken,” said coauthor Bela Bauer, a researcher at Microsoft Station Q. “On the other hand, it deepens our understanding that non-equilibrium systems can host many interesting states of matter that cannot exist in equilibrium systems.”

According to the physicists, it should be possible to perform an experiment to observe time-translation by using a large system of trapped atoms, trapped ions, or superconducting qubits to fabricate a time crystal, and then measure how these systems evolve over time. The scientists predict that the systems will exhibit the periodic, oscillating motion that is characteristic of time crystals and indicative of spontaneously broken time-translation symmetry.

Source: Time crystals might exist after all

The wizard war in orbit: Early American signals intelligence satellites

Read in full: The Space Review: The wizard war in orbit (part 1): Early American signals intelligence satellites

The wizard war in orbit (part 2): Black black boxes

The wizard war in orbit (part 3): SIGINT satellites go to war

The wizard war in orbit (part 4): P-11, FARRAH, RAQUEL, DRACULA, and KAL-007

Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer?

After you die, your body’s atoms will disperse and find new venues, making their way into oceans, trees and other bodies. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics, all of the information about your body’s build and function will prevail. The relations between the atoms, the uncountable particulars that made you you, will remain forever preserved, albeit in unrecognisably scrambled form – lost in practice, but immortal in principle.

There is only one apparent exception to this reassuring concept: according to our current physical understanding, information cannot survive an encounter with a black hole. Forty years ago, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes destroy information for good. Whatever falls into a black hole disappears from the rest of the Universe. It eventually reemerges in a wind of particles – ‘Hawking radiation’ – that leaks away from the event horizon, the black hole’s outer physical boundary. In this way, black holes slowly evaporate, but the process erases all knowledge about the black hole’s formation. The radiation merely carries data for the total mass, charge and angular momentum of the matter that collapsed; every other detail about anything that fell into the black hole is irretrievably lost.

Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics are extremely well-tested theories, and yet they refuse to combine. The clash reveals something much more fundamental than a seemingly exotic quirk about black holes: the information paradox makes it aptly clear that physicists still do not understand the fundamental laws of nature.

But Gia Dvali, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, believes he’s found the solution. ‘Black holes are quantum computers,’ he says. ‘We have an explicit information-processing sequence.’ If he is correct, the paradox is no more, and information truly is immortal. Even more startling, perhaps, is that his concept has practical implications. In the future, we might be able to tap black-hole physics to construct quantum computers of our own.

Read full article: Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer? | Aeon Essays

Einstein’s gravitational waves ‘seen’ from black holes

Gravitational waves: A triumph for big science

“We have detected gravitational waves,” Prof David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO project, told journalists at a news conference in Washington DC.

Source: Einstein’s gravitational waves ‘seen’ from black holes – BBC News

The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion

If you’ve heard of fusion energy, you’ve probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion—solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer—but progress with them has been plodding.

Now, tokamaks’ rebellious cousin is stepping out of the shadows. In a gleaming research lab in Germany’s northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1 billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), appears now as a 16-meter-wide ring of gleaming metal bristling with devices of all shapes and sizes, innumerable cables trailing off to unknown destinations, and technicians tinkering with it here and there. It looks a bit like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Inside are 50 6-tonne magnet coils, strangely twisted as if trampled by an angry giant.

Although stellarators are similar in principle to tokamaks, they have long been dark horses in fusion energy research because tokamaks are better at keeping gas trapped and holding on to the heat needed to keep reactions ticking along. But the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state, and they don’t spawn the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately, they are devilishly hard to build, making them perhaps even more prone to cost overruns and delays than other fusion projects. “No one imagined what it means” to build one, says Thomas Klinger, leader of the German effort.

W7-X could mark a turning point. The machine, housed at a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) that Klinger directs, is awaiting regulatory approval for a startup in November. It is the first large-scale example of a new breed of supercomputer-designed stellarators that have had most of their containment problems computed out. If W7-X matches or beats the performance of a similarly sized tokamak, fusion researchers may have to reassess the future course of their field. “Tokamak people are waiting to see what happens. There’s an excitement around the world about W7-X,” says engineer David Anderson of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison.

Read more: The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion | Science/AAAS | News

Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun

The leading hypothesis at the moment involves a swarm of comets that may have been sent careening toward KIC 8462852, possibly after a gravitational jostle by a passing star. But it’s also possible, astronomers say, that the signal Kepler saw was caused by huge structures built by an alien civilization — say, a giant assortment of orbiting solar panels.

That latter possibility, remote though it may be, has put KIC 8462852 in the crosshairs of scientists who hunt for signals that may have been generated by intelligent aliens.

“We are looking at it with the Allen Telescope Array,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California.

“No problem with that; I think we ought to, for sure,” Shostak told But, he added, people “should perhaps moderate their enthusiasm with the lessons of history.”

Shostak cited the example of pulsars, fast-spinning, superdense stellar corpses that emit beams of high-energy radiation. These beams are picked up by instruments on and around Earth as regular pulses, because they can only be detected when they’re fired straight at the planet (an event that occurs at predictable intervals because of pulsars’ rotation).

Astronomers know all this now. But in the 1960s, when the first pulsar signals were discovered, some scientists interpreted them as possible alien transmissions.

“So history suggests we’re going to find an explanation for this that doesn’t involve Klingons, if you will,” Shostak said of the KIC 8462852 mystery.

Source: Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun

Scientists Find A Double Black Hole Inside A Nearby Quasar

Quasars (“quasi-stellar radio sources”) can be brighter than entire galaxies, and they’re thought to be fueled by the friction and heat of stuff that’s getting swallowed up by a black hole. (Although light can’t escape a black hole, it can escape from the event horizon—the boundary and point-of-no-return surrounding the black hole.)

Now, it turns out that the quasar nearest to Earth, located 600 million light-years away in a galaxy called Markarian 231, is actually built around two twirling black holes. It’s a first-of-its-kind type of find, and scientists think there could be a lot more quasars with binary hearts out there.

Hubble data revealed a mysterious hole in the quasar’s accretion disk, or the ring of gas that spirals around the black hole, waiting to fall in. After doing some modeling studies, scientists concluded that the system must be made of two black holes: a large one and a small one orbiting each other.

Source: Scientists Find A Double Black Hole Inside A Nearby Quasar | Popular Science


Ruhr Economic Papers

Ruhr Economic Papers #220

Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap

by Sonja C. Kassenböhmer and Mathias Sinning

RWI, 11/2010, 39 S./p., 8 Euro, ISBN 978-3-86788-252-1

This paper analyzes changes in wage differentials between white men and white women over the period 1993–2006 across the entire wage distribution using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed characteristics measuring individual productivity. We fi nd that the gender wage gap narrowed by more than 13 percent at the lowest decile and by less than 4 percent at the highest decile. The decomposition results indicate that changes in the gender wage gap are mainly attributable to changes in educational attainment at the top of the wage distribution, while a sizeable part of the changes is due to work history changes at the bottom. Our findings suggest that the educational success of women could reduce the gender wage gap at the bottom of the distribution both before and during the 1990s but did not trigger a strong decline at the top of the distribution until today.

JEL-Classification: C21, J16, J31

Keywords: Gender wage gap; decomposition analysis; unconditional quantile regression


University of Minnesota
Human Rights Program

Human Rights Program's home page.

Graduate student Amber Michele examines the effects of counterterrorism initiatives on local Muslim communities

amber.JPGAs part of the first workshop of the Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group workshop series, Amber Michele, a graduate student in the interdisciplinary Master of Liberal Studies program delivered a talk on "American Islamic Organizations: Response Narrative to Counterterrorism Initiatives." Michele's current research examines how counterterrorism initiatives impact Muslim organizations in America and is particularly interested in examining how the pressure of policing destabilizes Islamic civil society in the U.S. Michel works extensively with local Muslim communities on issues of civil rights, law enforcement and discrimination.

Michel found herself at an advantage, by living in the Twin Cities, to study how counterterrorism measures impact local Muslim communities. Michele's research involved analyzing national Muslim institutions and conducting personal interviews with local members of the Muslim community, administrative members of local organizations that identify as Muslim, and organizations directly involved in supporting or opposing counterterrorism initiatives. Her research led her to pose a fundamental question: How does a community that is under intense scrutiny respond both organizationally and individually and what is the impact of such a response?

Michele assumed that Muslim communities would be strongly against counterintelligence initiatives as they invade their rights to privacy. However, through her research, Michelle was able to categorize the Muslim community's response to counterintelligence measures as accommodationist. Accomodationism is a concept that finds its origins in the period after the Civil War when Southern white leaders and African American leaders came to an agreement that black workers would submit to white political rule if the Southern whites would agree to grant them basic education and due process in the law. Michel argues that those in the Muslim community have adopted this notion and therefore, do not strongly resist counterintelligence initiatives. Instead, the Muslim community is working hard to tell their own narrative of American allegiance, their own condemnation of terrorism and their activism in de-radicalization programs.

However, Michel hypothesizes that the messages displayed by larger Islamic organizations of overall acceptance of counterintelligence results from outside pressures and policing and does not necessarily represent the main sentiment of the average Muslim citizen. While websites of national organizations seem to tell a story of de-radicalization and acceptance of counterintelligence, the sentiment in personal conversations portray a different narrative. There also seems to be general consensus that U.S. foreign policy needs to take into consideration the opinions of the local Muslim communities.
For a full schedule of Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Violence Studies workshops in the spring semester, click here. All workshops will be held in room 710 of the Social Sciences building.
March 12th, 2015


All commercial activities are performed with the objective of providing value of some
kind, where the value is a combination of the benefits gained from the activity and the
cost of achieving these benefits. In many situations, both the benefits and the real
costs are not understood, for example where they are measured at such a gross level
that individual activities cannot be accurately determined. This can cause problems for
projects that are aimed at improving these activities, as the real value cannot be found.

Value Analysis is an approach to improving the value of an item or process by first
understanding the functions of the item and their value, then by identifying its
constituent components and their associated costs. It then seeks to find improvements
to the components by either reducing their cost or increasing the value of their

Functions may be broken down into a hierarchy, starting with a basic function, for
which the customer believes they are paying, and then followed by secondary
functions, which support that basic function.

The purpose of functions may be aesthetic or use, and basic functions may be either
or both of these. For example, a coat may have a use function of 'making you warm'
and an aesthetic function of 'looking attractive'. Aesthetic and use functions tend to be
separate, and either may be of higher value.

The product or process may be broken down into components, which can be
associated with the functions they support. The value of the product or process may
then be increased by improving or replacing individual components. This also applies
at the whole item being analyzed, which may be completely replaced with a more
functional or lower cost solution.

Although this is a simple-sounding technique, it can be quite difficult in practice, as it
requires deep study and analysis of process

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your metabolism. A good tip to lose weight is to eat before going out with friends. After a few drinks or peer pressure, you might become tempted to give into your cravings and eat unhealthy foods. By eating beforehand you won't have to worry about wrecking your diet, because you won't be hungry. Eat more beans. Protein is great for your body when you are exercising and trying to lose weight. Meats are high is protein, but they can also be quite expensive. Beans are a great alternative. They are high in protein, inexpensive, and very filling. They also contain less fat than most meats. Trying to lose weight? Make sure you're drinking plenty of water, especially before a meal. Drinking a full glass of water before eating often helps many people eat less. And the next time you're tempted to reach for a snack, make sure you hit the water fountain - sometimes, when our brain tells us we're hungry, we're really just thirsty. One way to lose weight and still feel full is to add more fruit to your diet. You should eat fruit at least twice a day. Fruit contains no fats and it is composed of mostly water. Unless you are diabetic, don't worry about the fruit's carbohydrate count since it is the good type of carbs which contains loads of healthy fiber. If you are struggling to lose weight with traditional weight loss programs, try an alternative like "Alli". This drug causes a certain percentage of fat to not be absorbed by the body. It is pushed out. You may find this to be the right choice for your weight issues. When trying to lose weight, reward yourself with something other than food. A new dress looks great after you've lost ten pounds. A trip to the spa is well deserved after twenty pounds are gone. Rewards are important as they give you something to look forward to and keep you motivated. An easy way to add to your weight loss efforts is to make small changes. This could be walking up the stairs instead of riding in the elevator, or parking farther out in the parking lot instead of fighting for a spot right in front of the building. Little tweaks like this can burn more calories and help you lose weight. When you are trying to lose weight, make sure you get plenty of fresh air. Plenty of oxygen will help boost your metabolism and give you more energy. You may find that after you spend more time outdoors, even just reading on a bench in a park, you have the motivation and energy to exercise more.

A simple step you can take to help you lose weight is to increase how much water you are drinking. Water keeps you from being dehydrated and thirsty. Sometimes people can confuse thirst with hunger, so drinking enough water will eliminate that issue. Drinking water can also suppress your appetite. As previously mentioned in the beginning of this article, a majority of people would like to lose weight, but seem to be unable to do so. By utilizing the information in this article and creating a diet plan that can work for you, you may finally be able to achieve success.

Freshen up your weight loss routine with these tips


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At 97, Chunibhai Vaidya seems more energetic than ever as he fights for the rights of poor farmers - and for Gandhi-Vinobha's ideals - in Modi-land.

100 HL Students Join TOI’s Youth Brigade To Make Paper Bags

The “civil society” initiative on the Lokpal arrogates to itself the power to decide on the shape of the institution. (Editorial)

This article studies the development of the Non-Pesticidal Management Project (NPM) that emerged in the late 1980s in Andhra Pradesh's Warangal district of the semi-arid region Telengana as a response to accumulating agrarian distress, when chemical pesticides did not help to counter massive pest infestations.

How the State has responded to the fasts of Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and Medha Patkar and how the media has portrayed them are a study in contrasts and say something about our society.

Thousands rallied behind Anna Hazare, when he sat on a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar demanding an improved version of Lokpal Bill, the government

This article suggests how the Gandhi–Ambedkar–Narayanaguru–Marx visions can be synthesised in support of the movement for the liberation and empowerment of India’s dalits. It brings out the beginnings and evolution of Gandhji’s sensitivity and opposition to ‘untouchability’.

Gandhiji, Father of our Nation, is universally accepted as an exemplary model of ethical/moral life. Though he was not necessarily a theoretician of economics, he had given valuable concepts and an underlying philosophy for a humane, sustainable and ethical socio-economic order.

Himanshu Kaushik | TNN

Gandhinagar: Union minister for environment and forest Jairam Ramesh unveiled an ambitious Rs 25-crore plan to develop Dandi as a green zone and ecofriendly tourist destination. But, the fact is that this town, which shot into limelight when the Congress celebrated 75 years of the Dandi March in 2005 by re-staging it from Ahmedabad to Dandi, still needs a facelift.

With an aim to rejuvenate Gandhian principles and values and to immortalise the historical salt march undertaken by the Mahatma in March-April 1930, the UPA government has launched a unique Rs 25-crore green project for Dandi and the surrounding villages to transform the area into an eco-friendly tourist destination.


How to Make Decisions: Six Hats Thinking

The Six Hats Thinking technique enables you to break out of your habitual thinking style and make better quality decisions. Six Hats Thinking was created by Edward De Bono with the aim of looking at the effect of a decision from a number of important, different perspectives, and modifying your decision accordingly. This decision making approach can be successfully used individually or in a group.

In short, you consider the effect of a decision by wearing six “hats”, and in turn, articulating the aspirations and concerns of each group.

White Hat
This is the data hat, where you consider facts, figures and information, identify any gaps in your knowledge and either fill or acknowledge them. For example, you use historical data or case studies to predict future behaviour, or do a cost benefit analysis.

Red Hat
This is the emotional hat, where intuition, instinct and irrational responses are considered.

Black Hat
Is the negative, pessimistic, “the world is going to end” hat. This viewpoint is useful as flaws and assumptions can be flushed out and addressed, and contingency plans prepared.

Yellow Hat
Is the polar opposite of the black hat, where optimism prevails. This is where benefits and added value are considered.

Green Hat
The Green Hat is used to put some creativity into the process. What other options exist? Is there a trickier, smarter solution?

Blue Hat
Is the hat worn by the person facilitating the decision making process, ensuring each hat is worn in turn and gets a fair amount of air-time.

Here’s an example of how Six Hats Thinking can be used.

A small training company are deciding on whether to deliver online training. This is new territory for them as they have historically only done face to face training. However, they need to grow the business and think this is what customers want.

White Hat Thinking
The team look at their finances and see face to face training numbers are generally stagnant, and declining for some courses. Feedback from customers suggest a growing proportion would prefer a training solution that could be delivered “on demand”, wherever and whenever the trainee requires. There are already a considerable number of successful training companies with an online presence.

Red Hat Thinking
The team are nervous about their lack of experience in managing online training. They are concerned their roles will change into being technical support and no longer doing what they enjoy or are good at.

Black Hat Thinking
Black hat thinking flushes out concerns about the cost and complexity of building a website and creating an online training platform, particularly if not all courses are suited to an online environment. Also, how does this project fit with existing workload?

Yellow Hat Thinking
Yellow hat thinking frees the team up to believe that in a year’s time they will be wondering what they were worried about. They break the project up into manageable chunks, with agreed deadlines and deliverables. They realise that if all goes to plan, there may be a new market in turning other companies training from off-line into on-line training.

Green Hat Thinking
Spending some time wearing the green hat makes the team consider other ways to deliver training, both off and on-line. They create two different training solutions which they had not previously considered.

Blue Hat Thinking
Throughout the discussion, one person wears the blue hat, ensuring no thinking style dominates or colours the others.

Six Hats Thinking forces you to consider many different perspectives when making a decision, and break out of your habitual thinking style. This technique is particularly useful for both newly formed, or established teams, as there is a transparent decision making process to be followed.

Download ‘Six Hats Thinking’ in pdf format


Meet NAKASEC | Zu Kim

Today, we’re featuring Zu Kim, President of KRC‘s Board of Directors! We hope you enjoy!

Q: What’s your name?
A: Zu Kim (ZuWhan Kim / 김주환). My Korean name (sounds rather like Ju-Huan) means “shining broadly”. When I was applying for a visa, I didn’t really know how ‘J’ sounded like so I chose to spell my name with a ‘Z’ instead of a ‘J’ and later learned that these two letters sounded very different. My ignorance gave me a very unique name — and I like it!

Q: Where are you from?
A: I grew up mostly in Seoul, Korea. I came to the States for my graduate study in computer science at USC.

A: Around the time I came to the States, I was very interested in singing (rock music, in particular) and wanted to learn pansori (Korean traditional singing). I heard that KRC was offering a poongmool class so I visited to see if they taught pansori, too. KRC didn’t teach pansori and their beginner’s poongmool class did not interest me — but the people at KRC and the work they do did interest me.

Q: What was one of the first actions or campaigns you remember being involved in?
A: In 1997, North Korea was suffering from a terrible food crisis due to consecutive floods. In response, there was a North Korea Food Aid Campaign initiated by Young Koreans United with the UN World Food Program. KRC was also involved in the efforts and through them I became involved. In the beginning there was strong resistance in the Korean American community due to the red complex, but we eventually gained support from many of the community members as people became more aware of the food situation in North Korea. As a result, we and the UN World Food Program raised more than $1 million and a large part of it was $1 and $5 donations we raised at Korean markets.

A: KRC is different from many other non-profit organizations. We identify the community’s issue by providing service, then try to solve it by organizing the community members who are affected by the issue. For example, many Korean American seniors seek help because they do not understand complicated medical welfare documents. So we organized the seniors, identified the issues with them and held many actions and visited the offices of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services to let them know how our community was impacted by the lack of language access. As a result, now they can get important letters translated in Korean and, more importantly, they now know that they can make a difference by organizing. After all, as you can see from our Korean name (민족학교, literally translated to ‘Korean Education Center’), our goal is to empower the community and young people.

Q: Tell us of a memorable moment with KRC, KRCC and/or NAKASEC?
A: KRC participated in a census campaign in 2000 and a temporary census worker was assigned to KRC. I was a volunteer coordinator then, and tried to organize her — she is now my wife!

Q: What hope do you see for the Korean American community?
A: When I see the AKASIA members, mostly undocumented college students who study and work hard, I see bright hope for the community. Sufferings can be a blessing in disguise.

A: I have many — a rock star at a concert, a little child with no worries, one of Jesus’ disciples 2000 years ago, someone who can fly, and so on. In fact, for some of them, I dream about doing it for real even though I’m already 40. For example, I can plan to have one week in my life completely away from worries.

Q: What is your comfort food and why?
A: My favorite food is bossam (보쌈, steamed pork belly with vegetables) but I am trying not to eat much meat for my health and for the environment. ^^

Meet other folks at KRC, KRCC and NAKASEC!


eISSN 2329-0358

Blood Pressure after Renal Transplantation

Martin Zeier, Ralf Dikow, Eberhard Ritz

Ann Transplant 2001; 6(4): 21-24

ID: 497730

Published: 2001-12-19

Hypertension is extremely common in renal allograft recipients, mainly as the result of impaired renal function and cyclosporin Atherapy. Blood pressure is a powerful independent predictor of longterm graft outcome. This adverse effect is presumably mediated by both hemodynamic and non-hemodynamic factors. There is also evidence for activation of the renin angiotensin system in the renal allograft. Antihypertensive treatment is of known benefit on graft outcome in experimental models, but this has so far not been documented in clinical trials. Proteinuria is another independent predictor of longterm graft outcome. There is recent documentation of a specific antiproteinuric effect of ACE inhibitors on proteinuria which is of interest since proteinuria is an independent predictor of longterm graft outcome.

Keywords: renal transplantation, Hypertension, cyclosporin A, renin angiotensin system, sympathetic nerve activity


monday 23 july 02001 11:25am
chapter ten: reasons to live, from waking to now

- as i begin to rise from dreaming, stretch my legs toward the end of the bed. warm soft resistance, and thunk. opening my eyes: the blanket taut between my feet, a paw thrown up over the edge. po purrs. the vibration rises in my feet.

- jim heavy in sleep beside me.

- the stillness of morning.

- a single tendril from the neighbors' vine has snaked across the porch and has begun to wrap the base of ganesha.

- larry's email contained the phrase: "i've fallen into the sky and i can't get out!"

- moving in yoga, and stillness there.

- jasmine tea.

- lush alkmaar soap.

- apricots. the weight of them. the soft plush flesh. the give. the juice.

- the pleasure of language. of trying to put experience into words. like stuffing the sky through a keyhole.

- this.


Laying on of Hands and Succession

The laying on of hands is listed as an elementary principle and doctrine of the Christian church in Hebrews 6:1-2. What is the 'laying on of hands'? Was this practiced in the Old Testament? Did Jesus practice it? What types of reasons were the imposition of hands used for? Is there some special power in the hands of the ministry? Do all Christians need to have the laying on of hands? Can the casting out of demons and divine involve the laying on of hands? What kind of anointing oil is most commonly used? Did Church of God groups teach succession from the apostles through the laying on of hands throughout history? Has the Church of God ever had any type of succession list? Did the laying on of hands cross over to the Western hemisphere? Does succession entail more than the laying on of hands? Can you lose the mantle? What did the old Radio/Worldwide Church of God teach? Dr. Thiel addresses these issues and more.

A written article of related interest is titled "Laying on of Hands" URL:


During the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, the U.S. had leaders who expressed concern about climate change but who were unable to deliver strong actions to lessen its impact. With the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. will have a leader who views climate change as a hoax.

Given the overwhelming evidence that human activities play a major role in driving this present and looming climate crisis, it is hard to fathom Trump's position. For example, the World Meteorological Organization just issued a report for the ongoing climate change conference in Morocco. The report found that the 2011-2015 period was the warmest on record, a trend that is increasing the prevalence of extreme weather including flooding and drought.

There is clearly no sense of urgency among U.S. political/corporate leaders to deal with climate change. It appears as if these leaders don't care about future generations, including their own children and grandchildren. Trump's position does not bode well for the lives of coming generations who will suffer the brunt of the worsening climate disaster.

Native Americans understand that we have a responsibility to protect the planet and its resources for future generations. For example, here are two relevant quotes:

— Qwatsinas, Nuxalk Nation

— Cree prophecy

Unfortunately our current leaders seem to worship mammon and don't acknowledge their responsibilities to the future. They are intent on continuing the extraction of fossil fuels from the earth, further increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and exacerbating the crisis.

Fortunately, Dakotas and other Native Americans are using nonviolent action in North Dakota to stop an oil pipeline that is damaging their sacred sites and is in violation of their treaty rights (see counterpunch.org/2016/08/30/solidarity-with-standing-rock-sioux-tribe-against-dakota-access-pipeline). In addition to greenhouse gas considerations, Native Americans are trying to protect the water supply for themselves and others, including future generations, from the predictable contamination associated with pipelines. Disappointingly, the local police and the North Dakota National Guard are using violent means to support the pipeline company.

To support these Native Americans, go to standwithstandingrock.net.


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How mirror neurons allow us to learn and socialise by going through the motions in the head

The old adage that we can only learn how to do something by trying it ourselves may have to be revised in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience.

It turns out that humans, primates, some birds, and possibly other higher animals have mirror neurons that fire in the same pattern whether performing or just observing a task.

These mirror neurons clearly play an important role in learning motor tasks involving hand eye coordination, and possibly also acquisition of language skills, as well as being required for social skills, but the exact processes involved are only just being discovered. In particular the relationship between mirror neural networks and social cognitive tasks has been unclear, and greater knowledge of it could shed light on problems such as autism that may arise when this process goes wrong.

This emerging field of mirror neurons in social cognition was discussed at a recent workshop organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF), which laid the ground for the first common research network dedicated to this fast emerging field, within the EU's 7th Research Framework Programme running until 2013.

The role of mirror neurons at all levels of social interaction is even greater than had been realized, according to convenor of the ESF conference Riccardo Viale, president of Rosselli Foundation in Turin, Italy and professor of Cognitive Science (University of Milan). "Most of the speakers highlighted how the mirror mechanism is crucial for both more basic forms of emotional recognition and also higher aspects of empathy," said Viale.

Just as the same mirror neurons fire when observing and doing certain tasks, so other mirror neurons may be triggered both when experiencing a particularly emotion and when observing someone else with that emotion. At the ESF conference it emerged that mirror neurons involved in emotion resided in both the insula and cingulate cortexes, two regions of the brain known to play roles in emotions and feelings. However until recently the mechanisms of interaction between these two had been largely unknown. "In the case of emotions, we can say that there is a good deal of overlap between areas from the insula and cingulate cortexes," said Viale. "These areas become active both when individuals feel an emotion (e.g. disgust) and also when they watch someone else feeling that emotion."

Mirror neurons were discovered in the 1980s by an Italian group led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, which placed electrodes in the inferior frontal cortex of macaque monkeys' brains to study neurons dedicated to control of hand movement. This led to the surprising observation that some of the neurons responded in the same way when monkeys saw a person pick up a piece of food as when they were doing it themselves. This introduced the principle of the mirror neuron as a neuron capable of being triggered by imitation, as a mechanism both for learning and empathising in social situations.

While mirror neutrons cannot be observed directly in humans because electrodes cannot be inserted into their brains, the action has been inferred by imaging of the whole brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This showed patterns of brain activity consistent with the firing of motor neurons.

More recently motor neurons have also been discovered in birds. "This suggests that such a sensory-motor mechanism is not confined to primates, but is shared by different phyla," said Viale. However the mechanism is not thought to be present in more primitive animals, including the lower cold blooded vertebrates, that is fish, reptiles and amphibians.

The ESF workshop took the field forward by highlighting growing agreement over the role of mirror neurons in social cognition. "The main outcome of the workshop was substantial convergence on some key points concerning the basic mechanisms of social cognition," said Viale. "In particular, most of the invited speakers agreed on the relevance of mirror-based action and emotion understanding in the phylogeny and ontogeny of mind-reading abilities." There was also agreement on the need to develop a multidisciplinary approach to the different levels of social cognition. The ESF workshop, Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition, was held in Turin, Italy, in September 2008.

Thomas Lau | alfa
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QATAR: Qapco, Materia in R&D agreement for next-gen feedstock optimisation

Together, they will explore the possibilities to further optimise the use of Qatar's natural resources, by studying how to extract new products from Qapco's current feedstock, aimed at maximising the value from the Industries Qatar' subsidiary's existing processes.

Materia's breakthrough catalyst technology combined with Qapco resources could potentially lead to the development of new products.

The move would also open the door to new uses for energy products and derivatives such as petrochemicals as the country continues to grow its energy and industrial sectors with attempts being made to further optimise its hydrocarbon resources utilisation, research and innovation.

Nobel Prize winning chemist Professor Robert H Grubbs, Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, helped found Materia, which specialises in efficient feedstock utilisation and the extraction of specific petrochemical and chemical compounds.

"Joint industry-academia R&D, such as our collaboration with Materia and Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ), is very promising and paves the way to infinite possibilities while supporting the growth of Qatar's knowledge-based economy, Dr Mohamed Yousef al-Mulla, vice chairman and CEO of Qapco, said.

Collaborating with some of the world's leading experts on research projects focusing on olefins, polymers and petrochemicals has the potential to add further value to the feedstock, which could be beneficial for Qapco and ultimately for the hydrocarbon resources of the country, he said.

"This envisioned collaboration should enable Qapco to extract greater value from some of its by-product streams, therefore unlocking greater value from Qatar's natural resources, thanks to Materia's unique and advanced technologies, according to Dr Michael A Giardello, Materia's president, CEO and chief technology officer.

Qapco uses focused partnerships with Qatar's most prominent universities such as TAMUQ, as the launching point for its research activities. Most recently, it supported the establishment of an endowed chair position at TAMUQ for Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering.

Source: Daily "Gulf Times", Doha; 29 May 2014
(Syed Rashid Ali, Karachi, Pakistan)


US ‘Flirting’ with Recession in 2017

US ‘Flirting’ with Recession in 2017

US ‘Flirting’ with Recession in 2017

A team of economic strategists have warned that the US is flirting on the brink of a Recession. UBS Global Macro estimates a nearly 31% chance of a Recession in Y 2017.

The UBS’ credit model, designed to find the likelihood of a recession over the next few Quarters, considers 4 corporate credit measures, they are, as follows:

  1. interest coverage
  2. leverage
  3. loan performance
  4. bank lending standards in Recessions

Based on the historical relationship between the above 4  measures, the bank’s model estimates the risk of a recession at 31% over the next year, from Q-2 of Y 2016 to Q-2 of Y 2017.

The US recession risks is still elevated when compared to much of the post-crisis period.

Elevating this recession risk, according to the UBS report, are debt growth, up 5.5% Y-Y, struggling domestic profits, which fell 5.4% Q-Q in Q-2, and tighter lending standards.

Meanwhile, last Friday Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren wanted to raise interest rates last week to avoid a recession later.

Mr. Rosengren said he had argued for “a modest, gradual tightening: out of a concern that not doing so would put the recovery’s duration and sustainability at greater risk, by generating the sorts of significant imbalances that historically have led to a recession.”

Mr. Rosengren dissented at last week’s FOMC rate-setting meeting that left interest rates unchanged at a range of 0.25 to 0.50%.

Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester also dissented, saying they favored raising rates last week.

It was the 1st time since December 2014 that 3 Fed officials have dissented although Ms. George has run against the grain at four of the past 5 Fed policy meetings.

In his statement, Mr. Rosengren said such a low unemployment rate risked overheating the economy, putting upward pressure on inflation and increasing financial-market imbalances, which could ultimately lead to Recession.

The US economy last entered a recession, defined as 2 consecutive Quarters of Y-Y economic contraction, in December 2007, after the housing bubble burst, leading to a global financial crisis. That recession, dubbed the Great Recession, ended in mid-2009, making it the longest US recession since the end of World War II.

The fuel for the rising stock market; stock buybacks, is declining.

June was the least amount of stock buybacks in many a month. For 1-H of this year, we have seen a 33% decline in announced buybacks.

We are also seeing a significant decline in growth in the US economy’s incomes. Everybody talks about spending and GDP, but it is really incomes that count.

Individuals are showing a 2% gain in income and that is not enough to drive the economy North.

Stay tuned…

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Paul Ebeling

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Tag Archives: pi day

The Way to a Mathematician’s Heart Is through a Pi

Want to win over a mathematician? Bake them a pi.

What Can Pi Do for You?

Tomorrow is Pi Day!

And what a Pi Day! 3/14/15 (if you’re in the US, Belize, Micronesia, some parts of Canada, the Philippines, or Swahili-speaking Kenya), best celebrated at 9:26:53, if you’re up by then. Grab a slice of pie, or cake if you really must, and enjoy!

If you don’t have some of your own, download this one!

Pi is great not just because it’s fun to recite digits and eat pastries, but because it serves a very important role in physics. That’s because, often, pi is one of the most “natural” ways to get larger numbers.

Suppose you’re starting with some sort of “natural” theory. Here I don’t mean natural in the technical sense. Instead, I want you to imagine a theory that has very few free parameters, a theory that is almost entirely fixed by mathematics.

Many physicists hope that the world is ultimately described by this sort of theory, but it’s hard to see in the world we live in. There are so many different numbers, from the tiny mass of the electron to the much larger mass of the top quark, that would all have to come from a simple, overarching theory. Often, it’s easier to get these numbers when they’re made out of factors of pi.

Why is pi easy to get?

In general, pi shows up a lot in physics and mathematics, and its appearance can be mysterious the uninitiated, as this joke related by Eugene Wigner in an essay I mentioned a few weeks ago demonstrates:

While it may sound silly, in a sense the population really is connected to the circumference of the circle. That’s because pi isn’t just about circles, pi is about volumes.

Take a bit to check out that link. Not just the area of a circle, but the volume of a sphere, and that of all sorts of higher-dimensional ball-shaped things, is calculated with the value of pi. It’s not just spheres, either: pi appears in the volume of many higher-dimensional shapes.

Why does this matter for physics? Because you don’t need a literal shape to get a volume. Most of the time, there aren’t literal circles and spheres giving you factors of pi…but there are abstract spaces, and they contain circles and spheres. A electric and magnetic fields might not be shaped like circles, but the mathematics that describes them can still make good use of a circular space.

That’s why, when I describe the mathematical formulas I work with, formulas that often produce factors of pi, mathematicians will often ask if they’re the volume of some particular mathematical space. It’s why Nima Arkani-Hamed is trying to understand related formulas by thinking of them as the volume of some new sort of geometrical object.

All this is not to say you should go and plug factors of pi together until you get the physical constants you want. Throw in enough factors of pi and enough other numbers and you can match current observations, sure…but you could also match anything else in the same way. Instead, it’s better to think of pi as an assistant: waiting in the wings, ready to translate a pure mathematical theory into the complicated mess of the real world.

So have a Happy Pi Day, everyone, and be grateful to our favorite transcendental number. The universe would be a much more boring place without it.


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Product Overview

Upright Metallurgical Microscope UMM-12 Series
The upright trinocular metallurgical microscope has a reflected transmitted and a polariscope
Upright design is suitable to find a fixture object and to observe, research and analyse the object on a broader surface. The instruments are widely used in the field of IT, PCB and micro pellets、threads、fibre、surface coatings etc., and testing、researching、and analyzing metallurgical structure of materials. They are also broadly suitable for factories、laboratories、and teaching and researching areas.
Reflected (Co-axial vertical illumination) and transmitted light source fits for various observations and shoots.
The polarizing co-axial vertical illumination system, generating vivid images and clarifying contrasts, is proper for various complicated observation and shoots.
Co-axial vertical and horizontal moveable loading stage and a variety buitl-in fliter switching makes operation easy.
Ascend and descend focusing system is equipped with a limit switch device, which avoids collision between specimens and objective lens and repeated focusing in high volume testing.

Items/Models UMM-12A
Optical Total amplification ratio 50×- 400×
system plan achromatic objective PL 5× PLL 10× PLL 20× PLL 40×
PLL 60×（PLL big distance）(optional)
Wide field eyepieces WF10×/18
Intermediate Attachment Cross WF eyepiece and micrometers 10× zoom graduation:0.1/18 mm  micrometer 0.01/1 mm
Frame Basic Structure Upright Design, Hinge Trinocular Tube：45°obliquity, pupil distance 55-75 mm, Diopter ±5% (adjustable)
Revolving objective 4 hole ball bearing circumvolve
Double layer stage Size:185x140 mm, moving rance:70x50 mm,
vernier graduation 0.1 mm
Focus Coaxial coarse and fine, Up-down adjusting range:35mm, Vernier Calibration 0.002 mm, System up-down adjusting locking and torque adjusting
Illumination systems Reflected light Kohler Illumination Variable Aperture and field diaphragm, Adjustable Brightness Halogen lamp 20W/6V
polarizing setting: polarizer and analyzer
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Transmitted light lifting Abbe condenser, built-in aperture diaphragm and filter and adjustable halogen lamp
Power supply AC 110/220V/50Hz 30W
Weight/Dimensions Weight：10 Kg; Package Size： 340x400x460 cm

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Jatiya Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University

Jatiya Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University is a very recent public university which started its journey just seven years ago. The university is situated at Trishal; in the district of Mymensing. The place where it is situated is called Battala which has significance. There is an old Banyan tree under the shadow of which our national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam used to play his flute and develop poetic sense in his mind. Though the university is very recent, still it has made progress in this very short time.

The first thing which creates a positive sense in our mind is the natural view of  Jatiya Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University. The university is holding the beauty of nature remembering the great poet Kazi Nazrul Islam who once used to live among this beautiful nature and developed his sense of poetic genius. The nature also affects the minds of the inhabitants.

In spite of being a new university, Jatiya Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University is making progress very fast. It started its journey as a university in 2007. Since then the university has achieved a huge progress. When it started its journey, at first it had only 185 students. But today, there are thousands of students getting their education here. There are four faculties of the university under which a number of departments are running their program. There are Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Business Administration, Faculty of Science and Engineering and Faculty of Social Science. The departments under these faculties are: Bangla Language and Literature, English Language and Literature, Dramatics, Fine Arts, Music, Public Administration, Computer science and Engineering, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Accounting, Human Resource Management, Economics and Finance and Banking. All these departments are very much sincere about their students and their education. The teachers are also very careful and sincere. They are trying their best to take this university to a very prestigious position.

Jatiya Kazi Nazrul Islam University

As the university is named after the great rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, it bears the sense and motto of the great poet. It is the first university among all the public universities of our country which is bearing such kind of values. So, it gives very importance on the culture of the country and tries to enrich it by the knowledge they gain. But it is not just a place for practicing culture. Science and technology is also taught here to enable the students to keep pace with the modern time. It provides its students different types of modern equipments which help them in their study.

Though Jatiya Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University is a very new institution, still the progress it has made is really praiseworthy. Besides providing modern and technology based education, it is also trying to uphold the culture and values of the country giving tribute to its name. Moreover, the natural beauty of this public university has a positive effect on human mind. So, in a word, Jatiya  Kobi Kazi Nazrul Islam University is bearing a great motto and we wish that it will definitely go a long way.


Las Posadas

Las Posadas "The Lodgings (or Accomodations)" is a nine-day ceremony, "novenario", culminating on Christmas Eve which depicts the search for lodging that Joseph and Mary undertook immediately prior to the birth of Jesus. The nine days depicts the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy.

This ceremony originated in Spain but now is practiced primarily in Guatemala, Mexico and the southwest U.S. Each night a procession featuring Mary, riding on a donkey, Joseph, musicians and various onlookers travel from house to house seeking shelter for the night. At each place they are refused until they reach a designated location where they are welcomed and given shelter. The procession then enters the residence and prays the rosary. This is followed by a meal which is served to all participants.

In the Rio Arriba valley in northern New Mexico the ceremony is held in a different community each night and the local church is the final destination for the procession. These evenings are typically quite cold, especially in the communities nestled in and around the Sangre de Cristo mountains. On Christmas Eve, the final night of Las Posadas, the procession is welcomed at El Santuario where they observe midnight mass and are given refreshments to celebrate the season.