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|— Town —|
|• Mayor||Gerald M. Foreman II|
|• Total||1.6 sq mi (4.1 km2)|
|• Land||1.6 sq mi (4.1 km2)|
|• Water||0.0 sq mi (0.0 km2)|
|Elevation||36 ft (11 m)|
|Time zone||Eastern (EST) (UTC-5)|
|• Summer (DST)||EDT (UTC-4)|
|Area code(s)||571, 703|
|GNIS feature ID||_PHONE_|
Dumfries is located at.(38.567853, -77.324591)
According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 1.6 square miles (4.1 km²), all of it land. The town is situated approximately 25 miles/40 km south of central Washington D.C.
Dumfries history began as early as 1690 when Richard Gibson erected a gristmill on Quantico Creek. A customhouse and warehouse followed in 1731, and many others cropped up along the estuary by 1732. The Town of Dumfries was formally established on 60 acres (240,000 m2) of land at the head of the harbor of Quantico Creek, provided by John Graham. He named the town after his birthplace, Dumfries, Scotland.
After much political maneuvering, the General Assembly established Dumfries as the first of seven townships in the county. Dumfries received its charter on May 11, 1749, making it the oldest continuously chartered town in Virginia.
The Ceremonial Seal of the Town of Dumfries embodies elements of its heritage, from the period of 1651, when the first patents were issued to colonists, who following the Potomac recognized the value of a snug harbor in Quantico Creek. Thus the foundations for the establishment of a town, which in 1749 received its charter from the Colonial government in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The elements of the seal are contained within the pattern formed by the outer frame of a hawser rope or cable, and the inner frame of an anchor chain, of a type employed in ships of the Colonial era.
Within these frames are found items which are consistent with a town of maritime background. They are overlaid on a chart of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River, with Dumfries indicated at the head of Quantico Creek. The navigational aids of the sextant and compass rose complete the maritime motif.
The two water fowl relate to the wetlands of Quantico Creek. The dock with fishnet, pilings, ships block and line further the theme of a mercantile port of call. The thistle indicates the Scottish founders of the town, with the name of Dumfries, taken by John Graham, the founder, in honor of his home in Scotland.
The supporters of the shield are, on the left, a Piscataway brave, of the Powhatan Confederacy, the predominant tribe along the Potomac, in this area. On the right, a Colonial militiaman of 1775, when Colonel Henry Lee was company Commander. The shield in its upper quadrant, displays a sailing vessel of the period, and below the tobacco leaf, the first commodity, overlaid with shafts of wheat, the later commodity that supported the town.
When Dumfries became the second leading port in Colonial America receiving tobacco from the upland, it rivaled New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Dumfries peaked in size and importance in 1763. For about 15 years Dumfries was a thriving port when several factors brought about its demise: the Revolutionary War, erosion and siltation, and the shift in the main shipping commodity (from tobacco to wheat and sugar).
The Dumfries Cemetery contains burials of some of the Dumfries pioneers.
Alexander Henderson built a house known as the Henderson House which still stands on a hill in Dumfries, as well as owning various land in Prince William Forest Park. Alexander was a merchant when the ports were booming in Dumfries. Alexander is famous for his son, United States Marine Corps commandant Archibald Henderson.
As of the census of 2000, there were 4,937 people, 1,573 households, and 1,198 families residing in the town. The population density was 3,085.6 people per square mile (1,191.4/km²). There were 1,699 housing units at an average density of 1,061.9 per square mile (410.0/km²). The racial makeup of the town was 48.91% White, 35.26% Black, 0.63% Native American, 1.07% Asian, 3.73% from other races, and 8.40% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 15.06% of the population.
There were 1,573 households out of which 46.5% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 48.8% were married couples living together, 19.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 23.8% were non-families. 16.5% of all households were made up of individuals and 3.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.13 and the average family size was 3.51.
In the town the population was spread out with 35.0% under the age of 18, 9.7% from 18 to 24, 33.6% from 25 to 44, 17.1% from 45 to 64, and 4.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 29 years. For every 100 females there were 98.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 93.0 males.
The median income for a household in the town was $43,672, and the median income for a family was $46,927. Males had a median income of $35,247 versus $24,451 for females. The per capita income for the town was $17,652. About 10.4% of families and 12.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 16.0% of those under age 18 and 7.1% of those age 65 or over.
Residents of Dumfries are currently represented in the Virginia House of Delegates by L. Scott Lingamfelter.
Notable people
- Alexander Henderson, merchant
- Kendall Marshall, professional basketball player
- Ali Krieger, professional soccer player
- "American FactFinder". United States Census Bureau. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
- "US Board on Geographic Names". United States Geological Survey. 2007-10-25. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
- "US Gazetteer files: 2010, 2000, and 1990". United States Census Bureau. 2011-02-12. Retrieved 2011-04-23.
- "Google Maps". Maps.google.com. 1970-01-01. Retrieved 2012-07-20.
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dumfries, Virginia|
- Town of Dumfries
- Dumfries Magisterial District Supervisor
- Prince William County Government
- Dumfries Harbor as if it never silted in, from Google Earth
- Dumfries-Triangle Rescue Squad


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Churches and chapels
Over the centuries, the Bretons built many churches and chapels whose architectural variety attests to the longstanding influence of the Catholic Church. Prior to the 16th century, Breton churches were often rectangular or T-shaped, with somewhat stark interiors. Rather than stone vaulting, such buildings tended to feature a panelled timber vault that was sometimes carved. Over time, Brittany's religious architecture gradually adopted the Latin cross shape with its transepts and aisles. The region also features a small number of vestigial Romanesque churches.

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


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09 June 2021
Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on children and families in the Western Balkans and Türkiye
There is abundant evidence that children bear a heavy burden resulting from disrupted essential services, increased social isolation, and loss of family income. In pandemic times, parents and caregivers are more likely to feel overwhelmed with providing stimulation and care for their young children and delay seeking prompt medical attention for children. Childhood immunization and other basic services were often suspended. School closures can mean a year of lost learning and children become more susceptible to dropping out. Uncertainties have created family distress, which contributes to serious mental health issues, especially among children who are vulnerable to violence and abuse. The pandemic has deepened pre-existing vulnerabilities of children with disabilities and children living in poverty. In 2021, UNICEF and the European Commission Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations launched a two-year initiative to strengthen national health, education, early childhood development, and child protection systems to ensure continuity in the provision of core services for vulnerable children and their families in the immediate and the longer-term recovery response to COVID-19. The initiative is being implemented in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo* , Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Türkiye.

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


Electricity Bill Calculator & Energy Cost Calculations Online
Electricity Bill Calculator:
Select country:
Typical appliance:
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Hours of use per day: h/day
1 kilowatt-hour (kWh) cost:
Electricity cost per day:
Electricity cost per month:
Electricity cost per year:
Electricity bill calculator is an online electric consumption calculator that helps you to calculate the electricity cost of an electric utility in your home. It helps you to calculate the electricity bill to accurately & calculate how much it costs.
Electricity Bill calculation:
For calculating the electricity bills follow the steps,
Step1: First select your country, we have added 9 countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Philippines, Singapore, United Kingdom, United States and another country. Here other country option helps you to calculate the electricity bill apart from the above said 9 counties. As default United Kingdom will be in the first portion and by click that option you can change the country.
Learn More: Transformer Cable Size Calculations Calculator
Step2: Select the type of appliances such as Air conditioner, Clothes dryer, Clothes iron, Dishwasher, Electric kettle, Fan, Heater, Microwave oven, Desktop computer, Laptop computer, Refrigerator, Stereo receiver, Television, Toaster oven, Vacuum cleaner, Washing machine, and Water heater
After your selection, the default power consumption in Watts will be added. Also, you can change the value in integer level or W to kW.
Step3: Enter the number of operating hours in a day.
Step4: Enter the cost per unit (one kWh) with your currency. Also, we have given four types of currency such as cent, pence, rupees, and peso. While selecting the country automatically it will fit into it.
Step5: Finally click the calculate button to get the electricity bills on a daily basis, monthly basis and yearly basis. For monthly and yearly calculations, the number of our will be automatically multiplied by 30 as well as 365.
Electricity bill calculation for all devices:
First, you need to find the total electricity consumption, for that you can use your energy meter, by finding the initial and final reading.
Learn More: HP to VA Conversion calculator
Total energy consumption = Final reading – Initial Reading.
Electricity bill = Total energy consumption * per unit cost.
Technically, you can use the below-mentioned electricity consumption formula, Electricity consumption E(kWh) in kWh is equal to multiplication of power P(W) Watts and the Time period in a day divided by 1000.
E(kWh) = P(W) × t(h) / 1000(W/kW)
If your device is rated in kW means, you can use the below formula,
E(kWh) = P(kW) × t(h)
For month calculation,
E(kWh) = P(kW) × t(h) x 30
For yearly calculation,
E(kWh) = P(kW) × t(h) x 365
For hourly calculations,
Remember that 1 kWh is equal to one unit. It means if your device is running with 1 kW for an hour means, your device electricity consumption is 1kWh.
Electricity cost calculation:
The total electricity cost per hour in euro/rupees/dollar is equal to the multiplication of the energy consumption E in kWh and per kWh cost.
Learn More: Watts to kVA Conversion Calculator | Convert W to kVA
Cost(dollar) = E(kWh) × Cost(cent/kWh) / 100(cent/dollar)
Let us take an example of 1.5kW microwave oven operated for 20 hours calculate the electricity bill for the same with per unit cost is 0.15 $.
Use our formula,
Total electricity consumption = 1.5 * 20 = 30 kWh
Electricity cost is,
Cost(dollar) = 30 * 15 /100 = 4.5 $
Hence the totally you have to pay 4.5 USD as electricity bill.
By using our electricity bill calculator, you can get the same results.
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7.2 SEXUAL CONTACT WITH GUARDIANS AND STUDENTS: Marriage and family therapists do not make any sexual contact with guardians or students with whom they exercise professional authority. Sexual contact includes, but is not limited to, sexual intercourse, sexual intimacy, and sexually explicit communication without a solid, prudential or educational clinical basis. Such actions with the spouse, partner or direct family member of a guardian or student are likely unethical and exploitable. (See also section 4.5 Sexual contact)) 4.2 Treatment with students or tutors. Marriage and family therapists do not offer treatment to current students or tutors. 14. Sexual participation between a faculty member or supervisor and an intern or student in situations where an abuse of power may occur often exploits inequalities in labour relations and may be unethical, because: 3.02 Education and training (d) Social workers who act as pedagogues or field managers for students should not establish dual relationships or multiple with students; in which there is a risk of exploitation or potential for the student. It is incumbent upon social work educators and local trainers to set clear, appropriate and culturally sensitive boundaries. 3.7 Harassment. Marriage and family therapists do not engage in sexual or other harassment against clients, students, apprentices, supervisors, staff, colleagues or researchers. Lexi Walters Wright is the former Community Manager at Understood (_URL_.
Author and editor-in-chief, she helps parents make more informed decisions for their children and for themselves. 4.3 Sexual intimacy with students or supervising marriage and family therapists does not record any sexual intimacy with students or supervisors during the assessment or training relationship between the therapist and the student or caregiver. It can improve communication between home and school. Ideally, you and your child, his or her teacher are present when the goals of the behavioral contract are set. The school's social worker, psychologist and/or behaviorist can also participate in this meeting. This keeps you all on the same page. 6. In the declaration of consent, students and facilitators inform the client that they are under supervision and give their clients the name and references of their tutor.
1.3 Multiple Relationships. Marriage and family therapists are aware of their influential positions vis-à-vis clients and avoid taking advantage of the trust and dependence of these people. Therapists therefore do everything in their power to avoid multiple conditions and relationships with clients that may affect professional judgment or increase the risk of exploitation. These relationships include, but are not limited to, commercial or intimate relationships with a customer or the customer's direct family. If the risk of alteration or exploitation is due to conditions or multiple roles, therapists document the precautions taken. 2. CMHCs do not have ongoing consulting relationships with current facilitators, students and staff. Standard V: RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION Marriage and family therapists respect the dignity and well-being of researchers and are familiar with the laws, regulations and professional standards governing the conduct of research.
A behavioral contract is a written agreement between your child, his teacher and often you. 5.4 Right to refuse or resign participation. Marriage and family therapists respect the freedom of any participant to refuse to participate in or withdraw from a research study at any time. This obligation requires special reflection and reflection when researchers or other members of the research team are in a position of authority or influence over the participants. Marriage and family therapists therefore strive to avoid multiple relationships with researchers that could impair professional judgment or increase the risk of exploitation....


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Xenobiotics and Chemical Ecology
Xenobiotic studies the metabolic behaviour of the compounds whose chemical structure is not true in the predictable absorption arrangement of a given creature. They are secondary metabolites of other organisms or non-existent in nature or uncommon compounds. The Pharmacology is an order that studies Xenobiotics cell function in the organism due to its therapeutic on the other hand precautionary impacts (drugs).
Chemical ecology is the analysis of chemicals required in the interactions of living organisms. It focuses on the creation and reaction to flagging atoms, response to signaling molecules (i.e. semiochemicals) and toxins. Chemical ecology is one of the particular importance among ants and other social bugs - including wasps, honey bees and termites - as a means of communication essential to social organization. Also, this region of ecology deals with the studies of defensive chemicals, which are used to rebound potential predators or pathogens attacking a wide variety of species.


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|What does it mean
To fast is to do without food. Its purpose is to experience the effects of not eating. It also serves to be a penance or a sacrifice - for the purpose of strengthening us. When we don't eat, for even a little while, we get hungry. When we get hungry, we have a heightened sense of awareness. If, when we eat too much, we have a sluggish feeling, when we fast, we have a feeling of alertness. Fasting is a wonderful exercise whenever we want to sincerely ask for an important grace from God. It is not that our fasting "earns" God's attention, but by fasting, we clarify our thinking and our feeling. It is purifying and prepares us to pray more deeply.
When do I fast?
Catholics, as a group, are required to fast on only two days of the year - Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. On these days, fasting means something very specific and limited. It means that one eats only one full meal in a day, with no food in-between meals. It is understood that two other meals, if one eats three meals a day, should not total one full meal. One might fast in a more complete way, i.e., eating only a portion of a single meal.
Of course, anyone is free to fast at any time that it is helpful for their prayer and reflection. It is not recommended that anyone with impaired health should fast in any way. It is also important to note that everyone who fasts should drink enough fluids on a fast day.
What does it mean to "abstain"?
To abstain is to not eat meat. Its purpose is to be an act of penance - an act of sacrifice, that helps us grow in freedom to make much bigger sacrifices. Of course, it would not make sense to make the sacrifice of not eating meat, and then eat a wonderful meal I might enjoy even more. Many people eat a vegetarian diet, for a variety of reasons, and eating meat is not even an issue. It might be possible to abstain from a non-meal that I really like, on all the Fridays of Lent. It should be noted that many people in this world cannot afford to eat meat or do not have access to it. Part of our abstaining from meat can place us in solidarity with so many of our sisters and brothers around the world.
Our "Cooking Lent" site has lots of helps for preparing meatless meals with great devotion: Cooking Lent.
When do I abstain?
Catholics, as a group, abstain from meat on
Ash Wednesday and on all the Fridays of Lent.
What about "giving up something" for Lent?
When many of us were children, we might remember our giving up candy for Lent. And, it seemed like a real sacrifice. As we grew up, it was often more difficult to decide what special thing to do, to make Lent a special season - to get our attention and to prepare ourselves for deeper sacrifices.
What would help me grow in freedom? That's the question to ask. For some of us, it could be, committing ourselves to give up judging others, every single day of Lent. For others, it could be giving up a bad habit we've developed. For still others, it is obvious what seems to be the important choice for me during Lent.
For many of us, the choice may not be to give something up, but to add something to our daily lives during Lent. We may commit ourselves to extra prayer time. We may decide to do some service to the poor, once a week during Lent. We may choose to increase our almsgiving to the poor - perhaps related to something we choose not to do, e.g., some might choose not to go out to eat one night a week, and to give that total amount to the poor.
Whether it is fasting, abstaining or other
acts of penance, the whole desire we should have is to use these means
to help us grow closer to our Lord and prepare ourselves "to celebrate
the paschal mystery with minds and hearts renewed." (First
Preface of Lent)
May our Lord bless us all on this journey ahead.
and Abstinence for Catholics in the U.S.
During Lent, Catholics in the United States abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday and on all the Fridays of Lent. They fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
To abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday and all the Fridays of Lent means to not eat meat on those days. It does not intend the omission of eggs or dairy products.
The required fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday involves eating only one full meal on those days. One or two smaller meals may be taken on those days, but may not total one full meal. The required fast does not allow eating anything between meals.
"All Catholics who have completed their fourteenth year are bound by the law of abstinence; all adults are bound by the law of fast up to the beginning of their sixtieth year.
Nevertheless, pastors and parents are to see to it that minors who are not bound by the law of fast and abstinence are educated in an authentic sense of penance."
- Code of Canon Law, #1252


Should students be allowed to decorate their graduation caps?
Lily Tran and Kylie Yamada
Lily Tran: pro
For seniors, graduation is a symbolic ceremony that celebrates a personal milestone: finishing high school. So it only seems fair to allow graduating students the opportunity to personalize their grad caps to reflect their personal interests and personality.
The only decoration seniors are currently allowed to wear are badges of extraneous academic performances — sashes for being a part of leadership, honor cords for tutoring, or a stole for completing 30+ volunteer hours for NHS. Aside from that, everyone looks plain and ordinary and uniform … too uniform.
Graduation ceremonies are inherently generic as an endless list of names is read to a smattering of applause or loud cheering. Students find themselves herded like cattle through the procession — their reward for slaving away in high school for years only to be denied the opportunity to express themselves and their happiness in graduating.
When a graduate's name is called, they only get a few seconds and a tiny moment to savor their success. Then the next name is called and that's it. Decorated caps would give graduates a way to celebrate their personal success throughout the entire ceremony rather than just having a short walk across a stage.
Decorating caps gives students the opportunity to showcase their creativity, their individuality and their personal success. Some seniors like to put their future college on their caps to show that they're really graduating and moving on to bigger things.
Students should be free to express themselves during their graduation. The First Amendment ensures freedom of speech, and denying students the right to decorate their caps is a violation of that right. They should be able to use that right and say or express what they want on their grad caps, as long as the decoration does not violate the school dress code.
The possibility of students inappropriately decorating their caps with insensitive, vulgar or ignorant content is fairly low. They aren't going to risk giving up graduation for a joke. Administration could just take away the inappropriately decorated caps or not allow them to walk.
Besides, graduation is supposed to be about each individual, and not just the class. Allowing students to decorate their caps gives them that opportunity to bask in their impending future and success.
Kylie Yamada: Con
The graduation ceremony is one of the most memorable and iconic parts of American high school culture. In the last few weeks of the school term, social media is filled with tweets and pictures of students celebrating their newfound freedom, including some students wearing graduation caps elaborately decorated with pictures, glitter and paint.
Here at Bear Creek, however, graduates have been restricted from decorating their caps for years. For the more artistically inclined of Bear Creek's population, this restriction is an outrage and violates students' rights to self-expression.
However, decorating graduation caps can force the ceremony to become a competition between students. A moment which should be about achievement and community could turn into an event which only highlights certain students — and not necessarily for academic reasons.
Decorated graduation caps can include anything from pop culture references to showcasing students' pride to political statements. Caps which are designed to go viral may conflict with other students' hopes for their own graduation. If you've waited 18 years to finally graduate from high school and there's a guy a row in front of you with memes on his cap, it might ruin the moment.
Maybe it seems humorless, but graduation carries so much meaning for each person in the auditorium. A high school graduation means just as much to a graduate's parents as it does to the graduate. Should we really allow for one impulsive teenager to ruin such an important time?
In addition, a high school graduation provides a sense of unity for all seniors which teenagers rarely find elsewhere. Despite all of the drama and all of the fights students go through, graduation is a time where a senior class of hundreds can look at each other and realize that this is a day which they will all share together. Let's make sure the experience stays just as enjoyable for every graduate.


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Making Smarter Improvements
|Figure 3. Two-opt Strategy: The Two-opt heuristic looks for improvements by swapping pairs of links.|
The random improvement heuristic picks two stops in the route and swaps them to see if it can make an improvement. The Two-opt heuristic randomly picks two links between stops. It removes those links and replaces them with others that keep the route connected and checks whether the change is an improvement.
shows an initial route and an improved version found by Two-opt. The 2-6
links in red on the left have been removed and replaced by the 2-3
links in blue on the right. Notice also that the path 6-5-4-3
on the left was reversed to 3-4-5-6
on the right to keep the route valid.
|Figure 4. Comparing Strategies: Different heuristics may produce dramatically different results.|
You can make other heuristics that consider rearranging three, four, or more stops or links but the more complicated the heuristic is, the harder it is to implement and debug. Often it's just about as effective to run more trials starting from different random solutions as it is to build a much more complex heuristic.
shows the TSP example program displaying results for several different heuristics on a 35-stop TSP. The Random heuristic tested 10,000 random solutions in about 0.09 seconds and found one where the total length of the links in the solution was 3,345.
The Random Improvement heuristic generated a single solution and tried to improve it by making random swaps until it found no improvements in 10,000 trials in a row. This example took 0.02 seconds and examined 13,917 possible improvements. This test examined almost 40 percent more possible solutions than the Random heuristic did but in only about a quarter as much time. It was faster because it did not need to pick a completely new solution each time it looked for improvements. Instead it just swapped two stops on the route and checked the result.
The Four-opt heuristic does almost the same thing that Random Improvement does. It picks two stops and considers swapping them. But rather than actually performing the swap and then calculating the new solution's cost, this program determines how much it would change the route's cost to rearrange the four links leading into and out of the two stops, then actually makes the swap only if it will be profitable. In this test, Random Improvement found a slightly better solution than Four-opt did in about the same amount of time. In general these algorithms are pretty similar, although Four-opt may save some time in large problems because it doesn't need to recalculate the whole solution's cost at each step.
The Two-opt heuristic tries swapping links as described earlier. In this example it found a solution that is significantly better than the ones found by the previous methods.
Finally, the Mix heuristic uses the Four-opt and Two-opt heuristics many times until neither technique can find an improvement in 100 trials. You can see that this technique performed a lot more trials (more than 2 million versus around 10,000) and took longer, although it did find a slightly better solution.
|Figure 5. Brute Force: Exhaustive search finds the best possible result but can be very slow.|
How good is this solution? I don't know and I never will. It seems like a pretty good solution but the only way to be certain is to perform an exhaustive search. Until quantum computers appear, or some other science-fiction-like technology comes along, the sun would be a cold dark cinder before my
computer could check all of the possible solutions.
shows one final example displaying the results of an exhaustive search for a 10-stop TSP. The exhaustive search took about.3 seconds to examine 3.6 million possible solutions. If you look closely, you'll see that the more advanced heuristics produced increasingly better results. In this example, the Mix heuristic found the best possible solution, although in general any one of the heuristics might get lucky and find a perfect solutionor might be unlucky and always find bad solutions.
How long you let a heuristic run is for you to decide. You could let the heuristic run indefinitely, constantly displaying the best result it has found so far, until you decide you need to actually drive the route and get some work done. It might be nice to wait for the perfect solution, but if your boss is anything like mine, you won't be able to wait billions of years for a solution.
Even if you don't own a huge fleet, these savings can add up. I drive about 15,000 miles per year. If I can reduce this by 10 percent by using shorter routes, then I can save about 1,500 miles. If I get 30 miles per gallon (and most people don't do that well), that would save about 50 gallons per year. At today's prices that's nothing to sneeze at.


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0 1 5 10 12buttons on top of page represent photo heights of:
40px 133px 500px 1000px and 1200px
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Z) for a single photo:
1)normal, 2)background stretch, and 3)height or width stretch
Navigation - single photo* Click mouse in left/right part of the screen
* Use +/- 5 10 20 50 buttons to skip forward/backward
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Round Tailed Ground Squirrels
Ground Squirrels burrow in loose soil.
Round Tailed Ground Squirrelsweigh 4-8oz, are 8-11 inches long including 2-4 inch tail, have a uniform sandy color, a long round tail and hairy hind feet.
Their gestation period (fertilization to birth) is 28 days, with an average of 5.4 pups per litter. Males are dominant during the breeding season of Jan-March and females dominate during raising of the young March-April.
|5. Babies 2015|
|6. Babies 2016|
|7. Babies 2017|
|8. Babies 2018|
|9. Babies 2019|


Explore BrainMass
resource market and the producer market
1. Distinguish between the resource market and the producer market in a circular flow model. In what way are businesses and households both sellers and buyers in this model? What are the flows in the circular flow model?
1. The famous Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck remarked in his book on rent controls, "Rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city - except for bombing." Rent controls place price ceilings on rents at levels below equilibrium rental rates for the stated purpose of making housing more affordable for low-income families. Using supply and demand analysis, answer the following questions:
a. How does imposing rent controls affect the number of housing units available to low-income families?
b. Under rent controls, can all low-income families get rent-controlled housing?
c. Who gains from rent controls? Who loses?
d. Why would Professor Lindbeck think rent controls are destructive?
e. Is there an alternative policy to make plenty of housing available to low-income families that would not be subject to the problems of rent controls? Explain in detail.
Solution Summary
This posting clearly contrasts the resource and producer markets.


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I'm guessing some widely distributed high school physics text was talking about terminal velocity.
Originally posted October 4, 2010.
What is the Terminal Velocity of a Cat?
I don't know, let's ask a physicist.
From the University of Alaska, Fairbanks:
Terminal VelocityTerminal velocity, a rather chilling term, describes the velocity at which drag force from the air becomes equal to the force from the weight of an object, and thus the object no longer accelerates and consequently velocity remains constant. The greater an object's cross-sectional area and the less its mass, the lower the terminal velocity and the sooner it's reached. A cat reaches its terminal velocity of 60 mph within 5 stories of freefall. For comparison, a person's terminal velocity is 120 mph.
Once a cat reaches its terminal velocity, it then begins to slow down. This is because the cat relaxes, changing its position from back arched, head down, and legs pulled tightly underneath its body, to resemble a spread eagle cat. This increases its cross-sectional area and slows the cat down. The reason for this is that our bodies are only sensitive to acceleration (this is why at times on an airplane flight it feels as if you aren't moving at all). Relaxing also causes the impact force to be spread out over more area when the cat lands, resulting in a decrease in injuries to cats' limbs when they fall seven or more stories.Professor Puss-Puss demonstrating L=mvr:
**This graph is taken from "How Cats Survive Falls from New York Skyscrapers." It plots the percentage of adult humans and cats killed by a fall versus the stories fallen. The adult human graph increases steadily to 100% while the cat graph increases to about 10% and then decreases to about 5% for falls from 7 to 9 stories. Although the graph doesn't show it, the survival rate holds steady at 95% from 9 to 32 stories.
Not only do cats seem to "understand" how increasing their area can lead to a less painful landing, they also seem to be well acquainted with the conservation of angular momentum, which they artfully use to land on their feet time and time again.
However, as The Straight Dope points out:
...The potential flaw is this: the study was based only on cats that were brought into the hospital. Clearly dead cats, your basic fell-20-stories-and-looks-like-it-came-out-of-a-can-of-Spam cats, go to the Dumpster, not the emergency room. This may skew the statistics and make falls from great distances look safer than they are....Research at the University of Zagreb, "Feline high-rise syndrome: 119 cases (_PHONE_)" was inconclusive on the cat-in-a-dumpster hypothesis.
I believe this demonstrates that most market drops are survivable.
Next: The Bounce


Simulink Design Optimization
Magnetic Levitation Controller Tuning
This example shows how to use numerical optimization to tuning the controller parameters of a nonlinear system. In this example, we model a CE 152 Magnetic Levitation system where the controller is used to position a freely levitating ball in a magnetic field. The control structure for this model is fixed and the required controller performance can be specified in terms of an idealized time response.
Earnshaw's Theorem
Earnshaw's theorem proved that it is not possible to achieve stable levitation using static, macroscopic, classical electromagnetic fields. However the CE 152 system works around this by creating a potential well around the point at which the ball is to be suspended, thereby creating a non-inverse square law force. This is achieved by an inductive coil that generates a time varying electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field is controlled through the use of feedback to keep the ball at the required location.
Model Description
The magnetic levitation system is a nonlinear dynamic system with one input and one output. Double-click the Magnetic Levitation Plant Model to open this subsystem. The input voltage is applied to a coil that creates the electromagnetic field. The output voltage is measured by an IR receiver and represents the position of the ball in the magnetic field. The diagram below outlines this system.
The physical system consists of a ball (with mass 0.00837 kg) which is under the influence of three forces:
 - The magnetic field produced by an inductive coil. This is modeled by the Power amplifier and coil block in the Simulink® model. The input to the inductor is a voltage signal and the output a current. The force from the coil depends on the square of the current, the air-gap between the coil and the ball, and the physical properties of the ball. This produces an upward acting force on the ball.
 - The gravitational force acting downwards
 - A damping force which acts in a direction opposite to the velocity at any instant of time
These three forces cause the resulting motion of the ball and are modeled in Simulink as shown.
open_system('maglev_demo/Magnetic Levitation Plant Model')
Non-linearities arising from saturation of the coil and changes in dynamics outside the limits of the magnetic field are also modeled in the Simulink Model. As the force from the coil decays according to an inverse square law larger voltages are required the further the ball is from the coil. The control signal is scaled to account for this and the scaling is included in the Control signal scaling blocks.
Control Problem Description
The requirement for the controller is that it be able to position the ball at any arbitrary location in the magnetic field and that it move the ball from one position to another. These requirements are captured by placing step response bounds on the position measurement. Specifically we require the following constraints on the ball:
 - Position constraint: within 20% of the desired position in less than 0.5 second
 - Settling Time Constraint: within 2% of the desired position within 1.5 second
To meet the control requirements we implement a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller. For convenience the controller uses a normalized position measurement with a range from 0 to 1, representing the bottom-most and top-most positions of the ball respectively.
Simulink® Design Optimization™ and numerical optimization is ideally suited to tune the PID coefficients because:
 - The system dynamics are complex enough to require effort and time for analysis if we approach the problem using conventional control design techniques.
 - The controller structure is fixed
 - We have knowledge of the step response we require from the system.
Setting Constraint Values
Given the step response characteristic we desire, it is simple to specify the upper and lower bounds of the response. Double-click the Position Constraint block in the Magnetic Levitation Plant Model subsystem to view constraints on the position of the ball. The constraint lines may be moved using the mouse.
You can launch a pre-configured optimization task in SDOTOOL by first opening the model and by double-clicking on the orange block at the bottom of the model. From the SDOTOOL, press the Plot Current Response button to simulate the model and show how well the initial design satisfies the design requirements.
Defining Tuned Parameters
We select the PID controller parameters to tune by opening the Design Variables editor, as shown below
Running the Optimization
After specifying the optimization parameters and the required step response bounds we start the optimization by pressing the Optimize button from the SDOTOOL. During optimization, the plots are updated with the position of the ball for each iteration and the dark curve shows the final optimized trajectory of the ball (as shown below).
Verifying the Results
Once we complete the optimization, it is important to validate the results against other step sizes. A successful parameter optimization should be able to provide good control for all steps sizes close to the tuned step size of 1. Step sizes from.7 to 1 should be tested to confirm the controller's performance. The following plot shows the response to a step input from 0 to 0.85 at 0.1 seconds.
The verification step shows that controller's performance satisfies the requirements specified and the tuned parameter values are suitable for control. The tuned parameters could be used to provide baseline performance against which other control schemes can be compared, or a baseline for controllers for different operating regions.
% Close the model


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Two organ donor application leaflets shown in London on January 16, 2008. Credit: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images
At any given time, there are more than 114,000 Americans in need of life-saving organ transplants. And on average, 18 of them lose their lives every day because they did not receive the transplant they need. Even still, there were 28,535 organ transplants in the U.S. last year.
Given this shortfall, medical experts are always looking for ways to save more lives. One of the techniques being used more frequently is called elective ventilation, which is a practice that doctors us to keep a brain dead patient alive for the sole purpose of organ donation.
Examples include people who have suffered severe brain trauma who are close to death but have otherwise healthy organs and are certified organ donors. The practice is already in use, but some medical ethicists view techniques like elective ventilation as controversial because it involves keeping people alive for the sole purpose harvesting their organs.
Is it ethical to prolong the lives of people with terminal injuries given that those people can no longer give medical consent? Is saving lives with more and better organs worth the ethical considerations?
Read the Full Story at KPCC Blogs


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HISTORY OF THE COLDSTREAM GUARDS
The Coldstream Guards is the oldest serving regular Regiment in the British Army. These pages describe the highlights of the Regiments history and offer you an insight into some of the Customs and traditions formed in the past that exist to this day.
HISTORY OF THE REGIMENT
"The town of Coldstream, because the General did it the honour to make it the piece of his residence for some time hath given title to a small company of men whom God hath made instruments of Great Things; and though poor, yet honest as ever corrupt Nature produced into the world, by the no dishonourable name of Coldstreamers." Thomas Gumble 1671
The First 50 Years
Oliver Cromwell, after raising the New Model Army in 1645 to fight against the Royalists, finally defeated them in 1649. This paved the way for the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649. With the Civil War over, Cromwell held unprecedented power in England. Ireland, however, was still in a state of revolt and Cromwell led a force across the Irish Sea to impose his rule on the country. During the campaign, he became impressed by the military qualities of a certain Colonel George Monck and determined to give him command of his own regiment. Cromwell created a completely new body of men, by taking five companies from the Regiment of George Fenwick and five from the Regiment of Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, then Governor of Newcastle. Both these formations had been raised as part of the New Model Army in 1645. Cromwell formed the new Regiment on 13 August 1650 and gave it the name, Monck's Regiment of Foot. The modern-day Coldstream Guards is directly descended from Monck's Regiment of Foot and is therefore the oldest Regiment in continuous service with the British Army.
Scotland at this time still held great sympathy for the Royalist cause. Charles Stuart, on his return from exile, seized the offer of a Scottish army to help reclaim the throne of England. On hearing this news, Oliver Cromwell, now back from Ireland, marched north, and decisively defeated Charles's army at the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650. Monck's Regiment of Foot took part in the battle under Cromwell. Afterwards, Cromwell ordered a special medal to be struck and awarded to the officers and men of the New Model Army. The Coldstream Guards are the only surviving Regiment to have earned this early example of a campaign medal.
After Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658, Charles saw again his opportunity to reclaim the English throne. On 1st January 1660, General Monck assembled a large part of his troops in the little town of Coldstream on the Scottish border and decided to march to London. The march took five weeks and Monck entered the capital on 3rd February for the first time. Despite some opposition to his ideas, Monck managed to break the army's domination of the Government and brought about the election of a freely-chosen parliament, which met on 25th April 1660. One of the first acts of this new Parliament was to vote for the return of the Monarchy.
On 25 May 1660, the King landed at Dover, where General Monck welcomed him. During the journey to London, the King showed his gratitude to General Monck by bestowing on him the Order of the Garter, which is now the basis of the Regimental cap star. On 26 August 1660, Parliament passed an act ordering the disbandment of the entire New Model Army. No exceptions, including General Monck's regiments, were allowed, although one concession was made: they should be the last to disappear.
This concession had far reaching effects. On Sunday, 6 January 1661, two days before Monck's Regiments were to be disbanded, an armed revolt occurred against the King, forcing an alarmed Parliament somewhat reluctantly to call on Monck's Regiment of Foot for help. Monck's men, veterans of a decade of hard campaigning, swiftly quelled the rebels and ended the rioting. A grateful Parliament repealed the order for disbandment. On 14 February 1661, Monck's Regiment of Foot paraded at Tower Hill. The men symbolically laid down their arms and with them their association with the New Model Army. They were immediately ordered to take them up again as Royal troops in the New Standing Army.
The new Regiment received the title of The Lord General's Regiment of Foot Guards and became Household Troops from that moment. A Royal Commission placed them as the second senior Regiment of Household Troops. However, the Regiment, to make its views clear on the injustice of this decision, took as its motto the phrase Nulli Secundus, or Second to None. To this day, the Regiment does not accept that it should ever be referred to as The Second Guards. Monck, who had become the Duke of Albemarle, died in April 1670 and the Lord General's Regiment was conferred upon the Earl of Craven. From this time the Regiment became officially known as the Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards.
The Regiment saw much active service over the next few decades. In 1678, it served in Flanders before taking part in the Battle of Sedgemore in 1687, which ended the Monmouth Rebellion. The Regiment sent a detachment of two officers and 130 other ranks to Tangier in 1680 to form part of the King's Battalion stationed there. The Regiment's first Battle Honour immortalized this campaign. After 1688 and the accession to the Throne of William and Mary, the Regiment embarked for Flanders again and took part in the Battle of Walcourt (1689), the Limden campaign (1693) and the Siege of Namur (1695), the latter forming the second Battle Honour. After several further major engagements, the 1st Battalion came home in November 1697 after the signing of the Peace of Ryswick.
The 18th Century
In July 1702, six companies of the Coldstream joined a composite Battalion of Guards sent to Cadiz and Vigo. In July 1704, 400 men of the Coldstream and 200 men of the 1st Guards formed a composite Guards battalion for service in Portugal, seeing action in Gibraltar and Spain as well.
The renewal of the war in Flanders again saw the Regiment on active service and it took part in the Battles of Oudenarde in 1708 and Malplaquet in 1709. From 1715 to 1742, the Regiment enjoyed its first long spell of peace. This was eventually broken by the dispatch of seven companies to Spain, which culminated in the surrender of Vigo in May 1742. King George II was now on the throne of England and the 1st Battalion, with two other Guards battalions, embarked once more for service in Flanders to support of the cause of Maria Theresa. The Battalion was present at, although not heavily involved in, the Battle of Dettingen, the last in which an English King personally commanded his troops.
The Regiment played a distinguished part in the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. Although it did not result in a Battle Honour, this was one of the most glorious battles ever fought by the Brigade of Guards. The Brigade marched for half a mile under heavy fire to halt thirty yards from the French Guards. The French fired first, doing little damage; the British then fired with deadly effect and decimated the enemy ranks.
The 2nd Battalion proceeded to Flushing in 1747 and joined the Allied Army until after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1749. In July 1760, the 2nd Battalion went to Germany with two other Guards battalions to campaigns under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick and the Marquis of Granby. It played a distinguished role in the Battle of Wilhelmstal and at the Castle of Arnoneberg. The Battalion returned home in 1763.
In 1776, following the outbreak of the War of lndependence in the American Colonies, the three regiments of Guards under the command of Colonel Mathew of the Coldstream formed a composite force. The Coldstream contingent consisted of 307 men of all ranks. Early in 1777, this force formed two separate battalions with Colonel Mathew elevated to Brigadier. The battalions fought throughout the War and returned home after Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to a stronger American force of some 20,000 men, including 7000 French troops.
The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars
As a result of the French Revolution in 1793, Britain joined the confederacy against the Republican Government. Once more the Coldstream 1st Battalion joined the 1st Battalions of the other two Guards Regiments to form a Guards Brigade. The Brigade, consisting of four battalions (the fourth being made up of the Grenadier companies of the three Regiments), embarked for the Continent. The Brigade distinguished itself in subsequent actions, including the sieges of Valenciennes and Lincelles, and in several small engagements and skirmishes of less importance. The Coldstream arrived home in May 1795. In 1799, brigaded with the 1st Battalion 3rd Guards under General Burrard, they embarked again for service in Holland. There they took part in the campaign led by Sir Ralph Abercrombie that ended with the Battle of Egmont-op-Zee.
After taking part in the expedition against Vigo, the 1st Battalion sailed to join the Army in Egypt, once more under the familiar command


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I've seen various methods occurring during a burial.
After the casket (or body) is laid in the grave, people shovel dirt to cover the grave up to a certain point (usually). After that, I've seen:
- Some rabbis say that only Jews should cover the grave all the way to the top (meaning until the dirt is level with the land surrounding the grave.)
- Other rabbis have said that people should shovel until you can't see the casket any longer. Then a machine can cover the rest.
- Other rabbis say the same as 2, but the rest must be manually shoveled but can be done by non-Jews. However, a machine should never be used.
The common denominator in all 3 methods is that it seems that Jews have to do some minimal amount of shoveling. Is this true? Can a non-Jew do all or part of the shoveling? If not, how much is the minimum that Jews must do?
Can a machine be used for any of the remainder of the shoveling?
Can any of the shoveling be done by a non-Jew
In any of the above 3 methods, which are halacha vs. minhag?


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For more than 40 years, scientists have tried to figure out what's causing large parts of Canada, particularly the Hudson Bay region, to be "missing" gravity. In other words, gravity in the Hudson Bay area and surrounding regions is lower than it is in other parts of the world, a phenomenon first identified in the 1960s when the Earth's global gravity fields were being charted.
Two theories have been proposed to account for this anomaly. But before we go over them, it's important to first consider what creates gravity. At a basic level, gravity is proportional to mass. So when the mass of an area is somehow made smaller, gravity is made smaller. Gravity can vary on different parts of the Earth. Although we usually think of it as a ball, the Earth actually bulges at the Equator and gets flatter at the poles due to its rotation. The Earth's mass is not spread out proportionally, and it can shift position over time. So scientists proposed two theories to explain how the mass of the Hudson Bay area had decreased and contributed to the area's lower gravity.
- 7 Alternative Earth Theories (illuminutti.com)
- Gravity Change Reveals Magma's Underground Movements to Determine Likelihood of Eruption (sott.net)


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QUILT OF HONOUR CAMPAIGN
A speaker, mother, widow, and award-winning volunteer, Susan Hess speaks from the heart of real life experience. She moves audiences to both laughter and tears with stories about bringing up a child with mental illness.
While others ask what can be done about "out-of-control" kids, sad kids or angry kids, Susan is providing answers and changing lives.
Choose from among Susan's distinctive, informative, motivational and inspirational presentations. If you live or work with children in any way, you will gain fresh insight and understanding from Susan's presentation.
Please don't forget my daughter: Stories behind the Quilt of Honour
A strong advocate on behalf of children with mental health problems, Susan uses the Quilt of Honour as a visible testament to all children who struggle with mental illness. Susan shares the compelling stories of the children on the Quilt of Honour, including her own daughter's journey from chaotic violent illness to award-winning volunteer.
The stories of the children who are featured on the Quilt of Honour emphasize the importance of mental health services, treatments and supports for the child as well as the family.
Stigma: We Can, We Will, We Must
A gripping presentation about how stigma affects people's reactions to traumatic illness or tragedy in the lives of others. Drawing from her family's experience with suicide, cancer, and mental illness, Susan tells what stigma looks like, its impact on people's lives, and how to overcome stigma in yourself and others.
A note for high schools:
Susan has developed a special stigma presentation suitable for teenage audiences. Working with selected student leaders, she presents an interactive demonstration of the impact of bullying, name-calling and labeling. Susan's no-holds-barred approach holds the students' interest and helps them understand clearly the reality of stigma and how to triumph over it. Students have said, "Thank you for telling our story.
School is both the social and work environment for children. Using examples from her daughter's experiences at school, and her own knowledge as a teacher, Susan distinguishes between discipline and punishment in the schools, and how those terms might have different applications for children with mental health problems. The presentation includes practical suggestions for educators on recognizing and nurturing children with mental health problems.
Coping with mental illness tears families apart, destroys lives, and plunges survivors into darkness. Children and families can become victims, adapt and survive. By following a small light of hope and finding the fragments of joy, Susan Hess tells the story of how she held herself and her family together and brought them successfully into a new life. In this presentation, Susan inspires her audience to believe that finding the light in the darkness is not only possible, but the only choice.
From Here to There: Parent Mobilization
Susan outlines the steps taken to develop the Quilt of Honour Campaign and expand it into a model of parent mobilization that works. From an idea to presentations to workshops, Susan talks about the vision, the risks and the results of giving parents a voice.
Workshop: Caring for the Caregiver
This workshop is especially designed for anyone caring for someone who is seriously physically or mentally ill. Find out how to be selfish in a positive way, recognize warning signs of overload, and techniques of caring for yourself so you can care for others.
Workshop: Coping with Suicide
This workshop follows Susan Hess' personal journey as she describes the impact of suicide on her family and her community. The workshop includes a discussion of the reality of stigma associated with suicide, and the family's eventual triumph over it.
What do people say about the Quilt of Honour presentation?
"Thank you for telling your story and removing the stigma and isolation that exist for those of us affected by children's mental illness."
"Your gentle and compassionate spirit invites warmth and love in all you do."
"You have moved my soul."
"Your seminar reminds us of why we come to work each day. We understand that we do make a difference."
"No book can teach in the way a person sharing their personal journey can."
Past Volunteer President of Parents for Children's Mental Health, Susan is available to speak to your organization, church, school, community or business about the impact of children's mental health problems on the children and their families. Susan draws universal truths from her experiences that resonate with many types of audiences including social workers, medical professionals, high school students, teachers, parents, business leaders, legal professionals and politicians.
For more information or to book Susan Hess, please call or email:
Susan Hess _PHONE_ _EMAIL_


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"Stamp, stamp. Clickety click. The machinery runs with a quick sharp tick…" begins the line describing a post office in Margaret Wise Brown's 1952 children's poem "Seven Little Postmen."
More than half a century later, stamp canceling machines still click. So do buttons on computer keyboards, automobile gas caps turned to lock, and hundreds of other devices. It's one of those things you don't notice until you notice it. This type of tactile feedback is intentional. A firm, audible click is one of the best signals we have to tell the user of a product that an action is completed.
There's nothing really novel about making something click. But there's an art and a science to doing it right. When a client came to us and requested that we make a scalpel with a guarded blade that could be passed from nurse to surgeon safely, even in the dark, we decided to dive deep into the click hole. We came back with good data on just what makes a click tick.
Anatomy of a Click
Our first stop on our quest to comprehend the click was a stationery store. We were looking for the simplest clicking devices we could think of: pen caps. The satisfying click you can feel and hear when you push the cap of a pen or marker tells you the cap is on securely. It's simple, universally recognized, and almost impossible not to fidget with during a meeting.
We purchased several pens and took them back to the lab to try to quantify the sound and force of each snap. We rated each pen on how it felt to click, how much force it took, how sharp or mushy it was. Then we set up an auditory test in an echo-free chamber and analyzed the volume and shape of the sound waves each click generated (see pens and waveforms charted, above and below). Instron force-testing also revealed the characteristic shape of an effective click, with its sudden rise and drop-off. Once we'd rated the pens for sound and feel, we looked at what it was about each pen design that gave its click its unique, specific auditory and tactile qualities.
The basic pen is a male cylinder with discrete bumps or ridges around the perimeter, near the nib. The cap is a female cylinder with ridges that rub across the ridges on the pen. The quality of the click depends on the height and ramp angles of the ridges, the space between them, the type of plastic from which they are made, and the stretch of the cap as it passes over them.
- A ridge with a more gradual ramp makes a softer click. The height of each ridge determines the sound of the click, and a steeper drop-off creates a more noticeable click.
- The material, height of ridges, and space between ridges determines how hard it is to engage the click.
- Mechanisms made of ABS plastic make a sharper click than ones made of polypropylene. Metal makes the click sharper still.
- Manufacturing a click takes some experience. In molded plastic parts, undercuts and ramp angles must be designed in a way that the mold that will release the plastic cap as it slides out of the tool.
Pen caps may be the simplest clicking devices, but the basic technology stays the same no matter what product we looked at. The placement of the ridges depends on the shape of the device (a razor cartridge would have them in a different location than a pen, obviously) but the micro details, how you design the bumps and angles to produce the click, never changes.
Click for Safety
To make sure we got the click right on the Alcon Safety Knife (shown below), we interviewed nurses, ophthalmic surgeons and surgical technicians to understand the environment in which the safety knife would be used. A key point was that eye surgeons operate in very dimly lit rooms, with light shining only on the patient's eye, and often with music playing in the background.
The Center for Disease Control estimates that healthcare workers suffer 600,00 to 800,000 needle sticks and accidental cuts every year in the U.S. Surgeons, nurses, and technicians are handling extraordinarily sharp scalpels and can easily cut themselves if they grasp the wrong part of the device.
To prevent these types of injuries, the Alcon Safety Knife is retractable and has a guard. It also has a click. To get the right sound and feel, we designed a whole line of safety knifes that differed only in click. Some were louder, some quieter, some harder, and some softer. Our client made the final choice.
When the eye surgeon asks for the knife, the technician picks it up and clicks it. The click, loud enough to be heard over background music, signals the blade is now guarded. The surgeon takes the knife from the tech, and can feel from position of the click mechanism that the blade is indeed guarded, a reassuring tactile cue.
The click of the Alcon Safety knife uses the same basic idea as the pen cap. That wasn't the only technology we considered, though. Pens that have a retractable nib, for example, use a hysteresis model. When you push once, the nib follows a track in one direction to go down. Push again, and it follows a different track to come back up. Fancy. But making that work for a surgical scalpel would have required the surgeon to change their hand position to retract or extend the blade. And our user analysis showed they didn't want to do that.
The Click That Satisfies
Most products that click would work just as well if they were silent, but the user would lose an important sense of security.
How do you know your razor blade is secured on your shaver if it doesn't click? How do you know a cartridge has been successfully inserted? How do you know your car trunk won't fly open on the highway if it didn't click when you closed it?
Seeing might be believing, but feeling is knowing. That click tells the surgeon that the scalpel is extended the same way the click tells a writer the pen is ready. And there's nothing quite as satisfying a clicking a cap back on when you're done with a project.


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This page of explanations of Metaphors is part of Web site biblesecrets.org which is a site devoted to the new view of Jesus Christ's second coming. It is based on the interpretation of The Book of Job which is an allegory for Jesus while he was on the cross trying to figure out why God had forsaken him..Copyright © 2000 DSOTO--
Many of the deeper meanings of the Old Testament are missed because metaphors are used so extensively. Examples of this are "eating" and "drinking," which refer to learning spiritual truths or the Word; and vines, trees, briers and thorns, cattle, and even fish when they refer to people. Jesus used these metaphors many times in the New Testament, even referring to himself as the "bread and water" from heaven. We should easily recognize the metaphor of eating because it's so common in our speech. Surely, you have heard such expressions: "I swallowed his story, hook, line and sinker;" or, "I swallowed my pride;" or, "I really liked his ideas; I ate them up." If you watch for them, metaphors are more common in our speech than we might first think. A line from a recent song comes to mind is a prime example, "You are the wind beneath my wings."
The metaphors in the Old Testament are a little harder to see sometimes, especially when they are only alluded to. They can be used so subtly that it is easy to miss the real message. A good example of this is found in Isaiah 28:8. He says: " For all the tables(1)), are full with vomit and filthiness, so there is no place clean." This verse is referring to the same metaphor of eating that Jesus uses so many times. It means that all the tables, which are places for eating, contains fouled food, not wholesome "bread," which means, "the word, truth". It means, there is no knowledge on the table that is clean to "feast upon," that all of "the bread" of God that should be there has been fouled by men. God's truths have been turned into what the philosophies of men turn "bread" into--vomit and excrement,(2) metaphorically of course. (Cf. Isaiah 21:5).
"WATER" the most frequently used metaphor
"Water," representing truth and knowledge, is probably the most frequently used metaphor in the Old Testament but still is very often missed. It shouldn't be, though, when we remember that a vine, metaphorically, meaning the Lord's people, needs spiritual watering and nurturing. Not only is Israel, collectively, considered as the Lords vine, but so is each of his children, individually. It is used hundreds of times in these ways (See Isa. 5:2-7; Psa. 80:8 for examples.). It is a small step to extend this metaphor to include light, recognizing that "vines" need both "water" and "light" to do well. Even so, it is amazing how often we fail to recognize this use of "water" in the Old Testament, especially when Jesus used it so plainly in the New Testament. Jesus said, "Whosoever drinketh of this water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14). That water, of course, is his Gospel, which is the knowledge of how to "grow" into "everlasting life." He went on to tell us that he even personifies that water by saying "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink, (John 7:37)." In other words he is saying, If any man thirsts for spiritual knowledge, "I am that water," which means he is the way, the only way to salvation, and is, therefore, the Messiah. (Cf. Rev. 7:15-17--"the Lamb...shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.)
Recently the importance of this metaphor was brought back to my attention. After I had studied and written about the meanings of "water" in the scriptures for many years, one day in a Sunday school class the teacher dropped a bomb on me, so to speak. She casually gave the class the definition of the Hebrew word for "prophet" from Smith's Bible Dictionary. What a great thing to learn; and it is unlikely I would have ever made this connection myself because it is doubtful I would have ever looked this up. This simple definition fit in with everything I had learned about this important metaphor. It also gave my testimony of the gospel another big boost. Incidentally, Smith's Bible Dictionary is on the internet.
The ordinary Hebrew word for prophet is nabi, derived from a verb signifying "to bubble forth" like a fountain; hence the word means one who announces or pours forth the declarations of God. The English word comes from the Greek prophetes (profetes ), which signifies in classical Greek one who speaks for another, especially one who speaks for a god, and so interprets his will to man; hence its essential meaning is "an interpreter." The use of the word in its modern sense as "one who predicts" is post-classical. The larger sense of interpretation has not, however, been lost. In fact the English word ways been used in a closer sense. (Underlining added)
A quick connection is easy to see when the above words of Jesus are considered, but it has a much greater significance. Because it is so well known you would think we would never miss this metaphor of "water" representing the truth or gospel, but it's easy to do in the Old Testament. Isaiah, alone, speaks of water this way a minimum of thirty-three times. In addition, he refers back to this metaphor using words such as thirst, dry, and drought. When he speaks of the wilderness, meaning a spiritual wilderness, he is still referring to this metaphor because the wilderness (where people live without the Gospel) is a wilderness because of the lack of "water" (spiritual truth). This is made more than clear when he talks about the wilderness becoming flooded with springs and streams and pools of water (Isa. 35:6-7). He is talking about floods of spiritual knowledge coming to them, not just rain. Look for this metaphor constantly; it's everywhere in the Old Testament, even taking on other forms such as ice and snow. In the early chapters of Isaiah (of curses) he takes away their water, making spiritual Israel a desert (3:1,5:13, 19:5-6), and in later chapters (of blessing), their "water" is restored in abundance (35:6-7, 41:18). The following verse, in a synonymous parallelism, teaches clearly that water is knowledge of God.
my people are gone into captivity, because they have no
And the honorable men are famished, and their multitude drieth up with thirst. (Isa. 5:13).
The "honorable men are famished" (hungry and thirsty), meaning they have neither bread nor water--the bread and water represents knowledge of God. They are "gone into captivity" in two ways: by Assyria, and by Satan, and for the same reason--because of their ignorance of God. Consider these lines from the same chapter: (Isa. 5:6-7)
I will lay
it waste, that vineyard.[Israel]
It shall not be pruned, neither digged,
But there shall come up briers and thorns.[wicked]
I will command the clouds that they not rain.
For the vineyard of the LORD is the house of Israel,
And the men of Judah, his pleasant plant.
It means that the Lord will withdraw his help or guidance, which is represented by "pruning," "digging," and "watering." And when he does withdraw, the men of Judah become "briers and thorns" instead of his "pleasant plant" (righteous ones). The following verses also use plants (which need water) to represent people. He uses "trees" for the righteous, "thorns and briers" for the wicked: (Isaiah 53:13)
shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace;
The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing,
And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree,
And instead of the brier, the myrtle tree.
It means Israel "shall go out" of the wicked world with "joy" and "peace," which is salvation. The "mountains and hills" is the Lord's mountain, where all those live who have lifted themselves up and out of the realm of Satan (the deep) by keeping the commandments of God. It is Zion, the pure in heart. They "sing" out of happiness for your salvation. "All the trees" (which are righteous people) "of the field" are also joyous for you. Instead of "thorns and briers," there will be "trees" (the righteous) in Israel.
Because "water" and its other forms are used so frequently, learning to recognize just this metaphor is crucial to understanding the Old Testament. The Book of Job uses water, and the other forms of water, such as rain, hail, snow, and frost, metaphorically many times. Most of the time they are used in synonymous parallelisms so the meaning is more clear. Surely


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Richard Coote Bellomont, earl of
Bellomont, Richard Coote, earl of (bĕlˈəmŏntˌ) [key], 1636–1701, colonial governor of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, b. Ireland. He arrived (1698) in New York at a time when a more unified administration of colonial affairs was being attempted. His administration was uneventful, but his endeavors to enforce the trade laws and to suppress piracy brought him the enmity of the aristocratic party in New York. He was noted for his arrest of William Kidd, whom he had originally commissioned as a pirate hunter.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: U.S. History: Biographies


Understanding LDAP Security Processing
Understanding LDAP Security Processing
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It's Randy again, here to discuss LDAP security. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an interface used to read from and write to the Active Directory database. Therefore, your Active Directory Administration tools (i.e. AD Users and Computers, AD Sites and Services, etc.) as well as third party tools are often going to use LDAP to bind to the database in order to manage your domain. As you can imagine, we rely on Windows security to authorize what users can do when accessing this important database. Access to this database is controlled by the Directory System Agent (DSA), which is represented by Ntdsa.dll on a domain controller. Ntdsa.dll runs as a part of the Local Security Authority (LSA), which runs as Lsass.exe.
The process of granting access is a two step process; Authentication and Authorization. This blog post will focus on the Authentication portion (verifying the user's identity.) If you would like to learn more about the Authorization process, please read my post on security tokens. Objects in the Active Directory database conform to the same rules as other Windows objects. They have permissions and privileges that govern what the authenticated user can do.
I use the LDP.EXE utility in Windows 2008 to reproduce all of the scenarios that follow. This tool is a client GUI to connect, bind and administrate Active Directory. You also want to download Network Monitor if you are troubleshooting an LDAP problem or want to follow along in your own network traces.
If you open up LDP and choose "Connect…" under the Connection menu and do not put in any parameters:
And choose bind as currently logged on user:
The first thing that you will notice is that it just works. We locate a valid domain controller when we do not specify a target DC by leveraging the DC Locator process and we bind as the currently logged on user by leveraging the security packages included in Windows. So what do we see in a network trace? We will be filtering on LDAP when opening in Network Monitor 3.3.
Why do we get results in LDP.exe before we even Bind?
The first set of traffic that we see is a couple of LDAP Search Requests and Search Responses. You can see this in the Description field of the Frame Summary:
So why do we see an LDAP search request before we do the LDAP bind? This is because we first access the "RootDSE" partition of the Active Directory Database as an anonymous connection to query information on the rules to bind and authenticate to this DSA. We allow anonymous access to this root, but in Windows Server 2003 and later we deny anonymous access to all other partitions in Active Directory. You can change this setting by changing the DSHeuristics value; this will be a forest-wide change for the behavior of all domain controllers.
You can see the LDAP request parameters as "BaseDN: NULL" if you look at the Frame Details pane of the LDAP search request. Expand the "LDAP: Search Request ", then expand the "Parser: Search Request", then expand the "Search Request":
"BaseDN" is the container where the search begins in the LDAP query. NULL is going to be the RootDSE of the domain controller. This is why results return in the right hand pane of the LDP utility before we even bind.
The "LDAP: Search Result" shows this same data if you expand the "LDAP: Search Result", then expand the "Parser: Search Result", then expand the "SearchResultEntry":
Notice that the results in the trace are identical to what displays on the LDP.exe result pane. One important piece of information that we get is "supportedSASLMechanisms". These are the supported security mechanisms that we can use in our LDAP bind. We will discuss this later in the post.
Why do we log on as 'Null' when we select to pass credentials?
So next we bind and select the default of currently logged on user. In the result pane of LDP it shows that we are logging on as 'NULL'.
I consider this more as an idiosyncrasy of the tool and not completely accurate. When we perform the Bind, we do present 'NULL' credentials, but specify SASL as the authentication type. At this point, we are passing the authentication process off to the SASL mechanism to complete. We can see evidence of this in the network trace.
Looking at the Bind Request in the frame details pane, you will see some interesting information as you expand out the LDAP packet:
Here we see that we are passing NULL credentials, but negotiate SASL authentication. Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) is a method for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. So basically, LDAP binds with NULL credentials because we are handing off the logon process to SASL and letting it do all the work. We see details of the negotiation process in the bind request and where we present the Kerberos session ticket as a result of selecting the GSS-SPEGNO SASL mechanism:
So how does SASL provide authentication?
For detailed information, you can check out the IETF explanation of SASL. Similar to how the Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) uses security packages, SASL will use registered SASL mechanisms to complete the authentication process. During the initial LDAP query for supportedSASLMechanisms described earlier. We retrieve a list of all the mechanisms from which the client and server will choose. Below is a list of the default mechanisms in Windows Server 2008.
Authentication Protocols
GSS-SPNEGO, in turn, uses Kerberos or NTLM as the underlying authentication protocol.
GSSAPI, in turn, always uses Kerberos as the underlying authentication protocol.
Used to allow a client to authenticate itself using information provided outside of the LDAP communication. Can be used to present certificates to establish TLS or IPSec.
Encrypts authentication using Digest-MD5
The LDP tool allows you to choose various mechanisms and is a great tool to test connections when other tools fail. You can select the appropriate bind specifications in order to closely simulate what your application is trying to perform.
The application will decide how it will bind to the database by what functions are used to establish the connection (i.e. LDAP_Simple_bind, LDAP_Sasl_bind, etc )
What about LDAP signing?
If you have ever looked through security settings in Group Policy, you may have stumbled on a couple related to LDAP.
Domain controller: LDAP server signing requirementsNetwork security: LDAP client signing requirements
These are both under Computer Configuration \ Windows Settings \ Security Settings \ Local Policies\Security Options.
Signing LDAP traffic is a way to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. By signing the LDAP traffic, this guarantees that the LDAP response did originate from the DC of whom the request was made. With these settings enabled, computers would not be able to intercept the traffic and modify the data on the wire. You can see the digital signing value in the network trace below. This value will be on every LDAP response from the DC where signing is done.
What is a Simple Bind?
An LDAP Simple Bind will send username and password in clear text to provide credentials to the LDAP server. This is not secure, so if your application is using simple binds it needs to be reconfigured or updated. You can create a Simple Bind using this option in LDP.exe or calling the LDAP_Simple_bind function in your code. In a network trace we can see the username and password in the LDAP BIND Frame.
With Signing required in my domain, I was unable to perform a simple bind with LDP.exe. I received the error "LDAP_Simple_Bind failed: Strong Authentication Required".
What is an Anonymous Bind?
As mentioned earlier, every LDAP connection is going to perform an anonymous bind to query RootDSE of the LDAP server. Also mentioned earlier, by changing the DSHueristics value on your AD Forest, you can permit Anonymous Bind LDAP searches for all the AD Partitions. The anonymous bind is still restricted by the permissions on the Directory Objects themselves. I did an anonymous bind and performed a search for all the user objects in the domain and resulted in only one user because I had manually granted permissions on that User object.
I also had to grant permissions on the Organization Unit that contained the user; otherwise the anonymous logon was unable to traverse containers where it had no permissions. I did not have to grant access to the Domain Naming Context at the root. I was able to set permissions in "AD Users and Computers" by selecting the "Advanced Features" option in the View Menu.
What about LDAPS?
LDAPS uses SSL/TLS technology to establish an encrypted tunnel between the client and the LDAP server. The tunnel is encrypted with the LDAP server's PKI Certificate, this way no one else can read the traffic except for the client and LDAP server so the Client is free to perform a simple bind and safely pass the credentials in clear text. LDAPS is an entirely different subject that deserves its own post. Luckily James Carr has written it, check it out here.
Developers have a plethora of ways to bind to an Active Directory database. This provides supportability for numerous flavors of LDAP clients, but it does require some configuration on the part of the AD administrator. Farewell for now…
Randy "Baby Elvis, thank you verah muuuch" Turner
 - I am running Windows Server 2008 as a DC, AD LDS, AD, WSUS, etc and I'm trying to bnd to the LDAP (via AD LDS) using a 3rd party utility. I can not bind to it at all...then I found a KB to add userProxy class to the AD LDS but I'm unable to finish creating the object because the user


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The effects of introductory economics course on students' beliefs and aptitudes in economics
In a 2002 paper, Meyer and Shanahan claimed that there are subject-specific aspects of learning which cannot be uncovered using generalised student learning inventories; these generalised inventories are thus insensitive to subject-specific sources of variation in learning. The authors argue that there is a need to'seek additional sources of variation that are perhaps conceptually unique... within the discourse of particular disciplines'. This paper reports the findings of a survey study built on, and aimed to extend, Shanahan and Meyer's findings. The survey investigated (a) commencing students' economic beliefs, and (b) their capacity for economic thinking. A 30-item questionnaire was constructed and administered twice, first at the beginning, and then at the end of summer semester of 2003 (November 2003 – February 2004). Using factor analysis, the three economic belief constructs – economic misconception, economic methodology and economic assumption – were validated. Students with high scores in economic misconception were found to have a lower capacity for thinking like an economist. After one semester of study in introductory economics, it was found that students, on the whole, possessed more economic misconception, as compared to beginning of semester, and they had not demonstrated an increase in their ability to think like an economist.
Citation countsare sourced monthly fromand citation databases.
Citations counts from theindexing service can be viewed at the linked Google Scholar™ search.
|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Additional Information:||For more information, please refer to the journal's website (see hypertext link) or contact the author. Author contact details: _EMAIL_|
|Keywords:||First year economics, economics education, student learning, assessment, learning outcome, student learning inventory, economic misconceptions|
|Subjects:||Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification > ECONOMICS (140000)|
|Divisions:||Current > QUT Faculties and Divisions > QUT Business School|
|Copyright Owner:||Copyright 2004 Australasian Journal of Economics Education|
|Deposited On:||20 Jun 2007|
|Last Modified:||05 Jan 2011 23:31|
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'Yanny' Or 'Laurel'? Why People Hear Different Things In That Viral Clip
The debate over whether an audio clip says "yanny" or "laurel" is tearing the Internet apart.
Updated at 11 p.m. ET
If you haven't heard it yet, take a listen:
The short audio clip has sharply divided the Internet since it was posted on Twitter by Cloe Feldman on Monday. Why would people hear two totally different words?
To answer this, we consulted experts in how human brains perceive sound.
Nina Kraus, a neurobiology professor at Northwestern University, says, "It is not at all surprising to me that two different people will take a sound that is admittedly acoustically ambiguous and hear it differently."
"Acoustically ambiguous" in this case means that it's a very poor-quality file. That is crucial in explaining why people are hearing different things.
The viral tweet posted by Feldman was actually taken from a post on Reddit, as she has explained. And the person who appears to be the original Reddit poster, RolandCamry, says that he made it from playing a recording from Vocabulary.com out of his speakers. In other words, there are multiple steps that degrade the quality of the audio.
(Spoiler alert: Based on what the Redditor who claims to be the original poster said, the original recording is probably this one on Vocabulary.com, which says "laurel.")
The poor quality of the audio, likely re-recorded multiple times, makes it more open to interpretation by the brain, says Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona. Primary information that would be present in a high-quality recording or in person is "weakened or attenuated," Story says, even as the brain is eagerly looking for patterns to interpret.
"And if you throw things off a little bit, in terms of it being somewhat unnatural, then it is possible to fool that perceptual system and our interpretation of it," says Story.
Story says the two words have similar patterns that easily could be confused. He carried out his own experiment by analyzing a waveform image of the viral recording and compared it to recordings of himself saying "laurel" and "yanny."
He noticed similarities in the features of these words, which you can see below. Both words share a U-shaped pattern, though they correspond to different sets of frequencies that the vocal tract produces, Story explains. Take a look here:
Professor Brad Story analyzed the acoustic features of the words "yanny" and "laurel" from the viral audio clip and from his own voice.
/ Brad Story
"So with a recording that's somewhat ambiguous and low-quality, it's not surprising that some people may flip those when they're perceiving that word," Story says. That probably wouldn't happen in a high-quality recording, he says, or if it were spoken in a full sentence to give people more context clues.
Britt Yazel, a neuroscience doctoral student at University of California, Davis, analyzed the sound file and filtered out all the sound above the frequency 4.5 kilohertz.
That filtering "takes away the entire perception of hearing the word 'yanny' and all you get is the word 'laurel,' " he says. "If you lose the high frequencies, the illusion goes away."
Some people have greater sensitivity to higher frequencies or lower frequencies, Yazel says, which could explain part of why people hear different things.
"But not only that, the brains themselves can be wired very differently to interpret speech," he says. For example, if you hear the sounds in either "yanny" or "laurel" more in your everyday life, you might be more likely to hear them here.
It's also worth noting that people are expecting to hear either "yanny" or "laurel," which makes it more likely that they actually will hear one of those words and not something else.
For Kraus, the Northwestern professor who runs a laboratory on the biology of how humans process sound, it matters little how people interpret this single word in a poor-quality, idiosyncratic recording. Where this does matter, she says, and where similar issues are at play, is how people fill in the gaps of their hearing when faced with a noisy context. Much of what you hear, she says, is about what you're expecting to hear.
She provides another example. First, listen to this noisy clip and see if you can hear a sentence.
Next, listen to this clip, which is no longer noisy.
Finally, go back to the first clip. Now that the brain is primed to cut through the noise, you will probably be able to hear: "The juice of lemons makes fine punch."
"We all perceive the world a little differently based on our experiences," she says. It's crucial, she adds, to "use your experience with sound and what you know about it to fill in the gaps."


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For the following minimal example, there appears to be a regression in Intel Fortran LLVM 2023.0.0 20221201 and Classic 2021.8.0.20221119 that works in 2022.2.1 Build 20221101. The 'random_init()' second call should use a new seed, but does not.
program demo_rand use, intrinsic :: iso_fortran_env, only : stderr=>error_unit implicit none real :: r1, r2 call random_init(.false.,.false.) call random_number(r1) call random_init(.false.,.false.) call random_number(r2) if (r1==r2) then write(stderr,*) 'random_init fail: ', r1,'== ', r2 error stop 'these two random number should not match if random_init is working' endif print *, "OK: random_init: ", r1, " /= ", r2 end program
You are correct that the second call to RANDOM_INIT should result in a different sequence. The standard says (emphasis mine), "CALL RANDOM_INIT(REPEATABLE=false, IMAGE_DISTINCT=false) is equivalent to invoking RANDOM_SEED with a processor-dependent value for PUT that is the same on every invoking image. Different values for PUT shall be used for subsequent invocations, and for each execution of the program."
I've reworked your test program to more precisely match what the standard says:
program demo_rand use, intrinsic :: iso_fortran_env, only : stderr=>error_unit implicit none integer :: szize integer, allocatable :: seed1(:),seed2(:) call random_seed(size=szize) allocate (seed1(szize),seed2(szize)) call random_init(.false.,.false.) call random_seed (get=seed1) print *, seed1 call random_init(.false.,.false.) call random_seed(get=seed2) print *, seed2 if (all(seed1==seed2)) then write(stderr,*) 'random_init fail' error stop 'these two seeds should not match if random_init is working' endif print *, "OK: random_init" end program
In contrast to the first post that report a change in behavior in the last release, do not see any changes in behavior between 2022.1, 2022.2.1 and 2023.0 versions of ifx on Linux (I just tried these three versions as I all have them locally installed).
Here i s a link to the compiler explorer with Steve's slightly modified example in ifx 2022.2.1:
Thanks _USER_ you are correct. I was checking between Windows 2022.2.1 that does NOT have this issue and Linux that has long had this issue. I also checked with ifort Version 2021.1 Build 20201112 on Linux and saw the same issue. So yes, it's NOT actually a regression, it's just long broken behavior.