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The Very Early Perimenopause: What We Can Learn from Dr. Jerilynn Prior’s Research

By www.ourbodiesourselves.org
Published On :: Mon, 25 Nov 2019 14:49:19 +0000

by Nina Coslov

In my early 40s, I started noticing changes in my body. A once great sleeper, I was now waking at 2 a.m. – often with lots of energy and sometimes with anxiety. I’d be awake for about 3 hours before I could get back to sleep. Around the same time, premenstrual breast tenderness returned — something I hadn’t experienced since my 20s, before I had children. Not long after, I’d notice from time to time a pervasive edginess, a revving — an energetic ... More

The post The Very Early Perimenopause: What We Can Learn from Dr. Jerilynn Prior’s Research appeared first on Our Bodies Ourselves.


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Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s

By www.ourbodiesourselves.org
Published On :: Thu, 13 Feb 2020 19:51:46 +0000

“If the plastic speculum was the tool of choice for self-help advocates, leading women to a better understanding of their own bodies, then the popular media was Barbara Seaman’s preferred weapon in the cultural battle against medical sexism.”
— Kelly O’Donnell, in her article “Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s”

Barbara Seaman, a popular journalist in the 1960s and 70s who wrote for magazines including Brides, Ms., Ladies Home Journal, and Family Circle, was one of the first journalists to ... More

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Please Support Civil Liberties and Public Policy During the Covid-19 Crisis: An Appeal from Judy Norsigian

By www.ourbodiesourselves.org
Published On :: Fri, 01 May 2020 18:08:16 +0000

These challenging times require fierce, broad, and intersectional activism – which is just what Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP) has been doing for the past four decades. This now-independent nonprofit, which used to be affiliated with Hampshire College, continues its unique movement-building work preparing younger activists to work on the front lines of today’s struggle for reproductive justice. Please consider supporting CLPP today with a generous donation. 

As we know, the Covid-19 pandemic is disproportionately harming those in our communities who were already facing ... More

The post Please Support Civil Liberties and Public Policy During the Covid-19 Crisis: An Appeal from Judy Norsigian appeared first on Our Bodies Ourselves.


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  • Abortion & Reproductive Rights
  • Activism & Resources
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Book week 2019: the prologue

By separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sun, 24 Nov 2019 22:25:00 +0000

My new year's resolution for 2019 was: Finish the books I start. 

Now, it must be said, I don't read enough books. I do a lot of reading for research, which does not usually involve reading books from cover to cover. (It involves reading journal articles, reading chapters, using the indices of books to find the bits I need.) Since so much of my working life is reading (including multiple books' worth of student writing each term), after work I tend to do other things. But I still want to be reading books, because there are so many good books out there and I have great respect for the writers of books and the books they write.

I find it's very easy to start (reading) books. Rarely do I start reading a book and then lose interest in it. I have every intention and desire to finish most books that I start. But then some other book comes along and I just want to start that one too.

(It must be said here that these days I mostly read non-fiction—and it's relatively easy to leave non-fiction unfinished. If there is a story to a non-fiction book, I generally know how the story ends, so it doesn't have that page-turner vibe that fiction can have.)

At the start of 2019, there were four books that I had started months before, and had been really enjoying, yet instead of finishing them, I started other books. But thanks to my resolution, they are finished. Yay! 

So that was going well. Until I started starting books again. As of last week, I had seven books on the go (not counting a couple that made me say "Life's too short to spend it on this sub-par book"). And thanks to what I'm about to do, I will probably soon have 12 unfinished books heading into the LAST MONTH of 2019. So: made a resolution to reduce the number of unfinished books I have, and I am ending the year with THREE TIMES AS MANY unfinished books. What a failure!

But the reason I'm starting even more books is that people send me books. Publishers send me books. I get a lot of books. They send me the books because I have a blog and they want me to help publici{s/z}e the books. I like getting the books, and I want to help authors of good books. And it helps them if I tell you about the books in a timely way.

So this week, I am going to write about some of the books I've been sent this year and which I may not have read from cover to cover. For each book, I plan to read at least two chapters before telling you about it. So, I'm going to have a feel for the book, which I can tell you about, even if I haven't read the whole book.

Why do this now? Two reasons:
  1. I can assuage my guilt about not writing about these books sooner by pretending that I was waiting to give you a seasonal list of books that would make great gifts for the holiday season!
  2. I have the time.
I have the time because my union is about to go on strike for eight days. During this time, I am not engaging in the activities that the university pays me for. (And indeed, I will not be paid by the university for those days.) So, I'm catching up on things I want/like to do that are not within my job description. And apparently starting books and not finishing them is one of the things I like to do best.

I'm only going to tell you about books I like. I'm channel(l)ing my mother: "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." I'm also listening to the adage "There's no such thing as bad publicity." I've decided not to give any publicity to sub-par books. I could be scathing about them (and witty—scathing and witty go hand-in-hand). And that might be a lot of fun. But I'd just rather not shine my light on sub-par books, since that takes space and attention away from the good books. 

Some of the books I'll write about are by people I like. It's not that I know them well, just that I've had enough interactions with them to know we're on the same wavelength—so it's not quite nepotism (just tribalism?). And I'm going to try my best to have five posts for five days, but life happens and I might have to interpret "week" very loosely.

So: stay tuned, and we'll get this book week going.

Oh, and: I'm taking nominations for US-to-UK and UK-to-US Words of the Year. Are there any US-to-UK or UK-to-US borrowings that are particularly 2019-ish? They don't have to have first come to the other country this year, but they should have had particular attention or relevance in the other country this year. Please nominate them in the comments below.


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2019 UK-to-US Word of the Year: knock-on

By separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Published On :: Tue, 31 Dec 2019 20:32:00 +0000

It's the end of the year, and time to declare the Separated by a Common Language Words of the Year. As ever, I've got two categories: US-to-UK and UK-to-US. In other words: I'm interested in borrowings between these national dialects. To be a SbaCL WoTY, the word doesn't have to have been imported precisely in that year—it just needs to have been noticeable in some way. For past WotYs, see here. I'll post the US-to-UK word soon; this post is for UK-to-US.

I've been noticing a lot of Britishisms in American English this year (and, as ever, Ben Yagoda is recording many of them at his Not One-Off Britishisms [NOOB] blog). I've decided to go with one nominated by Neil Dolinger last month. The UK-to-US SbaCL Word of the Year is:

knock-on

The relevant sense is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:
Being a secondary or indirect consequence of another action, occurrence, or event
It's most commonly found in the phrase knock-on effect, which is first recorded in the OED in 1972. Knock-on itself seems to have passed into general usage from physics:

Ben Yagoda's blog had knock-on effect as an "on-the-radar NOOB" in 2012, and the reason I've chosen it as the 2019 UK-to-US Word of the Year is its 2018-19 surge in US usage, as can be seen here in the US portion of the News on the Web corpus:



Of the 612 US examples of it in this corpus, 481 are in the phrase knock-on effect(s). Another 83 are followed by another noun, such as impact, employment, and delays.

It's still very much a British expression: while knock-on still occurs about 5 times per million British words in the News on the Web corpus, it's still less than once per million in the US news corpus (.63 in 2019 overall). And that corpus is showing the marks of globali{s/z}ation—a frequent source of knock-on in the US data is from the US edition of the UK paper The Guardian and of the Irish Times international edition. Still, it is showing up in a lot of homegrown US media: local news channels, the Washington Post, Forbes, Variety, and others:

Click to enlarge
 
Why is it more common in the first half of each year than the second? Well, for 2019, there are no examples after October, so I think that might be an effect of the corpus collection methods. It could also be because of rugby, in which knock-on is a noun (for when the ball is knocked forward). The Six Nations tournament starts in February and 4 out of 24 US examples of knock-on in February 2019 and 4 of 13 in March have the rugby sense. By contrast, in January and April, zero of the 29 US hits have the rugby sense. So, while there is definitely noise from the rugby sense in two months of the year, that effect seems limited.

I'll let Ben Yagoda have the last say about whether this shift is enough to take it from "on the radar" to being a full-blown Not One-Off Britishism in the US, but I thank Neil for nominating it.
But before I go, it seems fitting to mention this dialectal difference: BrE Heath Robinson machine versus AmE Rube Goldberg machine. You can click on the links to learn about their namesakes, but here's an OK Go video to illustrate knock-on effects, just for fun. Happy New Year!


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2019 US-to-UK Word of the Year: gotten

By separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Published On :: Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:46:00 +0000

For part 1 of the 2019 Words of the Year, click here.  Now we're on to the US-to-UK WotY.

Radzi Chinyanganya, WotY inspiration
I had pretty much decided not to do a US-to-UK Word of the Year for 2019. The words nominated were generally ones that had made a big splash in English recently on both sides of the Atlantic, rather than long-standing Americanisms that were making a splash in Britain. I had begun to think that BrE had reached peak Americanism. But then I went through my top tweets of the year, and saw one that made me think: "Oh yeah, that's it."


The US-to-UK Word of the Year is:

gotten



Here's the tweet that reminded me: 
 


Now, this choice might be controversial in that gotten is not just and not originally American. It is one of those linguistic things that mostly died in the UK while it thrived in the US. When I moved to the UK, a colleague told me that you'd still hear gotten among old people in Yorkshire. I haven't had the chance to bother any old people in Yorkshire about that, but -en forms of get were found far and wide in English dialects. That said, the OED has it as "chiefly U.S." and it is widely perceived in the UK as an Americanism. In England you do hear it more from Americans (in the media, if not in person) than from British folk. Here's a bit of what I said about it in The Prodigal Tongue:

That part of the book goes on to examine the evidence that gotten only really got going in the US—that it was not used much in the formal English of those who came from England to the Americas, and that its use exploded only in the late 19th century, when the US was finding a voice of its own. (Want to know more? I have a book to sell you!)

So, while gotten is not just American nor originally American, America is where gotten made its fortune. The "standard" British participle for get is have got, as discussed (along with its meaning) in this old post.

What's interesting about gotten in Britain in 2019 is that it's been used quite a bit in places where you don't tend to hear non-standard, regional grammatical forms: like on the BBC and in Parliament. And I have heard it among my child's middle-class (orig. AmE) tween friends here in the southeast. Here are some interesting examples, besides our friend Radzi.*

On the CBeebies (BBC channel for young children) website:


In a BBC news story about an orange seagull in Buckinghamshire:

Hospital staff said the bird "had somehow gotten himself covered in curry or turmeric".

In the linguistically (and otherwise) conservative Telegraph newspaper:**
Yet, it is the ageing filter that has gotten most people talking.

By then-Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, who got into trouble for saying:
The Lib Dems have gotten kind of Taliban, haven’t they?

And in the House of Commons:
  • "I would like to share some of the thoughts of organisations that have gotten in touch in recent days to share their experience of training mental health first aiders..." —Luciana Berger, 17 Jan 2019
  • "...those in Sinn Féin say, 'Well, we’ve gotten away with two years of saying we’re not going back into government until...'" —Gregory Campbell, 5 Mar 2019
  • "...the mess that this place has gotten itself into..."  —Deirdre Brock 19 Mar 2019
  • "...the best way of dealing with this is not through a voluntary levy based on the least that can be gotten away with" —Jim Shannon, 2 July  2019
There's a difference, though, between the ones from the House of Commons and the others. The parliamentary ones have gotten in a set phrase of some sort. It's long been the case that British speakers say gotten in close proximity to mess and into, since they're alluding to Laurel and Hardy films, where gotten is indeed the form. And in the other cases above, we've got gotten away with and gotten in touch, which are figurative and idiomatic uses. (Neither of those particular idioms is particularly American.) Since gotten is heard in Parliament as part of set phrases, it's not clear that it would be a 'normal' way for those speakers to form the past participle of get in general.

The other examples above (and indeed Radzi's uses that inspired my original tweet) are have gotten just as a plain old verb in its many meanings. Those interest me more because they do seem more like the re-introduction of the get-got-gotten paradigm, and not just certain constructions that have been remembered with a certain verb form.

A lot of the British gotten that I've been exposed to is from homegrown children's television and children, and that's what really seals it for me as a 2019 word. After 20 years of not hearing it much (and training myself out of saying it much), I'm really noticing it. You can find lots of people, particularly older people, in the UK talking about its ugliness or wrongness, but the fact that younger people are un-self-consciously saying it makes me think that it will get bigger still.

And on that note, a bit later than is decent, I say goodbye to 2019!


Footnotes:

* I haven't presented corpus numbers in this post, since the bulk of the gotten numbers in corpora tend to be (in news) quoted Americans or (in other things) in set phrases. The Hansard corpus tool at Huddersfield University doesn't seem to be able to separate the gottens from the ill-gottens—which is a form that has remained in BrE despite the more general loss of gotten.

** (I got quite a few google hits for gotten in the Telegraph, for which I could see the gotten in the preview. But for some, when I clicked through, the same sentence had got. Might this be because some stories were originally posted with gotten then changed when the "error" was caught?)


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'X's Y' versus 'the Y of X'

By separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sun, 29 Mar 2020 21:45:00 +0000

[I had said I'd be blogging weekly, but that didn't happen when I had to travel for family reasons. I have got(ten) back to it, not that you'll always notice. I've decided that my goal is to *write* for the blog each week, but not necessarily to publish. So, I started writing this one last week, finished this week.]

I'm doing a lot of reading about the genitive case at the moment. Grammatical case is some kind of marking (e.g. a suffix) that shows what 'job' a noun is doing in a sentence. You might know a lot about case if you've studied German or Latin or Finnish (or some other languages), which have case suffixes on nouns. You'll know a little about case from being an English speaker who knows the differences between they, them, and theirs. Modern English marks pronouns for case, but not other nouns, except...

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had a robust case system, which it got from the ancestor it shared with German. The case suffixes pretty much died during Middle English. (English lost a lot of other kinds of suffixes over the centuries too, in part because suffixes are the kinds of things that get swallowed up in speech and in part becuase they're the kind of thing that become vulnerable when different languages come into contact—as happened for English and Norman French nearly 1000 years ago.) But one English case suffix, rather than disappearing, morphed into something else, and that something is the scourge of English spelling, the apostrophe-s: 's. 

So in the Old-English poem Beowulf, you can read about Grendles guðcræft. That -es on the name of the monster Grendel is the forebear of 's. We can translate it as something like 'Grendel's power' or 'Grendel's warcraft'. That (masculine, singular) genitive case marker says that there's a very close relation between Grendel and the guðcræft. Grendel is the power's source or its possessor.


But when that poem gets translated into Modern English, the translators sometimes translate the -es as an 's and sometimes not:
the might of Grendel (Francis Gummere)  
Grendel's power of destruction (Seamus Heaney)
That's because something else happened in Middle English: English started using of in the way that French uses de to express genitive relations—because French got all up in English's business at that point. Because of that change, of occurs only 30 times in Beowulf (where it has its original meaning of 'away from' or 'off'*), but over 900 times in Gummere's translation of it (where it means next to nothing).

So English has ended up with two ways of expressing those kinds of relations. We tend to talk about them as being 'possessive' relations and of the X in X's Y or the Y of X as 'the possessor'.  But the relation is not necessarily possessive. Think about something like the theft of the bicycle and the bicycle's theft: the bicycle doesn't possess the theft. The relations between the nouns in 's/of expressions are varied and hard to pin down (but they are very close relationships, covering a lot of the same ground as the genitive in Old English).

We don't exactly use 's and of interchangeably, though, and even where we can use both we often have preferences for one or the other. One of the strongest predictors of whether it'll be 's  or of is the animacy of the thing in the X position (the 'possessor'). Linguists often talk about an animacy hierarchy in which expressions that refer to  animate things are preferred in certain positions in sentences over non-animate things. In terms of what's animate, humans (the teacher, Heidi) come above animals (the badger, the parrot) and collectives (the company, the union), which come above objects (the table, the book).  All of the below noun phrases are "grammatical" but the higher up the list we go, the more apt people are to use the 's instead of the of phrase, all other things being equal:
the teacher's size        the size of the teacher
the badger's size         the size of the badger
the union's size           the size of the union
the table's size            the size of the table
A lot is going on in that 'all other things being equal' (a phrase used in both AmE and BrE, but AmE also likes all else being equal). Some other things that swing a possessive in favo(u)r of 's phrasing rather than of phrasing are:
  • heavier (more syllables/more complex syntax) possessed NPs rather than lighter ones
    (the table's dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge vs the dirty and worn-out alumin(i)um edge of the table)
  • the need for denser texts, as in newspaper headlines 
  • speech (rather than writing)
  • informal writing style (rather than more formal writing styles)
  • the dialect being spoken
So, on the last point: English in general used to be a much stronger avoidance of 's on inanimate object names. Inanimate possessors have become more and more accepted in English over the last 200 years or so. But that change has been happening faster in American English than British. This is like a lot (but not all!) of other changes in English (see The Prodigal Tongue, or if you really like to read about statistical methods, Paul Baker's book)—the change has roots deep in English's history, but goes faster/slower in different places. In this change's case (like some others), the "newer" form ('s on inanimates) is perceived as less formal and it's more condensed (and therefore quicker to say/read). Both of these properties might characteri{s/z}e some differences between the cultures that maintain the "standard" versions of English in the two countries. AmE tolerates more informality and more brevity in more situations.

So, having been thinking about all this, I did a Difference of the Day on Twitter, showing these two charts:


Here you can see that North Americans are much more happy than others to say the book's cover or the book's title or the table's edge or the table's width (or whatever other nouns might go after book's and table's). Here's the flipside, the of versions, which I didn't post on Twitter.



The table chart goes with what we'd expect to see: BrE doing a lot more with of than AmE. But the book table has AmE doing more of the book than BrE. You know why? Because American talk about books more. No, really:


So that's a lot more detail than you needed in order to see the AmE/BrE difference, but, hey, reading is good for you!

*Why does off look like of? Because they used to be the same word!

Some of the things I've been reading that influenced this post:
Carlier, Anne and Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2013. Genitive case and genitive constructions: an introduction. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Carlier, Anne, Michèle Goyens and Béatrice Lamiroy. 2013. De: a genitive marker in French? Its grammaticalization path from Latin to French. In Carlier and Verstraete (eds.), The genitive. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Lars Hinrichs. 2008. Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres. In Terttu Nevalainen, IrmaTaavitsainen, Päivi Pahta, and Minna Korhonen (eds.), The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam : John Benjamins.


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on the up and up

By separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Published On :: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 11:57:00 +0000

Thomas West recently asked:

I hadn't really noticed this before, but it looks like it's probably a case of an American phrase coming
to Britain and being re-interpreted (which happens now and again—I talk about a few other cases in The Prodigal Tongue and elsewhere on this blog).

The expression originated in AmE in or before the 1860s. It is often hyphenated: on the up-and-up. The OED entry for it starts:
a. Honest(ly), straightforward(ly), ‘on the level’. Originally and chiefly U.S.

1863   Humboldt Reg. (Unionville, Nevada) 4 July 2/1   Now that would be business, on the dead up-and-up.
But then it continues with a second definition that it does not mark as U.S.:
 b. Steadily rising, improving, or increasing; prospering, successful.
1930   Sun (Baltimore) 18 Aug. 6/1   From now on, we are led to believe, law and order will be on the up and up, as the current phrase is.
1937   G. Heyer They found him Dead xiii. 265   He certainly wasn't on the up-and-up when I knew him. He was picking up a living doing odd jobs for any firm that would use him.
1959   Encounter Oct. 25/2   Private travel is on the up and up.
Just the first example in sense b is from an American source—but I really can't tell why they think that either of the first two examples has sense b and not sense a. I would have thought that the first one is saying that the police are going to be less corrupt or disorgani{s/z}ed, and, in the second, I would think that they were saying that he was taking money under the table. But you can see how the two senses can overlap and therefore sense a could morph into sense b, which it definitely has done by the 1959 example.

Sense b comes 50 or 60 years after the first sense, during a time when the UK is getting a lot more exposure to AmE, so it does seem reasonable to think that the phrase came from the US and changed in the UK. The data from Google Books also seem to support this hypothesis:


The b sense is definitely the primary sense in BrE. The (UK-based) Collins COBUILD Idiom Dictionary marks sense a as American but not sense b, and the BBC World Service's Learning English pages give only the 'successful' meaning in their list of up idioms:
To be on the up and up: to be getting increasingly successful.
Example:
His life has been on the up and up since he published his first book. Now, he's making a film in Hollywood.

One of the sources on freedictionary.com explicitly marks the b sense as British:

But all that said, a few commenters on Thomas's original post seem to be Americans saying that they use the 'successful' sense. (I suspect they are younger Americans.) As we've seen above, it's not always clear which one people mean. Looking at a sample in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, though, the sense a meaning predominates:

Click picture to enlarge

Some of the BrE speakers responding to Thomas said that they assumed that on the up and up is an extension of a phrase on the up, meaning 'rising, being successful'. The OED doesn't record that, but there are plenty of examples in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I searched for them followed by a (BrE) full stop/(AmE) period, so that I could be sure there wasn't another and up after the first up.)


The examples in this data are often along the lines of "the numbers of X are on the up", so they are clearly about rising numbers and (by extension, often) success.

Now, there is no expression on the down to mean 'decreasing' and the OED hadn't yet noticed the on the up expression, so I have to wonder whether the phrase on the up and up came from the US, got reinterpred in BrE, and then got shortened to on the up (rather than the latter being expanded from the former).  It's harder to get information for on the up in a place like Google Books, because one can't do the punctuation trick and rule out all the examples like on the up grade or on the up line. I had a quick look at the Hansard corpus, the record of UK Parliamentary speech, as that gives a more reasonable amount of data to comb through. None of the examples of on the up before the first appearance of on the up and up (1946) are on the up to mean 'improving'—they are all on the up [noun], using up as a modifier for the noun. The 1946 Hansard example of up and up is used to mean 'growing, successful' (the b sense), as are the subsequent examples (33 of them). The first example of on the up in that meaning is in 1978. So, that is making it look like the phrase was cut rather than expanded in BrE.

Thanks to Thomas for pointing this one out!

And thanks to Jan Freeman and Ben Yagoda for noticing it earlier. I'd forgotten about Ben's post here.



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Breeching Valves – Should They be Used in Sprinkler Systems?

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2019-09-24T20:27:32Z

What on earth is a breeching valve? A breeching valve, also known as a safety shutoff valve or excess flow valve, monitors pressure and flow in a system. Upon seeing excessive flow, the valve will automatically close, essentially shutting off or


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Research Foundation Set to Study the Economic and Emotional Impact of Active Shooter/Hostile Events

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2019-10-16T19:14:39Z

The Fire Protection Research Foundation, the research affiliate of NFPA is overseeing a two-year project on the Economic and Emotional Impact of an Active Shooter/Hostile Event – thanks to Fire Prevention and Safety Grant money from FEMA.


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Changing of the guard at the Fire Protection Research Foundation

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2019-10-31T20:50:59Z

Amanda Kimball has been named executive director of the Fire Protection Research Foundation (Research Foundation). The eight-year veteran of the independent, non-profit research affiliate of the National Fire Protection Association replaces Casey Grant


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  • fire protection research foundation
  • research
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The Women of NFPA Celebrate National STEM/STEAM Day

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2019-11-08T15:31:41Z

National STEM/STEAM Day, celebrated November 8 this year, was established to help students recognize and advance in the fields of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Females at NFPA working in STEM/STEAM roles celebrate this mission


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Transition in the Refrigeration Industry Will Have an Impact on Emergency Response

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2019-11-12T19:46:05Z

  The ongoing push toward sustainability of refrigeration systems requires the adoption of low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants to meet the shift in environmental regulations. In 2016, nearly 200 countries signed the Kigali Agreement, a


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Despite relatively small numbers, more women are assuming leadership roles in the US fire service

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2020-02-25T17:00:56Z

It will come as no surprise to women in the fire service but the number of female firefighters in the U.S. remains relatively low, according to the most recent U.S. Fire Department Profile from NFPA. The newest data was released today on the heels of a


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International Firefighters’ Day: Recognizing and Supporting Firefighters in Their All-Hazards Role

By community.nfpa.org
Published On :: 2020-05-04T17:42:26Z

Today, May 4th, is International Firefighters’ Day. Each year on this day, firefighters are celebrated – and rightly so.   Most people have an image of firefighters clad in heavy coats, over-sized boots and sturdy helmets, rushing into


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COVID-19 and its effects on the environment

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 18:30:00 +0000

As SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus pathogen that causes the illness COVID-19, sweeps across the globe, social distancing measures are noticeably impacting the environment. Consequently, both the preservation and restoration of environmental quality are experiencing a new normal as the pandemic continues.[...]


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Prefab Danish home was built from CLT and weathered steel in just 3 days

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 17:30:00 +0000

Set into the lush green landscape of Denmark's Fyn island, Villa Korup is a large home designed for a family of six. A collaboration between Danish architect Jan Henrik Jansen and Australian architect Marshall Blecher, Villa Korup, which features three elongated "wings", was prefabricated offsite using weathered steel and CLT panels.[...]


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Sweden and Austria close their last coal plants

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 15:30:00 +0000

Europe just gained its second and third coal-free countries. Sweden and Austria have both shut their last coal-fired plants in late April, joining Belgium in going coal-free in favor of renewable energy sources.[...]


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New net-zero LivingHomes capture the future of sustainable living

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 16:30:01 +0000

Koto Design has teamed up with Plant Prefab to create two new incredible net-zero energy homes. Koto LivingHome 1 and Koto LivingHome 2 are modular homes that incorporate sustainable living systems of the future. Under the ethos of creating great architecture that is more sustainable, the dwellings are powerhouses of energy-efficiency, with passive elements to reduce energy demand and active systems that allow homeowners to reduce electricity consumption through an app.[...]


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LEED Gold-targeted library and community park has otherworldly appeal

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Fri, 01 May 2020 16:30:00 +0000

Toronto-based architecture firm RDHA has completed the Springdale Library and Komagata Maru Park, a new inclusive gathering space for Brampton, a city located about 45 minutes west of Toronto. Designed as a visual contrast to the flat suburban environment, the architects created an undulating landscape of hills that is reinforced by the building’s mountainous form. Surrounded by walls of glass and solar shades, the green-roofed library is powered by geothermal energy and is expected to achieve LEED Gold certification.[...]


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Brother sister duo create tropical tiny home in Hawaii

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Tue, 05 May 2020 15:30:00 +0000

Tiny homes are still all the rage within the minimalist and wanderlust communities of the world, and what better place to consider tiny living than in the warmth of the big island, Hawaii? If equatorial location is on your must-have list, this tiny home might be just the serving of simplicity and decadence you’re looking for. [...]


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10 ways to celebrate Mothers Day virtually in 2020

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Thu, 07 May 2020 14:30:00 +0000

With the majority of the country continuing to observe social distancing and shelter-in-place laws, families are beginning to face a new normal of interacting for the holidays. Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday, and while most of us won’t be able to see our moms in person this year, there are still ways to celebrate! A silver-lining? Choosing to celebrate from home, social distance-style, can be a win for the environment, too.[...]


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Skate the streets in style on these handmade wood skateboards

By inhabitat.com
Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 16:30:00 +0000

With limited traffic on the roads, cruising down abandoned streets on a slick new skateboard can be a dream come true for many skateboarders. Thanks to Rustek's new collection of wooden skateboards, handcrafted out of sustainably sourced wood, we can all dream of popping sweet 180-degree ollies while soaring down the street.[...]


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Rise and Fall of the Rupert Empire

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 13:06:40 -0400



Rise and Fall of the Rupert Empire


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The Sucker

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Mon, 06 Nov 2017 13:20:58 -0500



The Sucker


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They That Sow The Wind…

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Wed, 30 Jan 2019 06:03:50 -0500



They That Sow The Wind…


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…Reap the Whirlwind

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Wed, 06 Feb 2019 06:53:24 -0500



…Reap the Whirlwind


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…Reap the Whirlwind part Two

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Wed, 13 Feb 2019 10:31:58 -0500



…Reap the Whirlwind part Two


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…Reap the Whirlwind part Three

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Wed, 20 Feb 2019 09:48:31 -0500



…Reap the Whirlwind part Three


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…Reap the Whirlwind part Four

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 21:47:32 -0400



…Reap the Whirlwind part Four


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He Who Saw The Abyss

By abominable.cc
Published On :: Thu, 25 Apr 2019 04:29:33 -0400



He Who Saw The Abyss


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Artists Make Murals At Their Own Homes

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 11:21:28 -0700

With all of her plans cancelled because of the crisis that’s hit our planet recently, Jacoba Niepoort decided to use her own home to create murals.

“I wanted to use the spaces we were in to create parallel individual works.”

Together with Miami-based artist Alex Void and the Void Projects’ creative team, Niepoort curated Home MuralFest, which inspired many artists around the world to paint on the walls of their living rooms, studios, and garden sheds.

Check out the various murals over at Colossal.

(Image Credit: David de la Mano/ Void Projects/ Colossal)

(Image Credit: Helen Bur and Erin Holly/ Void Projects/ Colossal)


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COVID-Themed Lures Target SCADA Sectors With Data Stealing Malware

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 03:58:02 PDT

A new malware campaign has been found using coronavirus-themed lures to strike government and energy sectors in Azerbaijan with remote access trojans (RAT) capable of exfiltrating sensitive documents, keystrokes, passwords, and even images from the webcam. The targeted attacks employ Microsoft Word documents as droppers to deploy a previously unknown Python-based RAT dubbed "PoetRAT" due to


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The Incident Response Challenge 2020 — Win $5,000 Prize!

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 08:15:24 PDT

Cybersecurity firm Cynet today announced the launch of a first of its kind challenge to enable Incident Response professionals to test their skills with 25 forensic challenges that were built by top researchers and analysts. The challenge is available on https://incident-response-challenge.com/ and is open to anyone willing to test his or her investigation skills, between April 21st and May


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Hackers Trick 3 British Private Equity Firms Into Sending Them $1.3 Million

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 03:01:01 PDT

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to — while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News,


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Facebook Launches 'Discover,' A Secure Proxy to Browse the Internet for Free

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 06:19:38 PDT

More than six years after Facebook launched its ambitious Free Basics program to bring the Internet to the masses, the social network is back at it again with a new zero-rating initiative called Discover. The service, available as a mobile web and Android app, allows users to browse the Internet using free daily data caps. Facebook Discover is currently being tested in Peru in partnership


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The Wayfinder: YA Fantasy

By www.darcypattison.com
Published On :: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 14:36:57 +0000

The post The Wayfinder: YA Fantasy appeared first on Fiction Notes.

READ A FREE HEARTLAND TALES SHORT STORY: CLICK HERE The Wayfinder was my first published novel, 2000 Greenwillow/Harpercollins. I remember where I was when I heard the news that someone wanted to publish this manuscript. I was with my oldest daughter, Sara, at a local mall. I had to use a pay phone to call Continue Reading

The post The Wayfinder: YA Fantasy appeared first on Fiction Notes.


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Our mystery guest + le cafoutche = The "everything room" in France

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:51:30 +0200

Up till now, the best part of our cafoutche was the view. More about a few sweet and savory projects in today's missive. Thank you for reading and sharing this post with a friend! Today's Word: cafoutche : storage room, cupboard AUDIO FILE: click here to listen to the following quote in French Cafoutche: De l’occitan cafoucho synonyme de cahute. A Marseille il désigne un petit placard où l’on met de tout et de rien. Peut désigner la cave, aussi bien qu’une petite pièce fermée ou un débarras. Cafoutche: from Occitan cafoucho synonymous with hut. In Marseille this designates a small closet where you put everything and nothing. May refer to the cellar, as well as a small closed room or storage room. --www.lasardineduport.fr A DAY IN A FRENCH LIFE by Kristi Espinasse Not only is our guest on the mend, she is mending! Helping, that is, to fix everything from a punctual petit creux to our unruly store room--insisting all the while, ça fait du bien de travailler. What a positive way to look at work--as something that makes us feel better! I know this is true with my writing which I often put off to a later date,...

          


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Here’s Why Americans Need a Basic Income During the Coronavirus Outbreak

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 19:53:52 +0000

Dramatic action is needed now to blunt the immediate pain of vulnerable workers.


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17 Years Later: The Consequences of Invading Iraq

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:10:59 +0000

While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five […]


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Elections May Have to Change During the Coronavirus Outbreak. Here’s How.

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 17:12:50 +0000

As the novel coronavirus spreads through the U.S. during presidential primaries, election and government officials are scrambling to figure out how to allow voters to cast their ballots safely ― or postpone primaries altogether. Managing in-person voting during an unprecedented pandemic has forced authorities to overcome new virus-related hurdles: providing sufficient cleaning supplies to polling […]


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These Are the 51 GOP Senators Who Just Voted Against Expanding Paid Sick Leave to Protect Americans

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 20:17:51 +0000

Republican senators on Wednesday teamed up to kill an amendment introduced by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray that would have expanded paid sick leave to millions of U.S. workers left out of a bipartisan coronavirus relief package. Every Republican present for the vote, 51 in total, voted against the amendment while every Senate Democrat voted in favor. […]


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The Dem Primary is Over, and We Need Bernie Sanders to Lead on Health Care From the Senate

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 22:56:29 +0000

On Tuesday, I cast a joyless vote for the very much politically doomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Illinois primary, in an elementary school where hushed whispers and fearful glances had replaced the normal din of an election day. There was no one standing just outside the perimeter hustling me to vote for this […]


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Not Giving Up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 23:32:00 +0000

The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of […]


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If Trump Declares Martial Law Due to Coronavirus, Can He Suspend the Election?

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 05:52:16 +0000

Following the criticism that he has mismanaged the nation’s response to the coronavirus epidemic, Trump has declared himself a “wartime president.”  If martial law is next, what will happen to the November election?


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Imagining A New World on the Other Side of the Pandemic

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 21:08:04 +0000

At The Nation, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has a provocative piece that imagines how future historians may come to write the story of the Covid-19 pandemic. The speculative history takes the form of a “best-case” scenario that serves as both a challenge and a salve, an inspirational fantasy to help balance out the more easily imagined […]


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THE NEW CANADIAN GUN BAN

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Mon, 04 May 2020 13:01:53 +0000

Our Canadian friends knew it was coming even before the spree killing in Nova Scotia. That atrocity just gave the Prohibitionists more blood in which to dance.  The RCMP has not yet made public exactly what firearms were involved in … Read more


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APPRECIATING THOSE ON THE FRONT LINES

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 21:03:24 +0000

Reader Joe Wolking passed along a poem I’d like to share with you. It speaks to law enforcement officers, by extension offers homage also to firefighter/paramedics and all those on the medical front during the current crisis: Freedom: By Joe … Read more


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Please Stop Using The 'Brown Country' Lens Filter

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 PDT

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 06th, 2020 


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Mississippi Blew Money For The Poor On Brett Favre And Pro Wrestlers

By feedproxy.google.com
Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 PDT

By Isaac Cabe  Published: May 06th, 2020 


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