Archive for June, 2010
Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2l will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. "
4So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran: Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan®. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. ?Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, "To your offspring T will give this land. " So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. sFrom there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel®, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and invoked the name of the LORD. gAnd Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. 11 When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, "I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; 12and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. 13Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account. " 14When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. 15When the officials of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels.
17 But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram's wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, "What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? 19Why did you say, 'She is my sister,' so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone. " 2oAnd Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had.
Iesse said to his son David, "Take for your brothers an ephah of this parched grain and these ten loaves, and carry them quickly to the camp to your brothers; also take these ten cheeses to the commander of their thousand. See how your brothers fare, and bring some token from them. "
19Now Saul, and they, and all the men of Israel, were in the valley of Elah, fighting with the Philistines. 20David rose early in the morning, left the sheep with a keeper, took the provisions, and went as Jesse had commanded him. He came to the encampment as the army was going forth to the battle line, shouting the war cry. 21 Israel and the Philistines drew up for battle, army against army. 22David left the things in charge of the keeper of the baggage, ran to the ranks, and went and greeted his brothers. 23As he talked with them, the champion, the Philistine of Gath, Goliath by name, came up out of the ranks of the Philistines and spoke the same words as before. And David heard him.
24A11 the Israelites, when they saw the man, fled from him and were very much afraid. 25The Israelites said, "Have you seen this man who has come up? Surely he has come up to defy Israel. The king will greatly enrich the man who kills him, and will give him his daughter and make his family free
in Israel. " 26David said to the men who stood by him, "What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine, and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?" 27The people answered him in the same way, "So shall it be done for the man who kills him. "
When the words that David spoke were heard, they repeated them before Saul; and he sent for him. 32David said to Saul, "Let no one's heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine. " 33Saul said to David, "You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are just a boy, and he has been a warrior from his youth. " 34But David said to Saul, "Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, 35l went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. 36Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God. " 3?David said, "The LORD, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine. " So Saul said to David, "Go, and may the LORD be with you!"
Anna Kournikova is living proof that all Russian women don't look like Yogi2 Berra, much to the astonishment of many ethnocentric3 American males.
Quite to the contrary, the 17-year-old tennis champion (ranked 16th in the world) is a golden-haired beauty, known as much for her precocious4 good looks and brash5 attitude, as for her ability to send drop-shots rocketing to the playing floor.
Unfortunately, a few members of the press are less than thrilled with Anna's brashness. In fact, some have dished out6 their dissatisfaction in heaping, schoolmarmish7 doses.
Fake Bruce Schoenfield, of Tennis Match magazine, for one, who recently bashed Anna for committing such transgressions8 as wearing leopard-skin min-skirts and "the shortest of all possible of tennis shorts. "
Miether Schoenfield's been out in the sun too long is anyone's guess9. (Out-Joor sports can be rough on the old cerebral cortex during these hazy summer nonths.)
•Jevertheless, Anna—whose trail of nicknames has included such tags as Lolia and Baby Spice—seems to be taking it all in stride10. "I'm trying to look sminine," she explains. "Tennis is a women's sport, and we should look like idies out there."
Veil, tennis may or may not be a women's sport but looking feminine seems > come easily for Kournikova and has, to date, been rewarding her in hand->me ways".
(though her mother, Alia, and her agent, Tony Godsick (of the International lanagement Group) claim to be making no untoward moves to capitalize on nna-mania, truth be told, someone's raking in the perks.
So what is it about Anna that manages to raise the testosterone levels of male tennis fans — and, hell, just plain males — everywhere?12 Put simply, there seems to be a comfort zone that the five-foot-eight, 123-pound pro has with her raw charisma13 and star appeal.
To coin a phrase, she's got it; she flaunts14 it. She mugs for the camera, she wears those leopard skirts and, as Peter de Jonge of Details magazine pointed out, she tends to tie her shoes without bending her legs. ( Use your imagination here, Poncho. )
So why the Anna K. backlash? In addition to criticisms about exploiting her appeal , Kournikova has been on the receiving end of a good number of barbs due to her relationship with Sergei Fedorov of the Detroit Red Wings15.
The complaints are rooted in the fact that the hockey star is her senior by a good number of years , at age 27, and, moreover, that the relationship started a few years back when Kournikova was still at the tender age of 14.
The fact is that this was roughly the time that Anna turned pro. Obviously, she had to grow up fast. And by all accounts16 , she appears to be handling her celebrity with relatively good grace.
I don't doubt that some of the claims to her curtness may be true ( Davis Cup champion Eugene L. Scott dubbed her a "semi-spoiled brat"17; German pro Tommy Haas said she was "mostly stuck-up18") — but hell she just turned 17 in June and the pressure's on.
Maybe they should give her a break. A little vibrancy and personality are not necessarily bad things in this big, bland world. And besides, I've always had a liking for leopard-skin miniskirts and "the shortest of all possible of tennis shorts. "
No one knows quite how they will interact with the changing climate. Here's one example.- Plants and animals adapt to climate change over centuries. At the current estimate of half a degree centigrade of warming per decade, vegetation may not keep up. Climatologist James Hansen predicts climate zones will shift toward the poles by 50 to 75 kilometres a year — faster than trees can naturally migrate. Species that find themselves in an unfamiliar environment will die. The 1 000-kilometre-wide strip of forest running through Canada, the USSR and Scandinavia could be cut by half. Millions of dying tress would soon lead to massive forest fires, releasing tons of dioxides and further boosting global warming.
There are dozens of other possible "feedback mechanisms". Higher temperatures will duel condensation and increase cloudiness, which may actually damp down global warming. Others, like the "albedo" effect, will do the opposite. The "albedo" effect is the amount of solar energy reflected by the earth's surface. As northern ice and snow melts and the darker sea and land pokes through, more heat will be absorbed, adding to the global temperature in-crease .
Even if we were to magically stop all greenhouse-gas emissions tomorrow the impact on global climate would continue for decades. Delay will simply make the problem worse. The fact is that some of us are doing quite well the way things are. In the developed world prosperity has been built on 150 years of cheap fossil fuels.
Material progress has been linked to energy consumption. Today 75 per cent of all the world's energy is consumed by a quarter of the world's population. The average rich world resident adds about 3.2 tons of dioxide a year to the atmosphere, more than four times the level added by each Third World citizen. The US, with just seven per cent of the global pop-ulation, is responsible for 22 per cent of global warming.
Supporters de--^fend appropriate technology as ecological and job-creating. Opponents ( many of them thirdworlders) criticize it as a plot to persuade them to accept second best, third rate methods which will stop them competing with the West.
Overall, the supporters of appropriate technology are winning through, especially in United Nations organizations, which can directly influence the choice of technology through their own projects. But the spread of appropriate technologies beyond the experimental project stage doesn' t depend on their intellectual appeal. It depends on whether they really work out in the field in the hard climate of the physical, economic and social realities of the third world.
The fact is, however, that even on a purely mechanical level they often don't work. This is shown very clearly' by a new study of a UN organization. Their processes and products are sometimes socially unacceptable. And they may be economically unpractical. There may, to a westernized government officer, seem to be a real need for an innovation. But for success, local people must themselves feel a need for it, be able to pay for it, run it and repair it, and find it useful and profitable in their own lives.
Appropriate technology products are rarely thoroughly tested and evaluated—the money isn' t there yet to do this. This means that performance in its original place is rarely known in advance. The user of appropriate technology usually cannot bear the risk involved in adopting an innovation that may ruin him.
More testing means that a great proportion of research and development spending by developing countries should go towards appropriate technology. It won' t help developing countries much for advanced countries to invent technologies for them. Even if these are successful they simply increase the dependence on western technological talents. All in all, the lesson of this report is that alternative technology is bound to fail in a high proportion of cases if it is considered as a purely technical problem. Appropriate technology also has to be looked at in its social and economic context.
Changes in the average hours of work enter in exactly parallel fashion but have been quantitatively less significant. As productivity rises, less labor is re-[uired per dollar of national product, or more goods and services can be produced with the iame number of goods. If output does not grow, employment will certainly fall; if production ncreases more rapidly than productivity (less any decline in average hours worked) , employ-nent must rise. But the labor force grows, too. Unless gross national product (total final ex-lenditure for goods and services corrected for price changes) rises more rapidly than the sum if productivity increase and labor force growth ( again modified for any change in hours of rork ) , the increase in employment will be inadequate to absorb the growth in the labor force, nevitably the unemployment rate will increase. Only when total production expands faster iian the rate of labor force growth plus the rate of productivity increase and minus the rate at fhich average annual hours fall does the unemployment rate fall. Increases in productivity rere more important than growth of the labor force as sources of the wide gains in output expe-ienced in the period from the end of the war to the mid-sixties. These increases in potential reduction simply were not matched by increases in demand adequate to maintain steady full mployment.
Except for the recession years of 1949, 1954, and 1958, the rate of economic growth ex-eeded the rate of productivity increase. However, in the late 1950s productivity and labor >rce were increasing more rapidly than usual, while the growth of output was slower than usu-I. This accounted for the change in employment rates.
But if part of the national purpose is to reduce and contain unemployment, arithmetic is ot enough. We must know which of the basic factors we can control and which we wish to
control. Unemployment would have risen more slowly or fallen more rapidly if productivity ha increased more slowly, or the labor force had increased more slowly, or the hours of work ha fallen more steeply, or total output had grown more rapidly. These are not independent fac tors, however, and a change in any of them might have caused change in the other.
A society can choose to reduce the growth of productivity, and it can probably find way to frustrate its own creativity. However, while a reduction in the growth of productivity at th expense of potential output might result in higher employment in the short run, the longrui effect on the national interest would be disastrous.
We must also give consideration to the fact that hidden beneath national averages is con tinuous movement into, out of, between, and within labor markets. For example, 15 yean ago, the average number of persons in the labor force was 74 million, with about 70 millioi employed and 3. 9 million unemployed. Yet 14 million experienced some term or unemploy' ment in that year. Some were new entrants to the labor force; others were laid off temporarily, the remainders were those who were permanently or indefinitely severed from their jobs. Thus, the average number unemployed during a year understates the actual volume of involun¬tary displacement that occurs.
High unemployment is not an inevitable result of the pace of technological change but the consequence of passive public policy. We can anticipate a moderate increase in the labor force accompanied by a slow and irregular decline in hours or work. It follows that the output of the economy—and the aggregate demand to buy it —must grow by more than 4 percent a year just to prevent the unemployment rate from rising, and by even more if the unemployment rate is to fall further. Yet our economy has seldom, if ever, grown at a rate greater than 3.5 percent for any extended length of time.
We have no cause for complacency. Positive fiscal, monetary, and man power policies will be needed in the future.
Cantwell1's pursuit of Olympic glory one for the books.
In the sport of track and field, every-thing is measurable. The fastest and farthest win, simple as that. You could explain Christian Cantwell that way, too, by detailing his progress in distance and victories and records in the shot put. But you would miss a heck2 of a story.
The story of Christian Cantwell comes off3 better as a folk tale.
He was the oversized boy from the Ozarks whose sudden feats of strength seemed so unlikely that his future college coach assumed he was a rumor.4 When the coach finally saw the young strongman throw, he would have been no more surprised if Babe the blue ox was alongside, grazing on the infield.
The man-child immediately threw farther than anyone at the college ever had and farther than almost anyone in the nation could. The only snag5 was a balky6 finger, a career-threatening injury that arrived mysteriously, lingered7 for a year and then disappeared, thanks to the magical touch of a massage8 therapist or the mystical Kleenex of an Eldon preacher-depending on which version you prefer. Healthy again, he sought fame and fortune overseas, and found both. Then, he returned home and threw his 16-pound metal ball to greater and greater lengths, putting him on the cusp of the ultimate happy ending.
The catch is, Cantwell's tale is true.
"This literally is the kid growing up in hometown America without the benefit of getting started in fourth grade and focusing on9 one sport and going to 10 camps and having a personal trainer and having a sports psychologist10," Missouri track1' Coach Rick McGuire said. "This is pure, hometown kid makes good. This is a great story. "
Cantwell is no longer Mid-Missouri12 's big secret. He has won 14 straight13 competitions and has produced the four longest throws in the world this year. A few weeks ago, he was the subject of a large profile in USA Today1'4. He recently flew to Barcelona for the filming of an Allstate Insurance commercial that will be shown internationally. Starting tomorrow, he will compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials in Sacramento, Calif. , and, if all goes well, he will contend for a gold medal in August at the Olympic Games in Athens.
Cantwell appears as indestructible15 as a human being possibly could. But even Achilles had his heel. For Cantwell, it was his right ring finger.
Late in his junior year at MU in 2002 , Cantwell suffered a fairly common inju¬ry for a shot putter. Fairly common but fairly terrifying, because there's no consensus16 on how to fix it, and it can kill a career.
The sheath around the tendon in his finger tore. " Every time he bent his hand back, there was severe pain, which made throwing the shot torturous. The in¬jury persisted throughout most of his senior year.
Cantwell said the pain mysteriously ceased after the Drake Relays in April 2003 and guessed that the blessed tissue did the trick.
"That's the only thing I can think of," he said. "Only God knows how it's healed. "
The Theobroma Cacao tree, to use its scientific name, provides us with one of the world's most delicious foods—chocolate! Theobroma is a Gre word meaning 'food of the gods.' The tree originally comes from the Amazon region1 of South America. Hand-sized pods that grow on the tn contain cacao seeds—often called 'cocoa beans.' These seeds, or beans, a used to make chocolate.
The earliest use and consumption of cacao beans dates back to around 1000 B.C.2 Later, the Mayan and Aztec civilizations3 consumed cacao as a drink. They often flavored it with ingredients such as chili peppers, and other spices. It is believed that drinking cups of chocolate was important in Mayan rituals such as wedding ceremonies. Consuming cacao was also believed to have positive effects on health. In Peru, eating or drinking a mixture of chocolate and chili was said to be good for the stomach. The Aztecs thought it cured sicknesses such as diarrhea, and believed it was a aphrodisiac.4 Their ruler, Montezuma,5 was said to have drunk fifty cups day!
Christopher CoJumbus, along with Spanish explorers,6 made his fourth oyage across the Atlantic in the early 1500s, and arrived on the coast of fonduras. It was at this time that he first discovered the value of cocoa sans, which were used as currency in many parts of Central America.
About six years ago I was eating lunch in a restaurant in New York City when a woman and a young boy sat down at the next table, I couldn't help overhearing parts of their conversation. Atone point the woman asked; "So, how have you been?" And the boy-who could not have been more than seven or eight years old -replied. "Frankly, I've been feeling a little depressed lately. "
This incident stuck in my mind because it confirmed my growing belief that children are changing. As far as I can remember, my friends and I didn't find out we were "depressed" until we were in high school.
The evidence of a change in children has increased steadily in recent years. Children don't seem childlike anymore. Children speak more like adults , dress more like adults and behave more like adults than they used to.
Whether this is good or bad is difficult to say, but it certainly is different. Childhood as it once was no longer exists, Why?
Human development is based not only on innate biological states , but also on patterns of access to social knowledge. Movement from one social role to another usually involves learning the secrets of the new status. Children have always been taught adult secrets , but slowly and in stages; traditionally, we tell sixth graders things we keep hidden from fifth graders.
In the last 30 years, however, a secret-revelation ($t/j\) machine has been installed in 98 percent of American homes. It is called television. Television passes information, and indiscriminately ( ^FJPE5}"itfe) , to all viewers alike, be they children or adults. Unable to resist the temptation , many children turn their attention from printed passages to the less challenging , more vivid moving pictures.
Communication through print , as a matter of fact , allows for a great deal of control over the social information to which children have access. Reading and writing involve a complex code of symbols that must be memorized and practices. Children must read simple books before they can read complex materials.
Environmentalists and concerned local residents, for instance, might immediately suspect environmental radiation as the culprit when a high incidence of cancer cases occurs near a nuclear facility. Epidemiologists, in contrast, would be more likely to say that the incidences were "inconclusive" or the result of pure chance. And when a breast cancer survivor, Lorraine Pace, mapped 20 breast cancer cases occurring in her West Islip, Long Island, community, her rudimentary research efforts were guided more by hope— that a specific environmental agent could be correlated with the cancers—than by scientific method.
When epidemiologists study clusters of cancer cases and other noncontagious conditions such as birth defects or miscarriage, they take several variables into account, such as background rate (the number of people affected in the general population), cluster size, and specificity (any notable characteristics of the individual affected in each case). If a cluster is both large and specific, it is easier for epidemiologists to assign blame. Not only must each variable be considered on its own, but it must also be combined with others. Lung cancer is very common in the general population. Yet when a huge number of cases turned up among World War II shipbuilders who had all worked with asbestos, the size of the cluster and the fact that the men had had similar occupational asbestos exposures enabled epidemiologists to assign blame to the fibrous mineral.
Although several known carcinogens have been discovered through these kinds of occupational or medical clusters, only one community cancer cluster has ever been traced to an environmental cause. Health officials often discount a community's suspicion of a common environmental cause because citizens tend to include cases that were diagnosed before the afflicted individuals moved into the neighborhood. Add to this the problem of cancer's latency. Unlike an infectious disease such as cholera, which is caused by a recent exposure to food or water contaminated with the cholera bacterium, cancer may have its roots in an exposure that occurred 10 to 20 years earlier.
Do all these caveats mean that the hard work of Lorraine Pace and other community activists is for nothing? Not necessarily. Together with many other reports of breast cancer clusters on Long Island, the West Islip situation highlighted by Pace has helped epidemiologists lay the groundwork for a well-designed scientific study.
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