Saturday, 27 December 2014

Unico Wilhelm, Count van Wassenaer Obdam (30 October 1692 - 9 November 1766) was a Dutch nobleman who was a diplomat, composer, and administrator. He reorganised the Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order. His most important surviving compositions are the Concerti Armonici, which until 1980 had been misattributed to the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) and to Carlo Ricciotti (1681-1756).

Van Wassenaer was born into a distinguished family of wealth, power and accomplishment—the House of Wassenaer. He grew up in the Hague, where he was taught to play the harpsichord and violin. In 1707-09 he stayed with his father and three sisters in Düsseldorf at the court of Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine. The strong Italian influences at the court had a major influence on his musical development.

On 18 September 1710 Unico Wilhelm was admitted to the University of Leiden to study law. In December 1711 he interrupted his studies to go to Frankfurt for the coronation of the Emperor Charles VI. In June 1713, after completing his studies, he returned to Düsseldorf where his father and sisters had settled. He may have accompanied Arent van Wassenaer Duyvenvoorde on a visit to Britain in 1715-16. He made a grand tour of France and Italy in 1717-18. In 1723 Unico Wilhelm married Dodonea Lucia van Goslinga (the daughter of Sicco van Goslinga), with whom he had three children.

While based at the Hague between 1725 and 1740, Unico Wilhelm wrote the seven Concerti Armonici. The Concerti Armonici, published anonymously in 1740, were printed in London in 1755 as compositions by the violinist and impresario Carlo Ricciotti (c. 1681–1756). It has since been established that these were the work of Unico Wilhelm. There is no evidence that Ricciotti wrote any music. The concerti were dedicated to Wilhelm’s friend, Count Willem Bentinck. The slow movements of the concerti are especially remarkable and have expressive beauty.

The Polish composer Franciszek Lessel (1780–1838) asserted incorrectly that the concertos were written by Pergolesi. Since the style of the concertos is Italian, laid out in typical Roman fashion with four parts for violin and consisting of four parts instead of the Venetian three, they are comparable to works by Pietro Locatelli. However, in 1979-1980 a manuscript of the six concerti was found in the archives of Twickel Castle (the castle where Van Wassenaer was born) labelled “Concerti Armonici”. Although the handwriting was not by Van Wassenaer, the manuscript did have an introduction in his hand, reading: “Partition de mes concerts gravez par le Sr. Ricciotti”. Research done by the Dutch musicologist Albert Dunning, established there can be no doubt that the concerti were, in fact, written by Van Wassenaer.

The Concerti Armonici were among the works that formed the basis for Igor Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella”, based on works considered at the time to be by Pergolesi. Apart from Concerti Armonici, three sonatas for recorder and continuo also by Van Wassenaer were discovered in the early 1990s.

Friday, 26 December 2014

“Underneath our nice, friendly façades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.” - Joko Beck

After the excesses of the Christmas dinner table, it is good to have something light to eat in order to give your stomach a chance to recover. Here is such a dish, which nevertheless is quite filling and tasty. It is also one that can be whipped up in a hurry from ingredients that can be stored in your pantry (tinned stuff) and freezer (seafood highlighter, shelled prawns), making it the perfect dish to serve to unexpected visitors who turn up and decide to stay to lunch or dinner… Serve with fresh, crusty bread (or even crackers), some sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and wash down with some bubbly.

45 g tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil
185 g tin of tuna chunks in olive oil
170 g tin of shredded crab meat in brine
250 g thawed seafood highlighter (formed seafood chunks), sliced thinly
150 g thawed, shelled, cooked prawns, deveined and chopped finely
2 tbsp baby capers
2 tbsp chopped dill baby gherkins (cornichons) – buy Polish ones, which are not sweet
Juice of a lime
1 tbsp olive oil
Ground white pepper and salt, to taste
A little chopped dill, to taste
300 g Thomy Mayonnaise Delikatess (easily the best mayonnaise in a jar, with the least sugar! We use home-made mayonnaise that has zero sugar in it, but Thomy is good at a pinch)

Open all tins and prepare the contents by draining well and chopping up. In a large bowl shred the tuna chunks and add the chopped anchovy fillets. Mix well.
Add the well-drained crab meat chunks, the chopped seafood highlighter and chopped prawns. Mix well.
Add the capers, chopped cornichons, lime juice, olive oil, dill and seasonings, mixing well.
Fold in the mayonnaise, using a little more or less so that it binds all the ingredients together.
Chill for about 30 minutes and serve.

The success of the salad depends on using ingredients that contain no added sugar. Most mayonnaise in a jar is sickly sweet, as are the dill gherkins. The sweet taste combined with the seafood can ruin the salad, which should be slightly tart, savoury and pleasantly peppery, not hot.

Share your favourite recipes by using the Mr Linky tool below:

Thursday, 25 December 2014

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
New Testament; 1 Corinthians  XIII.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Well, it’s beginning to feel like Christmas, at long last. Yesterday, we had the Christmas decorations out and by late evening everything was up. The lights are lit, the wreaths and trees and balls send out a message of good cheer, while the holly and the mistletoe hark back to our European heritage of a wintry Christmas, although here in the Antipodes we had a top of 30˚C today! It’s interesting how here in Australia, we have preserved the Christmas traditions almost completely intact and it is only relatively recently that we are adapting to the climate and the summer celebration of Christmas.

Christmas as a Christian celebration came to supplant a pagan festival and customs relating to the ancient cults and gods were syncretised with the Christian ritual in order to absorb securely as many as possible of the new converts to Christianity. The Dies Natalis Invicti Solis was an ancient Roman festival more of a religious nature and thus important to priests predominantly. It was the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun and marked an important date on the calendar of the cult of Mithras.

Another winter solstice festival that became absorbed into Christmas was that of Yule or Jol, celebrated especially in the North, wherever the Norse pantheon held sway. Jolnir was another name for Odin, the chief god, the Norse equivalent of Zeus or Jupiter. Odin was the god of ecstasy and intoxicating drink, but also the god of death. The sacrificial beer of Odin became the blessed Christmas beer of the middle ages and also survives in the wassail cup of “lamb’s wool”.  The feasting that occurred during Yuletide also included providing food and drink for the ghosts that roamed the earth around this time (Finnish Christmas Eve tradition).  Bonfires were lit and this tradition has survived in the form of the yule log.  The Christmas tree tradition is essentially a Germanic one that may hail back to the Norse legend of Yggdrasil, the great tree on whose branches rested the universe.

            The ivie and holly berries are seen,
            And Yule Log and Wassaile come round agen.
            At Christmas play, and make good cheer,
            For Christmas comes but once a year.
                                     Thomas Tusser (ca 1520-1580).

Appropriately, the word for the day is: “Christmas

Christmas |ˈkrisməs| noun ( pl. -mases |ˌkrɪsməsəz|)
• the period immediately before and after December 25: We had guests over Christmas.
Exclamation, informal: Expressing surprise, dismay, or despair.
Christmassy |-məsē| |ˌkrɪsməsi| adjective
ORIGIN: Old English Crīstes mæsse (see Christ , Mass ).

Christ |krīst| noun

The title, also treated as a name, given to Jesus of Nazareth.
Exclamation: An oath used to express irritation, dismay, or surprise.
before Christ full form of BC .
Christhood |-ˌhoŏd| |ˌkraɪstˈhʊd| noun
Christlike |-ˌlīk| |ˌkraɪs(t)ˈlaɪk| adjective
Christly |ˌkraɪs(t)li| adjective
ORIGIN: Old English Crīst, from Latin Christus, from Greek Khristos, noun use of an adjective meaning ‘anointed,’ from khriein ‘anoint,’ translating Hebrew māšīaḥ ‘Messiah.’

There is a passage in C.S. Lewis’s book “The Silver Chair” where Eustace and Jill (the children who are transported by magic to Narnia, the land of Aslan) find themselves amongst giants. They are mollycoddled and made much of, fed all manners of things delicious and made as comfortable as possible. All seems to be delightful and they enjoy their sojourn there until they discover a giants’ cookery book that has this in it:
“MAN: This elegant little biped has long been valued as a delicacy. It forms the traditional part of the Autumn Feast, and is served between the fish and the joint. Each man...”

When I first read this as a child I felt a shiver of morbid fascination and abhorrence down my spine. I imagined myself in the place of poor Eustace and Jill, being fattened by giants so that I would be part of a rare and gastronomically delightful course in the Autumn Feast banquet. Cannibalism fascinates us and at the same time strikes us as the utmost indication of barbaric behaviour. Yes most of us think nothing of biting into a delicious ham sandwich, or a juicy steak or a serving of coq-au-vin.

The art of dining has been elevated to an exquisite art form and all manner of exotic ingredients are combined with the staples from the garden, the vegetable patch, the orchard and of course the farmyard to concoct delicious dishes to tempt even the most jaded palate. Vegetarians are few and far between, although the percentage of vegetarians in Western countries is on the increase (about 1% of Western populations would be classed as strict vegetarians – see this interesting [though dated] article:

For our literary Tuesday today, I offer you a book that is a veritable bible for vegetarians and animal activists, as it considers the plight of farm animals – animals raised for the sole purpose of providing food for humans. The book is “The Pig who Sang to the Moon” by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (2003). He argues convincingly that farm animals have feelings and consciousness. Intelligence and curiosity, self reliance and humour, sociability and bravery, grief and dignity are hardly the words that would immediately spring to our mind to describe goats and pigs, cows and chickens; however, Masson demonstrates that these emotions and attributes are evident in these ‘lowly’ animals.

In his 300-page book, Masson devotes each chapter to an animal: Cow, pig, chicken, sheep/goat, duck, etc and examines through history, literature, anecdotes, scientific studies and his own personal experience the way that we describe these creatures as “dumb beasts without feelings” is completely wrong. We all have immense sympathy for companion animals and pets like cats and dogs. We would think it enormously inhumane and barbaric to kill cats and dogs for food, but most of us would not blink an eyelid at eating a ham sandwich. However, pigs are cleaner than dogs and easier to housetrain, of all animals their physiology and flesh is most like ours, they are incredibly friendly and will curiously follow us all day, more so than our pet cats. In fact, “mini” pigs have been successfully adopted as pets by some people.

Masson’s position in his book is that farm animals that have been specifically bred for our table fare are living in a completely artificial environment (in some cases analogous to a medieval prison in human terms). These animals find themselves struggling to cope in an environment that is all wrong for them. The specific instinctual behaviours that these animals carry in their genes do not have a chance of being expressed in these wrong environments. They have been unable to adapt as adaptation takes hundreds of thousands of years and we have domesticated them for only thousands of years. How can a cow that is separated from her calf immediately it is born and bred to be milked by a machine daily, carry out the incredibly tender and loving rearing of her young that we see in wild cattle? How can a battery hen luxuriate in an obviously enjoyable dust bath that the free range chicken can? How can a pig be curious and companionable and clever if it is confined to an indoor “factory farm” sty and never sees the light of day in its life?

This is a book that will elicit gut-wrenching emotion from most of its readers, as it really does pack a punch in the stomach (both puns are intended!). Masson describes a harsh and brutal reality (and yes, the truth is bitter), but he is also optimistic about the way that some enlightened farmers go out of their way to make an environment that is more pleasant for the animals they rear, seeing that we are unable to completely do away with farm animals.

To be a devil’s advocate, Masson does fling some wild hypotheses around in his book (which are not substantiated or even argued through logically). He can become emotional over what he discusses and tugs at our heartstrings rather than the intellect in places. He can jump around from topic to topic without much connection or the rigour of a scientific paper. He often preaches from his self-righteous pulpit and can be extremely negative about some things (for example, arguing that even when raising chickens humanely in a free range farm, it is immoral to take their eggs from them).

Nevertheless, when we consider that 10 billion farm animals are killed for human consumption annually in the USA alone, Masson’s book is extremely thought-provoking. We have known for hundreds of years that we don’t need to eat animals to survive (vegetarians and vegans have lived long healthy lives throughout recorded history). Increasing evidence shows that vegans live a longer and healthier life than others. Gandhi said: “…first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight with you, then you win.” Masson closes his book by suggesting a variety of ways that we can help the plight of farm animals (not necessarily by becoming a vegetarian or a vegan).

Jeff Masson’s other books on animals are also worth looking at:
“When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals”
“The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood”
“Dogs Never Lie About Love: The Emotional World of Dogs”
“The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey Into the Feline Heart”

Monday, 22 December 2014

We have had some bushfires already here in Victoria, so the fire season has officially started. This is always an important issue every Summer in Australia, and as the season progresses we dread the news of highly destructive bushfires breaking out and causing loss of bushland, homes or even worse, lives. I think with gratitude of the dedicated people that fight fires, which in the countryside are often volunteers of the Country FireAuthority. They do much to educate the public, prevent fires through clearing and back-burning, and if there are fires, doing their utmost to save properties and lives.

So for Movie Monday a film that I have watched and has fires and firefighting as a theme. The bravery and self-sacrifice of firefighters is something that we seem to forget or push to the back of our minds until a time of crisis. However, these people can be called upon to put their lives at risk on a daily basis in order to save others’ lives, property and uphold social order during times where most of us would crack under immense physical and psychological strain.

The film is Ron Howard’s 1991 Backdraft. This could easily have been a film where overacting, over-the-top special effects and heavy-handed directing were the way that things could have turned out. However, despite what the detractors say, the film is satisfying, the performances are good and the directing is excellent. The plot revolves around sibling rivalry and unresolved psychological problems from the past, but overall, I feel, it is a tribute to firemen and a way of saying thank you to these men on whom we rely so much in times of catastrophe and when emergencies threaten our very lives.

The film immerses us in the lives of two firefighters, the brothers McCafferty, Stephen and Brian. The younger (and now rookie fireman) Brian, watched his firefighter father die in a fire when a child. Stephen, the older is in the force and in the same station as Brian. The two brothers have had a hard time seeing eye to eye and the conflict between them is inflamed by working together. A series of suspicious blazes begin to occur and each has been set in order to kill someone. Brian starts to investigate the suspected arson and this seems to cause more friction between himself and his brother.

Robert De Niro, Kurt Russell, William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland give good performances and as it is to be suspected, the female roles in the film are rather underplayed and of secondary importance. The special effects are effective and keep one on the edge of the seat. A subplot involving political corruption is an essential part of the movie and underpins the action at several key points. The script could have been tighter, but still the movie works. This is certainly a film that is worth seeing.


For Goodwill, Aid and Economic Growth: The Funding of Academic Exchange Through the Swedish Institute, 1945–2010

Andreas Åkerlund

The article investigates the financial basis of state-sponsored international academic exchange through the Swedish Institute (SI). Founded in 1945 the SI is the main institution for Swedish public diplomacy and is as such part of modern foreign policy and Swedish soft power. This article maps the changing sources of funding as well as the sums spent on academic exchange from 1945–2010. It also discusses the various forms of exchange programs and gives an overview of the ideas behind and arguments for such programs. The overall picture is that state-sponsored exchange after 1945 has expanded. Not only has more and more money been spent on exchange, which led to an increase in the number of persons benefitted, but there has also been a diversification in exchange schemes towards parallel programs, each designed to fulfill a certain task. Though they fund different parts of the SI exchange scheme, the main sources of funding, however, have remained the same: the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, various development assistance agencies and programs as well as the Ministry for Education.

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Google’s Ray Kurzweil on Google’s role in the Future of Artificial Intelligence

Ray Kurzweil On Future of AI at Google:

The Goldilocks Planets and SETI

Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky on the current state of AI Research

SyNapse and Blue Brain Projects Update

As noted before I think the two most promising “Artificial Intelligence” projects are Blue Brain and DARPA SyNAPSE and I’m happy to see in this Boston blog “Neurdon” by some of the SyNAPSE project folks a few of the DARPA bucks going to elaborate on some of the technical goals of the SyNAPSE project:

SyNAPSE seeks not just to build brain-like chips, but to define a fundamentally distinct form of computational device. These new devices will excel at the kinds of distributed, data-intensive algorithms that complex, real-world environment require…

It’s very exciting stuff this “build a brain” competition.  Although I think the theoretical approach taken by Blue Brain is more consistent with what little we know about how brains work, I’d guess SyNAPSE’s access to DARPA funding will give it the long term edge in terms of delivering a functional thinking machine in the 15-20 year time frame most artificial intelligence researches believe we’ll need for that ambitious goal.

My optimism is greater than many because I think humans have rather dramatically exaggerated the complexity of their own feeble mental abilities by a quite a … bit, and I’d continue to argue that consciousness is much more a function of quantity than quality.

Another promising development in the artificial brain area is in Spain where  Blue Brain project partner universities are working on the project:  Cajal Blue Brain

Artificial Intuition a key to AI?

Convergence08 was a great conference with many interesting people and ideas. Thankfully the number of crackpots was very low, and even the “new age” mysticism stuff was at a minimum. Instead I found hundreds of authors, doctors, biologists, programmers, engineers, physicists, and more clear thinking folks all interested in how the new technologies will shape our world in ways more profound than we have ever experienced before.

My favorite insights came from Monica Anderson’s presentation on her approach to AI programming, which she calls “Artificial Intuition“. Unlike all other approaches to AI I’m familiar with Anderson uses biological evolution as her main analogs for conceptualizing human intelligence. I see this approach as almost a *given* if you have a good understanding of humans and thought, but it’s actually not a popular conceptual framework for AI, where most approaches rely on complex algorithmic logic – logic that Anderson argues clearly did not spawn human intelligence via evolution. Yet Anderson is by no means a programming neophyte – she’s a software engineer who has researched AI for some time, then spent two years programming at Google and then quit to start her own company, convinced that her AI approaches are on the right track.

Anderson’s work is especially impressive to me because as someone with a lot of work in biology under my belt (academically as well as corporeally) it has always surprised me how poorly many computer programmers understand even rudimentary biological concepts such as the underlying simplicity of the human neocortex and the basic principles of evolution which I’d argue emphatically have defined *every single aspect* of our human intelligence over a slow and clumsy, hit and miss process operating over millions of years. I think programmers tend to focus on mathematics and rule systems which are great modelling systems but probably a very poor analog for intelligence. This focus has in many ways poisoned the well of understanding about what humans and other animals do when they … think… which I continue to maintain is “not all that special”.

Anderson’s conceptual framework eliminates what I see as a key impediment to creating strong AI with conventional software engineering – ie having to build a massively complex programmable emulation of human thought. Instead, her approach ties together many simple routines that emulate the simple ways animals have developed to effectively interact with a changing environment.

Combining Anderson’s approach to the programming with the physical models of the neocortical column such as IBM Blue Brain would be my best bet for success in the AI field.

Live from Convergence08 Conference


Black Wildebeest

Originally, black wildebeest ranged the high veld temperate grasslands during the dry winter and the arid Karoo during the rains. However, due to hide-hunting in the 19th century, they were reduced to living on protected game farms in southern Africa.

The black wildebeest lived in grasslands similar to the habitat of the common wildebeest when it ranged free. However, with its thicker, darker coat, black wildebeest are able to range farther south than the Orange River, into colder climates. They rarely seek shade, and need little winter shelter. Black wildebeest eat the foliage of karroid bushes and shrubs. They live in somewhat arid regions and can subsist without drinking every day.

Females breed once yearly. The breeding season coincides with the end of the rainy season, February to April. Offspring gestate for 8 to 8.5 months; only 1 extremely precocial calf is born. Calving peaks in November-December. Calves can stand at 9 minutes post-parturition, and are grazing at least part time within one month. Calves are weaned after 4 months. Females mature at 1.5 to 2.5 years of age while males don’t mature until 3 years of age.


Do you need food to fuel your workouts or should you train on an empty stomach?

Researchers have been trying to find the answer to that for decades, while the fitness industry stands divided over this issue.

However, a March study published in the American Journal of Physiology – Endocrinology and Metabolism reveals not eating has greater benefits, at least for healthy, overweight men, which was the sample studied.

This verdict concurs with another 2013 research from United Kingdom’s Northumbria University published in the British Journal Of Nutrition, which proves that people can burn up to 20% more body fat by exercising in the morning before consuming breakfast.

Do bear in mind that in the latest study, the men were only walking and not doing any form of high intensity or gruelling exercises.

It’s important to note that if you’re going to do a particularly strenuous workout, then you should eat some carbohydrates at least 45 minutes prior to the session.

That way, you’ll prevent your blood sugar levels from dropping too low, which can cause dizziness and nausea.

Really, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and everything depends on your fitness goals – are you targeting to lose weight or get fitter?

According to Max Lower, a personal trainer and author of Two-Meal Day, consuming carbohydrates before exercise can increase performance in certain fields like sprinting and sports that use power movements, but it also stops the body from using stored body fat for energy, which means you are less likely to reap the reported fat-burning benefits.

“Glucagon is released to keep your blood sugar at normal levels. Your body starts to break down adipose (fat) tissue into free fatty acids, which can then be converted into a form of energy known as ketone bodies. In layman’s terms, you’re burning fat for energy.

“As soon as you start eating, the process is halted. Insulin now inhibits the breakdown of fatty acids, leading your body to burn the sugars you’ve just ingested. The fat-burning stage is over.

“If you think about it, this all makes perfect evolutionary sense.

“When food wasn’t as readily available as it is today, holding on to stored body fat was crucial for our survival. We evolved to last a long time between meals,” he writes in an article in The Telegraph last month.

I’m an advocate of eating something light at least 60 minutes before a workout to maximise my performance.

An empty stomach depletes my energy stores and I find I just cannot push myself hard enough to the point of discomfort.

Any shorter duration than that and you may suffer cramps. Your body needs enough time to digest the food.

But, that doesn’t mean you can put in an oily curry puff or doughnut before heading out to the gym.

A lot of people tend to do that as they think the upcoming workout will justify the extra non-healthy calories consumed.

Stay off foods high in fat and sugar just before a workout. High-acid foods, fatty food, and even dairy products before exercising can upset people’s stomachs and cause digestive woes.

A pre-workout meal should consist of mainly easy to digest, carbohydrate type foods in order to supply the energy requirements for the up-coming workout.

Fruit and yoghurt smoothies, or nuts, are a great way to get a fast, convenient and healthy meal in before an exercise session.

For post-workout meals, it should contain some protein in order to provide the body with the building blocks used to rebuild muscle tissue and help the body recover from the exercises performed.

There is a one-hour window, right after the workout, which is important from a replenishing standpoint.

You want to consume your post workout protein meal within that one-hour timeframe.

But, despite what you’ve heard about the wonders of protein, it’s not necessary (or healthy) to pound a massive protein shake the second you stop pumping iron (for bodybuilders), as your kidneys can only synthesise so much protein.

Roughly one gram of protein per kilogramme of body weight is plenty to maximise muscle growth.

Apart from the risk of kidney damage, there’s evidence that overloading your body with protein can contribute to an imbalance in the acidity of your blood, which in the long run could lead to bone weakening.

So, as long as your workout is low to medium intensity and your goal is fat loss or maintenance, go ahead and exercise on an empty stomach.

We all know of people who can jump out of bed and log in long distance running without a bite of food. My “batteries” would be dead by the second kilometre.

Another important pointer: remember to hydrate with water before, during and after a workout.


Tips for Choose Prom Dresses

Prom just around the corner, you need to wear perfect prom dresses at your prom party. A prom dress is one of the most important dresses in every girl’s life .we will carry this valuable memory in our rest of life. A perfect prom dress not just looked stunning; it should also flatter your figure. Here are some advices may help you to find your perfect prom dresses.

Firstly, set a budget. You should ask your parents how much money they can afford. There’s no need to throw much money on a prom dress, you still need to buy other dresses such as homecoming dresses, graduation dresses.etc. And most online shop have beautiful prom gowns but in very lowest price.

You should clearly know the party theme before shopping. You can’t wear a short dress at dance party.

prom dress 687

Different girls have different figures, make sure you try on different prom dresses before make decision. Ball Gown dresses are perfect for the party which in dance theme. Sheath prom gowns are the perfect choice for petite girls. If you are tall and curved, go on mermaid prom dresses .Princess prom dresses are almost flatter every kind body shape.

The color of prom gowns in various lots, you should choose the color by your taste and personality. Fuchsia prom gowns are always trendy in every year, but it’s not perfect for deep skin tones.

Beautiful Lace High Low Prom Dress 2016

If you want to looked stand out at the party , you can choose the prom dresses with some decoration such as sequins ,crystals , ruffles .etc, but make sure don’t choose these decoration at your body disadvantage .for example , if you have a big belly , you will go big wrong if the dress have decorations at the tummy .

Make sure you have start early, so that you have enough time to consider. Make sure your nails, heels, hairstyle and accessories are matching your prom gown.


Data Engineer - SC Cleared

Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited
Newton Solney
£40 per hour
07 Sep 2017
23 Sep 2017
Contract Type
Full Time

Data Analyst or engineer with experience with SQL Server, Python, holding SC clearance

Data Analyst - If you are a Data Analyst or engineer with experience with SQL Server, Python, you are SC cleared and you are looking for a contract in the Derby area, then the following contract job could be of interest to you.

Working for a major engineering business you assist them with the implementation of complex data projects for a variety of end clients. This will involve collecting, parsing, managing, analysing and visualising large sets of data to turn information into value using multiple platforms. You will work with BA's and Data Scientists to gain an understanding of customers' businesses' and then build solutions that will aid the customers with their decision making process. You will also work to secure the data supply line. Once an understanding of the customers' need is established you will need to plan, design and test the solution.

To be suitable for the role you will need SQL Server and Python development experience you should have also worked with a NoSQL (or not only SQL) database from any vendor. You should also have ETL experience. You must hold valid SC clearance also.

Rate is commensurate with skill set and experience.

If you are SC cleared, have the above experience and would like to be considered for the role, then please apply, online, today.


2017 is not the time to blink

Harp Duet

"The poems in Harp Duet are three dimensional. They have a strong physicality as words on the page, their space and spacing part of the rhythm and sense, and they touch amazing notes. There is a lot of courage, sensuality and painful joy in a poem like ‘Clarsach’, which naturally pairs with the shyer, dreamier ‘Sleeping in his Harp Case’. The poems’ erotics as much as their poetics are compelling. These are poems to come back to, and that will come back to you. The Mallarmé version ‘Corelines’, with which the pamphlet concludes is inventive and exquisite."

Phoebe Power received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and a Northern Writers’ Award in 2014. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Rialto, POEM, Oxford Poetry and Magma. She lives in York.


Durchsuche Hunderte Reise-Websites auf einmal nach Angeboten im Cornwallis

Rectory Road, Eye, IP23 8AJ, Großbritannien
+44 137 987 0326

+44 137 987 0326
So 24.09.
Mo 25.09.

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    Über das Hotel

    The hotel is nestled within 23 acres of tranquil topiary gardens and woodland. As guests enter the long drive beautifully lined with lime trees, a sense of peace and relaxation takes over. The hotel is just off the A140 motorway, which goes towards Eye. It is approximately 4.5 km away from the historical market town of Diss. The hotel is set back from the main road, where guests will only hear the chirping of the birds, but it is close enough to go out for the day in the surrounding area. Norwich International Airport, London Luton Airport, London Stansted, London City Airport, London Gatwick, West Midlands International and London Heathrow are about 41 km, 92 km, 110 km, 143 km, 195 km, 209 km and 212 km away, respectively.There are a total of 16 rooms at this country house. Guests are welcomed in the lobby. Facilities include a bar, restaurant, conference facilities, rooms service and a car park.Guests can fall into one of en suite bedrooms after a day of discovery, all of which have been individually designed and furnished with some fine pieces of furniture. En suite amenities include a shower, bath and hairdryer. Double or king-size beds are also available. In-room amenities include a direct dial telephone, TV, Internet access, tea and coffee making facilities, an ironing set and heating.The nearby beach is sandy.The hotel serves a continental breakfast buffet. Both lunch and dinner are available from a set menu and à la carte.

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Murano seeks the most glorious of merchants. There is a lot going on in the Venetian lagoon: glassblowers are creating breathtakingly beautiful pieces of art, which are sold to discerning customers by the businessmen of various shops.

Various and esteemed personalities visit the small islands of

Murano in search of treasures to acquire. If your work lives up to their high standards, fame and glory shall be yours and you shall achieve victory in this game.

Murano is an exciting mix of different game mechanics and challenging from beginning to end. The game board changes from turn to turn and every move counts.

Only at the end of the game, will you find out who has spent his resources best, built most skillfully, and placed his gondoliers most profitably!

New Buildings must always be placed adjacently to streets – the trick is buildings may be neutral or belong to a player, making profit from all the many customers in the alleys.

On your turn move a ship to the next free spot and play the corresponding action. Murano‘s simple worker placement mechanic involves a lot of decisions, with each movement changing the options for everyone!

The building cards provide many special benefits that allow for a broad range of strategies every time you play.


The Detached Cabin is Intended For an Athens Rooftop

 - Jan 12, 2015
References: & gizmag
The Detached cabin is a concept, envisioned by Greek architectural firm Panos Dragonas Christopoulou Architects, that aims to give residents a sense of solitude in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the big city. This tiny cabin is designed to be placed on the rooftop of an apartment block in Athens, and was conceived for the Minimum Structure art exhibit.

The Detached cabin concept will measure 9 square meters and include some very basic furniture including a raised sleeping area and a table. Solar panels could be used to generate basic electricity while a dry or composting matter would make the structure an even more eco-friendly affair.

The structure would be built from wood and offer gorgeous views of the surrounding city.


Bagirmi and Wadai

Chad Table of Contents

In addition to Kanem-Borno, two other states in the region, Bagirmi and Wadai, achieved historical prominence. The kingdom of Bagirmi emerged to the southeast of Kanem-Borno in the sixteenth century. Under the reign of Abdullah IV (1568-98), Islam was adopted, and the state became a sultanate, using judicial and administrative procedures. Later, a palace and court were constructed in the capital city of Massenya.

Bagirmi's political history was a function of its strength and unity in relation to its larger neighbors. Absorbed into KanemBorno during the reign of Aluma, Bagirmi broke free later in the 1600s, only to be returned to tributary status in the mid-1700s. During periods of strength, the sultanate became imperialistic. It established control over small feudal kingdoms on its peripheries and entered into alliances with nearby nomadic peoples. Early in the nineteenth century, Bagirmi fell into decay and was threatened militarily by the nearby kingdom of Wadai. Although Bagirmi resisted, it accepted tributary status in order to obtain help from Wadai in putting down internal dissension. When Rabih Fadlallah's forces burned Massenya in 1893, the twenty-fifth sultan, Abd ar Rahman Gwaranga, sought and received protectorate status from the French.

In about 1800, during the reign of Sabun, the sultanate of Wadai began to expand its power. A new trade route north--via Ennedi, Al Kufrah, and Benghazi--was discovered, and Sabun outfitted royal caravans to take advantage of it. He began minting his own coinage and imported chain mail, firearms, and military advisers from North Africa. Sabun's successors were less able than he, and Darfur took advantage of a disputed political succession in 1838 to put its own candidate in power in Wara, the capital of Wadai. This tactic backfired, however, when Darfur's choice, Muhammad Sharif, rejected Darfur's meddling and asserted his own authority. In doing so, he gained acceptance from Wadai's various factions and went on to become Wadai's ablest ruler.

Sharif conducted military campaigns as far west as Borno and eventually established Wadai's hegemony over Bagirmi and kingdoms as far away as the Chari River. In Mecca, Sharif had met the founder of the Sanusiyya Islamic brotherhood, a movement that was strong among the inhabitants of Cyrenaica (in present-day Libya) and that was to become a dominant political force and source of resistance to French colonization. Indeed, the militaristic Wadai opposed French domination until well into the twentieth century.

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Source: U.S. Library of Congress


Student Research Day Abstracts and Posters

Document Type

Chapman access only Poster

Publication Date

Spring 5-14-2015

Faculty Advisor(s)

Ann Gordon

Income inequality has been increasing in the United States since the 1970s. The recession and recovery only exacerbated this disparity, with the top earners rising in wealth at unprecedented levels, while wages for middle class people remained stagnant. However, this issue of increasing income inequality has not been seen as an issue of importance in mainstream discussion and little has been done by politicians to address it. While research has been conducted regarding the relationship between peoples’ perceptions of inequality and factors such as the political economic system, expectations of the economy, cultural values, and actual levels of inequality, there are still factors to be examined. Using data from the American National Election Studies 2012 Time Series Study this paper explores the factors of political identity, level of education, and income in their effect on perceptions of income inequality in the U.S. Political identity in terms of the American two-party system and education have not been studied directly as causes for perceptions of inequality in the U.S. In addition, while there are several researchers who do attribute an individual’s personal wealth and income to being a primary factor affecting their perception of inequality, there is antithetical evidence, including data from the ANES study, indicating that there is actually an insignificant correlation between income and perceptions of income inequality. By examining the relationship between these factors, the disconnect between the reality of the increasing economic divide in the United States and the lack of action against this movement can be understood.

Presented at the Spring 2015 Student Research Day at Chapman University.


Saturday, March 20, 2010

Are We Living In "A Moment Of Punctuated Equilibrium"?

This blogger spent most of his life, prior to 2004, living on the edge of — or within — The Great Plains. It is raining today in the heart of Texas and this blogger has never seen a rainstorm that he didn't like. Life in The (semi-arid) Great Plains heightens appreciation for rainfall.

[x YouTube/The Necromancer143 Channel]
"Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" (1969)
By B. J. Thomas

If this is a (fair & balanced) appreciation of that farm girl — Clio, so be it.

[x American Scholar]
Historians And Nature
By Donald Worster

Tag Cloud of the following article

created at TagCrowd.com

We can hardly speak of evolution without mentioning the name of Charles Darwin. So I will begin with the founding father. Early in 1834 the young naturalist Darwin left his ship’s berth aboard the H.M.S. Beagle to venture across the grassy plains of Patagonia. Those plains left an impact on his mind that was almost as powerful as the impact of the more famous Galápagos Islands. Despite their dusty monotony, the plains offered him vivid glimpses into the deep, unknown history of life on earth—vestiges of creatures now extinct and ways of life now vanished.

At Port St. Julian, where grassland meets ocean, he discovered the fossilized remains of a large mammal. It was the first time in his explorations that he had come across such ancient bones. They turned out to be bones of an extinct giant llama, not the mastodon he supposed, but unmistakably they spoke of “the changed state of the American continent,” where species succeeded species, throwing “more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.” The grasslands forced Darwin to confront the power of nature, the mutability of organisms, and the ecological revolutions that had occurred in the past.

Darwin is surely the most influential scientist in modern times, not only as the founder of evolutionary biology and ecology but also as the inspirer of anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and philosophers. Despite the stubborn resistance of many religious people, his science has profoundly reshaped our modern worldview–indeed, evolution is its very foundation. His book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, argued that life has evolved by wholly natural processes, without any supernatural intervention. Every organism, he pointed out, varies in some degree or trait from all other organisms, and that variability is basic to evolution. In a world of limited resources, variation must compete against variation, and those individuals that survive and leave offspring provide the next generation of organisms that, in turn, may leave heirs of their own. The less successful—those less fitted to their environment—eventually vanish into the earth, unless conditions suddenly change in their favor.

Today we know far more about the history of life than Darwin did, although the main outlines of his theory of evolution through natural selection have held up amazingly well. Since the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists have learned how to track natural selection and other forms of evolution back in time millions of years. Through the science of ecology we know a lot more about how complex ecosystems evolve, often in response to large-scale and sometimes sudden and violent environmental disturbance by shifting climatic regimes, drifting continents, and crashing meteors. And not least in significance, we have directly observed what Darwin did not actually see in Patagonia or the Galápagos Islands: evolution actually taking place, not in some long ago period and at imperceptible rates, but in the present at a measurable pace.

We also know much more than Darwin did about how humans have evolved in mind and body, and we are beginning to establish scientifically how much our behavior is rooted in our genes, so that we are not solely the product of society or culture. Edward O. Wilson was not the first, back in 1975, to argue that our behavior has much in common with other species. But today that argument no longer meets such fierce resistance. The study of evolutionary psychology is making significant gains toward explaining how the brain has evolved and how it shapes what we see and how we behave. Today, more and more social scientists, following the lead of the natural scientists, are eagerly pursuing neo-Darwinian theories at the level of the individual mind, group interaction, and even religion and culture.

Human beings, those scientists tell us, are not born into this world with minds like blank pages, waiting to be written on by others—family, church, politicians, advertising executives. We emerged as a species a half-million years ago, during the Pleistocene, and ever since we have followed what Wilson calls “epigenetic rules,” which he defines as “innate operations in the sensory system of the brain. These are rules of thumb that allow organisms to find rapid solutions to problems encountered in the environment. They predispose individuals to view the world in a particular innate way and automatically to make certain choices as opposed to others.”

This is not to say that our genes explain every bit of human behavior. In many species, evolution can be cultural as well as biological, as Darwin himself realized and modern scientists agree. Cultural beliefs and ideas—or what some call “memes,” the cultural counterpart to genes–pass from individual to individual or from group to group or are selected for survival. Particularly in the case of Homo sapiens that process of cultural evolution deserves at least an equal place alongside those of biological evolution.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has defined culture “as a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)—for the governing of behavior.” Those control mechanisms can be a powerful means of survival–more rapid and flexible in their response to environmental change than genetic variation alone.

Human evolutionary theory thus rests on the concept of a “dual inheritance,” in which genes and cultures both are powerful determinants and each co-evolves with the other. We can distinguish cultural change from genetic change and can see how cultural change can follow an independent path from genetic change, but no great or eternal chasm separates them. Over time, genes and cultures interact repeatedly, constraining or reinforcing each other, forming the dual inheritance that shapes the life ways of the human organism.

If ever there was a scientific theory that is fundamentally historical, that purports to explain change over time, it is evolution through natural selection and its corollary, humankind’s dual inheritance. Yet I have to admit that my fellow historians, teaching in history departments and professing to study that process of change, have been highly resistant to evolutionary theory. Why has that been generally so? Why have historians insisted on drawing a rigid boundary separating culture from nature? And what are the possibilities for overcoming this separation?

The good news is that the field of environmental history, which has been emerging over the past two or three decades, has successfully contested the old dualism that separates historians from the natural sciences. Environmental historians focus on the relations that humans have carried on with the rest of nature. They take for granted that humans are part of the natural world and that historians should make history more truthful by placing human life in that broader context. In contrast to social or political historians, environmental historians read books and articles on evolution and ecology and have been trying to bridge the gap separating them from the natural sciences.

So far, however, environmental historians have focused mainly on the human impact on nature—i.e., how humans have changed the land, exploited natural resources, and replaced the wilderness with cities. Let me give you an example that represents an effort to bring evolution into history but does so by emphasizing the growing human impact on evolution.

In 2003 Edmund Russell, a historian at the University of Virginia, published an important essay entitled “Evolutionary History.” He begins by noting that evolution can occur through artificial selection, like the breeding of dogs or cattle, as well as through natural selection. Darwin, Russell reminds us, began his book On the Origin of Species by comparing the two kinds of selection. He observed how plant and animal breeders change their domesticated plants and animals and then concluded that nature does for the whole earth what the cattle breeder does with his livestock. Artificial selection led him to natural selection. However, Russell turns Darwin’s reasoning around to show that what the cattle breeder does for the farm, humans are doing for the whole earth–guiding evolution to suit their needs. The chasm between what is natural and what is artificial vanishes, and in Russell’s view the whole environment is becoming increasingly a product of human intervention.

But there are a few anomalies in this picture of an increasingly man-made planet. Many organisms are evolving in response to our human presence, but without any human control or management–far from it. Insects, for example, have evolved rapidly to withstand the barrage of modern pesticides. Deadly germs have evolved even in sterilized hospital rooms, defying all efforts to stamp them out. Cougars have learned how to wait for new kinds of prey along the jogger’s trail. This is not natural selection as Darwin understood it, nor is it similar to deliberate breeding or hybridization, which is to say, artificial selection. An insecticide-resistant mosquito or herbicide-resistant thistle is not the product of human intention in the way that a prize bull or a book of poetry is. In such cases organisms are self-evolving. They do so in an environment that humans have created but do not truly manage. Such organisms elude control and often pose a nuisance or a danger to their hosts.

Russell has offered us an important way to bring history and evolution together. However, I want to propose another way of thinking, one that regards human cultures not as completely independent forces changing the world, but as strategies that people develop in order to adjust to the natural world and exploit its resources. Instead of making nature a subset of culture, as Russell does, historians might see culture as a subset of nature. We can think of this approach, following the lead of biologists, as redefining culture as a mental response to opportunities or pressures posed by the natural environment. In other words, culture can be defined as a form of “adaptation.”

The word adaptation is as familiar to historians as it is to biologists. Historians often talk of cultures clashing and adapting to one other, mixing and merging through trade, immigration, and mass communications, or they talk about societies adapting to new technologies like the automobile or computer. More rarely, however, do they talk about people adapting to their natural environments. And this is a huge failing: historians have paid insufficient attention to evolutionary adaptation in general and in particular to the role that culture plays in adaptation to environment—adaptation to the capacity of soils to grow crops, the supply of water needed to sustain life, the vicissitudes of climate, the limits to growth and material consumption in a finite landscape.

The Oxford Dictionary of Science defines adaptation as “any change in the structure or functioning of an organism that makes it better suited to its environment.” After the word “organism,” we should add the phrase, “or society or culture.” In the case of biological organisms, adaptation occurs whenever a new shape of wing or beak allows a bird to fly better or crack more seeds than its rivals. Such change does not, of course, depend on intention or willpower; it proceeds blindly to fit organisms better to their environments, enabling them to use resources more efficiently. In the case of artifact-making organisms—the beaver building a lodge or the heron a nest–adaptation can mean modifying the environment to improve the organism’s chance of survival and those of her offspring. In the case of culture-making organisms like humans, adaptation can involve acquiring new information, learning new rules, and altering one’s behavior.

No society, whether the mammoth hunters in ancient North America or the commuters in today’s suburbs, has ever reached a state of perfect fitness to its environment. True, some societies have managed to sustain themselves far longer than others. Historians should ask why that was so; why some endured over long stretches of time while others did not; why some societies created more effective environmental constraints than others; and how those rules changed as conditions changed. Historians, in other words, should join evolutionists to ask what both adaptation and maladaptation look like. We should be investigating how societies can become trapped by a maladapted cultural inheritance and even become extinct, leaving their remains behind in libraries and museums.

As young Darwin discovered in South America, the grasslands are a highly legible place to watch evolution, adaptation, and maladaptation at work. This is true in North America as much as South America. As recently as the 19th century, North America’s grassland ecosystems stretched across almost a billion acres. At their maximum extent those grasslands swept from the Texas panhandle into Saskatchewan and extended westward from Ohio and Indiana to the Rockies, with significant outliers in the intermountain West. Grasses dominated that vast expanse because the environment was neither consistently humid nor arid, because droughts were frequent and temperatures fluctuated dramatically.

The grasses survived by investing most of their growth underground in elaborate root structures that captured the moisture and held the soil in place. They never achieved a static equilibrium but spread and then shrank back, nearly died and then recovered. Today, because of human intervention, the original grasslands are much diminished: the tall-grass prairies of the Midwest have shrunk to a single-digit percent of their extent in 1800 A.D.; they have been replaced by corn and soybeans. At the same time the native short-grasses of the High Plains have lost more than a third of their original extent.

The first historian of the North American grasslands was Walter Prescott Webb, author of The Great Plains (1931). No historian before him had made adaptation so important a theme. The dry, treeless plains, he argued, forced Americans to alter their way of life. They came out of a forest environment and forest history, going back far into the European past. They were unprepared for the ecological challenge of the prairies and plains. Eventually, through trial and error, they adapted, changing their weaponry, their fencing, their modes of transportation, their laws governing water rights, their farms and agricultural practices. A grassland version of what it meant to be American emerged, distinct from that of the eastern United States.

Nowadays, historians tend to dismiss Webb’s work as a case of “environmental determinism.” They are wrong in doing so because most of the adaptations Webb chose were impossible to dismiss: they were indeed examples of how nature determines what tools or techniques would work and what would not on the plains. On the other hand, Webb’s critics are right in the sense that his list of adaptations were limited to material culture techniques and technologies—and did not include deeper levels of culture and attitudes. Webb convincingly showed, for example, how barbed wire had to be invented where there was little wood for fencing, how cattle came to be herded on open range, and how windmills were needed to pump up groundwater where rainfall failed. But that kind of change did not necessarily indicate a change in the values and beliefs that settlers brought to the grasslands. Their non-material culture did not undergo any significant metamorphosis. The Texas rancher’s view of the world did not differ significantly from that of the Georgia cotton planter or the Massachusetts textile manufacturer.

That American culture did not adapt in any deeper cultural way is a fact that a few other historians have had trouble explaining. Following closely on Webb’s heels, James Malin published in 1936 a study of what he called “adaptation of the agricultural system” to the grasslands and therefore deserves credit, along with Webb, for trying to apply an evolutionary approach to history. But Malin was a champion of the plow. His idea of adaptation was hard to distinguish from conquest.

He had begun writing during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when drought, high winds, exposed soils, and massive erosion turned the region into a world-class disaster. Conservationists, scientists, and government officials were pointing fingers at the plow as the main culprit. Farmers had not adapted, they said; rather, they had destroyed the vegetation that was well adapted to the plains environment and were now suffering the consequences. Contemporary scientists like John Weaver, Frederick Clements, and Paul Sears, along with many rueful ranchers and farmers, had concluded that the plowman was partly responsible for his plight. A committee appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt called for major changes, not merely in machinery or techniques, but in the plowman’s “attitudes of mind,” including his attitude of environmental domination, economic individualism, and extreme risk-taking for the sake of profit. These attitudes, the committee argued, were maladaptive.

Observers had continued to ask whether white settlers who turned the North American prairies into plowed fields of wheat and corn knew what they were doing. Did they know what they were undoing? Has the culture associated with plains farming ever truly respected or adapted to nature to the point of becoming sustainable?

According to the historian Geoff Cunfer, the answer is yes. His recent prize-winning book On the Great Plains marks an impressive milestone in evolutionary history. Cunfer makes far more sophisticated use of census data, plant ecology, and soil chemistry to provide a fuller history than Malin, but he ends up with the same shaky conclusion: Anglo agriculture on the plains, he argues, evolved after an initial period of maladaptation to be more adaptive and sustainable. “Farmers quickly learned,” he writes, “which land could support crops and which would serve only as pasture for cattle.” Already by the 1930s, he believes, that region’s agriculture had reached a state of evolutionary fitness, and only an unforeseeable change in the weather could disrupt that adaptation. The Dust Bowl was, he goes on, “a temporary disruption in a stable system.”

Such an upbeat assessment, however, cannot be reconciled with the reality of economic decline and persistent vulnerability all over the region. It pays little attention to how farmers have long dismissed the native grasslands as buffers against disaster, or to how they continue to take risks in a competitive economy, or how they put short-term profit over long-term stability.

If farmers had learned how to listen to nature, then why did her voice prove less audible whenever crop prices rose substantially and promised quick and easy returns? In such boom times farmers were easily convinced by the financial and manufacturing sector to buy more machinery, use more chemicals, and put more acres under the plow or to use their lands more intensively. Over and over during the 20th century, farmers chose temporary panaceas over new “attitudes of mind.” For example, in the decades that followed the “dirty ’30s” they put their hopes in the miracle of deep-well irrigation, purchasing powerful water pumps to tap the immense Ogallala Aquifer in order to irrigate fields and free themselves from the persistent threat of drought. This “man-made rain” earned billions of dollars by irrigating crops to feed to cattle in confined animal feedlot operations. But it also led to the breaking out of marginal lands with unstable soils and to keeping lands in production that should have reverted to natural vegetation. And of course finally that strategy exposed the irrigators to a new potential catastrophe—eventual depletion of the ground water leading to economic collapse.

The voice of government, like the voice of credit and industry, has often been a force working against, not in favor of, adaptation. Take, for example, federal subsidies and disaster assistance, which have become a perennial prop to the Great Plains economy. Federal assistance to agriculture has shifted large amounts of cash from urban taxpayers while encouraging a mass-production, factory mentality, often in defiance of environmental realities. It was a government official who in a moment of exuberance proclaimed that through deep-well irrigation farmers could achieve a “climate-free agriculture” on the plains. Not only was it a false promise, it was potentially a dangerous one. In an era of global warming and long-term desiccation of the plains, such wishful thinking might prove to have severe consequences.

The economic culture of the Great Plains is not indigenous to the region. Market or capitalist economics first emerged on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean more than three centuries ago, long before Europeans made it to the interior of North America. Since then those beliefs have traveled far and wide like the invasive dandelion, until they have established themselves in every corner of the region.

The full origin of that economic culture that has dominated American agriculture is far more than we can explore today. To my knowledge, it has never been explored fully as a form of evolutionary adaptation by economists, historians, or sociologists. But let us simply note that the rise of market culture coincided with the “Age of Discovery,” the period from about 1500 A.D. on when ambitious navigators like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Francis Drake, through their voyages to the New World and the Pacific, stimulated Europeans of all classes to dream about the possibility of vast natural resources lying on the other side of vast oceans, so much more abundant than their depleted, overtaxed home environments. Capitalists and many others began to ask how those resources might be possessed and exploited.

That discovery of an entirely “new” hemisphere lying on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention the hitherto unknown or underappreciated world of the Pacific and Asia, was one of the most extraordinary events in human history. It represents, to borrow from the language of invertebrate paleontologists, a moment of punctuated equilibrium, when evolution abruptly picks up new energy and goes forward at a more rapid pace, after a long period of relative stasis. As in biology, so in culture: A new global environment and an influx of natural resources challenged the fairly stable body of European culture, which had long been characterized by slow, gradual change.

Evolutionists have shown how biological traits like the scales of reptiles or the hemispherical eyeballs of fish can persist more or less unaltered for very long periods. On average, mammalian species survive for a million years, clams for 10 million. In contrast, human cultures can rise and fall much more rapidly.

The life span of a cultural innovation may last less than a year, but market culture has survived much longer than that. No passing fashion, it has been around since what one historian has called “the long 16th century.” From that period down to the present market culture has changed its phenotype a great deal as it has encountered different societies and ecosystems. It has thrived in all kinds of environments and seems to be in no immediate danger of extinction. But its stunning successes in terms of cultural evolution and geographic diffusion neither obscure past failures nor guarantee a permanent future.

The adaptive advantages of market culture lie mainly in its ability to mobilize capital and labor quickly and efficiently in order to seize resources in distant lands and make them available to consumers living far from the site of extraction. But market culture looks more successful as an adaptation at the global rather than local level. While it was spreading rapidly across continents to discover and exploit resources, it was often destroying local ecosystems, depleting soils, forests, and minerals, and piling up wastes–a strategy that can work only until every locale is appropriated and exploited.

The maladaptive aspects of this economic culture need to be examined as carefully as its triumphs. Historians should ask whether market culture has produced in any place a sustainable way of life or whether it has typically led to land depletion and land degradation, pollution of air and water, population instability, derelict rural or industrial districts, dying towns, and abandoned farmsteads. Could this culture have survived as long as it has without the windfall of the New World’s rich ecosystems and geological deposits?

In biology the evolutionist tries to explain change over time by constructing what evolutionary biologist Ernst W. Mayr calls a “historical narrative.” Such a narrative addresses questions like these: Why did this trait appear in an organism when it did, what function did it serve? How did it reshape the whole organism and help it reproduce itself? When did the trait decline and disappear? These are good questions for historians as well as biologists to pursue. They should lead us to create narratives around changes in soil or climate conditions and in accessibility of resources and to relate those changes to technological innovation, the rules people make up and follow, and the moral ideals they invent to guide their relations with the natural world.

Telling such stories would require that historians follow the natural sciences by taking the environment more seriously as a force in human life. Historians would need to acknowledge, with the aid of evolutionary psychology, the reality of a human nature that evolves through time. At the same time they would need to think about the role of cultural beliefs and rules as a quasi-independent but never isolated force on the planet—a force that never functions in an ecological void, a force that can have a devastating effect on other forms of life and can enhance or threaten our survival.

The human mind is remarkable for finding multiple pathways through the natural world, but those paths are always contingent on what came before and what is happening now to the planet. Historians need to acknowledge the importance of the environment and to embrace the theory and worldview of evolution for the dazzling light it sheds on the origins, development, and fate of humanity. Ω

[Donald Worster currently is the Strachan Donnelley Distinguished Visiting Environmental Scholar in the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale University; he is the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Professor of U.S. History at the University of Kansas. Worster received a Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and a Master of Arts in 1964 from the University of Kansas. He continued his education at Yale University, earning an M.Phil. in 1970 and a PhD. in 1971. He is considered one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history; and in 2009, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of two biographies of John Muir and John Wesley Powell, and he won a Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.]

Copyright © 2010 The American Scholar

Copyright © 2010 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves


Would you like some, Lily?

Would ya? . . . HaHa, it tastes so good and you can’t have any ’cause I ate it all.

That is what Ella would have been saying this morning if she could talk.  Lily has found that if she sits near the baby’s highchair she might get some food if Ella is feeding herself some little puffs (similar to cheerios).  Well today Ella was teasing Lily and offering her a puff until she decided to eat it herself and popped it in her mouth.


Prenatal Massage

Jupiter Images/Pixland/Thinkstock
Jupiter Images/Pixland/Thinkstock

Prenatal massage, also known as pregnancy massage, helps to alleviate aches and pains associated with a pregnant woman’s shifting center of gravity, and growing pressure on the feet, legs, and back, joints. It is also a great way to promote overall health, wellness, and reduce stress. Mom-to-be is positioned on her side with pillows and support for her neck, knees and arms. Relaxing, nurturing massage with attention to areas of muscle tension, can be beneficial to sleep and circulation. There are some areas where reflexology and firm pressure should be avoided to avoid causing contractions. Discuss with your physician if massage is a safe and beneficial option for you.

30 Minute Massage

60 Minute Massage

90 Minute Massage


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Learn English Sakon Nakhon TOEIC Thailand

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Ten Reasons To Speak English

Learning English is becoming more important, and essential to people all over the world. More and more of us, are deciding to study English as a second language. Increasingly, more countries now include English as a second choice language in school syllabus, with children now starting to learn English at much younger.

However, have you ever wondered why learning English as a second language is so important? I have compiled a list of what I feel, are the best Ten reasons, to venture on in an English language course.

1- Most Common Language in the World

Did you know, that English is now the most commonly spoken language in the world? In fact, One person in five people can communicate, or at least understand some English!

2- The Language of Science & Aviation

English is the basic language of aviation, science, computing, world diplomacy, and not forgetting tourism. Understanding and Knowing even the smallest amount of English will increase your chances, of getting better employment positions, within multinational companies. Wheather that be in your home country, or applying for employment positions abroad.

3- Spoken in some 54 Countries

English is the official language of 54 sovereign states, as well as 27 non-sovereign entities. Now, let’s face it. That is a lot of people to get acquainted with and speak to.

4- 400 Million People Use It

It is said, that English is spoken as a first language by, approximately 400 million people from around the world.

5- The Language for Media

The Media industry is predominantly spoken and written using English. If you can speak and communicate in English, there is no need to rely on, subtitles or translations anymore when enjoying your favorite songs, books, movies and television shows.

6- The World Wide Web Language

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, a British national, invented the world wide web for us all, and English is the language of the internet. Many sites are compiled and written in English. By understanding English, no matter what level your language skills are at, you will be able to understand them and participate, in discussions and forums.

7- English is easier to learn than most Languages

Understanding English may seem a daunting task but is in fact built on a very simple alphabet. An Alphabet consisting of just 26 letters. Therefore, making it a fairly easy language to learn, when you compare other languages.

8- Learning English is Fun

I believe that English is one of the few languages, where you can describe something or a certain situation in astronomical depths. Making the English language, not just useful but enhances your satisfaction when using it. So progress in learning English is achieved much faster as your enjoyment increases.

9- Using One Language as a Common Tounge

It’s widely stated that the world is smaller, and I can’t help thinking that the understanding and speaking of English has been a significant influence in this. If you all can communicate in a common tongue, then the opportunities for discovering more about people, places, and their culture are endless.

10- English Enhances Multicultural Boundaries

Leading me on nicely to my last reason why learning English is so important. Learning English is fun, and as you grow and become more proficient, then your confidence increases while speaking it. Very few experiences in life will make you grow as an individual, more than learning values, culture, and way of life, in an environment that is entirely different from your way of life.

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If you would like to learn English as a second language, feel free in contacting us, to have an informal chat about how we can help you.

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A regal 19th Century residence

Set on the slope of Shamla Hill, the Jehan Numa Place is a stunning white structure that combines British Colonial, Italian Renaissance and Classical Greek architecture. Splashes of colourful bougainvillea, the champa, the palm and the flowering creepers are everywhere. A varied, luxuriant green drapes the building and the open spaces under a wide sky to create an enchanting visual treat. Arched walkways, colonnaded verandahs and verdant lawns in intimate courtyards take you to equally charming rooms. Jehan Numa Palace blends with nature and it is only fitting that one of its wonderful restaurants sits under the shade of an enormous mango tree, as its name so eloquently states.


Justice Sonia Sotomayor Slams Supreme Court Colleagues for Going Easy on Police

Justice Sonia Sotomayor believes her Supreme Court colleagues are letting police officers off the hook, and she’s not OK with that.

MORE: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Keeps it Real (Again): Not Everyone Can Pull Themselves 'Up by the Bootstraps'

In a dissent, backed only by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sotomayor explained how the high court helped skew the legal system in favor of the police, causing cops to get away with excessive use of force.

“Our failure to correct the error made by the courts below leaves in place a judgment that accepts the word of one party over the word of another,” Sotomayor wrote. “It also continues a disturbing trend regarding the use of this Court’s resources. We have not hesitated to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity in cases involving the use of force.”

Sotomayor is talking specifically about a legal technicality called a “summary judgment,” when the court enters a judgment for one party and against another party without a full trial.

This is what was being decided on through Salazar-Limon v. Houston.

Police officer Chris Thompson shot and paralyzed unarmed Ricardo Salazar-Limon during a traffic stop in Houston, Texas. The Latino man, who had been drinking, was pulled over after weaving from lane to lane. Salazar-Limon, who had no criminal history, was asked to get out of his car. When the officer attempted to handcuff him, there was some sort of struggle. Salazar-Limon says he was walking away. Thompson said the man reached for his waistband, giving him reason to shoot him.

This is a case that would see a full trial. However, because Salazar-Limon never explicitly disputed in court or testimony that he had reached for his waistband, lower courts, now backed by the Supreme Court, interpreted the key facts to be undisputed – never mind that he never had a weapon to reach for.

For Sotomayor, this is a flawed way to perceive the case. For her, there are major facts in dispute, including when and how quickly Thompson fired his gun. Even more, the Puerto Rican justice notes that Salazar-Limon's testimony and decision to file a lawsuit implies that he never reached for his waistband, even if the words "I did not reach for my waistband" never came out of his mouth.

“The most natural inference to be drawn from Salazar-Limon’s testimony was that he neither turned nor reached for his waistband before he was shot — especially as no gun was ever recovered,” Sotomayor wrote.

She continued: “This is not a difficult case. When a police officer claims that the victim of the use of force took some act that would have justified that force, and the victim claims he did not, summary judgment is improper. The Fifth Circuit’s decision should be reversed.”

Still, the high court granted summary judgment in the case, which, for Sotomayor, is evidence that the legal system is rigged to favor law enforcement.

PLUS: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Slams Racial Profilers in Recent Case

“We take one step back today,” she wrote. “I respectfully dissent.”


Interpretation and Social Criticism

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 1993 - Social Science - 96 pages
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What do social critics do? I How do they go about doing it? Where do their principles come from? How do critics establish their distance from the people and institutions they criticize?

Michael Walzer addresses these problems in succinct and engaging fashion, providing a philosophical framework for understanding social criticism as a social practice. Walzer maintains that social criticism is an ordinary activity--less the offspring of scientific knowledge than the "educated cousin of common complaint"-- and does not depend for its force or accuracy upon any sort of high theory. In his view, the social critic is not someone radically detached and disinterested, who looks at society as a total stranger and applies objective and universal principles. The true social critic must stand only a little to the side of his society--unlike Jean-Paul Sartre during the Algerian war, for example, who described himself as an enemy of his own people. And unlike Lenin, who judged Russian society against a standard worked out with reference to other places far away.

The "connected" critic is the model Walzer offers, one whose distance is measured in inches but who is highly critical nevertheless. John Locke is one example of the connected critic who argued for religious toleration not as a universal right ordained by reason but as a practical consequence of Protestant theology. The biblical prophets, such as Amos, were also men of their own day, with a particular quarrel to conduct with their fellows; the universalism of that quarrel is our own extrapolation. Walzer explains where critical principles come from, how much distance is "critical distance," and what the historical practice of criticism has actually been like in the work of social philosophers such as Marx, Gramsci, Koestler, Lenin, Habermas, and Rawls.

Walzer posits a moral world already in existence, a historical product, that gives structure to our lives but whose ordinances are always uncertain and in need of scrutiny, argument, and commentary. The social critic need bring to his task only the ordinary tools of interpretation. Philosophers, political theorists, and all readers seriously interested in the possibility of a moral life will find sustenance and inspiration in this book.

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How do we arrive at moral principles? With wit and charm Walzer argues that working principles are disclosed through social criticism. Social ideals may serve particular interests, but they must ... Read full review

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Mapping Agile Organisational Culture

One of the crucial (yet often under-acknowledged) aspects of digital transformation is nurturing and enabling the organisational culture that can support greater agility. Teams working in agile ways but surrounded by the wrong kind of culture will encounter the kind of friction that can be potentially disastrous to progress.

One of the best ways of thinking about organisational culture comes from Edgar Schein (author of Organizational Culture and Leadership and a former professor at MIT Sloan School of Management). Company culture might be defined in terms of the pattern of beliefs and behaviours that grows up around how the business has overcome challenges and prospered. Schein describes it as:

And he defines three key ways in which culture manifests within organisations: observable artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions.

Artifacts and behaviours: visible behaviours and elements in an organisation that might reveal what the company demonstrates as important, but might also be recognised by people who are not part of the culture. This might include physical surroundings and technologies but also language, jargon, stories, myths and practices. This might be thought of as the surface elements.

Espoused values: qualities and rules of behaviour that are advocated by a company’s leadership and management, and show how the organisation might represent itself. This might include published things such as a code of conduct, public statements or specific events and material.

Basic assumptions: less tangible, but powerful, underlying determinants of an organization’s attitudes, thought processes, and actions. These might include ingrained values and assumptions that are unquestioned, taken for granted, largely invisible and therefore hard to recognise from within.

A matrix like the Competing Values Framework enables us to map organisational culture on a 2 x 2 with axes expressing values that are widely different: the vertical axis pits flexibility and discretion against stability and control; the horizontal axis has internal focus and integration set against external focus and differentiation. In the book we discuss the kinds of cultures that enable greater agility as being rooted in people focused attributes such as autonomy, empowerment, collaboration — all qualities that sit more comfortably in the upper half of this matrix, and the opposite of those cultures that are more rooted in control, consistency, uniformity and competition. That’s not to say that agile teams can’t operate in more rigid and controlling cultures, but there is likely to be conflict that we need to be aware of and protect against.

Given the importance of the people side of digital transformation, and of employee experience as well as customer experience as a driver for change, then culture becomes critical. If the desire is to promote a culture that is more suited to agile attributes and working, then we need to think about this in three dimensions not one. Culture is far more than the visible signals (posters, words on walls, colourful cushions and ping pong tables) that some seem to think it is. Whilst artifacts and behaviours might be thought of as more obvious, surface elements, it is the basic assumptions that are deeply embedded, often poorly recognised, and which are therefore powerful drivers of behaviour.

Recognising what these are is an important first step in addressing behaviour change (there’s value here in an outside-in perspective, for example from new employees). Then we need to focus how to unlearn existing behaviours in order to relearn new ones, something we describe in the book in terms of understanding, breaking and creating organisational habits. Because that what they are — customs, practices, routines that are automatic, unquestioned. Habits support assumptions and behaviours. Assumptions and behaviours can either block change from happening at all, or they can be powerful enablers for transformation.

For more like this, order your copy of Building the Agile Business Through Digital Transformation, or you can join our community to access exclusive content related to the book.

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Originally published at Building The Agile Business.


NFL NBA Lockout Explained. Finally!

Christopher DavisContributor IMarch 6, 2010

As some may know, some also don't. We are getting very close to having "Work Stoppages" in both the NFL, and the NBA. I'm going to try to explain the best I can with different factors I've looked into.
The NFL is having problems trying to make a new Collective Bargaining Agreement(CBA). The old one ends in march 2011. See, the 2006 CBA increased the salary cap from $85.5 million per team in 2005 to $123 million per team in 2009.
The salary cap requires teams to spend at least $86.4 million in salaries, which smaller market teams don't like. The NFL makes most of its money from TV contracts, which makes these smaller market teams feel disadvantaged.
Revenue differences between big and small market teams are big enough that the state of Louisiana had to pay over $186 mill to bailout the Saints, and keep them in New Orleans.
In '06 the CBA was supposed to go into the 2012 season, with the option that the NFL and NFL Players Association can shorten it. Last May the owners unanimously voted to opt out after 2010. So this upcoming season will be uncapped, the first since '93.
Don't be to happy though, there are a lot of restrictions on free agents still, so teams will still find it hard to "buy" a Super Bowl. Hopefully they can all figure this whole mess out and play some football in 2011. But it seems more and more imminent.
The NBA is also very close to the same in the 2010-11 season, which is when their CBA expires.
The NBA's situation is a little different though. The main problem with the NBA’s CBA, Is that it allows NBA managers to give too much money over too many years to mid-level players. This results in a common problem: labor cost growth which exceeds revenue growth.
The NBA gives out to many guaranteed contracts to players that have not preformed good, or in some cases even played at all. In the mist of all this going on the number of bad contracts have been declining slowly because the NBA GM's are getting a little more aware of it.

So with all I tried to explain, I hope this clears it up some. All we can do is hope it all doesn't last very long, but I'm sure it will all happened. I cited Brian Karpuk a lot of NewsBurglar on this subject to get all the facts straight. One more thing, be ready to watch a lot of United Football League this year guys.


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From broadband Internet to latest-generation wireless technologies, from aeronautical and maritime navigation to radio astronomy and satellite-based meteorology, from convergence in fixed-mobile phone, Internet access, data, voice and TV broadcasting to next-generation networks, ITU is committed to connecting the world.


Student Stories

Moultrie, Georgia

Family and Consumer Sciences

Consumer Journalism and Spanish

Why did you choose to attend UGA?
I’ve bled red and black since the day I was born, so when applying to college I didn’t really have a back up plan. It was always my only option. In the words of Larry Munson “there is no tradition more worthy of envy, no institution worthy of such loyalty as The University of Georgia”. Everywhere else just can’t compare.
What is your most memorable UGA experience or memory?
Everyday I’m in Athens I think I have another “most memorable moment” experience, but it’s not everyday you can say you lived in Spain while you worked on your degree from the University of Georgia. Two summers ago I had the amazing opportunity to study abroad with the UGA en España: Cádiz program. I traveled through Europe and Africa and learned more about myself than I ever thought possible. It was the opportunity of a lifetime and will always be at the top of my list of most memorable experiences.
What is your favorite campus setting and why?
Being a Consumer Journalism and Spanish double major, I spend my time going back and forth between North and South campus. When I have a long enough break between classes, I love to skip the bus and take a walk down Sanford Drive from the Million Dollar Stairs all the way to Dawson Hall. It’s where my two worlds meet and where I always find myself still amazed (after four years) that I’m actually here at the University of Georgia.
What student organizations are you involved in?
College of Family and Consumer Sciences Ambassadors; Student Association of Family and Consumer Sciences; Shop with a Bulldawg; Alumni and Associates of Family, Career and Community Leaders of America
What are your career plans/aspirations?
When I tell people that I’m a Spanish and Consumer Journalism double major, they look at me like I’m crazy and ask what the two have in common. The answer is not much. Finding a career that brings my two passions together has been half the fun of my time in college. Upon graduation, I plan on attending culinary school in the metro-DC area and then hopefully get a job as a contributor for a magazine, through writing and working in a test kitchen. Eventually, I would love to go out on my own and do freelance cooking events and publish my own bilingual cookbooks.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
In five years I will have my two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Georgia, and a Culinary Arts degree from one of the top culinary schools in the US. I hope to then begin my career in the field of food and travel writing by working for a magazine or in a test kitchen.
How will you make a positive difference in the world?
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does”. I’ve been living by this advice for as long as I can remember, so I was really excited when I recently found this quote by the philosopher William James. Everything I do, no matter how big or small it may be will make a difference in the world. My job is to make that difference a positive one. Using my love for travel, food and Spanish I will strive to bring people together through the universal language of food. I hope to develop a cooking class that teaches people about food preparation and nutrition around the world. I would also love to provide more accessible nutrition education for Spanish speakers in the United States. It’s small steps like these that will make a positive change to bring our world together.
What message would you like to send to alumni and friends who support UGA financially?
Everyday I walk on the campus of the University of Georgia, I’m so thankful that I’ve gotten the opportunity to be a student here. However it’s because of generous donors like you that I’m able to be more than just a student. I’ve had amazing opportunities to participate in and lead student organizations, study in a foreign country, make friendships that will last a lifetime, maintain a GPA worthy of Presidential Scholar and Dean’s List status, and even pursue two undergraduate degrees, without bearing a financial burden. So THANK YOU. Because of you the past three years have been the best of my life. Because of you I’ve been inspired to strive to pay it forward and become a financial supporter of UGA in the coming years. But most of all, because of you I can yell Go Dawgs. Thank you.
Names of scholarship awards you have received?
Zena Costa Brown Scholarship; Virginia Wilbanks Kilgore Excellence in Family and Consumer Sciences Scholarship; Elise Bray Richie Scholarship; Julia Ann Simpson Elliot Scholarship
What has your scholarship meant or enabled you to do?
The scholarships I’ve received have allowed me to spend more time serving in student organizations doing the things I love and focus on maintaining a Presidential Scholar/Dean’s List GPA, instead of worrying about paying for school. I’ve been singing the words “glory, glory to old Georgia” for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I became a student here that these words began to have a deeper meaning. To give glory means to give everything you can to something, and with my scholarships I am able to give even more to the institution I love.


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Miss Hokusai Review | Otaku Movie Anatomy

Otaku Movie Anatomy hosts review Miss Hokusai!

The life and works of Japanese artist and ukiyo-e painter Katsushika Hokusai, as seen from the eyes of his daughter, Katsushika O-Ei.

Set in 1814, Miss Hokusai focuses on O-Ei, the daughter of famed artist Tetsuzo, better known by his pen name Hokusai, as she tries to navigate the various aspects of her life. O-Ei spends the bulk of her time assisting her divorced father who cares about his art and not much else.