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The architecture of Turkish mosques was based on Christian churches, which was in turn based on Roman basilicas. Whilst there were towns in the Middle East, many of the people were semi-nomadic, so used portable mosques, such as the one illustrated in this manuscript.Tent MosqueIran, early 14th centuryInk and colors on paperStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung (Diez A fol.
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Rather, I am interested in whether the current reaction by mainstream media to CCD tells us anything about how to evaluate the claims about global warmingâs likely consequences â in particular, whether dire consequences from environmental problems are as likely as environmentalists believe.Much of the reporting on CCD is certainly replete with the language of crisis that is so fundamental to modern environmental reporting. Here are excerpts from a recent New York Times story: The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.â¦As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call âcolony collapse disorder,â growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers. If (as I suspect is likely) the problem is dealt with by beekeepers, agrichemical companies, etc., without us suffering a disaster in the supermarket, this is strongly suggestive of what will happen if we react to global warming by refusing to hand up a number of never-to-be-regained freedoms to any international climate bureaucracy.
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Looking back I feel that China, both with its vast size and diversity, has motivated me to pick up the camera and try to tell its stories. It is China itself that motivated me, and it is China that has become entirely my focus.I did absolutely no photojournalism while I was attending U of T. I traveled around China looking for stories, scrapped together enough money to buy cameras and film by teaching English every now and then; Based on my work for the NYT I have been able to catch the attention of other magazines and newspapers including Foreign Policy Magazine, Sunday Times Travel, Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times Magazine and Der Spiegel Magazine in Germany.Question 3: When did you arrive in China? (Would you call China your base?)Answer:I first arrived in China in September 2001. After taking Professor Falkenheimâs Introduction to Modern China class in my second year at U of T I had always been curious about China. It was the toughest decision I have had to make, but my time working in China has been the most rewarding experience of my life.I may be bias, but I think China is the most interesting country on the planet. That coupled by the fact that the country growing so quickly, I knew there would be difficulties or gaps in the advancement that would important to document, and that is what I have spent much of my time and energy working on since my arrival.Lastly, I wouldnât call China my base; I live in Shanghai and travel from my home there to work on my documentary photography work in other remote parts of the country.Question 4: What’s it like living in China right now? While my language study does continue progress it is a formidable initial barrier to living and working in China.On a professional level the major challenges in China are government interference. But unfortunately Beijing has little or no control over the provinces, and the harassment by local government officials, local thugs and local police out in the provinces makes working in China difficult from time to time.Question 5: Many of your photo stories have a political bent: migrant workers, 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre. Does it have anything to do with your academic work at U of T?Answer:The domestic media in China is not free; For example, the worldâs biggest shopping mall gets built in China, the domestic media is covering the story and talk about what a great achievement this is for China; The images themselves are not very political at all, but when you realize that the government in Beijing has still not yet openly acknowledged that the attacks or massacre even occurred, and that scores of students were killed, the pictures can take on a different meaning.My academic work at U of T taught me how to think and see issues or stories from different angles, and that is critical to my work today. I feel my academic work at U of T prepared me very well for my experiences in China. There are a lot of Machiavellian government officials in rural China at the moment, and having a context to put them in is very helpful.Question 6: You certainly get around: Iran, Tibet, China, Hong Kong. The other 30% of the time I find and develop stories on my own, I bankroll them myself and I gamble that at some stage the images and the story will be strong enough that someone out there in the media world will feel, as I do, that this is something important and needs to be published.When I first started my career I thought it would be exciting to travel around the Middle East, Africa and Asia shooting great assignments for magazines. While I do travel extensively in China, I rarely leave the country and I choose assignments within China over assignments outside of China.Question 7: Tell me about one of your favorite assignments? One story was to cover the poor quality of rural health care in the region and the other was to be on bird flu in China, which was a topic of interest at that time (Nov.2005). The idea of the story was to remind people that with all the money being pumped in to China, with the record-breaking height of new office buildings, the new five star hotels and Olympic stadiums being built; The gap between the rich and poor in China is a potentially destabilizing factor that China needs to take much more seriously. I also do some corporate work from time to time, large corporations often need images from China for various advertising or internal purposes and I also provide these services.
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The chickenshit CEO of the Tribune Co., Dennis FitzSimons, reinforces the nosedive his papers are in, by announcing a new buyout and, very possibly, layoffs at the L.A. Times amounting to 5%, or approximately 150 jobs.The cut will be even more severe in the Times newsroom, where 70 of 920 staff members, or about 7%, will be asked to leave. (About 100 staff losses are also mandated for the Chicago Tribune and undoubtedly others for other newspapers unfortunate enough to be owned by Tribune).Jim Rainey’s story, buried on Page 2 of the Times Business section this morning, rather disingenuously declares, With revenue declining, many employees fear that the only way to sustain cash flow will be with further job reductions.Tribune Co. announced a 12% reduction in cash flow for the first quarter earlier in the week. But the fact is that every job reduction has been accompanied by a reduction in the news hole and quality of the papers, and, taking this as a sign of failure, readers and advertisers are running for the doors. So, under FitzSimons, all Tribune papers have been in an infernal downward cycle and his new job reductions will only intensify that. Many people who pay money to the Tribune papers do not want to support a sinking ship..The executives FitzSimons has sent to Los Angeles, publisher David Hiller and editor James O’Shea are, of course, not saying a word against the new staff reductions at the Times. They don’t want to follow their predecessors, Jeff Johnson and Dean Baquet, who were terminated when they protested further job cuts as counterproductive.Quite simply,. Johnson and Baquet did their duty, but Hiller and O’Shea are failing to do theirs, which is to stand by the publication they lead. Editorial employees at the Times numbered about 1,100 when Tribune took over.The role of the new Tribune owner, Sam Zell, who will not formally take over until the end of the year, in the latest announcements, if any, is not known. But Zell better watch out. By the time he comes on board, the value of his purchase could well have dropped even more than it has already.I suggested yesterday that Zell somehow get rid of FitzSimons now, with a severance of . Let me amend that. FitzSimons should be kicked out now, with no severance. Every year of his domain has been a failure.Since there have already been innumerable buyouts at the Times, and in many of them the terms are likely to have been more lucrative, (mine certainly was, when I retired three years ago), it is unlikely that this new one will be filled, meaning layoffs of experienced, more highly paid employees. The Times cannot help but be severely hurt by this travesty.And there is still no assurance that Tribune will invest the money in promotion that would be necessary to avert further circulation declines, declines that in seven awful years of Tribune control already amount to more than 300,000.FitzSimons is not only zn exceedingly stupid businessman, but a greedy one as well. He has never failed to elevate his own salary while terminating the income of others. Dante would have had little problem deciding in whatcircle of hell to place him.–The L.A. Times got off to a good start on its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre, I thought besting the New York Times in the first and second days. But, as has often been the case in the past, LAT effort dropped off, while the New York Times was staying on in a full court press and coming up with later stories that enhanced public understanding substantially.Two NYT stories in the last two days have certainly added to what we know. Neither were replicated in the L.A. Times.First, a story by Marc Santora and Christine Hauser on Friday, reporting that the anger of the killer, Cho Seung-hui, was evident in his writings in his English major, contained the information that eight members of the Virginia Tech faculty had formed an informal task force to try to deal with Cho. They got little if any help from the Virginia Tech administration. Second, some students were so scared of Cho, they stopped attending classes in which he was enrolled.Santora, just back from Iraq, is an outstanding investigative reporter. This report adds fuel to the supposition that the Virginia Tech administration was negligent in letting Cho remain at the school, especially since he had been ruled in a Virginia court to be a danger to himself and possibly others. (Time magazine’s Web site has already suggested that the Virginia Tech president, Charles W. Steger, ought, in all decency, to resign. He had the ultimate responsibility for failing to protect the 32 students and faculty members who were murdered),Second, the Page 1 lead NYT story this morning, by Michael Luo, breaks important new ground by reporting that, actually, federal laws should have prevented Cho from buying the guns he used in committing the crime, since he had been declared by a court to be a danger. This contradicts the earlier assumption that the law did not prohibit firearms from being sold into such hands.By contrast with the New York Times, the Virginia Tech story falls off Page 1 of the L.A. Times this morning, and the stories inside are not nearly so significant, although Miguel Bustillo’s story on the memorial service for Kevin P. Granata, one of the Virginia Tech professors who died trying to save their students after the shooting began, was beautiful. At the Granata service, the teacher’s doctoral advisor at Ohio State, William Marras, said, When I heard he had died trying to save the lives of students, I was not surprised. Thats Kevin.” And thats one of the glories of academic life, on a day of horror.Meanwhile, we are beginning to be in the period, which seems to follow several days after every major earthquake or human disaster, where nonsensical rumors and speculations are beginning to mark the comment on the tragedy.To cite examples, there was the Op Ed page piece in the L.A. Times yesterday by Rosa Brooks, criticizing the national anguish over the worst domestic shooting in U.S. history. Count me out, she writes. There’’s something fraudulent about eagerness to latch onto the grief of others and embrace the idea that we, too, have been victimized. This trivializes the pain felt by those who have actually lost something.What nonsense! It is certainly appropriate for the whole nation to mourn what has happened at Virginia Tech, in part because this was just one of a series of school shootings, and they are impacting lives all over the country. Brooks should not have written such a silly article, and when she did, Op Ed Page editor Nick Goldberg should not have agreed to run it. Goldberg seems mainly committed to inane commentary.Then, Los Angeles attorney Shelly Sloan, who frequently forwards articles supporting the Bush Administration, forwarded one suggesting that politically correct Virginia Tech was somehow complicit in the massacre by the courses it allowed to be taught on literature by criminal minds, and so forth. This too is nonsense. Virginia Tech has thousands of students. Only one committed the massacre, and it is ridiculous to suggest something he heard in class brought him to do it.Labels: Tribune failures
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Concerns About a Child Making Observations If you have ever had concerns about your child’s development, you are not alone. Whether you’re worried about your child’s use of language, ability to relate to others, or any other developmental concerns, your child relies on you to share your observations with those who can help. Having occasional concerns is a natural part of parenting. But when these concerns persist, it’s time to take action. Here, we offer parents and professionals important information about healthy development, how to monitor it, and how to know when a child has deviated from a healthy developmental path. We focus on the key social, emotional, and communication milestones and the red flags that may require an immediate evaluation. We try to help work through the range of concerns and realities that many parents face, and provide suggestions as to how parents, concerned friends, family members, and even healthcare professionals can describe their concerns to those who can help. Finally, we provide information about autism and other developmental disorders. Being aware of what children do and learn as they develop sets the stage to let you know if they are on the right path. Physicians are essential to help determine this. By monitoring healthy (or typical) developmental milestones, parents and professionals must work together to promote healthy development and to recognize when a child needs an immediate evaluation. Visit our developmental checklist on our Monitoring Development Web page to learn more about the key social, emotional, and communication milestones for young children (birth to age three). Also visit our Red Flags Web page, which describes the critical warning signs for when a child is at risk for developmental delays and disorders. Parents are in the best position to observe and report what their child is doing. Be confident that you know your child better than anyone else. Trust your instincts. When you child’s development worries you, don’t be afraid to describe these concerns to your child’s physician. And don’t wait. Developmental delays only develop further. Remember, you are your child’s best advocate. By expressing your concerns to your child’s physician, you take an important step toward ruling out or in what your child may have. The sooner you can identify a developmental delay, the sooner your child can receive appropriate intervention to improve the situation. Of course, some concerns may end up being nothing at all, even though you worried through many sleepless nights. Some concerns may be mild early signs of real problems that can easily be corrected if treated right way. Still other concerns may indeed be a more significant developmental delay or disorder for which early and intensive intervention is the key to a successful outcome. Sharing Concerns Parent to Physician Parents often have a difficult time sharing concerns about their child. The following outlines four crucial steps to follow with your child’s physician, and highlights the importance of a patient but persistent approach. Be prepared Express your concerns clearly Ask questions Follow up Each well visit provides an opportunity for your child to receive a routine developmental screening; however, if you don’t ask, it may not be offered. Whether or not you have specific concerns about your child’s development, it is best to come to the doctor’s office prepared. Physicians rely on parents to provide information about their child. As a parent, you are your child’s best advocate and a “resident expert” about your child’s health and development. During a well visit, a physician usually sees a child for less than 15 minutes, even less if there has been an emergency that day. It is a challenge, for both the parent and the physician, to cover the wide range of issues related to a child’s health within a limited time. If you have concerns about your child’s development, take the following four crucial steps: be prepared, express your concerns clearly, ask questions, and follow up. 1. Be prepared. Before you go to your next well visit, print out the checklist of developmental milestones and note whether your child has met each of the expected milestones. If you have questions or concerns, write down a few concrete examples that might assist your physician: “My child doesn’t respond to my voice.” “He spends so much time lining up his toys, he has no interest in other children.” “She hasn’t learned a new word in months.” “He doesn’t look at me—he never makes eye contact.” Whether or not you have concerns, ask your doctor for a routine screening. 2. Express your concerns clearly. While this issue can be an emotional one, try to focus on your concrete concerns, such as developmental milestones. If your physician doesn’t want to perform a screening, or isn’t responsive to your concerns, be persistent. Ask why. And remember, “don’t worry” or “let’s wait and see” are not adequate responses. Schedule a follow up appointment, if necessary, or ask for a referral to a developmental pediatrician. Your child’s healthy development is your most important concern. 3. Ask questions. If there are terms you don’t understand, ask your physician to explain. After the screening, ask what the results show, and what they mean. Inquire about referrals to specialists. Ask what the next step will be. 4. Follow up. For most parents, routine screenings indicate that a child is following a typical development pattern. Screenings at well visits in the future will help to confirm that. For other parents, who learn from the screening that their child may be at risk of a developmental delay, follow up is crucial. Children at risk of atypical development are routinely referred to Early Intervention for a closer look by a developmental specialist. You also may want a referral to a developmental pediatrician, a psychologist, a neurologist, a psychiatrist, or a specialist for further evaluation. Through all four steps, some parents may stumble or falter. Grief and disbelief can prove to be great hurdles. Parents may fear the worst and not move forward. Other parents may feel uncomfortable questioning their physicians. Proceed with confidence, as parents know their child best. Only by pursuing your questions and concerns, forming a sharing relationship with your child’s physician and then by following up with him/her, can you ensure the best possible outcome for your child. Be patient with yourself and persistent for your child. Get the help your child needs. “Pediatricians are the only professionals with knowledge of development who are in routine contact with the families of young children. Parents turn to their pediatrician for information about development, for assessment of whether their children are doing all right or not. If pediatricians don’t know or aren’t sure or don’t have the appropriate tools, the children with delays or disorders are missed. Sharing Concerns Physician to Parent Physicians may also find it challenging to identify children at risk for developmental delays and disorders and difficult to express their concerns about a child’s development with parents or caregivers. No doubt about it, these are critical life-changing discussions that require time, sensitivity, honesty, planning, and follow-through on your part. Here are some suggestions as to how you can handle this process successfully with your patients. Listen to parents Understand that early identification and intervention are essential Consider the prevalence of developmental delays and disorders Heighten your index of suspicion Make each well-visit an opportunity for screening and surveillanceCreate a screening training and implementation planDeliver difficult news to parents with sensitivity and understandingNarrow the gap between knowledge and behaviorFollow up with referrals; progress can be madeReferences to journal articles Listen to parents In recent years, parents of young children have become increasingly aware of the need to monitor traditional developmental milestones at each well visit prior to age three, due in large part to the popularity of the What to Expectseries, the Touchpointsbooks, and other baby books currently available. Parents expect to have a dialogue with their child’s physician about development, though even these highly regarded books do not cover social, emotional, and communication milestones well enough. Nor do they address behavioral problems. A recent national survey of parents with young children indicated that they want more information and support on childrearing and developmental concerns, yet pediatric clinicians often fail to discuss non-medical concerns with them .Moreover, detection rates in primary care show that 70% of developmental disorders and 80% of mental health problems are not caught.These discussions could yield developmental concerns early, since parent report has been shown to be highly accurate and indicative of a true concern Because parents are with their children around the clock, they are well positioned to be valid reporters about their child’s development. This, combined with routine observations and comparisons of other children is very powerful. This cuts across all populations: income, education, social level, culture, etc. A physician can make great use of these observations at a well child visit where the average time for a professional to observe a child is only 15 minutes on average. Thus, a collaborative parent/physician relationship is critical to the continued healthy development of a young child. When you have concerns about a child, remember, this is a family you anticipate having a professional relationship with for the next 18 years. It’s important to develop the ability to say, ‘Okay, this is a problem you’re experiencing, I’m going to take it seriously. I may not agree with you that it’s developmental; I may think this is more of an emotional or family problem, but you’re telling me it’s a problem, and I’m going to do something about it.” Understand that early identification and intervention are essential Early intervention’s positive outcome has been well-documented in the literature and goes far beyond IQ. In the short term, it improves the quality of life and functioning for the child and for the family. In the long term, early intervention’s impact extends into such key developmental areas as prevention of secondary emotional/behavioral issues, reduction in teen pregnancy, increase in high school graduates, increase in employment, and reduction in the crime rate. Pediatric clinicians are in a unique and central position to identify developmental concerns early and refer children at risk on for further evaluation and treatment. Parents depend on pediatric clinicians for advice, guidance, and support. They need healthcare professionals who can speak the language of development with them and work with them to keep their child on a healthy developmental path. I would advocate a preliminary developmental screening for all children. And if a parent comes in and has concern about a child, there should be an immediate discussion about it. If the pediatrician doesnt have time, it would be well for him to either have a person to whom he refers the family or for one of his staff to be able to sit down with the family for 15 minutes and make them feel heard. The risks of not doing that are enormous in that the first few years of life are the period of the greatest neuroplasticity and the greatest rate of change in brain development. This is a critical period. If we miss this critical period, we could miss the boat on helping a child to develop to his or her fullest potential. Consider the prevalence of developmental delays and disabilities Prevalence studies indicate that autism spectrum disorders are dramatically on the rise with the CDC citing 1 in every 166 children on the autism spectrum and developmental disorders representing 17% of young children. Thus, every pediatric professional can expect to see at least one patient in his/her practice (if not more) that lives with these concerns. This makes it essential for medical practitioners and clinicians to understand the key social, emotional, and communication milestones and to have a firm grasp of red flags. “The findings now from very large prevalence studies show that 16 to 18% of children have developmental problems. Thats one in every five patients or so, especially if you include the more serious mental health problems. One out of every five patients that you run into will be experiencing a developmental problem…its a huge concern. Its probably the biggest single issue that you encounter in pediatrics and, yet, it is just a fraction of pediatric traininglink
What a funny boy I am!*Random Old Comics That No-Doubt Reveal My Age Through My Use of the Term ‘Old’ Dept: One of my pet pursuits with back issues is looking into odd series from random publishers — especially publishers that went gunning for the ‘mainstream’ of the comics direct market — that managed to rope in an interesting creative team. Their comics are pretty easily recognized by the fact that just about every damn thing they published came equipped with some ‘name’ endorsement before the title, much like Virgin Comics does today. Gaiman was the only ‘name’ that came primarily from the comics world itself, though I don’t believe he actually wrote any of the books at any time.Teknophage was no different, although it was handled initially by the very interesting team of writer Rick Veitch, penciller Bryan Talbot, and inker/colorist Angus McKie (illustrator and Heavy Metal veteran whose So Beautiful and So Dangerous was adapted for the Heavy Metal film, albeit in heavily abridged and modified form). The series did not survive Tekno’s eventual switch to a general BIG Entertainmet label in 1996, complete with line-wide crossover Event to goose sales, although a Talbot-written miniseries titled Neil Gaiman’s Phage: Shadow Death was released in conjunction with the crossover (and I’m not done reading it).The memory of Teknophage lives on, though.
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