Artificial intelligence will make internal politics even nastier!
The author reflects on a new research reports about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). His prediction: AI will make internal politics nastier within management ranks.
Article first written for the People + Strategy blog of HRPS (USA).
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days. Not surprisingly, news outlets north of the 49th parallel jumped on the release of a new research report cleverly titled "The Talented Mr. Robot: The Impact of Automation on Canada's Workforce". The study was conducted by The Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship – a newly created independent and nonpartisan institute, housed within the Ryerson University of Toronto, that is dedicated to advancing Canada's innovation and entrepreneurship.
The news headlines focussed on the percentage of workers at high risk of seeing their jobs disappear over the next 10 to 20 years (42%); and on the probability that various job types will be automated as a result of the emergence and rapid adoption of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and advanced robotics.
However, it was something else that caught my attention: The Brookfield Institute's prediction that management jobs in most fields will be comparatively safer than their related lower-tier, front-line positions.
Get ready for nastier "dark" politics among managers!
In previous articles and blog posts, I talked about the fundamental difference between "light" and "dark" politics. If the intent of light politics is first and foremost the good of the organization, dark politics is all about personal gains.
As artificial intelligence dramatically changes our organizations over the next decade, get ready for dark politics to become significantly nastier at the management level!
Indeed, until now the main drivers of dark politics were power, pay and recognition. Managers with no qualms about planting knives in the backs of their peers have long discovered it was a good strategy to get more resources, larger bonuses, faster or bigger promotions, etc. The dark political game has been going on ever since.
As artificial intelligence makes further inroads into the workplace, organizational structures will change. Some jobs will disappear; others will evolve. There will be several rounds of reorganizations. Just that will be enough to increase political gamesmanship among management ranks.
But the prevalence and intensity of dark politics will be significantly heightened by the fact management jobs will be safer than lower levels jobs. It won't be just about power, pay and recognition anymore. It will also be about survival (i.e. job security).
Higher stakes can only mean an uglier political game.
Should you sharpen your political knives?
If you read some of my previous posts about internal politics (for example the ones whose links I provided above), you know I have never been a big fan of dark politics. I recognize it is a natural part of organizational life. But it creates lots of damages.
As you work on the necessary reorganizations – and makes decisions about the evolving management roles – see through the political games and avoid being influenced (too much) by them.
Recognize that you will also be "in the game" – whether you want it or not. So first, decide where to draw your own personal line between dark and light politics. Second, respect your own demarcation line so that you can continue watching yourself in the mirror every morning.
The Brookfield Institute used a 10-to-20-years time horizon for its research. My initial reaction was that we still had plenty of time to prepare for the heightened political games.


GWTW Forum > Kites! Kites! Kites! > Beginners Corner > Individual Kite Cases??
What do you guys use if your kites don't have a case?
Is there a good source for them?
sleeves? Into the wind offers some, pretty much any kite shop will have some.
the most basic sleeve you can make...make it out of any material!
Depends on the kite. - For the more fragile ones: either drain pipes, or the tubes anglers use to protect their rods. - Both cut to a convenient size.
Cool! Thanks! I'll have to get me a sewing machine. Any good sewing machines around the $100ish mark?
Oh, you just opened a can of worms.
Long-term, you'd be better off spending a bit more on sewing machine up front. It'll save you on service and repairs later. There are plenty of good used machines available online. I own 3 different Pfaff machines, all bought used. With regular maintenance, they work fine. Make sure you get at the very least a straight stitch and zigzag stitch; a triple zigzag is nice too. More does not equal better! And older machines sometimes work better than their fancy electronic counterparts. Test it, make sure it's in good working order, and good luck.
What should one pay for a sewing machine? In your opinion. What is a good first machine and price for one (good deal, normal price...)?
No. For $100 a new machine will only cause you grief and you will swear at it a lot. For a used machine you'll get something that can be adequate if it isn't worn out. If you pay $100 for a used machine and find that it needs $100 worth of parts, repairs and adjustments, you're better off spending $200 on a new machine.
Talk to family and neighbors. Someone may have a machine that you can use occasionally and they can probably help you a good deal until you learn to use it.
I'm going to give a different answer and please keep in mind your experience will possibly vary from mine but EVERY kite I've sewn so far has been on a $100-ish machine. Granted, I'm using a lot of tape and I do take it apart every bobbin change to clean the tape gumminess from the bobbin area and needle. It has been good to me. I may have just gotten lucky but at this point, if this machine falls apart on me, for the cost I'll just go get the same machine again. IMO as long as you have a good straight stitch and 3 step zig zag, you are probably going to be ok as long as you take your time. I've personally enjoyed my Brother SM2700. It might not be for everyone and might not work on everything but in my opinion, it sews a decent kite and bag.
Thank you for you opinion! I hear both sides!
I am a believer in any sewing machine that you can get your hands on to start with.
ZigZag and straight stitch is imperative!
I use a 1962 Singer Touch and Sew that I was gifted and have had no problems making all sorts of things...metals gears makes it pretty bombproof.


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Immigration to Australiaadmin2017-11-13T09:21:33+00:00
Australia, the world's smallest continent as well as the world's largest island, the name is derived from the Latin AUSTRALIAS, means southern, legends of an "unknown land of the south.
Australia is often referred to as the "lucky country" with pulsating economy, political stability and a quality of life envied by many. Australia is known around the world for its stunning landscapes.
A great country to live in and do business, Australia has an enviable reputation as it offers premium standard of living.
Australia skilled worker visa
Effective April 19, 2017, the Skilled Occupations List (SOL) has been replaced with Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL) and the Short-term Skilled Occupation List (STSOL) has replaced the Consolidated Sponsored Occupations List (CSOL).
Business visa Australia
A business visa offers a number of advantages including a temporary visa of up to 4 years and the applicant's immediate family members listed on the application to live, work and study in Australia with them. At EUCAN International Education Immigration Consultants, we have a team of expert consultants that guide you through processes like process and visa application, eligibility assessment, and ensuring that the application for visa is submitted and processed successfully within an appropriate time period for you to easily travel to Australia.
With a comprehensive economic policy framework, Australia offers a highly competitive market which has a sound, stable and modern infrastructure that serves as an ideal destination for investment. These are the two major reasons that make Australia a favored destination for doing business.
The Australian Family migration stream intends to reunite immediate and extended family members with their eligible Australian relatives.
Family Spouse Visa
A Family Spouse Visa allows a married partner (opposite or same-sex) to join his/her spouse in Australia. The sponsor should be Australian citizen or permanent residents or eligible New Zealand citizens. This temporary visa is issues for 2 years, after which, the relationship is re-examined. If it is considered as genuine then the applicant is issued a permanent visa. Upon approval, the applicant is permitted to live, study and work in Australia.
Apply For Assessment
Immigrate To

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Stylish and a bold basic, the Emiri Tee in White is a simple statement piece. Featuring an asymmetric cut and a luxury blend of modal and mercerised cotton, this tee adds a little edge to minimalism. Worn with our Jitsuko Mini Skirt.


Ronald A. Rensink; Further adventures with the magical number one. Journal of Vision 2006;6(6):1076. doi: 10.1167/6.6.1076.
Rensink (1999) found that visual search for the absence or conjunction of change had a capacity of about 1; this "magical number one" was taken as evidence for a nexus of attention that mediates change perception. The studies here explored this idea further, using arrays of horizontal and vertical rectangles under flicker conditions, where displays continually alternated between "on" (exposures of 160-800 ms) and "off" (blank fields of 120 ms).
For simple change involving orientation, capacity for presence was 3.5, while capacity for absence was 1.2. When the rectangles were embedded in ellipses, capacity for presence decreased by 50%, while capacity for absence remained unaffected. Likewise, when an irrelevant background grid was placed between items, capacity for presence decreased by 50%, while capacity for absence remained unaffected. This supports the idea that detection of both presence and absence of change is mediated by a nexus, with the higher capacity for presence achieved via some form of configural organization.
For compound change involving orientation and polarity, capacity for presence (i.e, conjunction of changing properties) did not exceed 1. Interesting, capacity for absence (i.e., a single change among conjunctions) was 40% higher. This indicates that the low capacities were not due to high levels of noise from the other items, but resulted from a structural limitation - viz., the nexus. It also suggests that the slight over-unity excess for both absence conditions might be due to the use of a comparator that can be applied to 2 items at a time.
Support provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.


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Encyclopedia > Iron
Manganese - Iron - Cobalt
Name, Symbol, Number Iron, Fe, 26
Chemical series transition metal
Group, Period, Block 8 (VIIIB)[?], 4 , d
Density, Hardness 7874 kg/m3, 4.0
Appearance lustrous metallic
with a greyish tinge
Atomic Properties
Atomic weight 55.845 amu
Atomic radius (calc.) 140 (156) pm
Covalent radius 125 pm
van der Waals radius no information
Electron configuration [Ar]3d64s2
e- 's per energy level 2, 8, 14, 2
Oxidation states (Oxide) 2,3,4,6 (amphoteric)
Crystal structure Cubic, body centered
State of matter solid (ferromagnetic)
Melting point 1808 K (2795 �F)
Boiling point 3023 K (4982 �F)
Molar volume 7.09 ×10-3 m3/mol
Heat of vaporization 349.6 kJ/mol
Heat of fusion 13.8 kJ/mol
Vapor pressure 7.05 Pa at 1808 K
Speed of sound 4910 m/s at 293.15 K
Electronegativity 1.83 (Pauling scale)
Specific heat capacity 440 J/(kg*K)
Electrical conductivity 9.93 106/m ohm
Thermal conductivity 80.2 W/(m*K)
1st ionization potential 762.5 kJ/mol
2nd ionization potential 1561.9 kJ/mol
3rd ionization potential 2957 kJ/mol
4th ionization potential 5290 kJ/mol
Most Stable Isotopes
DE MeV
54Fe 5.8% Fe is stable with 28 neutrons
55Fe {syn.} 2.73 y ε capture 0.231 55Mn
56Fe 91.72% Fe is stable with 30 neutrons
58Fe 0.28% Fe is stable with 32 neutrons
59Fe {syn.} 44.503 d β 1.565 59Co
60Fe {syn.} 1.5E6 y β- 3.978 60Co
SI units & STP are used except where noted.
Iron is a chemical element in the periodic table that has the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. Iron is group 8 and period 4 metal.
1 Notable Characteristics
5 Compounds
7 Isotopes
8 Precautions
Notable Characteristics
A typical iron atom has 56 times the mass of a typical hydrogen atom. Iron is believed to be the 10th most common element in the universe. Fe is an abbreviation for ferrum, the Latin word for iron.
Iron is a metal extracted from iron ore, and is hardly ever found in the free (elemental) state. In order to obtain elemental iron, the impurities must be removed by chemical reduction. Iron is used in the production of steel, which is not an element but an alloy, a solution of different metals (and some non-metals, particularly carbon).
The nucleus of iron has the highest binding energy per nucleon, so it is the heaviest element that is produced exothermically through fusion and the lightest through fission. When a star that has sufficient mass to produce iron does so, it can no longer produce energy in its core and a supernova will ensue.
Iron is the most common metal in the universe.
Cosmological models with an open universe predict that there will be a phase where as a result of slow fusion and fission reactions, everything will become iron.
Iron is the most used of all the metals, comprising 95 percent of all the metal tonnage produced worldwide. Its combination of low cost and high strength make it indispensable, especially in applications like automobiles, the hulls of large ships, and structural components for buildings. Steel is the best known alloy of iron, and some of the forms that iron takes include:
Pig iron has 4% - 5% carbon and contains varying amounts of contaminants such as sulfur, silicon and phosphorus. Its only significance is that of an intermediate step on the way from iron ore to cast iron and steel.
cast iron contains 2% - 3.5% carbon and small amounts of manganese. Contaminants present in pig iron that negatively affect the material properties, such as sulphur and phosphorus, have been reduced to an acceptable level. It has a melting point in the range of 1420-1470 K, which is lower than either of its two main components, and makes it the first product to be melted when carbon and iron are heated together. It is extremely strong, hard and brittle. Working cast iron, even white hot cast iron, tends to break the object.
Carbon steel[?] contains between 0.5% and 1.5% carbon, with small amounts of manganese, sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon.
Wrought iron contains less than 0.5% carbon. It is a tough, malleable product, not as fusible as pig iron. It has a very small amount of carbon, a few tenths of a percent. If honed to an edge, it loses it quickly.
Alloy steels[?] contain varying amounts of carbon as well as other metals, such as chromium, vanadium, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten, etc.
Ferric oxides are used in the production of magnetic storage in computers. They are often mixed with other compounds, and retain their magnetic properties in solution.
The first signs of use of iron come from the Sumerians and the Egyptians, where around 4000 BC, small items, such as the tips of spears and ornaments, were being fashioned from iron recovered from meteorites.
By 3000 BC to 2000 BC, increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appear in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt. However, their use appears to be ceremonial, and iron was an expensive metal, more expensive than gold. Some resources (see the reference What Caused the Iron Age? below) suggest that iron was being created then as a by-product of copper refining, as sponge iron, and was not reproducible by the metallurgy of the time. By 1600 BC to 1200 BC, iron was used increasingly in the Middle East, but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze.
In the period from the 12th to 10th century, there was a rapid transition in the Middle East from bronze to iron tools and weapons. The critical factor in this transition does not appear to be the sudden onset of a superior ironworking technology, but instead the disruption of the supply of tin. This period of transition, which occurred at different times in different parts of the word, is the ushering in of an age of civilization called the Iron Age.
Concurrent with the transition from bronze to iron was the discovery of carburization, which was the process of adding carbon to the irons of the time. Iron was recovered as sponge iron, a mix of iron and slag with some carbon and/or carbide, which was then repeatedly hammered and folded over to free the mass of slag and oxidise out carbon content, so creating the product wrought iron. Wrought iron was very low in carbon content and was not easily hardened by quenching. The people of the Middle East found that a much harder product could be created by the long term heating of a wrought iron object in a bed of charcoal, which was then quenched in water or oil. The resulting product, which had a surface of steel, was harder and less brittle than the bronze it began to replace.
In China the first irons used were also meteoric iron, with archeological evidence for items made of wrought iron appearing in the northwest, near Xinjiang, in the 8th century BC. These items were made of wrought iron, created by the same processes used in the Middle East and Europe, and were thought to be imported by non-Chinese people.
In the later years of the Zhou Dynasty (ca 550 BC), a new iron manufacturing capability began because of a highly developed kiln technology. Producing blast furnaces[?] capable of temperatures exceeding 1300 K, the Chinese developed the manufacture of cast, or pig iron. If iron ores are heated with carbon to 1420-1470 K, a molten liquid is formed, an alloy of about 96.5% iron and 3.5% carbon. This product is strong, can be cast into intricate shapes, but is too brittle to be worked, unless the product is decarburized to remove most of the carbon. The vast majority of Chinese iron manufacture, from the Zhou dynasty onward, was of cast iron. Iron, however, remained a pedestrian product, used by farmers for hundreds of years, and did not really affect the nobility of China until the Qin dynasty (ca 221 BC).
Cast iron development lagged in Europe, as the smelters could only achieve temperatures of about 1000 K. Through a good portion of the Middle Ages, in Western Europe, iron was still being made by the working of sponge iron into wrought iron. Some of the earliest casting of iron in Europe occurred in Sweden, in two sites, Lapphyttan and Vinarhyttan, between 1150 and 1350 AD. There are suggestions by scholars that the practice may have followed the Mongols across Russia to these sites, but there is no clear proof of this hypothesis. In any event, by the late fourteenth century, a market for cast iron goods began to form, as a demand developed for cast iron cannonballs.
Early iron smelting (as the process is called) used charcoal as both the heat source and the reducing agent. In 18th century England, wood supplies ran down and coke, a fossil fuel, was used as an alternative. This innovation by Abraham Darby supplied the energy for the Industrial Revolution.
Iron is one of the more common elements on Earth, making up about 5% of the Earth's crust.
Iron is extracted from the ore hematite, which is mainly Fe2O3. The iron is separated from the ore by reduction with carbon - a more reactive element. This process takes place in a blast furnace at temperatures of about 2000°C.
First coke, mainly carbon, is entered in to the furnace and reacts with the oxygen to form carbon dioxide:
C + O2 → CO2
Then the carbon dioxide reacts with more carbon to form carbon monoxide:
CO2 + C → 2CO
Carbon monoxide goes on to actually react with the haematite ore:
3CO + Fe2O3 → 2Fe + 3CO2
The iron is tapped off as a liquid. However it is still not pure, the main impurity being sand (silicon dioxide). This is reacted with limestone (CaCO3) to form slag First the limestone (CaCO3) is decomposed to calcium monoxide[?] and carbon dioxide:
CaCO3 → CaO + CO2
Then the calcium monoxide reacts with the silicon dioxide forming slag, which can be used for road-building or fertiliser:
CaO + SiO2 → CaSiO3
Approximately 1100Mt (million tons) of iron ore was produced in the world in 2000, with a gross market value of approximately 25 billion US dollars. While ore production occurs in 48 countries, the five largest producers were China, Brazil, Australia, Russia and India, accounting for 70% of world iron ore production. The 1100Mt of iron ore was used to produce approximately 572Mt of pig iron.
Common oxidation states of iron include:
the ferrous state, Fe+2,
the ferric state, Fe+3,
the ferryl state, Fe+4, stabilized in some enzymes (e.g. peroxidases).
Iron (VI) is also known, if rare. In the form of potassium-ferrate (K2FeO4) it is a selective oxidator for primary alcohols. The solid is only stable under vacuum and dark purple in both (caustic) solution and as a solid.
iron carbide Fe3C is known as cementite.
Essential in animals, where iron is the central atom in the heme molecule, and therefore an essential component of all hemoproteins. Inorganic iron is also found in the iron-sulfur clusters of many enzymes.
Bacteria often use iron. When the body is fighting a bacterial infection, the body "hides" iron so it cannot be used by the bacteria.
Iron has four naturally-occurring stable isotopes, 54Fe, 56Fe, 57Fe and 58Fe. The relative abundances of the Fe isotopes in nature are approximately 54Fe (5.8%), 56Fe (91.7%), 57Fe (2.2%) and 58Fe (0.3%). 60Fe is an extinct radionuclide which had a long half-life (1.5 Myr). Much of the past work on measuring the isotopic composition of Fe has centered on determining 60Fe variations due to processes accompanying nucleosynthesis (i.e., meteorite studies) and ore formation. The abundance of 60Ni (daughter product of 60Fe) present in extraterrestrial material may provide insight into the origin of the solar system and its early history. Of the stable isotopes, only 57Fe has a nuclear spin (-1/2). For this reason, 57Fe has application as a spin isotope in chemistry and biochemistry.
Excessive dietary iron is toxic, because excess ferrous iron reacts with peroxides in the body, producing free radicals. When iron is in normal quantity, the body's own antioxidant mechanisms can control this process. In excess, uncontrollable quantities of free radicals are produced.
The lethal dose of iron in a 2 year old is about 3 grams of iron. One gram can induce severe poisoning. There are reported cases of children being poisoned by consuming between 10-50 tablets of ferrous sulfate over a few hour period. Overconsumption of iron is the single highest cause of death in children by unintentional ingestion of pharmaceuticals.
If iron intake is uncontrollably high, a disease results, called hemochromatosis. The iron excess accumulates in the liver, with siderosis[?] and organ damage as a result. For this reason, people shouldn't take iron supplements unless they suffer from iron deficiency.
WebElements.com - Iron (http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Fe/index)
EnvironmentalChemistry.com - Iron (http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/periodic/Fe)
It's Elemental - Iron (http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele026)
... Contents Christiania Christiania can refer to: Christiania - the name of Oslo, from 1624 to 1925. The Free State of Christiania - ...


Have you ever dreamed of capturing beautiful photos of powerful waterfalls, black sand beaches, glaciers, and the amazing Northern Lights? We can show you these fantastic sights on our special Instagram Photo Tour! Join us for an adventure by private 4x4 jeep to the most popular Instagram locations to take perfect photos that will give you many likes and boost your social media profiles!
We will visit the black church in Budir, perfect photo location if you love minimalism in photography, thanks to the contrast of the black facade and the colors of the surrounding Icelandic landscape.
Not far from Budir lies another popular Instagram location: the charming village of Arnarstapi, with its sea cliffs and rock formations. There are a lot of platforms along the cliffs of Arnastapi from where you can take pictures of the cliffs and the waves crashing through lava arches. Walk around to find the perfect angle and make sure you have a tripod to take some fantastic long exposure shots.
We will then continue our drive through Snæfellsness National Park with the mystical Snæfellsjökull, the glacier mentioned in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. We will stop at Lóndrangar to admire amazing cliffs and rock formations and in Djúpalónssandur for spectacular black beaches.
The absolute highlight of the tour is the majestic Kirkjufell, the most photographed mountain in Iceland. Kirkjufell, the church mountain, is a trendy photo location for Instagrammers and also one of the filming locations of Game of Thrones. The features that make this mountain so unique are its cone shape and the small Kirkjufellsfoss waterfall opposite the mountain. Following a short path, you will be able to take the iconic shot of the waterfalls with Kirkjufell in the background.
We will end our tour in charming Stykkishólmur, a picturesque town on the Northern coast of the peninsula, where you will walk through old colorful Icelandic houses and take pictures of the iconic red lighthouse overlooking the harbor before we head back to Reykjavik.
If you take the tour in the winter (September-March) we will try to get a glimpse of the Northern Lights before getting back to Reykjavik, weather permitting.
Pick-up from your accommodation in Reykjavik, please confirm at time of booking.
Pick-up and drop-off possible from Keflavik Airport, with additional charge.


text:
Saudi Arabia Is Not "Sunni Central"
Unlike what many Western pundits think, Saudi Arabia does not represent the "true" Sunni Islam. Even within the country, there are older traditions of Islam that are far more open and tolerant than the Kingdom's official Wahhabist sect.
By Tarek Osman
Pilgrims at the Grand Mosque, Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Kazuyoshi Nomachi/Corbis
In his column in the New York Times on November 27, Roger Cohen described Saudi Arabia as "Sunni Central." It is not, was never so, and will never be.
"Sunni Central" means, or implies, being the heartland, or embodiment, or representation of Sunni Islam. Islam was born in the region Al-Hijaz, which since the second decade of the twentieth century after a succession of military battles led by Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, has become the western province of the kingdom bearing the family's name. But whereas the traditionally austere culture of Najd (the central part of Arabia dominated by Bedouin and tribal heritage) shaped the kingdom's culture, Al-Hijaz has always been a trading hub, a place where Yemeni, Levantine, Egyptian, and local cultures interacted. And so, despite the nine-decades long political link between Al-Hijaz and the rest of present-day Saudi Arabia, Al-Hijaz has retained its distinct cultural and social milieu, which is vastly different from those of the kingdom's other regions. Invoking any historical or cultural link between Al-Hijaz, the birthplace of Islam, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, confuses traditions and heritages.
Embodiment entails being, in the perception of at least a majority, a prime example of the values associated with, or indeed a clear expression, of Sunni Islam. The history of Sunni Islam does not lend any of that to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The political, social, and to some extent theological expressions of Sunni Islam evolved during the times of the Umayyad, Abbasid, Mameluk, and Ottoman dynasties, from the eight to the eighteenth centuries. These took shape in the, at the time, culturally diverse, and to a large extent cosmopolitan and socially tolerant (many in Saudi Arabia would say decadent) Levant, Iraq, Egypt, and Ottoman heartlands in Asia Minor. These could not be more different in their social influences and theological understandings of Islam from Wahhabism, the highly strict, almost literalist discipline that the Al-Saud family allied itself with in the eighteenth century. This is one reason why Wahhabism remained almost totally confined to the Arabian peninsula up until the early 1970s, when millions of poor and lower middle class Arabs from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa emigrated to the Gulf, and especially to Saudi Arabia in search for jobs after the exponential increase in oil prices in that decade.
All of this makes the notion of Saudi Arabia representing the "true" Sunni Islam highly fraught. It is important to note that despite being the richest Sunni-majority country in the world, the host of Al-Hajj (the annual Islamic pilgrimage that attracts millions of Muslims every year), and one of the very few Islamic countries in which a group of scholars (the Wahhabi establishment) have a highly influential role in key areas such as education, Saudi Arabia has never managed to establish a religious institution that commands global veneration in the Islamic world, such as that enjoyed by Egypt's Al-Azhar or Tunisia's Al-Zeituna.
What leads many observers—not only in the West—to confer on Saudi Arabia the positioning of "Sunni Central" is that, for half a century now, the country has been trying to export the Wahhabi understanding of Islam to the rest of the Sunni Islamic world. It has also been, by far, the biggest and most prominent financier of some Islamist groups, especially in the West. And in the hot-spots where Sunni Islamic forces were drawn into religious or sectarian tensions, for example in Lebanon since the late 1970s, and in Iraq since the mid-2000s, Saudi Arabia has indeed supported the leading forces of Sunni Islam, even if they had no connections at all to Wahhabism.
But that support was always selective. In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia forged a brief alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, as the two saw in the secular Arab nationalist movement (and its towering representative, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser) a common enemy. But, Saudi Arabia, whether its political or theological elite, quickly developed many apprehensions against the Brotherhood. More recently, in the last five years, Saudi Arabia emerged as an opponent of—and in some cases saw a strategic threat in—the Brotherhood, Turkey's Islamist AKP party (which has ruled the country since 2002), and Tunisia's Ennahda Movement (which arguably has developed one of the most sophisticated attempts by a political Islamist group to reconcile Islamism with secular modernity). And so, Saudi Arabia's support of Sunni Muslim actors has always been subject to either the kingdom's interests or its theological discipline, or both.
The notion of Saudi Arabia as "Sunni Central" creates many problems for Sunni Muslims, the world, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself. This notion dilutes the rich heritage of Sunni Islam into one of its severest and most rigid interpretations. Without intending it, this notion strengthens the ideologies that reject the Islamic world's historical episodes of pluralism and openness to intellectual and cultural engagement with the world. It also subtly strengthens the ideologies that permit the usage of violence to spread its presence. It betrays the confusion of many in the West, including in supposedly well-informed circles, of the ideological and cultural struggles that lie behind many of the cold and hot wars that are currently raging across the Middle East.
This notion of being "Sunni Central" also presents Saudi Arabia with a colossal responsibility: of playing a leading role in finding a new way of reconciling secular modernity with Islam as a social frame of reference, identity, and a system of governance and legislation. Despite its wealth and the prestige conferred on the kingdom as the host of Islam's holiest shrines, Saudi Arabia is unprepared to assume that responsibility. Because of its relatively young age and still limited political experience (the country of Saudi Arabia is less than a hundred years old), the economic and technological changes that are consistently bringing down oil prices and diminishing oil wealth (the fuel that has sustained the project of King Abdulaziz Al-Saud in the last seven decades), and the kingdom's demographics (over two-thirds of its population under 30-years old, with one of the world's highest rates of exposure to satellite and digital media), Saudi Arabia is compelled to undergo a transformation of its political and social system to absorb the ambitions—and frustrations—of the majority of its people. And this is happening at a time when the first generation that has ruled the country in the last seven decades (that of Abddulaziz's sons) is handing over to the next generation of the grandsons, with all the tension and uncertainty that come with such transfer of power, especially in a highly closed structure. Saudi Arabia has its own colossal challenges to confront, to be able to assume any genuinely leading role in the Islamic world that is undergoing its own fraught transformation.
Understanding the diversity that has always characterized and shaped the Sunni Islamic world is key to isolating and diminishing the narrow minded and pugnacious ideologies that are the product of the most frustrating episodes of Islamic history, and which today plague Sunni Islam.
Tarek Osman is the author of Egypt on the Brink and the forthcoming Islamism: What It Means for the Middle East and the World from Yale University Press. He wrote and presented the BBC series "The Making of the Modern Arab World" (2013) and "Sands of Time – A History of Saudi Arabia" (2015). He is the political counselor for the Arab World at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Tags: Saudi Arabia Sunni Islam Wahhabism
Saudi Arabia's Struggle for Sunni Leadership
The Limits of Reform in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia's Post-Oil Future
Saudi Arabia's Moment in the Sun


Among all the bad press recently about state-sized floating islands of plastic in oceans and perpetual presence of one-use plastic along highways and plastic bag and straw wars in California cities, the plastic industry is changing behind the scenes.
For the last half dozen years large investments (including by Bill Gates) have been made to find alternative ways to build the basic building blocks of plastic-polymers.
Polymers are the long chain molecules needed for life and plastic. The nature of petroleum-based polymers is, however, that they can last nearly forever. Pottery lasts as long, but for some reason environmentalists have left this material alone, while focusing on any petroleum-based product. This is not without some reason; we simply throw too much away and fail to recycle as much as we could. The day will come when archeologists will discover us the way they learn about 3,000-year-old communities using pottery. Based on how much pottery we threw away, versus plastic they will learn much more about us!
But this "live forever" quality of plastic may be coming to an end now. The investments in finding new ways to build polymers is starting to yield results. Lego, the international toy company famous for its plastic building blocks, has been working on new plastic resins with different qualities that will break down better in nature and under composting conditions.
Lego started ironically with a new sugar-based polymer made from plant material or biomass. Sugar cane and corn will one day soon be inside your children's Lego blocks. The concept is that plastic polymers that are biomass-based will not last forever but will break down into "natural" components over time. Ironically, Lego will make their trees, bushes, and leaves in this new material starting soon.
While it is just a tiny part of their toy line, it is a real start in a high-profile company that may, indeed, help move the industry to plastics that turn to dust, or organic materials anyway over time.
Petroleum based plastics can break into very small pieces, but they really don't break down into more natural molecules that can be used by living organisms later. New biomass-based polymers will be friendlier, but not completely biodegradable quite yet.
In the spirt of Lego's first launch into more earth-friendly polymers, Microdyne Plastics is pleased to be working with these materials as well. Recent tests using one of these new resins indicated no perceivable difference in the product or its characteristics, except how nature treats them.
Microdyne has three options for newer Earth Friendly Plastic Polymers and Resins: Biodegradable and Compostable, Negative Carbon Footprint, and Resin Additives. See Earth Friendly Plastic Polymers and Resins from Microdyne here. .
These new options will provide opportunities for companies that have a "green" clientele and will be an advantage compared to traditional polymers, however, at a price. As in most economic situations, small quantities of anything tend to have higher prices just due to the scale of manufacturing. As more companies use more of the new materials, the prices are sure to fall from initial levels.
A survey done by Tetra Pak a packaging company, with 6,000 consumers in 13 countries, indicates 81 percent of customers look for environmental logos on purchases and 43 percent say Eco-friendly packaging can influence brand purchase, up from 39 percent in 2015.
Companies will need to evaluate the increased cost against the customer's perceived utility of the total product, including the container. Little research has been done on this subject. One such study did find that consumers receive 34 percent of their overall product utility from packaging. Of that group of customers, 31 percent placed environmentally friendly packaging as the most important factor driving their purchasing decision. The value of each product to this segment of consumers will need to be determined by each company.
Some companies, however, currently do not use plastic precisely for the same reason. These companies using some glass and metal containers may consider plastic for the first time. One home delivery milk company that has used glass for a half century is now looking at the future of biomass plastic.
The marketing benefits of more earth-friendly containers, will be very real as the prices come down, companies of all types would do well to stay abreast of the new developments. Microdyne can help you do that.
Do you have a question about these new earth-friendly plastic resins? Fill out a quote form here and give us your details.


Facebook is the best social networking site in now a days and it is getting more popular day by day. I feel surprised when someone is using internet and then he/she explained that they don't have any facebook account till now. Facebook is actually a social symbol now. As the virtual world of the social networks increases it also increase the risks of misusing your identity. So it is very important for all of us to make sure that our facebook account should be secure. So in this blog i am going to show you how you can make your facebook account more secure.
1. The first thing to make your account secure is login notification. You must enabled login notification of your facebook account security. If you have enabled login notification then if there is someone tries to login to your account then facebook instantly sends you an email and SMS. So it is better to enabled your login notifications.
2. If you found any email from facebook to enter your password then i strongly recommend you to please never click on such links. It is the phishing attacks where hackers tries to steal your login crudentials. So it is much better to avoid such emails where there is a password request.
3.Don't accepts friend requests from unknown persons on facebook. Please don't attract by the beauty that they show you on facebook. There may be a chance that there is a Hacker who is looking to know your login crudentials. So it is better to take care of that.
4. Never Click on links that shows attractive titles like the celebrities scandals and more like these.If you are asked to click a link to view something, then don't. Click on "Profile", then "Wall" and then place the cursor over the virus update – then click the "Remove" button that shows up when hovering over the update and confirm.
5. And at last i must suggest you to please Check the Facebook security page that is updated with the latest news on viruses and scams.


text:
Q: SELECT with conditions for preferential source I have a query which I've been using for sometime however I have a new scenario which I'm not sure how to handle.  The query below extracts avg pricing from a table called availables.  The problem I have now is that, the data which is contained in this table can come from one of two sources.  So I added a source field to the table.
The problem is one or both of these sources for any record may be blank which is fine now, or they may contain data for the same record (which is my problem).  The records are normally unique except for the new alternative sources.
IE
Room Date        Price   Source
27   2010-02-28  $27.99  1
27   2010-02-28  $25.99  2

I this one instance I need the query to pull only the first source and ignore the second, but only if they both exist.
SELECT
    rooms.id,
    name,
    ppl,
    private AS exclusive,
    MIN(spots) AS spots,
    AVG(availables.price) AS price FROM "rooms"
INNER JOIN
    "availables" ON availables.room_id = rooms.id
WHERE
    (("rooms".hostel_id = 6933) AND
     (rooms.active IS true AND bookdate BETWEEN '2011-02-20' AND '2011-02-22'))
GROUP BY
    rooms.id, name, ppl, private ORDER BY price

A: add a subquery like:
inner join
  (select Room, Date, min(Source) as Source
  from availables
  group by Room, Date) first_available
on first_available.Room = available.Room
    and first_available.Date = available.Date
    and first_available.Source = available.Source

A: SELECT  *
FROM    rooms
JOIN    (
        SELECT  DISTINCT ON (room_id, date) *
        FROM    availables
        ORDER BY
                room_id, date, source
        ) a
ON      a.room_id = rooms.id
WHERE   …

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
package com.x5.template.filters;

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;

import com.x5.template.Chunk;
import com.x5.util.ObjectDataMap;

public abstract class ObjectFilter implements ChunkFilter
{
    public Object applyFilter(Chunk chunk, String text, FilterArgs args)
    {
        return text;
    }

    public abstract String getFilterName();
    public String[] getFilterAliases()
    {
        return null;
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public Object applyFilter(Chunk chunk, Object object, FilterArgs args)
    {
        if (object instanceof ObjectDataMap) {
            // expose inner object for direct manipulation
            object = ((ObjectDataMap)object).unwrap();
        }
        return transformObject(chunk, object, args);
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
    public abstract Object transformObject(Chunk chunk, Object object, FilterArgs args);

    public ObjectFilter() {}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


LONDON (Reuters) - OMERS Private Equity, the private equity investment arm of the OMERS Pension Plan, said on Tuesday it has entered into an exclusive agreement with France's Ardian to acquire a majority stake in calibration services firm Trescal.
The proposed transaction values the company at around 670 million euros ($786.78 million), it said in a release.
Trescal serves more than 40,000 customers over a range of sectors, including defense, aerospace, telecommunications, transportation and automotive.


text:
Bringing down the language barrier
By Mike Schroepfer
For billions of people around the world, language remains a major barrier to getting the most out of the internet. All the stuff that people like me take for granted when we go online — the ability to learn new things, or be entertained, or participate in global communities — simply doesn't work very well for those who don't speak one of the handful of languages that dominate the internet.
The first AI model that translates 100 languages without relying on English data
Facebook AI leads in 2019 WMT international machine translation competition
Unsupervised machine translation: A novel approach to provide fast, accurate translations
Universal translation, from any language to any other, would change all of that. It's hard to imagine a technological development that would be more transformative for more people, immediately breaking down barriers and creating opportunities on an enormous scale. It's no coincidence that such technology is a core part of so much great sci-fi, from Star Trek to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And while we're not there yet, I think people underestimate just how much progress has been made in the last 8 years.
In fact, in the decades I've been working in technology, there are only a few examples I can think of where so much progress has happened in such a short amount of time. There's a lot about AI that gets overhyped, especially when people assume that progress in one area easily transfers to another. But in areas like machine translation and multilingual understanding, the progress has been truly stunning — and with so much more to come.
Our AI team released an incredible new step in this direction just this week: an AI model that has been trained to work with 100 languages, and can translate directly between any pair of them. Typical translation systems are centered on English — they often translate first into English, and then from that into the third language, or are trained to learn languages based on their relationship to English. By removing that middle step, we're not just making the whole system much more efficient — we're making it significantly more accurate, reducing the game-of-telephone errors that emerge when you're working with a translation of a translation.
And we're putting languages that have historically been overlooked by machine translation research at the center of our systems. If a Bengali speaker in Bangladesh wants to communicate with a Tamil speaker in Sri Lanka, this new system, named M2M-100, understands both their languages and translates directly, with no detour via English. And the whole thing has been made available as an open source project, free for all to build on and experiment with.
This is just one of many new translation capabilities that AI work at Facebook and elsewhere is enabling. Some of them are already operational, improving the accuracy of the 20 billion translations we already do every single day. Some are advances that are yet to be deployed, but they soon will be. And others are part of a long and extremely promising R&D pipeline that will keep producing major advances for years to come.
These advances will be great for people like me, letting us experience the richness of cultures across the world in ways previous generations could never have imagined. But they will have a much, much bigger impact elsewhere: universal translation will be truly life changing for people currently held back from the online world by language barriers. Those barriers are going to fall, and witnessing the creation of the technology that will bring them down is incredibly exciting.
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Local welding equipment manufacturer TPS WeldTech has had a visit from Brian Whittle MSP. The South Scotland MSP met with Chairman Tom Palmer and his wife Margaret, who founded the business almost 50 years ago in Kilmarnock.
Dudley College of Technology's new Advance II building is setting a new standard for skills training for the welding sector. Dudley's £12 million investment in a dedicated Centre for Advanced Building Technologies has attracted a range of industry partners including sector leaders TPS WeldTech, who are keen to equip the college with the newest technology for students to work with.


The Avaya Aura platform is available as a FedRAMP Authorized solution through a partnership with collab9. Public sector agencies that choose to implement the secure solution will enjoy a number of benefits.
Collab9 takes a best-of-breed approach to providing a comprehensive suite of hosted unified communication applications. Agencies can run Avaya Aura from a secure cloud service on a subscription basis.
This solution directly addresses a primary concern for public sector cloud migration projects: security. For the first time, public sector agencies can take advantage of a FedRAMP authorized Avaya Aura platform for unified communications. In order to qualify for its FedRAMP Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) for public sector cloud deployments, the collab9 platform was subject to 325 security controls, as defined in NIST special publication SP 800-53r4.
By migrating to a cloud-based platform hosted by collab9, agencies can upgrade to the latest communication technology while limiting the need for significant capital expenditure. Through migration to a hybrid environment of cloud and premises components, agencies often retain much of their existing equipment, while eliminating onerous maintenance contracts and leveraging the monthly, per-user subscription that allows them to scale as needed and avoid wasted spend.
Collab9 infrastructure incorporates multiple, dual-redundant data centers to support agency Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP) as a contingency for disruptive events.
The Avaya Aura cloud-based UCaaS platform allows workers to securely connect, regardless of location, using desktop and mobile applications in conjunction with optional "plug and play" VoIP telephones. This enables reduced friction for collaboration between remote and geographically dispersed teams.
With the collab9 platform, the latest upgrades and technology are always available, along with maintenance and support, so that users can focus on their core functions.


text:
All posts tagged Nature
The short paper by James Watson and Francis Crick establishing the helical structure of the DNA molecule was published in the science journal, Nature, on April 25, 1953. The blurb of this book describes it as the scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. Quite probably, although it was a busy century – the discovery of antibiotics was quite important, too, not to mention the atom bomb.
James Watson and Francis Crick with their DNA model at the Cavendish Laboratories in 1953
Anyway, what makes this first-person account of the events leading up to the discovery such fun is Watson's prose style and mentality. He is fearless. He takes no prisoners. He is brutally honest about his own shortcomings and everyone else's and, in doing so, sheds extraordinarily candid light on how science is actually done. He tells us that foreign conferences where nobody speaks English are often pointless. Many scientists are just plain stupid. Some colleagues are useless, some make vital contributions at just the right moment.
Watson has no hesitation in telling us that, when he arrived in Cambridge in 1951, aged just 23, he was unqualified in almost every way – although he had a degree from the University of Chicago, he had done his best to avoid learning any physics or chemistry, and as a graduate student at Indiana he had also avoided learning any chemistry. In fact the book keeps referring to his astonishing ignorance of almost all the key aspects of the field he was meant to be studying.
The one thing he did have was a determination to solve the problem which had been becoming ever-more prominent in the world of biology, what is a gene? Watson says he was inspired by Erwin Schrödinger's 1946 book, What Is Life? which pointed out that 'genes' were the key component of living cells and that, to understand what life is, we must understand what genes are and how they work. The bacteriologist O.T. Avery had already shown that hereditary traits were passed from one bacterium to another by purified DNA molecules, so this much was common knowledge in the scientific community.
DNA was probably the agent of hereditary traits, but what did it look like and how did it work?
Our hero gets a U.S. government research grant to go to Copenhagen to study with biochemist Herman Kalckar, his PhD supervisor Salvador Luria hoping the Dane would teach him something but… no. Watson's interest wasn't sparked, partly because Kalckar was working on the structure of nucleotides, which young Jim didn't think were immediately relevant to his quest, also because Herman was hard to understand –
At times I stood about nervously while Herman went through the motions of a biochemist, and on several days I even understood what he said. (p.34)
A situation compounded when Herman began to undergo a painful divorce and his mind wandered from his work altogether.
It was a chance encounter at a conference in Naples that motivated Watson to seek out the conducive-sounding environment of Cambridge (despite the reluctance of his funding authorities back in the States to let him go so easily). John Kendrew, the British biochemist and crystallographer, at that point studying the structure of myoglobin, helped smooth his passage to the fens.
Head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where Watson now found himself was Sir Lawrence Bragg, Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of crystallography. The unit collecting X-ray diffraction photographs of haemoglobin was headed up by the Austrian Max Perutz, and included Francis Crick, at this stage (in 1951) 35-years-old and definitely an acquired taste. Indeed the famous opening sentence of the book is:
I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.
followed by the observation that:
he talked louder and faster than anybody else, and when he laughed, his location within the Cavendish was obvious.
So he had found a home of sorts and, in Francis Crick, a motormouth accomplice who was also obsessed by DNA – but there were two problems.
The powers that be didn't like Crick, who was constantly getting into trouble and nearly got thrown out when he accused the head of the lab, Bragg, of stealing one of his ideas in a research paper.
Most of the work on the crystallography of DNA was being done at King's College, London, where Maurice Wilkins had patiently been acquiring X-rays of the molecule for nearly ten years.
There was a sub-problem here which was that Wilkins was being forced to work alongside Rosalind Franklin, an expert in X-ray crystallography, who was an independent-minded 31-year-old woman (b.1920) and under the impression that she had been invited in to lead the NA project. The very young Watson and the not-very-securely-based Crick both felt daunted at having to ask to borrow and interpret Wilkins's material, not least because he himself would have to extract it from the sometimes obstreperous Franklin.
And in fact there was a third big problem, which was that Linus Pauling, probably the world's leading chemist and based at Cal Tech in the States, was himself becoming interested in the structure of DNA and the possibility that it was the basis of the much-vaunted hereditary material.
Pauling's twinkling eyes and dramatic flair when making presentations is vividly described (pp.37-8). Along the same lines, Watson later gives a deliberately comical account of how he is scoffed and ignored by the eminent biochemist Erwin Chargaff after making some (typically) elementary mistakes in basic chemical bonding.
It is fascinating to read the insights scattered throughout the book about the relative reputations of the different areas of science – physics, biology, biochemistry, crystallography and so on. Typical comments are:
'the witchcraft-like techniques of the biochemist', p.63
'In England, if not everywhere, most botanists and zoologists were a muddled lot.' p.63
In a typical anecdote, after attending a lecture in London given by Franklin about her work, Watson goes for a Chinese meal in Soho with Maurice Wilkins who is worried that he made a mistake moving into biology, compared to the exciting and well-funded world of physics.
The physics of the time was dominated by the aftershock of the massive wartime atom bomb project, and with ongoing work to develop both the H-bomb and peacetime projects for nuclear power.
During the war Wilkins had helped to develop improved radar screens at Birmingham, then worked on isotope separation at the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Now he was stuck in a dingy lab in King's College arguing with Franklin almost every day about who should use the best samples of DNA and the X-ray equipment and so on. (Later on, Watson tells us Wilkins' and Franklin's relationship deteriorated so badly that he (Watson) was worried about lending the London team the Cambridge team's wire models in case Franklin strangled Wilkins with them. At one point, when Watson walks in on Franklin conducting an experiment, she becomes so angry at him he is scared she's going to attack him. Wilkins confirms there have been occasions when he has run away in fear of her assaulting him.)
It's in this respect – the insights into the way the lives of scientists are as plagued by uncertainty, professional rivalry, and doubts about whether they're in the right job, or researching the right subject, gnawing envy of more glamorous, better-funded labs and so on – that the book bursts with insight and human interest.
By about page 50 Watson has painted vivid thumbnail portraits of all the players involved in the story, the state of contemporary scientific knowledge, and the way different groups or individuals (Wilkins, Franklin, Pauling, Crick and various crystallographer associates at the Cavendish) are all throwing around ideas and speculations about the structure of DNA, on bus trips, in their freezing cold digs, or over gooseberry pie at their local pub, the Eagle in Cambridge (p.75).
For the outsider, I think the real revelation is learning how very small the final achievement of Crick and Watson seems. Avery had shown that DNA was the molecule of heredity. Chergaff had shown it contained equal parts of the four bases. Wilkins and Franklin had produced X-ray photos which strongly hinted at the structure and the famous photo 51 from their lab put it almost beyond doubt that DNA had a helix structure. Pauling, in America, had worked out the helical structure of other long proteins and had now began to speculate about DNA (although Watson conveys his and Crick's immense relief that Pauling's paper on the subject, published in early 1953, betrayed some surprisingly elementary mistakes in its chemistry.) But the clock was definitely ticking very loudly, rivals were closing in on the answer, and the pages leading up to the breakthrough are genuinely gripping.
In other words, the final deduction of the double helix structure doesn't come out of the blue; the precise opposite; from Watson's account it seems like it would have only been a matter of time before one or other of these groups had stumbled across the correct structure.
But it is very exciting when Watson comes into work one day, clears all the clutter from his desk and starts playing around with pretty basic cardboard cutouts of the four molecules which, by now, had become strongly associated with DNA, adenine and guanine, cytosine and thymine.
Suddenly, in a flash, he sees how they assemble the molecules naturally arrange themselves into pairs linked by hydrogen bonds – adenine with thymine and cytosine with guanine.
For a long time they'd been thinking the helix had one strand at the core and that the bases stuck out from it, like quills on a porcupine. Now, in a flash, Watson realises that the the base pairs, which join together so naturally, form a kind of zip, and the bands of sugar-phosphates holding the thing together run along the outside – creating a double helix shape.
The structure of the DNA double helix. The atoms in the structure are colour-coded by element and the detailed structures of two base pairs are shown in the bottom right. (Source: Wikipedia)
I am not qualified to summarise the impact of the discovery of DNA has had on the world. Maybe it would take books to do so adequately. I'll quote the book's blurb:
By elucidating the structure of DNA, the molecule underlying all life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionised biochemistry. At the time, Watson was only 24. His uncompromisingly honest account of those heady days lifts the lid on the real world of great scientists, with their very human faults and foibles, their petty rivalries and driving ambition. Above all, he captures the extraordinary excitement of their desperate efforts to beat their rivals at King's College to the solution to one of the great enigmas of the life sciences.
The science is interesting, but has been overtaken and superseded generations ago. It's the characters and the atmosphere of the time (the dingy English rooms with no heating, the appalling English food), the dramatic reality of scientific competition, and then the genuinely exciting pages leading up to the breakthrough which makes Watson's book such a readable classic.
Rosalind Franklin
I marked all the places in the text where a feminist might explode with anger. Both Watson, but even more Crick, assume pretty young girls are made for their entertainment. They are referred to throughout as 'popsies' and Crick in particular, although married, betrays an endless interest in the pretty little secretaries and au pairs which adorn Cambridge parties.
It is through this patronising and sexist prism that the pair judged the efforts of Franklin who was, reasonably enough, a hard-working scientist not at all interested in her appearance or inclined to conform to gender stereotypes of the day. She felt marginalised and bullied at the King's College lab, and irritated by the ignorance and superficiality of most of Watson and Crick's ideas, untainted as they were by any genuine understanding of the difficult art of X-ray crystallography – an ignorance which Watson, to his credit, openly admits.
Eventually, Franklin found working with Wilkins so intolerable that she left to take up a position at Birkbeck College and then, tragically, discovered she had incurable cancer, although she worked right up to her death in April 1958.
Franklin has become a feminist heroine, a classic example of a woman struggling to make it in a man's world, patronised by everyone around her. But if you forget her gender and just think of her as the scientist called Franklin, it is still a story of misunderstandings and poisonous professional relations such as I've encountered in numerous workplaces. Watson and Crick's patronising tone must have exacerbated the situation, but the fundamental problem was that she was given clear written instructions that she would be in charge of the X-ray crystallography at King's College but then discovered that Wilkins thought he had full control of the project. This was a management screw-up more than anything else.
It does seem unfair that she wasn't cited in the Nobel Prize which was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962, but then she had died in 1958, and the Swedish Academy had a simple rule of not awarding the prize to dead people.
Still, it's not like her name has disappeared from the annals of history. Quite the reverse:
Rosalind Franklin posthumous recognition
Impressive list, don't you think?
And anyone who hasn't read the book might be easily persuaded that she was an unjustly victimised, patronised and ignored figure. But just to set the record straight, Watson chooses to end the entire book not with swank about his and Crick's later careers, but with a tribute to Franklin's character and scientific achievement.
In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms [of DNA], by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. Later, when she moved to Bernal's lab, she took up work on tobacco mosaic virus and quickly extended our qualitative ideas about helical construction into a precise quantitative picture, definitely establishing the essential helical parameters and locating the ribonucleic chain halfway out from the central axis.
Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realising years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death. (p.175)
That is a fine, generous and moving tribute, don't you think? And as candid and honest as the rest of the book in admitting his and Crick's complete misreading of her situation and character.
In a literal sense the entire book leads up to this final page [these are the last words of the book] and this book became a surprise bestseller and the standard source to begin understanding the events surrounding the discovery. So it's hard to claim that her achievement was 'suppressed' or 'ignored' when this is the climax of the best-selling account of the story.
The Double Helix on Amazon
by Simon on April 15, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in biology, Books, chemistry, Science
Tagged 1953, 1968, adenine, biochemistry, biology, Birkbeck College, Cal Tech, Cambridge, chemistry, cytosine, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, double helix, Erwin Chargaff, Erwin Schrödinger, Francis Crick, guanine, Herman Kalckar, James Watson, John Kendrew, King's College London, Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, Max Perutz, Nature, Nobel Prize, O.T. Avery, physics, Rosalind Franklin, Salvador Luria, Science, Sir Lawrence Bragg, the Cavendish Laboratories, The Double Helix, The Manhattan Project, thymine, USA, What Is Life?, X-ray crystallography, x-rays
Posted by Simon on April 15, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/15/the-double-helix-james-watson/
Nature's Numbers by Ian Stewart (1995)
Stewart is a mathematician and prolific author, having written over 40 books on all aspects of maths, as well as publishing several guides to the maths used in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, authoring half a dozen textbooks for students, and co-authoring a couple of science fiction novels.
He writes in a marvellously clear style but, more importantly, he is interesting: he sees the world in an interesting way, in a mathematical way, and manages to convey the wonder and strangeness and powerful insights which seeing the world in terms of patterns and shapes, numbers and maths, gives you.
He wants to help us see the world as a mathematician sees it, full of clues and information which can lead us to deeper and deeper appreciation of the patterns and harmonies all around us. This is a wonderfully illuminating read.
1. The Natural Order
Thus Stewart begins the book by describing just some of nature's multitude of patterns: the regular movements of the stars in the night sky; the sixfold symmetry of snowflakes; the stripes of tigers and zebras; the recurring patterns of sand dunes; rainbows; the spiral of a snail's shell; why nearly all flowers have petals arranged in one of the following numbers 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89; the regular patterns or 'rhythms' made by animals scuttling, walking, flying and swimming.
2. What Mathematics is For
Mathematics is brilliant at helping us to solve puzzles. It is a more or less systematic way of digging out the rules and structures that lie behind some observed pattern or regularity, and then using those rules and structures to explain what's going on. (p.16)
Stewart trots through the history of major mathematical discoveries: Kepler discovers that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses. That the nature of acceleration is 'not a fundamental quality, but a rate of change'. Then Newton and Leibniz invent calculus to help us work out rates of change.
Two of the main things that maths are for are 1. providing the tools which let scientists understand what nature is doing 2. providing new theoretical questions for mathematicians to explore further. These are, respectively, applied and pure mathematics.
Stewart mentions one of the oddities, paradoxes or thought-provoking things that comes up in many science books, which is the eerie way that good mathematics, mathematics well done, whatever its source and no matter how abstract its origin, eventually turns out to be useful, to be applicable to the real world, to explain some aspect of nature.
Many philosophers have wondered why. Is there a deep congruence between the human mind and the structure of the universe? Did God make the universe mathematically and implant an understanding of maths in us? Is the universe made of maths?
Stewart's answer is simple and elegant: he thinks that nature exploits every pattern that there is, which is why we keep discovering patterns everywhere. We humans express these patterns in numbers, but nature doesn't use numbers as such – she uses the patterns and shapes and possibilities which the numbers express, or define.
Mendel noticing the numerical relationships with which characteristics of peas are expressed when they are crossbred. The double helix structure of DNA. The computer simulation of the evolution of the eye from an initial mutation providing for skin cells sensitive to light, published by Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger in 1994. Pattern appears wherever we look.
Resonance = the relationship between periodically moving bodies in which their cycles lock together so that they take up the same relative positions at regular intervals. The cycle time is the period of the system. The individual bodies have different periods. The moon's rotational period is the same as its revolution around the earth, so there is a 1:1 resonance of its orbital and rotational period.
Mathematics doesn't just analyse, it can predict, predict how all kinds of systems will work, from the aerodynamics which keep planes flying, to the amount of fertiliser required to increase crop yield, to the complicated calculations which keep communications satellites in orbit round the earth and therefore sustain the internet and mobile phone networks.
Time lags The gap between a new mathematical idea being developed and its practical implementation can be a century or more: it was 17th century interest in the vibration of a violin string which led, three hundred years later, to the invention of radio, radar and TV.
3. What Mathematics is About
The word 'number' does not have any immutable, God-given meaning. (p.42)
Numbers are the most prominent part of mathematics and everyone is taught arithmetic at school, but numbers are just one type of object that mathematics is interested in.
The invention of numbers. Fractions. Some time in the Dark Ages the invention of 0. The invention of negative numbers, then of square roots. Irrational numbers. 'Real' numbers.
Whole numbers 1, 2, 3… are known as the natural numbers. If you include negative whole numbers, the series is known as integers. Positive and negative numbers taken together are known as rational numbers. Then there are real numbers and complex numbers. Five systems in total.
But maths is also about operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And functions, also known as transformations, rules for transforming one mathematical object into another. Many of these processes can be thought of as things which help to create data structures.
Maths is like a landscape with similar proofs and theories clustered together to create peaks and troughs.
4. The Constants of Change
Newton's basic insight was that changes in nature can be described by mathematical processes. Stewart explains how detailed consideration of what happens to a cannonball fired out of a cannon helps us towards Newton's fundamental law, that force = mass x acceleration.
Newton invented calculus to help work out solutions to moving bodies. Its two basic operations – integration and differentiation – mean that, given one element – force, mass or acceleration – you can work out the other two. Differentiation is the technique for finding rates of change; integration is the technique for 'undoing' the effect of differentiation to isolate out the initial variables.
Calculating rates of change is a crucial aspect of maths, engineering, cosmology and many other areas of science.
5. From Violins to Videos
A fascinating historical recap of how initial investigations into the way a violin string vibrates gave rise to formulae and equations which turned out to be useful in mapping electricity and magnetism, which turned out to be aspects of the same fundamental force, the understanding of which underpinned the invention of radio, radar, TV etc – taking in descriptions of the contributions from Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi.
Stewart makes the point that mathematical theory tends to start with the simple and immediate and grow ever-more complicated. This is because of a basic principle, which is that you have to start somewhere.
6. Broken Symmetry
A symmetry of an object or system is any transformation that leaves it invariant. (p.87)
There are many types of symmetry. The most important ones are reflections, rotations and translations.
7. The Rhythm of Life
The nature of oscillation and Hopf bifurcation (if a simplified system wobbles, then so must the complex system it is derived from) leads into a discussion of how animals – specifically animals with legs – move, which is by staggered or syncopated oscillations, oscillations of muscles triggered by neural circuits in the brain.
This is a subject Stewart has written about elsewhere and is something of an expert on. The seven types of quadrupedal gait are: the trot, pace, bound, walk, rotary gallop, transverse gallop, and canter.
8. Do Dice Play God?
Stewart's take on chaos theory.
Chaotic behaviour obeys deterministic laws, but is so irregular that to the untrained eye it looks pretty much random. Chaos is not complicated, patternless behaviour; it is much more subtle. Chaos is apparently complicated, apparently patternless behaviour that actually has a simple, deterministic explanation. (p.130)
19th century scientists thought that, if you knew the starting conditions, and then the rules governing any system, you could completely predict the outcomes. In the 1970s and 80s it became increasingly clear that this was wrong. It is impossible because you can never define the starting conditions with complete certainty.
Thus all real world behaviours are subject to 'sensitivity to initial conditions'. From minuscule divergences at the starting point, cataclysmic differences may eventually emerge.
Stewart goes on to explain the concept of 'phase space' developed by Henri Poincaré: this is an imaginary mathematical space that represents all possible motions in a given dynamic system. The phase space is the 3-D place in which you plot the behaviour in order to create the phase portrait. Instead of having to define a formula and worrying about identifying every number of the behaviour, the general shape can be determined.
Much use of phase portraits has shown that dynamic systems tend to have set shapes which emerge and which systems move towards. These are called attractors.
9. Drops, Dynamics and Daisies
The book ends by drawing a kind of philosophical conclusion.
Chaos theory has all sorts of implications but the one Stewart closes on is this: the world is not chaotic; if anything, it is boringly predictable. And at the level of basic physics and maths, the laws which seem to underpin it are also schematic and simple. And yet, what we are only really beginning to appreciate is how complicated things are in the middle.
It is as if nature can only get from simple laws (like Newton's incredibly simple law of thermodynamics) to fairly simple outcomes (the orbit of the planets) via almost incomprehensibly complex processes.
To end, Stewart gives us three examples of the way apparently 'simple' phenomena in nature derive from stupefying complexity:
what exactly happens when a drop of water falls off a tap
computer modelling of the growth of fox and rabbit populations
why petals on flowers are arranged in numbers derived from the Fibonacci sequence
In all three cases the underlying principles seem to be resolvable into easily stated laws and functions – and we see water dropping off taps or flowerheads all the time – and yet the intermediate steps between principle and real world embodiment, are mind-bogglingly complex.
Coda: Morphomatics
He ends the book with an epilogue speculating, hoping and wishing for a new kind of mathematics which incorporates chaos theory and the other elements he's discussed – a theory and study of form, which takes everything we already know about mathematics and seeks to work out how the almost incomprehensible complexity we are discovering in nature gives rise to all the 'simple' patterns which we see around us. He calls it morphomatics.
The Beauty of Numbers in Nature: Mathematical Patterns and Principles from the Natural World on Amazon
by Simon on March 31, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Mathematics
Tagged 1995, addition, book, calculus, chaos theory, communications satellites, complex numbers, Daniel Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, data structures, differentiation, Discworld, division, DNA, double helix, earth, force = mass x acceleration, functions, Guglielmo Marconi, Heinrich Hertz, Henri Poincaré, Hopf bifurcation, Ian Stewart, integers, integration, James Clerk Maxwell, Kepler, laws, Leibniz, Mathematics, maths, Michael Faraday, morphomatics, multiplication, natural numbers, Nature, Nature's Numbers, negative numbers, Newton, operations, oscillation, patterns, period, phase portrait, phase space, rainbows; snail's shell, rational numbers, real numbers, reflection symmetry, resonance, rotation symmetry, rules, Science, square roots, strange attractors, subtraction, symmetry, Terry Pratchett, tigers, transformations, translation symmetry, zebras
Posted by Simon on March 31, 2019
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In flower in the back garden are crocuses and daffodils, in the front garden snowdrops, hyacinths and lesser celandines. Buds appeared overnight on the lilac tree and the flowering blackcurrant.
In wide Thornton Avenue numerous trees are decorated with delicate pink or white blossoms, already beginning to scatter like confetti on the pavements, the magnolia trees are coming into their brief, creamy bloom, and lush pinky-red cammelia flowers are burgeoning out from their dark green foliage.
In the back garden in the last few minutes I've seen a coal tit, some blue tits, a pied wagtail, a fat thrush preening itself, two wood pigeons canoodling on next door's fence, a robin on the climbing frame, two striking black and sheeny-blue magpies, and a green woodpecker inquisitively poking at my overgrown lawn. All that's missing is the sun!
Flowering blackcurrant blossom in my back garden
Posted in Nature
Tagged crocus, daffodil, flowers, garden, great tit, green woodpecker, hyacinth, magnolia, magpie, Nature, snowdrop, thrush
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/nature/


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Minister St. Onge of Quebec Highlights the Benefits of the Canada Digital Adoption Program for Small Businesses
Small businesses are the backbone of the Canadian economy and the heart of communities across the country. As small businesses adapt to the digital economy and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Canada is working to help them continue growing, thriving, and creating good jobs.
Today, the Honourable Pascale St-Onge, Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, on behalf of the Honourable Mary Ng, Minister of International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development, highlighted the benefits of the Canada Digital Adoption Program's (CDAP) Grow Your Business Online grant for small businesses in Quebec. Minister St-Onge noted that small businesses can access a grant of up to $2,400 to help them adopt e-commerce or expand existing e-commerce operations. As part of the grant, small businesses will also receive advice from e-commerce advisors.
The grant is available from the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec and the Réseau des Sociétés d'aide au développement des collectivités et Centres d'aide aux entreprises.
CDAP, which will provide $4 billion over four years, will support up to 160,000 small businesses and create good middle-class jobs across the country, including thousands of jobs for young Canadians.
Under CDAP, Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises will be able to assess their digital readiness and apply for grants and loans online. This funding will help them leverage e-commerce opportunities, upgrade or adopt digital technologies, and digitize their operations to stay competitive in the digital marketplace and meet their customers' needs. Depending on their size, specific needs and goals, businesses can apply for funding through the Grow Your Business Online or Boost Your Business Technology option.
Accelerating the digital transformation of Canadian businesses will help them stay competitive while creating jobs and growing the economy as we recover from the pandemic.
"Canadian entrepreneurs and business owners in Quebec are innovative and resilient, and they are core drivers of economic growth in their communities. The government will continue to support them as they start up, scale up and export to new markets in Canada and around the world."
– The Honourable Pascale St-Onge, Minister of Sport and Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec
Announced in Budget 2021, the Canada Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) is an investment in helping businesses succeed. It is expected to support as many as 160,000 small businesses and help create thousands of jobs, including up to 28,000 job placements for students and recent graduates to gain valuable work experience.
CDAP consists of $1.4 billion in grants and advisory services to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) adopt e-commerce and up to $2.6 billion in loans from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) to help SMEs cover the cost of implementing digital transformation plans.
The Grow Your Business Online option provides microgrants of up to $2,400 and support from e-commerce advisors to help small businesses implement digital storefronts and e-commerce capabilities.
The Boost Your Business Technology option provides grants covering 90% of costs, up to $15,000, for advisory services to develop a digital adoption plan; access to interest-free loans from BDC; and opportunities for student placements.
SMEs interested in applying for a grant or loan under CDAP can answer a few quick questions online to help determine the funding that is best suited to meet their needs.
Retail e-commerce rapidly increased during the pandemic. According to Statistics Canada data, year-over-year retail e-commerce increased by more than 110% in May 2020 compared to May 2019.
News Source: Newswire
Digital AdoptionMinister St-OngeQuebecSmall Business
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Home Apps Rhapsody launches app for iPad users
Rhapsody launches app for iPad users
Online music service store Rhapsody launched a streaming app for iPad and the iPad mini on December 17, 2012. The company said that the new app will be a visual treat and will deliver a stunning Rhapsody experience.
The launch of the new app is good news for iPad users, who can now finally listen to and stream music on Apple tablets. The company has also assured that the new app is designed with speed in mind and has also significantly improved playback speed.
The new app has been designed to emphasize the iPad's display, which allows users to visually navigate a larger category of Rhapsody's musical content. The app also supports downloads, so that users can listen to music when an internet connection is not available. Moreover, the player for the iPad and iPad Mini is ad-free for subscribers. With the help of the new app, subscribers can listen to any of the 16 million tracks which Rhapsody has in its database. Users can also access member-created playlists and libraries, as well as edit, create and sync music and playlists across any device where Rhapsody is available.
The new app will help draw more users to the concept of music streaming on hand-held devices like the iPad.
More interesting News - Twitter launches email sharing feature for their website
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After showcasing its Pre-Fall 2018 collection filled with pop art gone luxe, the Raf Simons-helmed CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC now unveils its FW18 campaign featuring Luca Lemaire and Fernando Albaladejo. Captured by Willy Vanderperre, the imagery depicts a play of scale and juxtaposition between select pieces and the isolated Utah landscape to evoke an otherwordly feeling. A sense of calm and hope are also present with the ever-present theme of American youth.


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Andretti signs Indy Lights champion Askew
Oliver Askew will make his Formula E debut with the Andretti Formula E squad for Season 8.
The American driver raced with the Andretti stable to the 2019 Indy Lights championship, and moved up to the main IndyCar series with Arrow McLaren SP in 2020.
Though he switched to arrow McLaren in IndyCar, Askew continued to race with Andretti in Sportscars, and sees the return to single-seaters with the team as "returning home".
"I am beyond excited to return home and join Andretti Autosport full time again for the 2022 ABB FIA Formula E championship," he said. "I consider Andretti Autosport family and to be able to attack this chapter in my career with them means more than words can describe.
"To have a partner like Avalanche with us could not be a more perfect fit.
"Being the only confirmed driver to represent the United States in Formula E is something I am very proud of. I look forward to getting to work as soon as possible."
While the US might be well represented in the FE paddock in terms of teams – with both Andretti and Penske, through Dragon Racing, present – the series hasn't had an American driver since the inaugural season.
In 2015, Scott Speed raced with Andretti for four races, picking up a podium in his debut race before a DNF and two non-points finishes.
Andretti is optimistic the first full-time American racer in the series should fare better, and hope to recreate the 2019 success.
"We're happy to welcome Oliver back to the Andretti family to round out our Formula E line up," said Andretti Autosport CEO Michael Andretti.
"We had a lot of success with Oliver back in 2019 when he won the Indy Lights Championship with us and we're looking forward to introducing him to Formula E. He's a hard worker and races smart, we're confident he'll apply that to this new opportunity."
Team principal Rodger Griffiths added: "We know Oliver well from his success with us in Indy Lights but now he tackles a very different challenge; however, from what we have already seen with his work ethic and dedication, we expect great things from him. His first chance to demonstrate this will be in Valencia in just a few days' time, a track where the team already has shown strong pace in testing in previous years and of course Jake's win last season!"
Askew joins the already confirmed Jake Dennis at the team, replacing Maximilian Guenther who joins Nissan e.dams alongside Sebastien Buemi.
Image courtesy of Andretti Autosport
Ticktum joins Turvey at NIO 333 for Season 8
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Sam Bird has signed a new multi-year contract to remain with Jaguar Racing in Formula E. Sam Bird has been racing in the fully-electric series since its inaugural season back in 2014. He switched to Jaguar at the...
Andrea Perilli
India is one step closer to hosting a Formula E race as Hyderabad signs a Letter of Intent to host the series.Hyderabad is the capital city of the southeastern state of Telangana and is famous for the Hussain Sagar...
Maserati will make its return to single seater motorsport with a Formula E entry in 2023. The Italian luxury car brand was a regular in Formula 1 up until the 1960s, but hasn't competed in single-seaters in more than 60...


Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/12/2009 08:36PM by Azumandias.
The download has been deleted from orbit files. Can it be reposted?
Thanks for reporting the problem. I have reuploaded the files to this site (no more orbitfiles) and they can be downloaded from the same links above.


The Tony Di Pede Residence opened in September, 2008. It's a 112 unit apartment building, consisting of bachelor, one bedroom, and two bedroom units.
Fifty-six of these units are for frail seniors. The other 56 are for individuals living with HIV/AIDS, including an 11 unit transitional housing cluster.
Residents are integrated on each floor, except for the 11 room transitional housing cluster.
The vision is the creation of a safe, supportive environment of acceptance and tolerance for all residents of the building.
The building is owned by Wellesley Central Residences Inc., which is the landlord. WoodGreen Community Services, as property manager, acts as the landlord's agent.
Supportive housing services are provided by Fife House and WoodGreen 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, providing personal support, homemaking and coordination services.
As 97% of the Fife House waiting list applicants are homeless, having transitional housing units is an important part of Fife House's services. Transitional housing provides a secure and supportive environment in which to assess the clients' needs and to determine the best course of action regarding permanent housing, medical care and access to social services. The 11-room cluster is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, offering intense case management services. Life skills development addresses nutrition, housekeeping chores and setting up and keeping appointments, thereby ensuring future success when clients leave the program and move to a permanent residence.
The building includes a roof-top healing garden with an adjacent amenities room and kitchen area, a community kitchen, a large function room, a wellness centre and a communal lounge area.
A laundry room is located on the ground floor.
Apartments are all wired for cable and internet service and a limited number of lockers are available for tenant storage.
There is a small patio at the back of the building and a public park adjacent to the property. Bicycle parking and a Wheel-Trans drop-off/pick up area have been accommodated.
The location provides easy access to grocery shopping, a community centre, library, drug store and medical services in the immediate neighbourhood. Public transit is literally at the doorstep with entertainment, shopping and specialized services within walking distance.
Similar to most apartment buildings, there is a security camera and door entry system in the lobby of the building. There are no on-site security guards. Access to the healing garden, community kitchen, communal lounge area, etc. is viapass key and/or swipe cards, and may depend on the time of day.
Fife House and WoodGreen each have on-site resident support staff to provide services to their respective residents. Both agencies provide 2 staff — each working 8-hour shifts on a 24/7 basis.
Though WoodGreen and Fife House staff typically work exclusively with their own residents, the two agencies collaborate when they have a mutual client (i.e. a person living with HIV/AIDS who is also a senior; therefore, requiring services from both agencies) and in cases of emergency.


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Osek () is a town in Teplice District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 4,600 inhabitants.

Administrative parts
Villages of Dlouhá Louka and Hrad Osek are administrative parts of Osek.

Geography
Osek is located about  west of Teplice and  west of Ústí nad Labem. A short part of the municipal territory borders with Germany. The southern part of the territory with the built-up area lies in the Most Basin, the northern part lies in the Ore Mountains. The highest point is the mountain Vlčí hora at  above sea level. The Osecký Stream flows through the town.

Salesiova výšina is a rock city of huge quartzite blocks, pillars and fissures. It is protected as a nature monument.

History
The history of the area is closely connected with the Osek Monastery. Between 1196 and 1197, Cistercian monks arrived from Mašťov and founded the monastery. The monastery complex grew over time to become the economic and social hub of the region. In 1278, it was looted by Brandenburg troops.

The village of Osek was founded shortly before the monastery. Until the early 14th century, the inhabitants of the village made a living mainly by cattle breeding. In the 14th century, mining of silver and tin developed.

In 1421 and then again in 1429, the monastery was burned down by the Hussites and many monks were killed. The property of the monastery was gradually dismantled, and in 1580 it was abolished by Emperor Rudolf II. Osek was acquired by the Prague archbishopric and the monks were forced to leave for Zbraslav Monastery. The dissolution of the monastery was annulled in 1614 by Pope Paul V. During the Thirty Years' War, the Osek estate was confiscated by Protestants and sold to several buyers. In 1626, the monastery was returned to the Cistercians and began to regain its glory, which fully developed in the 18th century.

Demographics

Culture
Osek Festival is an annual event with fairground markets, demonstrations of traditional crafts and funfair attractions.

Sights

The main landmark is the Osek Monastery. It is an extensive complex of buildings, built from the Romanesque to the Baroque era. The main reconstruction into its current Baroque appearance took place in 1712–1718, when it was rebuilt by the architect Octavio Broggio. The interior of the monastery Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary was decorated by painters Václav Vavřinec Reiner and Jan Kryštof Liška.

The ruin of the medieval Rýzmburk (Riesenburg) Castle is located northwest of the town. It belonged to its founders, the noble Rýzmburk family until 1398; the ownership then shifted to the margraves of Meissen. The castle was built shortly before 1250. It was abandoned in 1538 and fell into disrepair. It was one of the strongest fortresses in Bohemia that was probably never conquered. It has two parts, the first one is the core with residential towers and a chapel, and the second one is a large complex surrounded by a wall with shooting turrets, dominated by a massive bergfried. Today it is freely accessible.

In popular culture
Parts of the film Anna Proletářka were filmed on location in Osek and Osek railway station.

Notable people
Karl Lieffen (1926–1999), German actor
Kamil Střihavka (born 1965), singer

Gallery

References

External links

Cities and towns in the Czech Republic
Populated places in Teplice District
Towns in the Ore Mountains

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia