Growing up I was told I'm intelligent. I've always thought I was average. True I knew a thing or two but I also knew many people who were much better than I was at certain things. The following explains the different types of intelligence. Enjoy!
Howard’s Theory of Multiple Intelligence
Interesting types of intelligence
1. Spatial
Intelligence (“Picture Smart”)
Spatial intelligence is the ability to think in three
dimensions.Core capacities include
mental imagery, spatial reasoning, image manipulation, graphic and artistic
skills, and an active imagination.Sailors, pilots, sculptors, painters, and architects all exhibit spatial
intelligence. Young adults with this kind of intelligence may be fascinated
with mazes or jigsaw puzzles, or spend free time drawing or daydreaming.
2. Musical
Intelligence (“Musical Smart”)
Musical intelligence is the capacity to discern pitch,
rhythm, timbre, and tone.This
intelligence enables us to recognize, create, reproduce, and reflect on music,
as demonstrated by composers, conductors, musicians, vocalist, and sensitive
listeners. Interestingly, there is often an affective connection between music
and the emotions; and mathematical and musical intelligences may share common
thinking processes.Young adults with
this kind of intelligence are usually singing or drumming to themselves.They are usually quite aware of sounds others
may miss.
Logical-mathematical intelligence is the ability to
calculate, quantify, consider propositions and hypotheses, and carry out
complete mathematical operations.It
enables us to perceive relationships and connections and to use abstract,
symbolic thought; sequential reasoning skills; and inductive and deductive
thinking patterns.Logical intelligence
is usually well developed in mathematicians, scientists, and detectives.Young adults with lots of logical
intelligence are interested in patterns, categories, and relationships.They are drawn to arithmetic problems,
strategy games and experiments.
4. Naturalist
Intelligence (“Nature Smart”)
Designates the human ability to discriminate among living
things (plants, animals) as well as sensitivity to other features of the
natural world (clouds, rock configurations).This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters,
gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or
chef.It is also speculated that much of
our consumer society exploits the naturalist intelligences, which can be
mobilized in the discrimination among cars, sneakers, kinds of makeup, and the
like.
5. Existential
Intelligence
Sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about
human existence, such as the meaning of life, why do we die, and how did we get
here.
6. Interpersonal
Intelligence (People Smart”)
Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand and
interact effectively with others.It
involves effective verbal and nonverbal communication, the ability to note
distinctions among others, sensitivity to the moods and temperaments of others,
and the ability to entertain multiple perspectives.Teachers, social workers, actors, and
politicians all exhibit interpersonal intelligence.Young adults with this kind of intelligence
are leaders among their peers, are good at communicating, and seem to
understand others’ feelings and motives.
7. Bodily-Kinesthetic
Intelligence (“Body Smart”)
Bodily kinesthetic intelligence is the capacity to
manipulate objects and use a variety of physical skills.This intelligence also involves a sense of
timing and the perfection of skills through mind–body union.Athletes, dancers, surgeons, and craftspeople
exhibit well-developed bodily kinesthetic intelligence.
8. Linguistic
Intelligence (Word Smart)
Linguistic intelligence is the ability to think in words and
to use language to express and appreciate complex meanings.Linguistic intelligence allows us to
understand the order and meaning of words and to apply meta-linguistic skills
to reflect on our use of language. Linguistic intelligence is the most widely
shared human competence and is evident in poets, novelists, journalists, and
effective public speakers.Young adults
with this kind of intelligence enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing
crossword puzzles.
9. Intra-personal
Intelligence (Self Smart”)
Intra-personal intelligence is the capacity to understand
oneself and one’s thoughts and feelings, and to use such knowledge in planning
and directioning one’s life.Intra-personal intelligence involves not only an appreciation of the
self, but also of the human condition.It is evident in psychologist, spiritual leaders, and philosophers.These young adults may be shy. They are very
aware of their own feelings and are self-motivated.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
We IT people have all been there. You get the dreaded sales call from a salesman who is trying to sell their wares. What this team came up with - this is just hell
I grew up in the world of 80s music. Depeche Mode, The Smiths, B-52s..those acts were my penut and jelly of music. Now and again though I love my 60's music. 10 years after is one of those acts that just ...is so right. So...says the right thing even years later.
Built to ferry dry
goods, the schooner Lanikai was destined for a boring life. Instead it
found itself in a Hollywood blockbuster and racing to evade the Japanese
invasion.
Just
after dawn on March 13, 1942, the harbor pilot in the western
Australian port town of Geraldton noticed a small ship coming up over
the horizon, sails billowing from her two tall masts. As the vessel got
closer he saw she was a schooner of a type common in the South Seas, and
that her hull and upper works were painted an odd shade of faded,
splotchy green. A large American flag flew from the top of the ship’s
forward mast, and a smaller Philippine ensign snapped in the breeze from
her equally tall aft pole.
Intrigued
by the mystery vessel’s unannounced appearance, the pilot boarded his
motorboat and set out to meet the newcomer. As he approached the ship he
saw men working to drop her well-worn sails, and was surprised to see
that what he had taken to be a tramp cargo vessel was armed with at
least two machine guns and what looked to be a small cannon. As he came
alongside the pilot shouted through cupped hands, “What ship are you”?
and was dumfounded when a bearded and deeply tanned man standing near
the schooner’s wheel responded, “USS Lanikai, from Manila.” The
pilot was equally surprised that the weather-beaten and somewhat
dilapidated ship was apparently part of the U.S. Navy, and that she had safely navigated more than 3,000 miles of Japanese-dominated ocean.
With
his motorboat tethered to the schooner’s stern, the pilot guided the
American vessel toward a berth at Geralton’s main pier. As he did, the
bearded man—Lieutenant Kemp Tolley, USN—recounted what would ultimately
become known as one of the great sea adventures of World War II.
***
Lanikai’s voyage into the history books was a colorful passage that began long before that early morning arrival in Western Australia.
Built in 1914 in Oakland, California, the 90-foot-long wooden-hulled schooner initially bore the name Hermes andspent
the first months of her existence carrying dried coconut meat and other
cargo from the German-ruled islands of Micronesia to Hawaii. Two months
after the outbreak of World War I the vessel managed to evade
patrolling Japanese ships—Tokyo was on the Allied side in that
conflict—and dash into still-neutral Honolulu harbor. Hermes was
interned, and sat tied to a pier until the United States entered the war
in April 1917. At that point the vessel was officially seized from her
German owners, and on April 1, 1918, she was commissioned into the U.S.
Navy as the auxiliary schooner USS Hermes and undertook general
patrol and supply duties in the waters around the Hawaiian Islands until
being decommissioned in January 1919. When the Hawaiian territorial
government declined to accept ownership of the vessel she remained in
Navy custody, acting as a stores ship.
Hermes was sold to Oahu’s Lanikai Fish Company in October 1926 and renamed Lanikai,
and spent the following five years carrying seafood among the islands.
In 1933 she was purchased by a member of Honolulu’s aristocratic Castle
family, who refurbished the schooner and used her as a charter yacht. In
1936 Lanikai was sold to Captain Harry W. Crosby of Seattle, who
put the schooner to work hauling salmon from Alaska to ports along the
U.S. west coast. It was a task for which Lanikai was apparently
not well suited, however, for in early 1937 Crosby sold her to
Hollywood’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Later that year the photogenic
ship went back to her island-hopping roots, portraying a South Seas
tramp and nearly upstaging Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall in MGM’s
pioneering disaster-pic-cum-island-romance The Hurricane. After
location filming ended off California’s San Clemente Island the schooner
stayed on as the movie studio’s yacht until April 1939, when she was
bought by the American-owned Luzon Stevedoring Company and shifted to
Manila.
Lanikai might
well have spent the remainder of her days hauling guests and cargo
among the Philippines’ many islands had it not been for the war clouds
gathering on the Pacific’s western horizon. Though the increasingly
tired schooner seemed an unlikely warship, in the fall of 1941 a man in
faraway Washington, D.C., ensured that Lanikai would once again fly the Navy’s Union Jack.
His name was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
***
The first few days of December 1941
were extremely busy ones for Manila-based Admiral Thomas C. Hart. The
64-year-old commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet was certain
that war with Japan was imminent, and he was hurriedly attempting to
deploy his relatively modest forces to protect an operational area
encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean from the
Philippines to China to Southeast Asia.
Hart
was therefore understandably puzzled when on December 3 he received a
top-secret message directly from President Roosevelt ordering him to
acquire, arm and crew three small civilian-looking ships and dispatch
them as soon as possible to patrol off the harbors of Japanese-occupied
French Indo-China. While the small ships’ official task was
reconnaissance—their crews were to report by radio any “suspicious”
activities—many historians have long asserted that their real mission
was to get themselves attacked by the Japanese, thereby giving the
United States a plausible reason to enter the war on the Allied side.
Whatever the purpose of the small ships’ deployment, Roosevelt’s
directive ensured that preparations moved ahead at flank speed. Indeed,
the first vessel, the 710-ton patrol yacht USS Isabel, put to sea on December 3 bound for Cam Ranh Bay.
Even as Isabel headed west the ship tapped to relieve her was being inducted into service. That vessel was Lanikai,
whose owner had agreed to lease the schooner to the Navy for $1 per
year, asking only that she eventually be returned in good condition.
The
man selected to command the schooner on her secret mission was Kemp
Tolley. The 33-year-old Naval Academy graduate had arrived in the
Philippines on December 4 from China, where he’d been executive officer
on the river gunboat USS Tutulia. His assignment to what he later
referred to as “the President’s secret project” came as something of a
surprise—he’d envisioned serving aboard a destroyer or cruiser—but he
assumed his first command with his usual enthusiasm. By the time Lanikai
was commissioned early on December 5 at Cavite Navy Yard Tolley had
assembled a crew of two Navy chief petty officers and 11 Filipino
seamen, and had invoked Roosevelt’s orders to acquire food, fresh water,
two World War I .30-caliber Lewis machine guns and a Spanish-American
War-vintage 3-inch quick-firing cannon. All that was lacking was sailing
orders, and those arrived late in the afternoon—along with three
additional U.S. sailors.
Lanikai finally got underway from Cavite on the afternoon of
December 7 (still the 6th in Hawaii), though she didn’t go far. In
accordance with his orders Tolley dropped anchor just inside the
entrance to Manila Bay; departing vessels were only allowed to navigate
the channel through the offshore minefields during daylight. Everyone
but those on lookout duty settled in for the night, unaware that events
already transpiring in Hawaii would make their assigned mission
irrelevant and change their lives forever.
Just before 5 a.m. on December 8 Lanikai’s
radioman awakened Tolly with a short but startling message that had
just arrived from Hart’s headquarters. The first sentence, “Orange War
Plan in Effect,” informed the schooner’s skipper that the United States
was at war with Japan, and a second line ordered Lanikai to
return to Cavite. Once back at the Navy Yard Tolley learned the details
of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He and other officers were also told that
a Japanese assault on the Philippines could be expected at any moment,
and that they should make themselves and their ships ready to undertake
whatever missions Hart deemed necessary.
Lanikai
spent the first weeks of World War II in the Pacific running errands in
and just outside Manila Bay—moving equipment and personnel, patrolling,
and attempting to avoid the Japanese air attacks that were
systematically reducing American installations to smoking rubble. The
steady southward advance of enemy ground troops from their landing
beaches on Lingayen Gulf made it clear that the entire Manila area would
soon come under direct attack, but on December 24 General Douglas
MacArthur—commander of U.S. Army Forces Far East—declared Manila an open
city, meaning that it would not be defended so that the Japanese would
not destroy it. His pronouncement, made without prior consultation with
Hart, completely undermined Navy plans for a prolonged defense of the
installations surrounding the bay. The Asiatic Fleet commander had no
choice but to order the destruction of all remaining facilities and the
scuttling or dispersal of surviving vessels. Hart himself would
eventually make his way by submarine to the relative—and
temporary—safety of Dutch-controlled Java, but for many of those in his
ravaged command the future held only capture, imprisonment and death.
Fate had something else in store for Lanikai
and those aboard her, however. Tolley and his crew—now numbering seven
Americans and 12 Filipinos—made a final sweep of abandoned storehouses
for food, water, diesel fuel, an additional machine gun, ammunition and
other essential gear. After being quickly camouflaged with salvaged
green paint and taking aboard six additional men—two Navy officers,
three enlisted men and a Dutch naval officer who were also seeking to
escape the oncoming Japanese—under cover of darkness on December 26 Lanikai turned her bowsprit toward the open sea.
***
Tolley’s plan was to sail for Java,
where he assumed British, Dutch and American naval forces would be
massing. The most obvious danger during the nearly 2,000-mile passage
was discovery by Japanese ships or aircraft—a threat the schooner’s
skipper hoped to evade by sailing only at night and tying up in secluded
anchorages during daylight. But there were other challenges as well.
While he and several others aboard Lanikai were proficient in
celestial navigation, Tolley had only a few basic charts and a library
atlas to rely on. It would also be necessary to replenish the ship’s
fresh water and food supplies; while the former could be supplemented by
captured rainwater and the latter by fish hauled from the sea, it was
more than likely that those aboard Lanikai would have to run the
risk of bartering with local people encountered during the voyage—people
whose loyalties couldn’t be known for certain. And there was one other
serious problem: The military radios installed aboard the schooner for
her aborted trip to Indo-China had failed even before the ship left
Manila, so her only contact with the outside world would be Tolley’s
personal and very temperamental commercial radio.
Despite a
minor shipboard fire, sightings of unidentified warships on the horizon
and several high-altitude overflights by Japanese aircraft, Lanikai’s
first two weeks at sea went relatively well. Tolley and his shipmates
stuck to their operational plan, sailing at night and laying up by day.
Helpful civilians living near the temporary anchorages provided food
and, equally important, intelligence about Japanese movements. A huge
storm allowed the schooner to stop hugging the east coast of Palawan and
during a tense and seasickness-inducing two-day voyage cross the entire
Sulu Sea. After passing the Japanese-occupied island of Jolo and making
a brief stop for provisions at a small Muslim village southwest of
Zamboanga, Lanikai set out southward across the Celebes Sea,
bound for Makassar on the island of Sulawesi. There were several tense
minutes during the passage when three unidentified flying boats
approached the schooner at low altitude, but the aircraft proved to be
Dutch and after dipping their wings in greeting they departed in search
of suitable prey.
On January 9, 1942, Lanikai
dropped anchor in Makassar, the first real city Tolley and his crew had
set foot in since leaving Manila. It was a significant waypoint on the
voyage to Java, because it was still controlled by Dutch forces (though
not for much longer) that were able to provide as much fuel, food and
fresh water as the schooner could carry. Two days after her arrival Lanikai
set out on what all aboard thought would be the final leg of their
cruise—the 500-mile passage across the Flores and Bali seas to Java’s
vast harbor at Surabaya, the largest naval base in the Netherlands East
Indies and at that point headquarters for the senior Allied naval
commanders in the western Pacific, including Hart.
The port initially seemed to be the haven Tolley and the others had hoped it would be. Lanikai
went into drydock for long-overdue engine repairs and hull-scraping
while her crew—after saying farewell to their passengers—enjoyed the
city’s various entertainments. Things did not stay so peaceful, however,
for the Japanese had continued their southward advance and on February 3
enemy aircraft bombed the city for the first time. This was the opening
move in a campaign that would ultimately lead to the Allied defeat in
the East Indies, though lucky Lanikai would not be present for that inevitable capitulation.
***
The final leg of the schooner’s epic voyage began
early on February 17, when Tolley took the ship to sea in order to
escape the rapidly advancing Japanese. All but one of the passengers
who’d accompanied the vessel from Manila had gone ashore to take up
other duties and remained behind, as did one of Lanikai’s original Filipino crewmen, who was too sick to travel.
Though
the ship’s ultimate destination largely depended on the Japanese,
Tolley’s initial objective was Tjilatjap, the only decent port on the
south coast of Java and the designated rendezvous point for Allied ships
vacating Surabaya. Lanikai’s course took her back
toward Bali, which was already under attack by the Japanese, but she
made it through the narrow Bali Strait undetected. The remainder of the
700-mile trip to Tjilatjap was made in the familiar “sail at night, hide
during the day” manner, and the schooner reached its goal on the
morning of February 25.
Unfortunately, Tjilatjap proved to be no more of a haven than Surabaya had been. There was an air raid warning within hours of Lanikai’s
arrival, and though no enemy bombers appeared Tolley noted that the
makeshift port headquarters building was pervaded by an air of quiet
desperation brought about by news that two large Japanese invasion
fleets had been spotted just off Java’s north coast. Fairly sure that Lanikai
and the other vessels in port would not be staying long, Tolley talked
the Dutch harbormaster into filling his ship’s fuel tanks, then took the
schooner alongside the U.S. Navy tanker Pecos to take aboard fresh water.
Tolley’s intuition soon proved accurate: At 3 p.m. on February 26 Lanikai
hoisted anchor and once again headed to sea, this time carrying two new
passengers, both Navy enlisted men with no other way out of Java, as
well as one of the American officers who had made the voyage south from
Manila. All aboard the schooner realized that their only logical
destination was Australia, and as soon as Java disappeared below the
horizon Tolley set a course southeast across the Indian Ocean.
In many ways the last lap of Lanikai’s
journey was the most challenging. Not only did the danger of discovery
by Japanese ships and aircraft remain, the schooner had to contend with
some of the worst weather she had encountered since leaving the
Philippines. Within 24 hours of departing Tjilatjap the ship was firmly
in the jaws of a major typhoon and for much of the 1,000-mile voyage
south Tolley and his crew had to contend with mountainous seas, howling
winds and, on more than one occasion, the near capsizing of their
vessel.
Yet
as drenched and miserable as all those aboard the schooner were, they
took some solace in the fact that heaving ocean and terrible visibility
would also keep potential enemies at bay. And the enemy threat in the
waters around Java was all too real. The day after Lanikai’s
departure from Tjilatjap Japanese ships and aircraft dealt Allied
forces a crushing defeat in the Battle of the Java Sea, sinking several
ships and killing more than 2,300 Allied sailors. And on the night of
February 28/March 1 two cruisers attempting to reach Tjilatjap—USS Houston and Australia’s HMAS Perth—were also sunk by the Japanese.
The
weather eventually began to moderate, and after a short stop at dry and
inhospitable Montobello Island, off the coast of northern Western
Australia, the schooner coasted south. Lanikai briefly grounded
on a sandbank but floated off with the rising tide, and on the night of
March 12 dropped anchor off Geraldton. The following morning the
surprised Australian pilot guided the schooner to her berth. After a few
days enjoying Australian hospitality Lanikai moved on, reaching
Freemantle—and the official end of her epic voyage—on March 18, 82 days
and nearly 4,000 miles out from Manila.
Lanikai
remained in Australian service until the Pacific war ended in 1945. She
was then returned to the Luzon Stevedoring Company in Manila, but the
firm refused to accept her on the grounds that she was no longer in the
shape in which she had entered service in 1941. The schooner lay
abandoned in an arm of Subic Bay until February 1946, when a storm sank
her in 100 feet of water. Her remains were rediscovered by sport divers
in 2003, and artifacts from the history-making vessel are now on display
under the auspices of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority.
Stephen Harding, editor of Military History magazine, is the author of the New York Times best sellerThe Last Battleand the forthcomingThe Castaway’s War.
Artist’s concept of Venus Express aerobraking. Image: ESA–C. Carreau
Venus is a blistering hellscape of a planet that
melts anything it comes in contact with, right? Not entirely. The data
from the European Space Agency’s first mission to Venus is back, and
with it comes some fascinating insights into our nearest neighbor’s
atmosphere. It turns out, parts of Venus are very, very cold.
Arriving at Venus in 2006, the ESA’s Venus Express mission was
intended to last 500 days. Instead, the probe proved an exceptionally
worthy investment by exploring Venus for the next eight years.
Eventually, Venus Express ran out of fuel. Then, like so many space probes before it,
it made a suicidal plunge to the planet’s surface. Venus Express lost
contact with the Earth in November 2014, and by now, we can safely
assume it has melted into an expensive puddle of e-waste.
But before all that happened, back in July 2014, Venus Express
performed an important technology demonstration. As it descended around
Venus’ polar regions, the probe allowed itself to be slowed by
atmospheric drag—a process known as “aerobraking.” Onboard
accelerometers acquired precise measurements of the drag, which
scientists on Earth used to calculate atmospheric properties like
density and temperature.
“None of Venus Express’ instruments were actually designed to make such in-situ atmosphere observations,” Ingo Müller-Wodarg, lead author on a recent Nature Physics paper describing the space probe’s findings, said in a statement. “We only realized in 2006–after launch!–that we could use the Venus Express spacecraft as a whole to do more science.” Mapping the density waves in Venus’ lower atmosphere. Image: ESA/Venus Express/VExADE/Müller-Wodarg et al., 2016
And the spacecraft’s swansong science has yielded some big surprises.
For one, the planet’s polar atmosphere is way colder and less dense
than we expected, with an average temperature of -157 degrees Celsius.
As the ESA notes, that’s chillier than any spot on the surface of the
Earth.
What’s more, the polar region is dominated by strong atmospheric
waves. These waves are often likened to ripples in a pond, except they
travel vertically rather than horizontally. Atmospheric waves help shape
our planet’s atmosphere, and as they’re partly responsible for the beautiful haze layers New Horizons discovered over Pluto. This marks the first time we’ve measured them on Venus.
Finally, Venus Express’ suicide plunge demonstrated that aerobraking
is an effective way of making a controlled descent. The space agency’s ExoMars mission,
which is scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in October, will also
use aerobraking to gently insert itself into a low-altitude orbit.
Personally, I love studies like this because they remind us just how
little we know about the planets in our own backyard. A few years back,
who would have guessed that hothouse Venus would feature a roiling and
frigid polar atmosphere? Clearly, our nearest neighbor is still full of
surprises.
The ‘Wizard of Oz’ theme park still has a creepy yellow brick road. Picture: Seph Lawless
PHOTOS have emerged of an eerie and all but abandoned amusement park dedicated to the 1939 L. Frank Baum movie classic.
Photographer Seph Lawless,
best known for his photos of urban decay and abandoned spaces across
the United States, took the photos while on a recent trip to the ‘Land
of Oz,’ in North Carolina.
“The theme park is at the top of one of the highest mountain peaks in
the eastern US so it felt like being on another planet.,” Lawless told
News Corp Australia.
After. Picture: Seph Lawless
Before. Picture: Trip Advisor
It was opened in 1970 and was fully operational until 1980.
Visitors could take a walk down the Yellow Brick Road, “experience”
the tornado which struck Dorothy’s house, and meet all the characters
like Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch of
the West.
“I’m a huge fan of the movie so being here was a real treat and a great experience for me,” Lawless said.
After. Picture: Seph Lawless
Before. Picture: Trip Advisor
After the park closed, much of it fell into disrepair, with props and buildings damaged by vandals.
The ‘Land of Oz’ was reopened in 1991 for one day as part of a local Independence Day celebration.
In the late 1990s former employees started an event called ‘Autumn at
Oz,’ which they treated as a reunion for old staff and visitors.
Even though the doors are locked for most of the year, visitors manage to find their way in. Picture: Seph Lawless
A few years later this became an annual event, and in 2009 the
festival had 8,500 people attending. For the rest of the year, the park
lies completely abandoned as these creepy photos show.
“I‘ve spent over a decade photographing abandoned structures and
abandoned amusement parks are one of my favourite places to visit,”
Lawless added.
His book ‘Bizarro-The World’s Most Hauntingly Beautiful Abandoned Amusement Parks’ documents the top 10 most terrifying abandoned theme parks in the world.
The yellow brick road is still fully intact. Picture: Seph Lawless
The Land of Oz opened in 1970 with the intention of
extending a ski resort to be a ‘year-round’ attraction. Picture: Seph
Lawless
Its opening day in 1970 attracted more than 20,000 visitors. Picture: Seph Lawless
The park is overgrown with plants and vegetation. Picture: Seph Lawless
The yellow brick road to nowhere. Picture: Seph Lawless
Despite it being creepy, the views are pretty amazing. Picture: Seph Lawless
An abandoned stream crossing along the yellow brick road. Picture: Seph Lawless
Creepy ceramic people can be seen in the bushes. Picture: Seph Lawless
On 8 June 793 C.E., a band of foreign warriors attacked the
Christian monastery of Lindisfarne on the English coast, wrecking the
church, killing the monks, and making off with all the treasure their
ships could hold. This brutal attack has long been thought to mark the
start of Viking aggression. But archaeo logist Neil Price of Sweden’s
Uppsala University suspects that the roots of the Viking era go back
long before this raid.
Armed with a $6 million grant—a princely sum in archaeology—Price and
his colleagues want to know the extent to which a need for captive
labor and overseas wives helped drive Viking expansion, transforming the
provincial Scandinavian sailors and fur traders of the earlier Vendel
period into international explorers and marauders. “The social processes
are going on long before” the Lindisfarne raid, Price said after his
talk at a symposium on Vikings at the annual meeting of the Society for
American Archaeology here last week. “We can erase this boundary between
the Vendel and Viking eras.”
A few kilometers from Price’s office at Uppsala, Viking leaders and
warriors gathered each spring to plan raids on distant lands. Now, Price
plans his own assault, gathering specialists from across Europe to nail
down the social and economic forces that spurred the Viking phenomenon.
At the meeting, he and his colleagues laid out research plans and
discussed preliminary finds. Rather than excavate, the team intends to
use the Swedish Research Council’s largest ever archaeo logical grant to
reexamine spectacular existing finds using modern methods such as
isotopic analysis.
“Price’s project goes to the core of the question that all Viking
scholars ask: Why the Vikings?” says Jan Bill, an archaeologist at
Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. “Just putting some order into the old
excavations and publishing them properly will tell us a lot about the
background to the Viking age,” adds archaeologist Marek Jankowiak of the
University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who specializes in the
period but also is not part of the project.
The sudden and dramatic breakout by the Vikings has long puzzled
scholars. The Lindisfarne raid inaugurated 3 centuries of expansion that
led to settlement of Iceland, Greenland, and, briefly, Newfoundland in
Canada. To the east, Vikings dominated the rivers of today’s western
Russia and Ukraine, sent diplomats to Constantinople, and traded as far
afield as Baghdad and North Africa.
But although previous scholars identified the raids as the start of
the Viking era, Price stresses that their way of life began long before.
In the Vendel period from about 550 C.E. to 790 C.E., Scandinavians
exported iron and furs and developed impressive seafaring skills. And
between 2008 and 2012, researchers discovered two ship burials on the
edge of the Baltic Sea in Estonia, 250 kilo meters from the Swedish
coast. The burials are “the most significant Viking discovery of the
last hundred years,” Price says—and they apparently predate the
Lindisfarne raid by nearly a century, according to dating by
radio carbon and artifact styles.
Doubled-edged swords like this one from
an Estonian ship burial show that Scandinavians far from their homeland
fought fiercely before the accepted start of the Viking era.
LIINA MALDRE
Found on the island of Saaremaa in the town of Salme, the two war
boats served as graves for 40 men. In one, 33 men were stacked atop one
another and covered with wooden shields. Elite soldiers were buried with
elaborately decorated double-edged swords, and a man who appeared to be
the chieftain clasped a sword with a jeweled hilt and held a gaming
piece made of walrus ivory in his mouth.
Working with Estonian collaborators, “we plan to throw massive
science” at these ancient vessels to glean everything possible about
this period, Price said. He’ll also focus on some spectacular ship
burials at Valsgärde, just outside of Uppsala, dated from the sixth
century to the 11th century. The area includes 60 tombs, including those
of women, and hundreds of artifacts yet to be carefully analyzed.
Price and his colleagues wonder whether the burials will yield
evidence of slavery, which they increasingly see as a powerful factor
driving the Viking expansion. Price said the need for slaves may have
begun during the Vendel era, when the fast-growing fleet of ships
demanded an enormous number of massive woolen sails. This required
transforming land into pasture for sheep, producing wool, and making
sails—a labor-intensive craft. A single 90-square-meter sail might take a
single person up to 5 years to produce, said Ben Raffield, an
archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who is
involved in the project. Price adds that “each ship needed two sails,
and there were hundreds of ships,” raising the possibility that slave
labor was needed to maintain the fleet.
Historical sources make it clear that the “Vikings were taking,
transporting, and selling slaves,” Raffield said in his talk. He
estimates that slaves comprised as much as 25% of Scandinavia’s
population. Norse sagas mention slaves—“thralls” in Old Norse—who were
often given pejorative names like Stinky, Stumpy, and Stupid. But
compelling archaeological evidence has been elusive. Iron manacles and
collars hint at slavery, but might have been used for prisoners or dogs.
Raffield plans to search for evidence of special vessels designed to
carry captives.
Other archaeologists have found tantalizing hints of slavery in
existing remains. About one in 25 male Viking burials in Sweden and
Norway includes teeth incised with deep grooves. The marks were long
thought to indicate a warrior class, but at least some of these men were
decapitated and placed in a burial with another man, said Anna
Kjellström of Stockholm University, who is also part of the project.
“You can make a strong argument that these were special slaves who were
ritually killed” upon the death of their master, she said in her talk.
“The slaves may have been in front of us all the time.” The team plans
extensive isotopic analysis to discover whether the victims were local
or recent, perhaps involuntary, arrivals.
The research program also will analyze changes in Viking society as
shown by land use. For example, by the 10th century, architectural clues
to slavery become clear. At a site outside Stockholm near today’s Ikea,
a small round hut dug into the ground sits on a slope above a large
manor house. The hut appears to have been the living quarters for slaves
at the height of Viking prosperity, said Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
of Stockholm University. At another Swedish site, Sanda, a large house
is surrounded by much smaller structures, possible slave quarters. “It’s
not going too far to see these as the big house on a plantation,” Price
said.
Other researchers praise the team’s integration of details into a
fuller picture of Vendel and Viking society. “It is now clear that we
cannot fully understand the Vikings without taking into account slave
hunting and slave trade,” Oxford’s Jankowiak said. “The ‘business model’
of the Baltic Vikings appears to have depended on it.”
The team also will tackle the disturbing issue of sexual slavery.
There are hints of polygyny in Germanic cultures from this time, though
researchers aren’t sure of its extent in Viking society or in the Vendel
era. But if it were prevalent, Price speculates, poorer men would have
been eager to seek wives outside Scandinavia. Researchers hope to
understand more by pulling together DNA and other data to determine
relations and origins among Viking dead.
The argument that Vikings set out to capture women gets tantalizing
support from recent genetic studies of living people in Iceland, which
has not experienced a significant migration since the Vikings settled it
more than a thousand years ago. About three- quarters of male Icelandic
settlers hailed from what is today Norway, although well over half of
the women were from the British Isles, according to genetic studies of
today’s Icelanders. That suggests that Viking men partnered with British
women on a massive scale. “We must be talking about some degree of
coercion,” Price said. His team will emphasize examining the remains of
Viking women—long understudied—to understand their origins.
Price adds that much more work is required to understand the
emergence of the Vikings’ raiding society. “This is just the start of a
decade of research,” he says.
This is a YouTube clip from Sleepy Sara Elizabeth. This is the note under the video Sara wrote about it:
Published on Jul 7, 2014
I
have narcolepsy with cataplexy, and it can be very frustrating to try
to explain what it's like to people who have never seen narcolepsy in
real life, and how much of a struggle it can be. Most people think that
it's funny until they see what actually happens, or they are completely
unprepared and get really scared and panic.I filmed this by accident,
and it was really weird to go back and watch later from an outside
perspective. I am posting this video as a way to help educate people, so
please no trolling. Just like people with epilepsy, I can't control
having a sleep attack or cataplexy any more than they can control having
a seizure. Thank you for your understanding.
In the US, restaurant servers work under a very
different pay system than most people. Beyond a small hourly rate, their
employers don’t pay their wages—customers do. Essentially, these
workers have dozens of different bosses each day that individually
decide how they should be compensated. And there’s not even a
requirement, beyond social mores, that these de-facto bosses pay their
servers anything at all.
For years, Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and
co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United)
and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of
California, Berkeley, has advocated and organized to end this system.
But it wasn’t until she started researching her new book, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining,
that she discovered that the separate, lower minimum wage for tipped
employees comes from a dark part of American history: slavery.
“The original
workers that were not paid anything by their employers were newly freed
slaves,” she tells Quartz. “This whole concept of not paying them
anything and letting them live on tips carried over from slavery.”
Many Americans in post-slavery America initially
resisted tipping, a custom that originated with European aristocrats. To
tip was patronizing, Jayaraman writes in her book; it was seen as
“despicable, undemocratic and wholly un-American.”
But the idea that anyone who accepted tips was in
a lower class held on into the early 20th century. Jayaraman quotes an
American reporter, John Speed, who reflected on the tipping system in
1902 while traveling to the North for the first time. His words
underscore the inherent racism to tipping: “I had never known any but
negro servants. Negroes takes tips, of course; one expects that of
them—it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white
man was embarrassing to me.”
Tipping eventually took hold in the hospitality
industries, though—at restaurants, hotels, and rail companies with
porters who served affluent travelers.
Today, the National Restaurant Association,
a trade group representing more than half a million restaurants,
encourages tipping. “Tip-earning employees can be among a restaurant’s
highest earners,” the association notes on its website.
Its research “shows that on a national level, median hourly earnings
for servers range from $16 to $22, depending on experience.”
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, the median hourly wage for servers is actually $9.01, with an annual salary of $18,730. The NRA says the BLS data may skew lower because restaurateurs may not know they should include tips in their reports.
In Europe, tipping has gone mostly out of
fashion, with service usually included in the rest of the bill. In the
1920s, US railroad car porters successfully fought for higher wages. But
in the US restaurant industry, it remains. And while the standard
minimum wage has risen from $4.75 in 1996 to $7.25 in 2009, representing
a 53% increase, the national minimum wage for restaurant workers (which
is lower to take tips into account) hasn’t budged since it was set 20
years ago at $2.13 an hour.
While the discrimination against tipped workers
was originally rooted in racism, there is now a different demographic
suffering because of it: according to Forked, “66 percent of the almost six million tipped workers in America are women.”
A horse sporting a custom-made Harris Tweed three-piece suit
(with matching tweed cap) impressed thousands of attendees at the 2016
Cheltenham Festival. A team of seamstresses employed over 18 metres of
authentic tweed from the Scottish Isle of Harris in crafting the
equine's uber-fashionable ensemble.
Dressaged To Kill
Tweed – a woven woolen fabric long-associated with
upper-class outdoor recreational activities such as fox-hunting, skeet
shooting and horse racing – is said to be enjoying a revival of late,
and the Cheltenham Festival
in Gloucestershire is famed for its crowds of tweed-wearing attendees.
What better place, therefore, would there be for a horse to sport some
serious tweed?
The model for this “mane” event was Morestead, a veteran
thoroughbred who was accompanied by champion jockey Sir Tony McCoy,
himself nattily attired in the classic fabric. “I have many fond memories of racing at Cheltenham Festival amongst the sea of tweed-wearing racegoers looking on,” commented McCoy, who can proudly list 31 Cheltenham Festival winners on his resume.
A True Clothes Horse
It was Morestead, however, who hogged the spotlight today
thanks to his immaculately tailored tweeds. Credit bookmaker William
Hill with commissioning the unique outfit and former Alexander McQueen
apprentice Emma Sandham-King with overseeing its creation.
After receiving a copious shipment of genuine tweed fabric from
Scotland's Isle of Harris, Ms Sandham-King and a hand-picked team of
seamstresses and tailors got down to the business of suiting up a horse –
an undertaking that took a full four weeks to complete!
Why The Long Face?
“Creating the world's first tweed suit for a horse has
been one of the biggest challenges that I have faced in my career as a
designer,” explained Ms Sandham-King. “We have used 18 metres of genuine Harris Tweed to create the head-turning fashion garment,” she added... about 10 times the amount used to tailor a suit for a human being.
As for the horse, one might say he was as stalwart and stolid as a stallion. “Some models can be real divas,” confirmed Sandham-King, “but veteran racing horse Morestead was calm and a pleasure to work with.” Methinks Morestead was anticipating a warm reception from the mares when he shows off his natty tweeds at the stud farm. (via Aberdeen Journals Ltd)
The British Medical Journal’s (BMJ) campaign, Too Much Medicine,
aims to draw attention to a growing body of evidence that many people
are overdiagnosed and overtreated for conditions such as prostate and
thyroid cancers, asthma, and chronic kidney disease.
“Like the evidence based medicine and quality and safety movements of
previous decades, combating excess is a contemporary manifestation of a
much older desire to avoid doing harm when we try to help or heal,”
said BMJ editor, Dr Fiona Godlee.
“Making such efforts even more necessary are the growing concerns
about escalating healthcare spending and the threats to health from
climate change. Winding back unnecessary tests and treatments, unhelpful
labels and diagnoses won’t only benefit those who directly avoid harm,
it can also help us create a more sustainable future.”
Overdiagnosis wastes billions every year and new research is urgently
needed on how clinicians can scale back the numbers of medications
being taken unnecessarily, said Ray Moynihan, a senior researcher from
Bond University’s Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine.
“It’s not anti-medicine or anti-doctor. Often it’s dismissed as some
kind of unintelligent assault on medicine but nothing could be further
from the truth,” said Mr Moynihan.
“The fact that the BMJ is launching a campaign on overdiagnosis is an
extraordinary thing. Here’s one of the world’s most respected medical
journals saying we have a problem. It’s a dramatic wake up call, not
just for the profession and the government but also the research
community.”
Bond University and the BMJ are co-hosting an international conference on the issue, called Preventing Overdiagnosis, to be held in the US in September.
Mr Moynihan said further research was needed into the possibility
than many of the normal aspects of ageing were a source of
overdiagnosis.
“I think part of the problem here is that too many of the normal
processes of ordinary life are being transformed into the symptoms of
medical conditions. I think this campaign is about bringing attention to
that problem,” he said.
Mr Moynihan said previous studies
had found that up to a third of screening detected breast cancers may
be overdiagnosed and the risk that a cancer detected by prostate
specific antigen testing is overdiagnosed may be over 60%.
A 2008 Canadian study found that 30% of people diagnosed with asthma in the research sample group did not actually have the condition.
“We put them through a diagnostic algorithm to determine if they
truly had asthma, and we tapered their asthma medications off in a
series of steps. We found 30% had been over-diagnosed. They did not have
asthma when their asthma medications were stopped and when they were
objectively tested,” said lead author of the study, Dr Shawn Aaron, a
senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.
“Overdiagnosis is happening because physicians are diagnosing asthma
based on symptoms, and not sending the patients for lung function
testing prior to assigning patients a diagnosis of asthma, which is a
chronic disease.”
Overdiagnosis researcher Associate Professor Dee Mangin, Director of
the General Practice Research Group at New Zealand’s University of
Otago, said the problem was rife.
“Over diagnosis and over treatment are the biggest problems facing
doctors and patients in the next decade as they try to make good
decisions about health care. It creates illness in otherwise well
patients as well as adding to the burden of those who and already ill,”
she said.
Among the drivers of the problem were an ageing population concerned
with staying healthy for as long as possible and commercial imperatives
of drug and diagnostic companies to provide profits for shareholders,
she said.
“This drives aggressive marketing campaigns involving direct
marketing as well as capture of the research evidence base in a way that
overstates benefits and underestimates harmful effects,” said Associate
Professor Mangin.
A common fear among doctors of missing a diagnosis or failing to give
a treatment that might help a patient has exacerbated the problem, she
said.
“It results in harm from the investigations themselves, from
treatments that carry significant harms and from the transformation of
individuals perceptions of themselves as healthy into someone who now
feels they are not. This can have profound effects of the way we see
ourselves and the way we live our lives.”
Charles Watson, convicted of seven first-degree murders in 1971, does
not dispute that he stabbed, shot and mutilated several people to death.
Nor does he deny being "the right-hand man" of the cult leader and
killer Charles Manson.
But Watson, still serving a life term in Ione, California, does
reportedly want to set the record straight on a couple of scores: last
week, someone claiming to be the 70-year-old convict submitted a list of
meticulous corrections to Wikipedia.
Among other things, the person claiming to be Watson disputes that he
took $70 from one of his victim's purses, or that he ever went by the
nickname "Mad Charlie." He also wants the world to know he attended Cal
State, not the University of California — and that, four years after his
infamous killing spree, he converted to Christianity.
Some hand-written edits apparently submitted by Watson.
The requests, which were made on a print-out copy
of Watson's Wikipedia page dated February 16, reached Wikipedia via a
little-known process that lets non-editors suggest changes to the site.
Watson's request was processed on Thursday when a volunteer noted it in
the discussion thread on his page, and became public earlier this week
when it was reported by the Wikipedia watch blog The Wikipedian.
We should note up front that it's not 100 per cent clear whether Watson
actually made the requests: Wikipedia's rules on verifying identity in
such cases are highly flexible, and repeated calls to Watson's
foundation, Abounding Love Ministries, were not answered.
Lane Rasberry, the Wikipedia volunteer who processed the request, told The Washington Post
that the message arrived at Wikipedia via a volunteer-run transmission
service that helps inmates communicate with the outside world. Rasberry
says that he was personally convinced the intermediary was genuine, and
that he did provide, in response to Rasberry's request, a signed legal statement asserting both that the handwritten edits came from Watson and that he'd given Wikipedia permission to upload and publish them.
More hand-written edits apparently submitted by Watson.
That seems to have satisfied Wikipedia editors, who quickly jumped on
several of the suggested changes. It's also provoked fascinating
discussion about the merits of involving socially stigmatised groups
like prison inmates in the Wikipedia knowledge-making machine.
In a widely circulated blog post
on the subject, Rasberry — who is also the Wikipedian-in-residence for
Consumer Reports — makes a strong case for doing so: After all,
Wikipedia's core philosophy values information far above the anonymous
crowd of people actually writing it. In Watson's case, the edits were
well-sourced and meticulous. As a result of his (or his impersonator's)
notes, editors acknowledged that the page lacked citations to reliable
sources and flagged it for further revision.
"There is lore in the community of reference work developers," Rasberry
wrote, "that it is best to accept good contributions from any source."
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation has certainly devoted a lot of money
and effort to diversifying those sources. In this year's grant cycle
alone, the foundation has funded projects to encourage women, senior
citizens, adults with disabilities, and people in the developing world
to contribute to it more. But neither Rasberry nor William Beutler, the
publisher of the Wikipedian, recalls ever hearing of a project or
proposal that would specifically encourage prison inmates to become
Wikipedia editors — that in spite of a proliferation of programs and
services that help inmates send emails or write blogs, for instance.
Whether the Watson incident inspires more activism along these lines
remains to be seen. But Rasberry, for one, seems open to the
possibility.
He cites the story of W.C. Minor, widely recognised as one of the most
prolific and valuable contributors to the early Oxford English
Dictionary. Minor shot and killed a man in 1871 — and made most of his
contributions to the English language from the inside of an insane
asylum.
The Washington Post
Understanding the difference between awareness and attention might be the key to unlocking the mystery of human consciousness.
In the 1950s, an 8-year-old boy suffered a head injury in a road
accident. The back left part of his brain was damaged, specifically the
primary visual cortex. As a consequence, he went blind in a large part
of his right visual field. Years after the injury, his neurologists
uncovered something strange. He could still see on the right side, even
though he didn’t entirely know it.
The neurologists told him to face a screen and look at a small cross
at the center to stabilize his eyes. A single dot appeared in his blind
area, and he was told to point to the dot. In frustration, he insists
there is no dot. But then, he takes a wild guess, and points right at
it. Try after try, as the dot is flashed in different locations in the
blind area, he points accurately most of the time.
This bizarre
phenomenon is called blindsight. It was discovered in the 1970s by
British researchers Larry Weiskrantz, Nicholas Humphrey, and others.
It’s caused by damage to the primary visual cortex, one part of a vast
network of brain areas that process vision. Without that part, some
aspects of vision are still possible but the conscious visual experience disappears.
Blindsight offers a tantalizing hint about human consciousness. It
demonstrates the difference between merely processing visual information
in the brain, like in a computer, versus having a reportable conscious
experience of it.
What is this brain system that causes consciousness, and how does it work?
But this hint from blindsight proved hard to interpret. Does the primary visual cortex somehow generate awareness? If so, what exactly is being generated and how does it get from the back of the brain into our speech circuitry so that we can say that we have it? Maybe the primary visual cortex doesn’t create awareness itself, but instead sends visual information to a different system in the brain that is more closely related to consciousness. But if that’s so, what is this brain system that causes consciousness, and how does it work?
For a while, it seemed as though blindsight would remain only a
tantalizing hint, but in 1999, Robert Kentridge, Charles Heywood, and
Larry Weiskrantz stumbled on a new quirk of blindsight. It’s easy to
mistake their discovery for a minor detail, but it turned out to be one
of the most important insights into consciousness in decades.
Imagine
you’re looking at a screen. A distracting dot flashes on the right
side. A fraction of a second later, a number appears at exactly the same
location. Your job is to report the number as quickly as possible. Your
response time is probably pretty fast because the initial dot
automatically drew your attention to that location. On the other hand,
suppose the dot flashes on the left side of the screen. A fraction of a
second later, the number appears on the right side. Now you’re probably
slower to read the number. The dot automatically drew your attention to
the wrong side and it takes a moment for your attention to readjust.
This simple experiment allows researchers to measure how much attention
was snagged by that initial dot.
It turns out that in people with
blindsight, the dot can snag attention even when it doesn’t snag
conscious experience. Bizarrely, attention and awareness can be
separated.
You can attend to the dot even if you’re not aware of it.
This finding was so startling that researchers were curious whether it
might be true in anyone, not just people with brain damage. Imagine the
same experiment I just described, but the initial dot is very dim and
hidden in a distracting grid of colors and lines. Even if you don’t have
clinical blindsight, you’ll swear you’ve seen no dot at all. And yet
the dot can still snag your attention, sharpening your ability to
process anything else that happens at the same location. You can attend
to the dot even if you’re not aware of it.
For decades scientists used the terms “awareness” and “attention”
more or less interchangeably, as though both referred to what happens
when your mind takes hold of something. Blindsight has helped to pry the
two concepts apart. We now know that we need a better theory of what
they are and how they relate to each other.
One such theory is the
Attention Schema Theory (AST), first proposed by my lab in 2011. In
that theory, attention and awareness have a precise relationship to each
other. Attention is a data-handling trick. It’s the brain’s way of
focusing resources on some signals, boosting them and processing them at
the expense of other signals. It’s a mechanistic process. Awareness is
different. It’s more like the brain’s explicit knowledge about
what it’s doing. The brain doesn’t have information about the
microscopic details of attention, the neurons and the electrochemical
signals, but it can give you a general account. It can say, “Yeah, I’ve
got hold of that dot. I’m processing it. I have a kind of mental
possession of it.” Awareness is the brain’s schematic description of
attention.
In AST, attention is a constant process like a factory
stamping out parts, and awareness is a constantly updated account of
what the factory is doing, for quality control purposes. If you want to
control something carefully, monitor it. If you doubt that, here’s a
simple exercise and a favorite challenge for robotics experts. Balance a
ruler vertically on your hand. It takes some practice, but you can get
the hang of it. The skill depends on always watching the ruler. Your
visual system registers what that stick is doing and computes what it’s
likely to do next. Close your eyes, and you shut off that constant
information. No matter how hard you try, the stick wobbles and falls.
AST
makes a simple prediction. Take away awareness, and attention should
start to wobble. We designed an experiment to test the prediction. (The
results were recently published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.)
The logic of the experiment is simple. A person looks at a screen and
every few seconds a dot is flashed. Sometimes the participant is aware
of the dot, sometimes not. We used many ways to manipulate awareness. A
simple way is to use a very dim dot. We ask the person, “Did you see a
dot?” and sometimes they say yes, sometimes no. Another way is to flash a
distracting pattern on the screen around the same time as the dot.
Depending on the exact timing of the pattern— the difference can be as
subtle as a hundredth of a second— the dot either pops out as obviously
visible or disappears and becomes perceptually invisible.
