text:
Whatever is used in fire you shall pass through fire and then it will be clean; it must also, however, be cleansed with sprinkling water, and whatever is not used in fire you shall pass through water. (Numbers 31:23)
There are two separate areas of Jewish law which pertain to this verse. The first is the law of hechsher keilim, the cleansing of forbidden foods from kitchen utensils.
The Gemara (Pesachim 44b) explains that when food is cooked, its taste is transferred into the utensils used in the process. If the food is non-kosher, the taste transferred will also be non-kosher and the utensil will be rendered unfit for use in a kosher kitchen.
Our verse explains that for the utensil to become kosher again, it must go through the same process used in the cooking of the non-kosher food. Once cleaned, if the non-kosher food had been grilled with fire, the utensils used can only be purified with fire. If the food was boiled, the utensils used must be purified with boiling water.
The second principal is the law of tevilat keilim, which dictatesthat kitchen utensils (except those made from plastic or wood) acquired from non-Jews must be immersed in a mikveh (ritual bath) before use in a kosher kitchen in order to carry out a process of spiritual purification.
The first law of kashering kitchen utensils achieves a physical change in the utensil whereas the process of tevilah – immersion in a mikvahi, does not change the physical properties of the utensil at all.
The Gemara (Rosh HaShannah 17a) compares a sinner to a blackened pot. The process of teshuvah – repentance (lit. return) is a two stage process. First one must desist from the sinful act and confess which is similar to the process of hechsher keilim yielding a noticeable change in behaviour. Secondly the sinner must begin to make internal changes to their character to safeguard themselves from repeating the sinful act. This is similar to tevilat keilim which does not generate a physical change, but represents a profound spiritual transformation.


The theory of life effect • Presentation of the website PDF Imprimer
The theory of life effect is an artistic theory based on the discovery of a universal invariant that can be found in the texts written by great artists of all times and in all cultures.
It postulates the existence of an innate aptitude of homo sapiens for art. It proposes that a work of art is successful when it creates in the body-mind of the recipient an 'effect' that awakens not only the affect, but all faculties, and does so in a coherent manner.
A work of art is therefore a living work, and a work of life. In order to study it, one needs a specific human science that is able to integrate the rich contributions of the other sciences that study art, as well as to examine closely the corollaries of the life effect invariant.


Marketing the News
Course Description
The course explores the mechanisms of how newscasters achieve confidence and integrity in the public eye; the way stories are presented as 'unbiased, impartial, honest, and fair'; and what factors contribute to this implied relationship between newsperson and audience.
Learning Outcomes
 - Investigate how the news is disseminated through media channels and online.
 - Evaluate how newscasters gain public trust and confidence through audience viewership.
 - Analyze how news organizations build their brand and cultivate a loyal viewer base.
 - Interpret the methodologies of anchors and reporters in developing brand loyalty and how news dissemination influences mass-media perception.
 - Compare a diversity of stories and media channels and discuss the newscaster's intent and result of delivery.
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text:
The highlights of this release are:
Improving Productivity and Workflow
- Redesigned results analysis mode, capable of producing plots and tabular data orders of magnitude faster than before
- Post-Processing Automation and Intelligence
- Full visual results in the parametric Command Center tool.
This group of enhancements substantially reduce the engineering time required to inspect simulation results.
Enhancing the Thermal Digital Twin
- Multiple temperature sensor support for Power Controller object
- Semiconductor materials: Tabular definition of thermal conductivity variation with temperature
These enhancements improve the ability to include semiconductor materials and power control strategies in the thermal digital twin.

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


text:
Non-Profit Spotlight: Devon Wildlife Trust
By Jessica Hardesty Norris
As an appreciation for beaver as wildlife outstripped the appetite for hats and clothing made with beaver fur, Europe has initiated reintroductions across the continent. The pilot project to bring the mighty rodent back to the British Isles is somewhat on the tail end of that activity. Unlike other parts of Europe, which have quickly growing beaver populations, the English landscape is more challenging, with fewer natural areas and more barriers to connectivity. Peter Burgess, the Director of Conservation and Development for the Devon Wildlife Trust (DWT) and self-described keen enthusiast of beavers, is undaunted. DWT has been spearheading a strengthening collaboration to bring wild beaver back for over seven years. It's a short period compared to the 400 years since wild beaver were hunted to extinction from the island, but things are moving fast.
"We started to see a groundswell of public support for the idea," says Burgess. "And it became apparent that Devon would likely be in the spotlight." Compared to other regions of England that are more highly constrained by development and their inherent or altered ecological context, Devon presents advantages for beaver reintroduction. A pastoral landscape with a mild, wet climate, Devon has lower population density. It also hosts remnant Culm grassland systems, which depend on poorly drained acidic and clay soils that retain water and stay too wet for modern farming practices. Maintained by grazing and occasional managed burning, Culm grasslands support a unique community of plants and animals, including a highly endangered species of butterfly, the marsh fritillary. More than half of the original grassland extent has been lost since the 1980s, mostly as land was drained to allow for agricultural improvement. Given this context, Burgess and others felt that beaver could likely serve as a natural mechanism to restore the hydrology and thereby the former Culm grasslands through their coppicing activity.
By 2011, the Wildlife Trust had constructed a three-hectare fenced area where beaver could be released and studied to understand their capacity as landscape engineers. This project was a first step along a road to reintroduction, a chance to examine the efficacy of beaver as a wet grassland management tool, introduce stakeholders to a concrete example of their effects, and build popular support for reintroduction efforts. The results have been promising.
Devon Wildlife Trust was merrily proceeding with the enclosure experiment when there was an unexpected development that offered an opportunity to fast-forward the overarching program. They heard and confirmed reports that beaver of unknown origin were busily building dams outside the enclosure, along the nearby River Otter. Though their provenance remains a mystery, they are thought to be animals from a private collection that had either escaped or were released into the area.
"Hearing about those introduced beaver gave us an amazing opportunity to crack on with the process of understanding the public sentiment and regulatory framework for beaver reintroduction," says Burgess. The mystery beavers posed an interesting problem: because beaver can carry a potentially damaging tapeworm (Echinocochus multilchularis), they needed to be tested.
Once they were captured for testing, their legal status posted specific challenges. Captive beavers, which they now were, are not allowed to be released into the wild. Even where legal, such releases are carefully managed according to established guidelines from the IUCN. So once the beavers were given a clean bill of health, DWT saw their situation as an opportunity to generate public awareness and a chance to pioneer the process of securing legal authorization for their release.
DWT initiated a massive outreach campaign that built on the relationships they had developed while securing permission and buy-in for the enclosure experiment. DWT knocked on doors of local landowners and farmers, appeared at public meetings, sought opportunities to speak to community groups, and began to untangle the concerns of stakeholders and other parties who resisted the notion. Eventually the regulators from Natural England Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, who worked closely with DWT and other experts from the start, decided that the mystery beavers could be rereleased as an independent trial, lasting five years. The solution required DWT to reframe its approach.
"We started out campaigning for the re-release, but that role has shifted in that we are sharing responsibility for supervising an independent research study," says Burgess. "We have permission to add additional animals. After five years, we will face a decision about how to proceed."
This facet has important implications for the team's decisions today, which is roughly the midpoint of the trail period. A tiny population of beaver, left to breed amongst themselves for even five years, will undergo inbreeding and have a very restricted genetic diversity. Would that mean that if the trial is successful, a thoughtful reintroduction program should not begin with the population already living in the wild? The nine beavers found today in the River Otter are believed to have a common parent. In England, there is no studbook for the beavers. Most animals in England today have come from areas in Bavaria, Germany, and Norway.
"Genetic diversity is something we are trying, retrospectively, to improve," says Burgess. Another challenge that has to be worked out centers on how the animals will be managed if they cause trouble for humans or infrastructure. DEFRA must decide how to respond if the beaver build dams that increase local flood risk, for example. The answers are starting to become clearer through the listening sessions and conversations occurring today. The hard data on the water quality and quantity changes are captured by the research enclosure, but the situation of the mystery beavers has quickly advanced everyone's understanding of potential socioeconomic impacts, such as changes to land immediately adjacent to the river that would prevent its use for agriculture. Most social considerations, though, are rapidly becoming less complex.
"The nearby communities are amazingly supportive," says Burgess. Neighbors describe their enthusiasm for the program, and their sense that they are proud to see the beavers coming back to the landscape. This has been a welcome insight to Burgess, who is resolutely optimistic about the future of the program. "England has so little natural vegetation and so few unaltered ecosystems. We now have a chance to enable beavers to breathe new life into our waterways and provide them with more space to behave in much more dynamic, complex, and ecologically beneficial ways – and whilst doing so reduce flood risk to communities downstream and improve the quality of water."
The River Otter Beaver Trial is led by Devon Wildlife Trust working in partnership with The University of Exeter, the Derek Gow Consultancy, and Clinton Devon Estates. Expert independent advice is also provided by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, Professor John Gurnell, and Gerhard Schwab, an international beaver expert based in Bavaria. Their funding support, however, comes entirely from individuals and foundations. Click here for more info. [hyperlink _URL_


January, 2008
 - Wriju's BLOG
 ADO.NET : OleDbCommand Parameterized Query Sequence Rule
 While working with MS Access database with OleDbCommand you might have faced issue that your parameterized update statement is not working. The most frustrating part is that it also does not throw any runtime error. So ideally you paralyzedJ.
 Golden rule is that you need to maintain the exact sequence of parameters you have specified in the sql statement. So while adding the parameter value sequence is very important.
 Command parameter collection addition sequence has to match with the sql statement sequence.
 String sSQL = "UPDATE PHONEDB SET [NAMES] = _USER_ WHERE [ID] = _USER_";
 OleDbConnection conn = new OleDbConnection("ConnectionString");
 OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand();
 cmd.Connection = conn;
 cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
 cmd.CommandText = sb.ToString();
 cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("_USER_", "Your Name");
 cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("_USER_", 12345);
 Now if you alter the sequence like,
 cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("_USER_", 12345);
 Things would not work as expected.
 - Wriju's BLOG
 LINQ to SQL : Understanding Mapping
 In LINQ to SQL you play with pure.NET objects and write your LINQ on top of that. But question might arise how this magic happens. Though we say that it is object, the question might arise in our mind that there has to be a mechanism through which it connects. Yes, there is. That is DataContext which controls the background transaction. But again how it understands that your class is actually representing a database object, is only though Attribute magic.
 There could be different database components,
 Database Æ DataContect
 Table Æ Class
 Column Æ Property/Field
 Relationship Æ Property/Field
 View Æ Class
 Stored Procedure Æ Function
 Now when we write code for that how we define them?
 Let us have a database TestDB and a table Emp.
 CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Emp](
 [Id] ASC
 ) ON [PRIMARY]
 Step 1:
 Create a table representation,
 public class Employee
 public int Id { get; set; }
 public string Name { get; set; }
 Now map this class for dbo.Emp table through attribute.
 public class Employee
 public int Id { get; set; }
 public string Name { get; set; }
 Step 2:
 Now you need to map columns,
 [Column(IsDbGenerated=true, IsPrimaryKey=true)]
 public int Id { get; set; }
 Now this is because the Id column is Primary Key and automatically generated column.
 public string Name { get; set; }
 Notice here I am not specifying the "Name=" is because the property name and the column names are identical.
 Step 3
 You have Database which ideally DataContext should be able to handle, so if you do not want to create class for that, you can very well do that. Like
 DataContext db = new DataContext(@"Connection String");
 var query = db.GetTable();
 But if you really would like to get the strongly typed behavior with statement completion then the approach would be little different.
 public class TestDB : DataContext
 public TestDB(string sConn): base(sConn){}
 public Table Emps;
 Now if you start writing the same code this will give you the itellisense and statement completion,
 TestDB db = new TestDB(@"Connection String");
 var query = db.Emps;
 var query1 = from e in db.Emps
 where e.Id == 1
 select e;
 Hope you liked this.
 - Wriju's BLOG
 Funny but real SDLC
 I was browsing _URL_
 A nice view which is self explanatory reality
 - Wriju's BLOG
 MSDN Tech Posters
 I found an article at _URL_ for Tech Posters.
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Manual uploads
When testing your preview feed, if you are using the push method for uploading your data, you can test various feed elements by manually uploading data files. This is particularly useful as you prepare to automate your data delivery.
To manually upload data files:
 1. Access the Transit Partner Dashboard.
 2. Select your feed.
 3. Click Realtime Feeds.
 4. Scroll down to Manual Feed Upload.
 5. Click Select File.
 6. Choose the file(s) you want to manually upload
 7. Click Upload.
Manual upload is a tool used during the review and testing phase. If you don't have the resources to create a realtime feed but want to provide us with service alerts, use our Service Alerts Editor.
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Skrill (MoneyBookers)
MoneyBookers (Skrill)
One of the most widely used deposit methods online comes from This is an e-wallet account that can be funded multiple ways and is accepted on most major websites. It allows the user to deposit and withdraw funds to and from online accounts with ease and is completely free to top it all off.
Moneybookers has been around for well over 8 years and is well established in the European marketplace as a preferred method of payment. This is not, however, restricted to just Europe as Moneybookers services the entire world, allowing literally anyone in any country to open and use the account services. While U.S. citizens can open an account, only certain websites will take this as a deposit and withdrawal method for them.
Signing up is a short and simple process that only requires visiting the website and filling out a brief form. Then once the form has been filled out, the account will be activated and it can be funded a number of ways. This can be accomplished either by linking it directly to a bank account that is already in use or by attaching a credit or debit card to it.
The bank accounts are verified by Moneybookers making a small deposit, usually a few cents, to the account in question. When this has been done, an email is sent with a verification link in it. By retrieving the amount and clicking on the link, you will be redirected to the website and prompted to enter the deposit amount.
This is simply to verify that the information for both the account number and routing number to the account are correct. The verification process can take up to 3 to 4 business days in some cases as it depends on how quickly the bank processes electronic transactions. The verified account can then be funded from this method at anytime without having to re-enter the information over and over for each use.
The e-wallet concept allows the user to have one online account to fund multiple websites rather than having to enter the same information at each different website. This helps to keep personal and financial information secure and in one place. All data transmissions done through Moneybookers are encrypted to add another level to the security they provide for their clients.
With so many websites accepting this form of payment, it simply makes sense to have one account that can be trusted rather than spreading a credit or debit card all over the Internet. In this day and age where identity theft is a big issue, especially online, it is nice to know that the account holder's information is safe and secure. They will never release account information to any website or merchant without express consent from the account holder.
It is rare for this particular e-wallet service to have issues but as with anything, they do happen. Depending on which country the account is funded from, the contact information for support differs slightly. You can contact MoneyBookers via their main website ( or by using one of the following methods:
Mailing address
Moneybookers USA, Inc.
155 Water Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Call Center 24/7
Registering in Moneybookers
Registering on Moneybookers is not as fast as on other e-wallet sites. When you want to avail of the services of Moneybookers, the company requires you to present proof of your identity when you take out an account with them. This precautionary measure of providing proof of your identity is to help minimize money laundering and fraud that is sometimes perpetrated through such entities. The company even takes security measures one step further by requiring more identity verification steps for accounts that want to have a maximum amount of twenty thousand Euros.
Moneybookers is not exclusively used for online gambling purposes. The company is actually used for a lot of other purposes, like online purchasing, auction site payments, and many more. You can even send money to people in other countries with the use of your Moneybookers account. The restrictions that Moneybookers has in place are for U.S. users. While users in the US can receive and send funds via Moneybookers, they cannot use this account for online gambling. There are a lot of countries that Moneybookers serves, and for you to know whether your country is part of the list, you may need to register and check the drop-down list of countries that the registration form of the site has.
Fees for sending money via Moneybookers can amount to 1% of the amount you are sending. Depending on the country of origin, uploading funds via your credit card can cost somewhere between 0.90% and 2.50%. Bank transfers are facilitated for free. Withdrawing funds, however, come with varying fees with bank transfers for such transactions costing a standard 1.80 Euros and cheques costing 3.50 Euros. Using a Visa debit card to withdraw money with Moneybookers will also cost you 1.80 Euros per transaction. The credit cards that Moneybookers allows registered users to utilize with their accounts for international money transfers, uploads, and withdrawals include Mastercard, Visa, JCB, Amex, and Diners cards.
People who need to get in touch with the customer service department of the company can call their international number, which is +44 _PHONE_; and they can do so from Mondays to Fridays between 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. GMT. There is also a UK number that people can call, which is 0905 _PHONE_. For e-mail support, you will need to send the company your e-mail address via their e-mail support page, and their customer support staff will get back to you for your concerns. You can also contact them via snail mail at their address, which is Welken House, 10-11 Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6EH, United Kingdom. Other ways you can get in touch with the company include fax numbers for certain countries like the United States, the UK, France, or Germany; however, they do have a couple of international fax numbers, which are _PHONE_ and +44 _PHONE_.
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text:
Predicting protein structures and simulating protein folding are two of the most important problems in computational biology today. Simulation methods rely on a scoring function to distinguish the native structure (the most energetically stable) from non-native structures. Decoy databases are collections of non-native structures used to test and verify these functions.
We present a method to evaluate and improve the quality of decoy databases by adding novel structures and removing redundant structures. We test our approach on 20 different decoy databases of varying size and type and show significant improvement across a variety of metrics. We also test our improved databases on two popular modern scoring functions and show that for most cases they contain a greater or equal number of native-like structures than the original databases, thereby producing a more rigorous database for testing scoring functions.


text:
|Possible Values:||none | left | right | both
|Applies to:||All elements
The clear property specifies if an element allows floating elements to its sides. A value of left moves the element below any floating element on its left; right acts similarly for floating elements on the right. Other values are none, which is the initial value, and both, which moves the element below floating elements on both of its sides. This property is similar in function to HTML 3.2's , but it can be applied to all elements.
Maintained by John Pozadzides and Liam Quinn
CSS Index ~ CSS Structure ~ CSS Properties
Copyright © 1997 John Pozadzides and Liam Quinn. All rights reserved.


Florida Monkeys Threaten Residents With Herpes
 September 14, 2013
 Amanda Crum
A large group of Rhesus monkeys from a small island near Silver River are now posing a health threat to Floridians, wildlife experts say.
The monkeys–which were first brought to the area by tour guide Colonel Tooey in the 1930's–have had a population boom over the years and eventually learned to swim, and now hundreds of them are infected with Herpes B and are moving towards Jacksonville. Officials say the virus is rarely transmitted to humans, but it is possible, and it can be deadly.
The virus is caused by Macacine herpesvirus 1, according to the Center for Disease Control.
The virus is commonly found among macaque monkeys, including rhesus macaques, pig-tailed macaques, and cynomolgus monkeys (also called crab-eating or long-tailed macaques), any of which can harbor latent B virus infection and appear to be natural hosts for the virus. Monkeys infected with B virus usually have no or only mild symptoms. In addition, rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice can be experimentally infected with B virus. Infection with B virus is extremely rare in humans; however, when it does occur, the infection can result in severe neurologic impairment or fatal encephalomyelitis if the patient was not treated soon after exposure.
Local residents are being urged not to approach the animals, no matter how friendly they may seem.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Amanda Crum


text:
Our analysis task was to import images (JPG format), extract numerical data (pixel brightness), and compare to various theories. While I'm sure there are straightforward ways to do this in other languages, I found Python had more than enough to offer in terms of possible solutions. One additional requirement was that we wanted to average many slices of the image in order to decrease the sensitivity to localized variations. The final solution was to import the image using tools provided by Scipy. This also allowed us to use standard image processing functions to rotate the image and average many cross sections. Because the object (a nickel) has rotational symmetry, we took 36 slices (each 10 degrees from the previous) and averaged them. This gives a good picture of the radial dependence of the brightness. Plotting and fitting were straightforward using other Scipy routines or your favorite 2D plotting software (mine is DataGraph).
Writing and debugging the code took about an hour and plotting/analyzing took about another hour. Two hours start to finish!
We quickly realized that we don't have an analytic theory to compare to so we discussed various numerical models and decided to implement a relaxation method to solve the Laplace equation in 3D for a reasonable set of boundary conditions. This code took about 1.5 hours and depending on the mesh density, runs in about 3 minutes. Best of all, we get very interesting qualitative agreement. All this for about 4 hours at the computer. Not too shabby.
For what it's worth, the code is attached below. The relevant functions are scipy.misc.imread, pylab.imshow, pylab.semilogy, and scipy.sum. These import an image, show an image, plot on semilog axis, and sum an array along one axis. The code comments should help illustrate why each is used.
from pylab import imshow, figure, zeros, plot from scipy.misc import imread from scipy.ndimage.interpolation import rotate from numpy import savetxt a = imread("Jefferson.JPG",flatten=1) # imshow(a) center = [1930,1289] # define the center of the image (for cropping) width = 1000 # choose a radius for the cropped image crop = a[center-width:center+width,center-width:center+width] # imshow(crop) stack = zeros((2000,10)) # create an array to save the slices total = stack[:,0] # create an array to save the average slice for i in range(10): # take ten slices stack[:,i] = rotate(crop,i*36,reshape=False)[1000,:] total += stack[:,i] plot(total) # plot the data savetxt("Jefferson-v2.dat", total) # save the data to a file
from scipy.misc import imread from pylab import gray, imshow, plot, show, semilogy from scipy import zeros, sum image = imread("circle.png",flatten=True) image = -image + 255 # rescale so background is zero sizex,sizey = image.shape depth = 15 mesh = zeros((sizex,sizey,depth)) mesh[:,:,0] = image mesh[:,:,1] = image mesh[:,:,2] = image mesh[:,:,3] = image mesh[:,:,4] = image runs = 500 # iterate over the whole array setting each point to be # the average of the neighbors for round in range(runs): print "Run number: ", round for i in range(sizex-2): for j in range(sizey-2): for k in range(depth-2): mesh[i+1,j+1,k+1] = 0.166 * (mesh[i+1,j+1,k] + mesh[i+1,j+1,k+2] + mesh[i+1,j,k+1] + mesh[i+1,j+2,k+1] + mesh[i,j+1,k+1] + mesh[i+2,j+1,k+1]) total = sum(mesh, axis=2) # Sum the potential through the whole region. This was to see if the light generated is proportional to the potential. It is more likely that the light is proportional to the field strength so more calculation will be required. semilogy(total[:,sizex/2]) # plot a slice through the center of the region
I should point out that one interesting feature of this code is that is uses an image to provide the initial conditions for the Laplace solver. This means that the code could be easily adapted to a wide variety of situations and you could quickly explore all sorts of funky shapes.
The top five slices are set to have the potential given in a grayscale image. I just created a black circle on a white background in Inkscape and exported it to PNG. The code inverts this image in order to set the voltage to 255 in the center and 0 on the outside. Then there is a little trick to zero (ground) the areas outside the circle. From there, it's just a for loop that carries out the relaxation method: set each point to the average of the neighbors.
This project isn't necessarily polished, but I wanted to share the code in case anyone is looking for something like this. If you have to extract some data from an image, python is a great place to start.


Do This Exercise to Improve Your Photography Lighting Skills
Practice makes perfect. Consider football players practicing before a game. While practicing, they do all kinds of things that they wouldn't do during an actual game. In practice sessions, they push themselves and their skills to their limits, because they want to improve their skills, agility, strength, and decision making. As a photographer, you should do the same. In the following video, photographer Mark Wallace from Adorama takes you through an exercise to help you stay on top of your photography game:
To understand how to have better control over lighting as a photographer, Wallace takes you through an exercise similar to what classic painters used: a still life. By shooting still life, you will have a better understanding of how to control specular highlights, shadows, and the direction of light. So follow along and start practicing.
Setup for Still Life Photography Practice
For the practice session, Wallace has the following setup:
 - Leica M10 camera with a 50mm lens, set at f/8 for greater depth of field
 - At the other end of the camera, he has some tomatoes, apples, grapes, and a glass pitcher with potpourri. Note that the fruits, vegetables and the glass pitcher are shiny and have specular highlights.
 - The setup is lit with big windows on the side, and one incandescent light on the top.
Exercise to Control Specular Highlights
Since the items that Wallace has chosen are very shiny, they show off reflections of the light source (specular highlights). The first exercise is to control those specular highlights, as they can be very distracting and difficult to deal with even in post. Here's what Wallace does to control the specular highlights:
 - First off, he starts by taking a photo of the fruit and vegetable setup just using the ambient light. This gives him an idea of how the specular highlights appear in the image.
lighting practice with ambient light
 - Taking inspiration from the classic master painters, he approaches the situation with the idea of getting rid of ambient light by closing the windows.
 - He uses a Profoto B2 with a soft box to light the subject. To avoid specular highlights, he places the light setup close to and behind the subject, also making sure that some amount of light is spilled in front of the subject.
 - He then meters the light by pointing the light meters toward the light (and not the camera) and takes the photo as per the reading to get the following result:
lighting practice using still life
Notice the reflection of chairs on the edges of the glass.
The image looks a lot better. However, there are still specular highlights on the glass due to the reflection of the chairs. By getting rid of the chairs, the result is further improved. Notice how being aware of your surroundings can help you in figuring out issues with your photos.
still life lighting exercise
If you look closely, you can still see the light stand behind the subject. Wallace uses a black cloth to cover it up while using a 12 second timer to delay the shutter release.
lighting practice with still life
Using a black cloth to get rid of the light stand
lighting practice activity
The light stand is not visible anymore.
Retouching Still Life Images
Once satisfied with the image, Wallace opens it up in Adobe Lightroom and makes use of adjustment brushes to make local corrections. Here is what he does in post:
 - Add some front light to the underexposed areas (tomatoes, grapes, and apples).
 - Make the background more seamless by reducing the exposure on the edge of the cloth.
 - Get rid of the table legs by reducing the exposure.
 - Add some clarity.
 - Experiment with vibrance.
Once happy with the adjustments in Lightroom, he opens up the image in Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop, using the Analog Efex plug-in, he experiments with various presets until he's happy.
how to practice photography lighting
While retouching, don't over stress yourself. Feel free to experiment and play around until you're happy with the end result. Remember that you're practicing and learning skills that you will use next time you're on an actual photo shoot.
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Topic: Parallel In Serial Out Diasy Chaining (Read 747 times) previous topic - next topic
So for my engineering design project, I have to read in 12 buttons using just 4 arduino pins. I know it's possible to do it using 2 Parallel In Serial Out Registers, but I have no idea how to daisy chain them together. Can someone help me? Also, how would the code work?
In brief:
Serial out from one chip into serial in of the other, parallel the other control signals, parallel-load then clock for twice as many pulses...
Or use a MCP23S17 or a better yet with only 2 pins a PCF8575.
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Banka: Tax write-offs for the self-employed sole proprietor
Last issue, I addressed the available tax write-offs for people who were employed but worked away from the office.
This week, the topic shifts a little—what are the write-offs for people who are operating as contractors or self-employed persons?
The main concern here is whether the person could actually be classified as an employee.
The Canada Revenue Agency has a booklet called _TAG_ Employed or Self-Employed that outlines the criteria used to make that determination.
To give a basic summary, the self-employed person must pick their own hours, must use their own tools and must experience the risks of being in business for themselves.
This last criteria seems to be key. For example, if you make a mistake, do you lose the client, or does your employer?
Having determined that you fall under the self-employed category, reference the CRA booklet T4002 Business and Professional Income Guide.
Both these booklets are downloadable from the CRA website.
Bookkeeping for a self-employed person is very similar to bookkeeping for a corporation, other than the share structure and preparing the tax return.
The profit made by a self-employed person is included in their own personal income tax return and is taxed at the personal tax rates.
On the other hand, the corporation is taxed as a separate entity and taxed at corporate tax rates.
The business owner needs to be able to tell the difference between current and capital expenses.
Current expenses are those expenditures that will be used up in the business in the current year. Capital expenses are those expenditures for items that will be used by the company for more than the current year.
Some examples of these are computer hardware, manufacturing equipment, office equipment, buildings and automobiles.
Capital expenses are collected in various classes and are amortized or depreciated over the expected life of the asset or the corresponding lease or the life of the business depending on the type of asset.
The amortization or deprecation for tax purposes is called the Capital Cost Allowance or CCA.
Some of the current expenses are items such as advertising and promotion—for all those gifts that you give out to your clients or prospective clients, bad debt expense for writing off those accounts that will never be collectible.
Meals and expenses can only be deducted at 50 per cent and if you are remitting your HST, you can only deduct 50 per cent of the HST that you paid on your meals on your HST return.
You can hold up to six employee dinners per year and deduct the entire cost of these events and the corresponding HST.
If you sponsor or hold an event for charity, that is also totally deductible. If you provide meals to employees at a job site where the employee does not return home every night, those are also 100 per cent deductible.
Of course, there are many different scenarios when it comes to the deductibility of meals and each will need to be reviewed separately as they occur.
If you carry stock, like a corporation, you have the ability to start with an opening inventory count, add the purchases for the year and then deduct the closing inventory count to determine your actual costs of sales.
Included in the cost of sales category could also be your production wages and benefits and any monies paid to subcontractors (yet another self-employed person).
There is also a comprehensive schedule to record your motor vehicle expenses such as gas, repairs, insurance and leasing costs.
If you have a space in the home that you have designated an office and where you can meet prospective business clients, you may also be able to deduct a portion of your home expenses.
The items that you can deduct are your heat, electricity, home insurance, property taxes, mortgage insurance or rent payments, maintenance costs on your home, telephone and Internet costs, strata fees, other utility fees such as garbage pick up and even landscaping.
To determine how much to deduct, measure the area of your office and work out a percentage with the total area of your home.
What you need to give your accountant are the total home expenses for the year, the square footage of your office and the square footage of your home.
The tax software will then calculate the correct amount of office in home expenses for you to deduct.
Finally, if you made a profit and owe tax to CRA, that tax must be paid by April 30 of every year, which is why you are encouraged to make installment payments. The actual tax return does not need to be filed until June 15.
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text:
Human Rights and Business: Direct Corporate Accountability for Human Rights
Jernej Letnar Černič, Tara Van Ho (eds.)
Pages: 550 pages
Shipping Weight: 450 gram
ISBN (softcover) : 9789462402072
The global business environment has changed rapidly in the past decades, but the human rights and business discourse has often lagged behind. At the international level, hard law regulations still seem decades away. United Nations initiatives such as the Guiding Principles and the UN Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises are more than a step in the right direction. However, they alone are insufficient to prevent violations and ensure victims receive justice. This edited book uses a broad and pluralistic understanding of direct human rights obligations, concentrating on legally enforceable standards. The enforceability can come directly from international law, through national legislation, or through non-state actors. The contributions engage both with the law as it is as well as the law as it needs to be developed. In doing so, the book challenges the current reticence to recognise direct human rights obligations of corporations by highlighting the various tools already available for remedying corporate human rights impacts while pushing for the development of further mechanisms.
This book and its contributors have followed pluralistic approaches to human rights and business. The book builds on existing literature, but also offers a unique contribution by considering the effectiveness and availability of current mechanisms as well as discussing gaps in the existing framework for human rights protection. The approach in this book allows for a clearer understanding of the global human rights framework, and the manner in which voluntary and binding initiatives can reinforce one another.
By weaving together analysis on the current standards and practices with critical approaches, this book allows scholars and practitioners to capture the complexity of holding businesses accountable for their human rights impacts.
Jernej Letnar Černič is an Assistant Professor of Human Rights Law at the Graduate School of Government and European Studies (Kranj, Slovenia), where he serves as a Vice-Dean. Tara Van Ho is a Project Associate with the Essex Business & Human Rights Project and a member of the Essex Transitional Justice Network.


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Musician Timothy Gudger shares how music has impacted him
In the series, "Playing It Forward," the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra has shared what motivates musicians to teach music to children. To close it out, here is a letter from Timothy Gudger, principal violist with the Salisbury Symphony.
Although Gudger is not a music teacher, he is a great example of the benefits children receive from early music education.
"There are a variety of my current attributes and achievements as an adult that I believe are a direct outcome of having been privileged to partake in the strings programs offered in the Salisbury-Rowan School System:
"Dexterity is probably one of the more evident outcomes. The mind-power to be cognoscente of what is written on the page, what one is hearing, what one is seeing, and translating all of this into, in its most basic essence, movement of your right and left hands on an instrument requires a tremendous amount of focus.
"Developing this mental agility at an early age, I believe, is what gave me the knowledge to excel academically, get a master's degree in viola performance, acquire a well-paying job as a staff accountant, and continue to play in four orchestras and be principal violist in one.
"The discipline that is required to learn, improve and succeed as a musician had immediate benefits that still carry on today in my personal life. I believe that this discipline is what kept my high attendance in school. I suspect that this is the same reason that I take the same approach to my work. From an early age, I was taught to set standards and goals and that I had to stick with them.
"Being in the strings program gave me a group of friends with whom I could identify and bond. Moreover, it kept me out of circles of people who might have led me down a path of personal destruction.
"Furthermore, I have found later in life that the people who identify with music as I do tend to be of a higher caliber and social standing. I think these positive and upstanding individuals tend to improve my integrity as well. In retrospect, I think these people may have always been a positive role model for me and a reason for my success.
"There is a uniqueness to playing an instrument. I was in a sizeable string class, yet we all sounded different. It may have been the amount of discipline each individual put forth in his practice, but I think it's more than that. There is an ineffable quality to music that allows each person to play, hear, or interpret it differently. So, even at that early age, uniqueness is developing. The strings program only boosts that individuality we all inherently have. It hones it, nurtures it, and then it blossoms.
"I want to add that I was the fourth child in a family of non-musicians. I had never heard classical music until the Symphony came and played at our elementary school. While my parents didn't understand my fascination, at least they didn't discourage it. So here I am today, the first in our family to graduate from college, the first to be successful financially, blessed to be in association with friends and colleagues who are respected and well established, and motivated to still improve and self-determined enough to do it. Do I accredit this to music? Most definitely!"
This is the fifth in a series of short stories submitted by the Salisbury Symphony Orchestra to spotlight its teachers.
For more information about After-School Strings classes, call _PHONE_ or visit the symphony's website at _URL_.

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


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Our teams of unpaid volunteers and dedicated staff work towards a world in which women, men and young people everywhere have control over their own bodies, and therefore their destinies.
Volunteerism is at the heart of IPPFAR's work. Our Member Associations (MAs) are managed by some 38,000 volunteers. They are drawn from all walks of life from a local policeman in Uganda, a former beauty queen in Benin, a lawyer in Kenya to numerous other ordinary women and men.
Our volunteers advocate access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights for all in Africa by information dissemination (peer educators), providing services (community based distributors and clinicians) and by governing the MAs.
Youth Action Movement
Created in 2005, the Youth Action Movement (YAM) is the youth arm of IPPFAR volunteer's body based within the Member Associations (MAs) that catalyze Youth participation. YAM plays a key role in identifying priority areas and needs for young people to be fed into the MAs plans and the regional plans thus enriching the process of consultation and involvement of this audience. The structure enables young people to advocate and be recognized, and empower them to be equal partners in programmatic decision making and resource allocation at all levels.
Broadly, the objectives of the Youth Action Movement are to:-
- Promote equal partnership between young people and adults at both regional and MA levels
- Accelerate IPPFAR's adolescent and youth SRH agenda in the region
- Ensure youth participation/involvement/empowerment and representation at regional and MA levels
- Support effective implementation of the IPPFAR youth policies and strategies


Duolingo's Bilingual True Crime Podcast Helps Makes it Fun to Learn Spanish
Duolingo's true crime podcast El Gran Robo Argentino preview with bulletin board full of photos and notes
If you've ever talked to someone who spent time living in another country, you probably heard them say they really started to pick up the local language by jumping in and engaging with native speakers. That's exactly why Duolingo decided to launch its new bilingual true crime podcast, El Gran Robo Argentino.
This serialized season actually marks a decisive new turn for Duolingo's Spanish podcast, which has been around since 2017. Now, with El Gran Robo Argentino (or, The Great Argentine Heist), language learners can experience some immersive language-learning experiences of their own. The serialized podcast will span six episodes, and is narrated by bilingual podcast host and producer Martina Castro.
The Spanish-for-English-speakers podcast tells the story of one of the greatest bank robberies in Latin American history. In it, learners will be able to listen to interviews from actual people involved in the Buenos Aires robbery, including investigators, journalists, and even one of the actual bank robbers.
El Gran Robo Argentino includes native speakers telling their stories in easy-to-understand Spanish, alongside Castro, who deftly weaves between Spanish and English to help listeners follow along. The podcast launched on October 22, and you can listen to it wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts.
via The Verge


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Search the 500+ resources on crisis-sensitive educational planning in our library.
Guidance & Tools
These resource kits provide practical tools, strategies and guidance on addressing safety, resilience and social cohesion in educational planning and in curriculum design.
Overview: Incorporating safety, resilience and social cohesion in education sector planning
Overview: Curriculum enhancement to promote safety, resilience, and social cohesion


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Stanley Park Playground at the Air India Memorial Site
The Air India Memorial playground commemorates those who perished in the 1985 Air India bombing. In respect to the 82 children that lost their lives aboard the flight, the old Ceperley playground was refurbished and provides a safe, fun, and carefree environment for children to grow.
"The children's playground symbolizes the innocence of those children who died in this tragedy. This place offers a beacon of hope to the children of today and the future," – Jayashree Thampi, who lost her husband and young daughter in the tragic attack


Tallinn Environment
Try not to ruin the world we live in for future generations. A clean and healthy living environment is essential for everyone. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!
Capacity: Infinite
Quality: incredible (Last measured 9/20/2020)
While the capacity of air (amount of oxygen) is virtually infinite, it is highly vulnerable to pollution. A lot of human activity emits pollution straight into the air and the effect on air quality is more or less immediate. Air pollution is dangerous for human health, especially if smog arises.
Capacity: 10000 (Last measured 5/24/2014)
Quality: perfect (Last measured 9/28/2020)
Groundwater is fresh water that over a long period of time has accumulated under the ground. It regenerates very slowly. Pump up too much of this limited resource and it may run dry! Since it is located deep down, it normally takes quite long for surface pollution to contaminate the groundwater. It could happen though - and if it does, you're in big trouble...


text: We report a functional double-dissociation of the effects of THC such that intra-NASh THC infusions produced robust OR-dependent reward effects selectively in the aNASh, but OR-dependent aversive behavioural effects in pNASh. pharmacological mechanisms controlling the dissociable effects of THC in mesolimbic-mediated affective processing. neuronal electrophysiology, we report that THC infused into the anterior NASh produces -opioid receptor dependent reward, potentiates morphine reward salience, decreases medium spiny neuron activity and increases the power of high frequency -oscillations. In contrast, THC in the posterior NASh produces OR dependent aversion, impairs social recognition, increases medium spiny neuron activity and decreases the power of high frequency -oscillations in local field potential. These findings reveal novel dissociable and distinct mechanisms for the bivalent motivational effects of THC directly in the NAc. Materials and Methods Animals and surgery Male Sprague Dawley rats (300 to 350?g; electrophysiological recordings extracellular recordings were performed as described previously26C28. Rats were anesthetized with urethane (1.4?g/kg, i.p.) and placed ENSA in a stereotaxic apparatus with body temperature maintained at 37?C. A scalp incision was made to remove the skin above the skull, and holes were drilled in the skull above the NASh and the cranial ventricle. For intra-cranial ventricle (ICV) microinfusions of THC (1?g/L), a 10?L gastight Hamilton syringe was slowly lowered into the cranial ventricle (15? angle): AP:?0.9?mm from bregma, LAT??2.7?mm, DV:?3.8?mm from the dural surface. For intra-NASh extracellular recording, glass micro-electrodes (with an average impedance of 6 to 8 8 M) filled with a 2% Pontamine Sky Blue solution were lowered using a hydraulic micro-positioner (Kopf 640) Asenapine maleate at the following flat skull stereotaxic coordinates: AP: +1.5 or +2.5?mm from bregma, LAT: 0.8?mm, DV:?6.0 to?8.0?mm from the dural surface. Extracellular signals were amplified using a MultiClamp 700B amplifier (Molecular Devices) and recorded through a Digidata 1440A acquisition system (Molecular Devices) using pClamp 10 software. Extracellular recordings were filtered at 1?kHz and sampled at 5?kHz. NASh medium spiny neurons were identified using previously established criteria. Any cells with a spike width of less than 1?ms and more than 2?ms were excluded from analysis. The electrode was used to simultaneously record local field Asenapine maleate potentials (LFP). Recording analyses were performed with Clampfit 10 software. Response patterns of isolated NASh neurons and LFPs to microinfusion of THC alone or in combination with either CYP or nor-BNI were determined by comparing neuronal frequency rates and local field potentials (LFP) oscillatory patterns between the 10-minute prevs. post-infusion recording epochs. A cell was considered to have changed its firing rate if there was a minimum of 20% difference in frequency rate from baseline. The electrode was used to simultaneously record LFPs. For histological analysis of extracellular NASh neuronal recording sites, recording electrode positions were marked with iontophoretic deposit of Pontamine Sky Blue dye (?20 A, continuous current for 12C15?minutes). Brains were removed and post-fixed 24?h before being placed in a 25% formalin-sucrose solution for one week before sectioning (60 m). Following this, sections were stained with neutral Asenapine maleate red and infusion/neuronal recording sites were confirmed with light microscopy. Experimental design and statistical analysis ANOVA tests were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics software followed by LSD testing. Asenapine maleate Sample sizes were pre-selected based on previous work. During electrophysiology experiments, an average of 5 cells were recorded per animals but some were excluded due.


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WebMD Medical News
Laura J. Martin, MD
Aug. 15, 2011 -- New genetic research may help explain some of the different ways that alcoholism affects men and women.
Gender differences in alcoholism have previously been attributed to differences in size and body composition. But the new study suggests that genes may also play a role in the way men and women react to alcohol.
The study is published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
The presence of two genes, ADH1B and ALDH2, increases risk for alcoholism. But men and women differ when it comes to how these genes affect risk.
An inactive ALDH2 gene actually delays the development of alcoholism among men. But in women, it may accelerate it, according to the study.
The study results suggest that gender differences in the effect of the ADH1B and ALDH2 genes may be helpful in predicting the course of alcohol dependence, says study researcher Mitsuru Kimura, MD, PhD, of the Kurihama Alcoholism Center in Kanagawa, Japan, in an email.
ADH1B and ALDH2 act to eliminate most of the alcohol taken into the body. But a lack of ALDH2 activity causes a flushing response due to drinking alcohol. This response is characterized by flushing, nausea, and a headache and tends to greatly suppress drinking.
In the new study of 415 men and 200 women who were hospitalized for alcoholism at the Kurihama Alcoholism Center, female alcoholics with inactive ALDH2 were more likely to have psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety than women with the active version.
This may drive certain women towards dangerous drinking despite the flushing response, the researchers suggest.
Women with inactive ALDH2 also tend to develop alcoholism earlier than women with the active version of the gene. In contrast, ALDH2 does not seem to affect age of onset of alcoholism among men.
"There are male/female differences in alcohol use rates and addiction rates, but this was thought to be due to differences in size, but this paper suggests that it has to do with metabolism as well," says Victor M. Hesselbrock, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington, Conn.
The new findings may help develop more targeted treatments for alcoholism that take both genes and gender into account, he says.
"Gender and genetic differences can put you at risk even without realizing it," says Harold C. Urschel, MD, an addiction expert in Dallas.
SOURCES:Harold C. Urschel, MD, addiction expert, Dallas.Victor M. Hesselbrock, PhD, professor of psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, Conn.Kimura, M. Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, 2011.Mitsuru Kimura, MD, PhD, Kurihama Alcoholism Center, Kanagawa, Japan.
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text: Suggested Applications Watercolors: Make a sketch, sprinkle it with water and allow the colours to dilute. Pick up colours from a palette and paint in wet as watercolor. Apply Neocolor II onto smooth paper and spread it onto the design with a stiff brush. Bold painting: Create a large design on dry paper. Spread the colours vigorously with wet fingers. Wash and varnish: Hold the pastel flat and draw on moistened paper. Colour the design with a brush full of Neoclor II. Cover the dry layers with a transparent layer. Rainbow techniques: Pick up the graded colours from a smooth palette and place the brush flat on the paper. Template: Apply Neocolor II on a template or on the edge of sheets of smooth paper. Spread the colour onto the design with the fingers. Monotype: Draw with Neocolor II on a mirror or any flat glass surface. Cover the design with moist paper, press it down firmly then peel it off. Neocolor II washes off any smooth surface with water.


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Does Pristine Nature Exist?
Some ecologists are arguing that humans and alien species have been churning up ecosystems far more intensively, and for far longer, than we assume:
We like to think that most nature was pristine and largely untouched until recent times. But two major studies in recent weeks say we are deluded. In one, Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and colleagues have calculated that at least a fifth of the land across most of the world had been transformed by humans as early as 5,000 years ago — a proportion that past studies of historical land use had assumed was only reached in the past 100 years or so.
The human footprint was huge from the day, perhaps 60,000 years ago, when we began burning grasslands and forests for hunting, according to the Ellis study. It extended further with swidden "slash-and-burn" agriculture, and became more intense when farmers began to domesticate animals and plow the land.
And if that is right we should change the way we think about stewardship:
Far from reaching some equilibrium state with niches filled, ecosystems have always been in a constant state of flux, says Stephen Jackson, of the Southwest Climate Science Center in Arizona, in Novel Ecosystems. "Change, including rapid and disruptive change, is a natural feature of the world." Humans may have dramatically speeded that up, but novelty is the norm.
In that light, we need to look afresh at conservation priorities. Novel ecosystems cannot be dismissed as degraded versions of proper ecosystems, nor can alien species be demonized simply for not belonging. If novelty and change is the norm, Hobbs and colleagues ask, does it make sense for the growing business of ecosystem restoration to try and recreate static historic ecosystems? By doing that, you are not creating a functioning ecosystem; you are creating a museum exhibit that will require constant attention if it is to survive.
Ecosystems can be hardy, and no doubt have always been in a state of flux and evolution. The big issue now is that humans are turbo-charging the rate of change. And that will be a severe test of how fast ecosystems and the species within them can adapt. No doubt some will, but it could get ugly.


Platinum Partner
Isolation in MongoDB
MongoDB features weaker forms of the ACID properties with respect to what RDBMS give us; for example, the atomicity of an update is only guaranteed inside a single document. All these properties are traded away for a focus on availability via replication to multiple server and sharding.
One of the properties put in question is isolation of operations from each other: while iterating on cursors, it's not a given. If you use MongoDB in production, you have to improve your knowledge of the database properties or write migration scripts that corrupt your data.
The collection physical model
MongoDB stores data in memory-mapped files - in short, areas of mass storage which are preallocated and mapped into virtual memory directly, as if they were areas of RAM. If I understood this model correctly, the operating system deals with the writes, but MongoDB can occasionally force the synchronization to disk (with the fsync option in write operation, and in committing its journal periodically).
Documents are stored in each collection sequentially, and returned in the order of insertion while iterating over cursors without sorting operations set. This means that during updates, document may potentially overflow their area of storage:
D1[10], D2[9], D3[12],...
If D2 is updated by adding a field, it may become larger and have to be moved forward in the collection:
D1[10,..., D3[12],..., D2[15]
So documents can be moved during update, changing their insertion order. While this is usually hidden in relational databases, it is exposed in some reading operations of MongoDB.
The Mongo cursor documentation explicitly says that cursors may return the same document multiple times. The first reaction to this statement is usually:
But I guess we have to understand that we have traded-off even the consistency of a read operation over multiple documents, getting in return the possibility to operate over millions of documents and multiple shards (while if you execute an ALTER TABLE over millions of rows you may observe spectacular explosions.)
In both relational and NoSQL databases, cursor return a result at a time with their API, guaranteeing that a bounded number of rows or document is ever reconstituted into memory in any moment.
However, Mongo cursors may use the natural order of documents when the actual order of selection doesn't matter; for example, during migrations. But since documents may move in the natural order, you may find that a migration script passes twice over each document in a collection.
db.my_collection.find().forEach(function(d) {
 d.new_field = newValue(d);;
It is natural for this code to move each d instance further down in the collection to an empty bucket, if documents are not padded.
To avoid this effect, you can snapshot a cursor so that its results are cached server side and passed to you no matter what happens to the collection after the cursor creation:
db.my_collection.find().snapshot().forEach(function(d) {
 d.new_field = newValue(d);;
In this way, a multiple-document read can effectively be isolated from the operations interleaved between reading the different documents. There is no other option than interleaving writes to reads if you want to operate on one document at a time, to save memory and avoid crashing the current process.
Isolation in other read operations
However, db.collection.count(filter) executed from another connection is only eventually consistent with the updates, as it shows an increased number of documents that comes back to normal after all updates are performed.
So other reads present the same problem of the cursor, although they are in another connection in this case. db.collection.count() isn't affected, as probably when called without filters is able to perform some optimizations.
Here's the discussion we opened on the mongodb-user mailing list, along with the.js code necessary to reproduce this behavior.
The solution we found was to call db.collection.find(filter).snapshot().count(), which performs the count over another snapshot; the results are almost consistent with this option. All operations were performed on MongoDB 2.2.3, the newest available release.
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ANN ARBOR--Humans have been cooling metal mixtures from liquid to solid for thousands of years. But surprisingly, not much is known about exactly what happens during the process of solidification. Particularly puzzling is the solidification of eutectics, which are mixtures of two or more solid phases.
Ashwin Shahani, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, is working to solve the mystery of eutectic solidification, and his research has revealed an intricate and beautiful universe of nanoscale rods, sheets and spirals that form spontaneously in cooling metal alloys.
We sat down recently to talk with him about his latest paper, "Multi-Step Crystallization of Self-Organized Spiral Eutectics," and how it could lead to a new generation of lightweight alloys and optical products with properties superior to monolithic materials.
What motivated you to study metal solidification?
I think it's one of the most remarkable feats of nature. How can these elaborate patterns form spontaneously from a disordered liquid? Why does nature choose one pattern or configuration over another? A lot of it is just inborn curiosity and the joy of sharing it with my students.
Why is it important to understand how these nanoscale structures form?
A material's nanoscale structure changes its properties. So if we can understand why a given structure forms, we can design a manufacturing process to recreate it, or even change it to build in specific properties that we want. We can make materials that are lighter, or stronger, or that bend light in a certain way, for example.
What could those new materials be used for?
A material that bends light in a certain way could be used to make an invisibility coating. You could engineer a single sheet of metal with properties that differ along its surface--for example an airplane wing that's stronger in some places and lighter in others. You could make lighter and more fuel-efficient automotive components. The possibilities are just about endless.
Why can't we make these materials using existing manufacturing methods?
We can, but it's extremely difficult and time-consuming. If we want to fabricate a nanoscale spiral pattern, for example, we have to use lithography to print each tiny spiral. That's not practical for large-scale manufacturing. But what if you could cause those spirals to self-assemble just by cooling the liquid differently or slightly changing its mix of metals? That would make the process much faster and more scalable.
If humans have been using solidification for so long, why hasn't someone already figured this out?
Because in the past, this kind of research relied on sectioning up a material that has already solidified and looking at it under the microscope. And that gives you a very limited view of how solidification happens.
We're using a unique combination of multiscale and multimodal imaging technologies to create a 3D picture of what's happening in real time during the solidification process. It involves combining a lot of different imaging techniques that can give us a cohesive picture from the scale of micrometers all the way down to individual atoms.
What are some of the challenges of combining all those technologies?
One of the biggest challenges is that high-resolution 3D images are just so data-intensive. That makes this a big data challenge as well as a materials science challenge. Obviously, just having a high level of computing power is important, but we've also introduced some novel strategies. For example, we've begun using machine learning algorithms to comb through our data and find things that are noteworthy.
What's the next step for this research?
Most engineering materials consist of not just two components but a cocktail of elements. So right now, we're looking at how chemistry affects the solidification process. If I add a small amount of another metal to the molten mix, how does that change the nanoscale structures that form? It's another step toward understanding and ultimately controlling these structures.


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10 Lessons Learned While Baking an Apple Pie with Beth Howard, Ms. American Pie
Beth Howard really doesn't see what all the fuss is about when people bake pies. To her, the process should be as simple as possible.
Heather Hoch Beth Howard loves her pie.
From the meditative quality of making a lattice crust on an apple pie to the alluring ability of baking for different guys in her college years, Howard sees a lot of benefit to making pies from scratch. Her demo, signing, reading, and pie tasting is tonight at Changing Hands Bookstore, and we got a sneak peek into Howard's straightforward pie process, and we have some quick tips for you before the event.
Chow Bella Presents: Baking with Ms. American Pie or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pie
Heather Hoch Beth Howard demonstrates that pie isn't a science.
From the length of time cooked to the amount of flour, water, or sugar used, Howard doesn't like exact measurements. She doesn't even like to use exact oven temperatures in recipes because it's so variable. Instead, Howard prefers feeling everything out as she goes to test when it's ready.


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Is Toilet Water Safe For Dogs?
The question of the day, "is toilet water safe for dogs to drink?"
The quick answer is yes, it is safe for our loyal pals to drink the water from the toilet.
The long answer generally remains yes, however, it depends what is in the water.
In fact, with an average flush rate of five flushes per day, the water that comes from the toilet tanks after a refreshing flush, is flowing, and highly oxygenated. This is much more "thirst quenching" for dogs versus what could be the still, stale water of their water bowls.
Dogs are highly sensible animals, and they use their instincts to make choices when it comes to intake. They can smell, and taste, and feel the differences between the two sources of water. With most pipes lying underground, temperature wise, this is a cooler source. During summer days, or where climate is predominantly hot, it is common for dogs to prefer the cooler toilet water.
Dogs also have very different stomach compositions than humans. So while we immediately think about the bacteria and other potentially harmful germs that arise with drinking toilet water, it doesn't phase dogs. This is because dogs have a much stronger level of hydrochloric acid in their stomachs which kills off any potentially harmful bacteria.
What are the dangers and concerns that our animal friends might face when drinking from the toilet?
The products we use to sanitize our toilets should be analyzed. Whether we use bleach, soap, or any other cleaner that mixes itself with the toilet water, these are full of harmful chemicals. If ingested, these chemicals are potentially life-threatening for dogs.
Toilet water generally comes from the same source as our tap water. Depending on your region, tap water might not be safe to drink. If there is a high frequency of rodents in your region, and it is advised to not drink tap water, it also should be advised for your dogs to not drink from the toilet. Bacteria such as leptospirosis might be present. This is one strain of bacteria that is very harmful to dogs and even fatal if left untreated.
Symptoms of leptospirosis in dogs are:
Sudden fever and illness
Sore muscles, reluctance to move
Shivering or weakness
Lack of appetite
Increased thirst and urination, may be indicative of chronic renal (kidney) failure, progressing to inability to urinate.
Apart from harmful bacteria, there is a real risk of falling into the toilet if your dog is of a smaller breed. If unable to escape, this could result in severe fatigue, and even death.


For example: In the Romanization of Sumerian, /ŋ/ is written as ⟨g̃⟩ or ⟨ĝ⟩ instead of ⟨ng⟩ or even ⟨ŋ⟩. Also in Sumerian /t͡sʰ/ is written ⟨ř⟩ or ⟨dr⟩. The list goes on with Sumerian.
In Proto-Indo-European (Which I know is technically not a real language) /kʷ/ is written as ⟨kʷ⟩ instead of ⟨kw⟩. This problem mostly applies to Proto-languages actually, but it also applies to some extinct semetic languages, like Ge'ez.
I'll admit I'm definitely a novice in Linguistics, so this could all make perfect sense. But I don't understand and would request clarification.
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 Why should /kʷ/ not be written ⟨kʷ⟩? It seems like a natural transcription, from an IPA perspective. – Draconis Mar 26 '20 at 19:14
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 I'm saying it's more practical just to write it as a standard letter right next to a letter, instead of the having the little ⟨ʷ⟩. Or that's my perspective at least. – user8796978 Mar 26 '20 at 23:11
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 The thing is, PIE (as commonly reconstructed) has a distinction between * (one phoneme) and *kw (two phonemes). – Draconis Mar 26 '20 at 23:36
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 You are asking about an impractical orthography in English!?! ;-) – Peter - Reinstate Monica Mar 27 '20 at 7:09
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 I am not sure this is tolerate here. So please tell me if I should remove that message. Is there a website where you can learn to at least write and if possible speak sumerian? – Florian Castelain Mar 27 '20 at 7:36
First, it's worth noting that these are transcriptions, used by linguists, not actual orthographies used by native speakers. The ancient Sumerians didn't write their word for "god" as diĝir; they wrote it as 𒀭. And the people who spoke something like Proto-Indo-European never wrote it down at all. It's only modern scholars who use the Latin alphabet for this.
And since these are modern transcriptions of extinct or reconstructed languages, we generally aren't sure how the sounds were pronounced! Some scholars think that Sumerian ř was pronounced like IPA /t͡sʰ/, but others disagree, and some argue that it wasn't a distinct phoneme at all (just an artifact of a sound change in progress).
All that we can be certain of is that certain words (like guř "ox") are sometimes transcribed with Akkadian phonetic signs containing /d/, and sometimes with Akkadian phonetic signs containing /r/. So if you want to talk about this new maybe-phoneme without getting into the weeds of how it was actually pronounced, ř or dr are reasonable names to pick.
Or, sometimes it's for reasons of typesetting (like Sumerian ĝ being much easier to type than ŋ until very recently), or to show that something is a single segment (PIE * is generally considered a single phoneme, rather than *k followed by *w). In the end, these transcriptions are mostly only used by specialists in specific fields, who quickly get used to all the idiosyncracies. With no native speakers using these transcriptions in day-to-day life, practicality isn't much of a concern.
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 Your first paragraph is "obvious" but also really important! You might also mention that the written symbol 𒂷 doesn't necessarily have any internal structure relating it to a vocalization (the way English spelling relates to vocalization). My background is a quick skim of Wikipedia, in justification of my desire to shoehorn in a link to zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm here. :) – Quuxplusone Mar 27 '20 at 14:10
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 Tangentially, I was a bit confused by your use of 𒂷 (ĝa₂) instead of 𒂍 (e₂) for "house", but apparently that's an Emesal spelling. – Ilmari Karonen Mar 27 '20 at 16:46
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 (Looking at the various meanings of 𒂷, I would guess that the original was probably bisaĝ = "basket, container", for which it may have been a pictograph, which was then adopted as one of the spellings of the common verb ĝa(r) = "put, place", and from there phonetically as a syllabogram for /ĝa/ in various contexts. I'd further guess that the Emesal usage of 𒂷 for "house" is probably one of those phonetic uses, as Emesal in general tended to be written as "eye dialect" using syllabic signs.) – Ilmari Karonen Mar 27 '20 at 16:46
 - _USER_ Yes, sorry, I should have clarified that better! It was the first sign I could find that had an initial ŋ, but I should have gone with something more standard like diŋir. I'll edit that now. – Draconis Mar 27 '20 at 16:51
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 For a modern, real-life parallel to Sumerian , there is Breton , which is a phoneme realised in some dialects as /z/ and in others as /h/ (and deriving historically from /θ/, I believe). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 28 '20 at 8:02
There are numerous reasons specific to the language in question. Semitic transcription practices were established a long time ago before the IPA swept the field of linguistics (likewise Finno-Ugric, Bantu, and so on). The letters used are often deliberately vague because there is uncertainty as to the phonetic property of the sound in question (thus Bantu "c" in Guthrie's transcription). Most works before 1985 or so were prepared on a typewriter which had limited capacity for writing phonetic symbols. There is a strong tendency for the first works in a language family to be historical reconstruction (certainly the case in Bantu), so that a description of Sotho is driven by the desire to relate the sounds of Sotho to reconstructed Proto-Bantu – therefore, the same alphabet will be used for talking about the specific language and the proto-language.
In some cases, there is a deliberate choice, for example in IE, the point is to graphically distinguish the labiovelar from a sequence of velar plus glide. That notation is important in understanding the phonology of languages like Tigrinya, since "kw" is not phonologically a consonant sequence.
 - Blooper: Tigrinya is not considered IE, and you likely didn't mean to imply otherwise, though it appears as if you did. Trivial: "kw" is indeed not a con-sonant sequence, it's a grapheme sequence. – vectory Mar 26 '20 at 21:48
 - _USER_ Does this answer imply that Tigrinya is IE? I certainly didn't read it that way. It's just a language where the difference between kʷ, one segment, and kw, two segments, is phonologically relevant. – Draconis Mar 26 '20 at 21:51
 - _USER_ I don't know but don't suppose so. That's why I'm trying to make it clear, to avoid that anyone could get a wrong impression, because the wording, "that notion", isn't very clear unless one already knows what is implied (*kw is a cluster, the other one is a unit? the difference is fleeting nevertheless). – vectory Mar 26 '20 at 22:15
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Results-Based Technical Assistance
CSSP believes technical assistance should be directly linked to the overall goals of a recipient community, organization, group or entity. Interventions should combine the right amount of skill/knowledge development and relationship building to enable recipients to take action on their stated goals. Our approach is guided by the belief that effective technical assistance views constituents – residents, families, community leaders, parents and youth – as expert advisors of the changes needed in their communities.
CSSP helps communities map out the "who, what and how" of their community change efforts by identifying:
- Results, or conditions of child and family well-being they want to attain.
- Resources they needed in order to build the local capacity necessary to achieve sustainable change.
- Relationships with key stakeholders that needed to be built and strengthened to create ongoing focus on improving results.
Our results-based approach is founded on a set of principles for engaging with communities to provide assistance:
- Demand driven and co-designed: CSSP believes effective technical assistance is a partnership with the community. Together, participants identify objectives and priorities, learn about local opportunities and develop strategies that produce the best outcomes.
- Informed by the best available data: Relevant data about child, family and community conditions and trends is always used to help partners make good decisions about their goals, strategies and use of technical assistance. We combine the best available data with common sense and on-the-ground learning.
- Respects the expertise of people involved in and affected by the process. CSSP seeks to authentically engage community residents, families and others in the technical assistance process so the outcomes reflect their priorities, viewpoints and insights.
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César Vallejo Poetry: World Poets Analysis
One of the unique qualities of César Vallejo's poetry—one that makes his work almost impossible to confuse with that of any other poet writing in the Spanish language—is his ability to speak with the voice and sensibility of a child, whether as an individual orphaned by the breakup of a family or as a symbol of deprived and alienated human beings everywhere. Always, however, this child's voice, full of expectation and hope, is implicitly counterposed by the adult's ironic awareness of change and despair. Inseparable from these elements is the poet's forging of a language capable of reflecting the register and the peculiarly elliptical reasoning of a child and, at the same time, revealing the Hermetic complexity of the adult intellectual's quest for security in the form of truth. The poetry that is Vallejo's own answer to these problems is some of the most poignant and original ever produced.
The Black Heralds
The lines of Vallejo's subsequent development are already evident in his first volume, The Black Heralds, a collection of sixty-nine poems grouped under various subtitles. As critics have observed, many of these poems reflect his involvement with Romantic and Modernista poetry. They are conspicuous in many cases for their descriptions of idyllic scenes in a manner that juxtaposes words of the Peruvian Sierra and the vocabulary of Symbolism, including religious and erotic elements. Vallejo did not emphasize rhyme and rhythm to the extent that some Modernistas did, but most of these early poems are framed in verse forms favored by the latter, such as the Alexandrine sonnet and the silva. While demonstrating his impressive mastery of styles already worked out by others, he was also finding his own voice.
This originality is perhaps most evident in the last group of poems in The Black Heralds, titled "Canciones de Hogar" ("Home Songs"), poems dealing with the beginning of Vallejo's sense of orphanhood. In "A mi hermano Miguel in memoriam" ("To My Brother Miguel in Memoriam"), the poet relives a moment of the childhood game of hide-and-seek that he used to play with his "twin heart." Speaking to his brother, Vallejo announces his own presence in the part of the family home from which one of the two always ran away to hide from the other. He goes on to remind his playmate of one day on which the latter went away to hide, sad instead of laughing as he usually was, and could not be found again. The poem ends with a request to the brother to please come out so as not to worry "mama." It is remarkable in that past and present alternate from one line to the next. The language of childhood, as well as the poet's assumed presence at the site of the events, lends a dramatic immediacy to the scene. At the same time, the language used in the descriptive passages is clearly that of the adult who is now the poet. Yet in the last verse, the adult chooses to accept literally the explanation that the brother has remained in hiding and may finally respond and come out, which would presumably alleviate the mother's anxiety and make everything right once more. The knowledge that the poet is unable (or refuses) to face the permanent alteration of his past may elicit feelings of tragic pathos in the reader.
"Los pasos lejanos" ("The Distant Steps") recalls the poet's childhood home in which his parents, now aged, are alone—the father sleeping and the mother walking in the orchards. Here, the only bitterness is that of the poet himself, because he is now far away from them. He in turn is haunted by a vision of his parents as two old, white, and bent roads along which his heart walks. In "Enereida," he imagines that his father has died, leading to a regression in time so that the father can once again laugh at his small children, including the poet himself, who is again a schoolboy under the tutelage of the village priest.
Many of the poems in The Black Heralds deal with existential themes. While religious imagery is pervasive, it is apparent that the poet employs it to describe profane experiences. Jean Franco has shown that in speaking of "the soul's Christs" and "Marías who leave" and of Communions and Passions, Vallejo trivializes religious language rather than attempting to inflate the importance of his own experiences by describing them in religious terms. As well as having lost the security and plenitude of his childhood home, the poet has lost the childhood faith that enabled him to refer in words to the infinite.
In the title poem, "Los heraldos negros" ("The Black Heralds"), Vallejo laments life's hard blows, harder sometimes than humans can stand. He concludes that these blows come from the hatred of God, that they may be the black heralds sent by Death. In "Los dados eternos" ("The Eternal Dice"), God is a gambler throwing dice and may as easily cast death as life. In fact, Earth itself is his die. Now worn to roundness, it will come to rest only within the sepulchre. Profane love is all that is left; while the beloved may now be pure, she will not continue to be so if she yields to the poet's erotic impulses. Love thus becomes "a sinning Christ," because humankind's nature is irrevocably physical. Several poems allude to the poet's ideal of redeeming himself through brotherly love, a thematic constant in Vallejo's work, yet such redemption becomes difficult if not impossible if a person is lonely and alienated. In "Agape," the poet speaks of being alone and forgotten and of having been unable therefore to "die" for his brother. "La cena miserable" ("The Wretched Supper") tells of the enigma of existence in which humans are seen, as in "Agape," as waiting endlessly for spiritual nurture, or at least for some answer concerning the meaning of life. Here, God becomes no more than a "black spoon" full of bitter human essence, even less able than humans to provide needed answers. The lives of humans are thus meaningless, since they are always separated from what they most desire—whether this be the fullness of the past, physical love, God's love, or brotherly love.
Even in the poems most laden with the trappings of Modernismo, Vallejo provides unusual images. In "El poeta a su amada" ("The Poet to His Beloved"), he suggests that his kiss is "two curved branches" on which his beloved has been "crucified." Religious imagery is used with such frequency that it sometimes verges on parody, and critics agree that in playing with language in this way Vallejo is seeking to highlight its essential ambiguity, something he continues to do in Trilce and Human Poems, even while totally abandoning the imagery of Modernismo. Such stripping away of excess baggage is already visible in The Black Heralds. Antitheses, oxymorons, and occasional neologisms are also to be noted. While the great majority of the poems are elegantly correct in terms of syntax—in marked contrast to what is to become the norm in Trilce—there are some instances of linguistic experimentation, as when nouns are used as adjectives. In "The Distant Steps," for example, the mother is described as being "so soft, so wing, so departure, so love." Another device favored by the poet in all his later poems—enumeration—is also present. Finally, traditional patterns of meter and rhyme are abandoned in "Home Songs," with the poetic emotion being allowed to determine the form.
Despite these formal adumbrations and although The Black Heralds is not a particularly transparent work, there is little in it to prepare the reader for the destruction of language in the Hermetic density of Trilce, which came along only three years later. These were difficult years for the poet, in which he lost his mother, separated from Otilia, and spent what he was later to refer to as the gravest moments of his life in the Trujillo jail. All the anguish of these events was poured into the seventy-seven free-verse poems of his second major work. If he suffered existentially in The Black Heralds and expressed this suffering in writing, it was done with respect for traditional verse forms and sentence structure, which hinted at an order beyond the chaos of the poet's interior world. In Trilce, this order falls. Language, on which "logical assumptions" about the world are based, is used in such a way as to reveal its hollowness: It, too, is cut loose and orphaned. Abrupt shifts from one metaphorical sphere to another make the poems' internal logic often problematic.
A hint of what is to come is given in the title, a neologism usually taken to be a hybrid of tres (three) and dulce (sweet), an interpretation that is in accord with the poet's concern about the ideal number expressed in several poems. It is not known, however, what, if any, concrete meaning the poet had in mind when he coined the word; it has become a puzzle for readers and critics to solve. It is notable that in "interpreting" the Trilce poems, critics often work out explications that seem internally consistent but that turn out to be related to a system diametrically opposed to the explication and system of some other critic. It is possible, however, to say with certainty that these poems deal with a struggle to do something, bridge something, and say something. Physical limits such as the human body


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Definition of Terms
For this discussion;
- mediated means active participation by a teacher, tutor or facilitator throughout the learning process,
- collaborative means students combining their experiences and capabilities to bring both breadth and depth to their learning, and
- online learning means delivery of education materials and associated communication and administration via a learning management system such as Moodle or Blackboard.
Consistent with online education in general, an obvious benefit of mediated and collaborative online learning is flexibility, especially in terms of a student's geographical location and competing time demands from employment, family and social obligations.
In addition, it is flexible in terms of a student's intellectual and professional interests and their (probable) need for individualised support.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it has the benefit of an overarching, externally imposed study discipline.
As with all forms of learning and modes of education, mediated collaborative online learning has characteristics that must be carefully weighed and balanced. First is the process of student socialisation; which is to say, the process of introducing students to, and helping them feel comfortable with, the learning environment. The five stages of Salmon's Model of Online Learning describe this well; beginning with Access and Motivation and then progressing through Online Socialisation, Information Exchange and Knowledge Construction, until reaching the stage of Construction where students take personal responsibility for their learning.
A second important consideration is learning style; which is to say, the need to provide appropriate, or at least multiple media and delivery methodologies (eg text, audio, audio-visual, contemplative, reflective, interactive etc). Variety in the learning environment raises the potential to maintain the attention of students with differing learning preferences.
Academic capabilities is another issue. Where the poorer a student's academic capabilities, the greater the need for an imposed study discipline (eg tasks with follow-up assessment by specific dates). Similarly, the poorer a student's academic capabilities, the greater the need for continuous feedback on performance, focussing not just on absolute performance but also on performance change (eg performance improvements since previous feedback).
Structure is an issue sometimes not recognised as important by non-educators. Online learning, typically, can be structured either by topic or time, but to be effective, mediated and collaborative online learning should be structured by time (perhaps weekly).
Finally, there is assessment, perhaps the most challenging, but sometimes the least considered, issue in education. In formal academic and professional environments, assessment processes are not just for students and not just about achievement of their learning objectives, but should also be used to identify the effectiveness of an education methodology and its application in a particular context.
In an online environment, assessment, whether formative or summative, can be visible or hidden. Where a student produces and submits a piece of work for assessment it is visible, but assessment can also use hidden activities such as whether a student accessed a particular learning object and the time the student spent reading postings to a discussion forum.
Hidden assessments, to be hidden, can not be defined in a subject outline or similar public document, and therefore can not be used to justify a student's grade. They can, however, be used to understand a student's work rate and method, and thus can be a guide to the possible depth of their understanding and to identify opportunities for remedial intervention.
Hidden assessment methods, possible in online learning environments, are most useful in subjects where the expected academic capabilities and quality of assessable artefacts is relatively low.
To illustrate aspects of mediated and collaborative online learning, take as examples two semester-length subjects; a university first year undergraduate subject for recent school-leavers and a postgraduate subject for professionals in full-time employment. The undergraduate subject might be built around a textbook (ideally available in both electronic and hard-copy formats), whereas the postgraduate subject might have no textbook but numerous online readings the total of which is too great for a student to read; meaning that they must select just those readings relevant to their personal interests.
Associated with the undergraduate textbook could be pointers on how to take notes and identify key points, whereas in the postgraduate subject the readings are followed-up with questions such as "what and how can you apply what you have just learnt to your current work environment" or "how can you use what you have just learnt to progress your career as a …"
Sometimes useful is for students to find materials themselves which they then must introduce and justify to their student colleagues. This has the benefit of introducing the students to self-directed study which they can continue after completing their formal coursework.
Both types of subject are supported by audio visual materials (perhaps published through YouTube or similar) though the undergraduate videos are typically how-to type instruction videos whereas the postgraduate materials might be interviews and conference presentations published by universities and other research organisations
In terms of Bloom's Taxonomy in the Cognitive Domain, the intellectual skills developed in the undergraduate subject are probably limited to knowledge recall and evaluation, perhaps sometimes to the level of concept evaluation; whereas the postgraduate subject might consistently involve skills for meaning synthesis and the evaluation of ideas.
Both subjects will use regular discussion forums (perhaps weekly) which should be assessed; both for formative reasons and also to ensure students post regularly and appropriately. In both subjects the discussion forums are the principal tool for student collaboration so the seeding (in the form of meaningful questions) and support (by providing mid-stream direction to conversations or to motivate participants) is critically important. The difference between the subjects is primarily in the types of question used to seed conversations and the intellectual quality of the subsequent discussions. In the undergraduate subject, discussion forums might be supported with elementary, perhaps multiple choice, quizzes focussing on knowledge recall and precision.
This has been a very brief discussion of mediated and collaborative online learning. It has argued that a key benefit of the method is flexibility in terms of student location, time and interests. In addition, and most importantly, it has the benefit of an externally imposed study discipline.
The most important take-away message from this discussion is that mediated and collaborative online learning, like all formal education, it is not a trivial activity. To be effective it requires serious consideration by professional educators familiar with different types of learner, the significance of assessment, the methodology itself and the technologies over which it can be delivered.