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The column republished below, originally at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/04/22/primetime.html, was the vector that connected me to my dear friend Gardner Campbell. I'm resurrecting it here partly just to bring it back online, but mainly to celebrate the ways in which Gardner — a film scholar among many other things — is, right now, bringing his film expertise to the practice of online teaching.
In this post he reflects:
Most of the learning spaces I've been in provide very poorly, if at all, for the supposed magic of being co-located. A state-mandated prison-spec windowless classroom has less character than a well-lighted Zoom conference. A lectern with a touch-pad control for a projector-and-screen combo is much less flexible and, I'd argue, conveys much less human connection and warmth than I can when I share a screen on Zoom during a synchronous class, or see my students there, not in front of a white sheet of reflective material, but in the medium with me, lighting up the chat, sharing links, sharing the simple camaraderie of a hearty "good morning" as class begins.
And in this one he shares the course trailer (!) for Fiction into film: a study of adaptations of "Little Women".
My 2005 column was a riff on a New York Times article, Is Cinema Studies the new MBA? It was perhaps a stretch, in 2005, to argue for cinema studies as an integral part of the new freshman comp. The argument makes a lot more sense now.
The New Freshman Comp
For many years I have alternately worn two professional hats: writer and programmer. Lately I find myself wearing a third hat: filmmaker. When I began making the films that I now call screencasts, my readers and I both sensed that this medium was different enough to justify the new name that we collaboratively gave it. Here's how I define the difference. Film is a genre of storytelling that addresses the whole spectrum of human experience. Screencasting is a subgenre of film that can tell stories about the limited — but rapidly growing — slice of our lives that is mediated by software.
Telling stories about software in this audiovisual way is something I believe technical people will increasingly want to do. To explain why, let's first discuss a more ancient storytelling mode: writing.
The typical reader of this column is probably, like me, a writer of both prose and code. Odds are you identify yourself as a coder more than as a writer. But you may also recently have begun blogging, in which case you've seen your writing muscles grow stronger with exercise.
Effective writing and effective coding are more closely related than you might think. Once upon a time I spent a year as a graduate student and teaching assistant at an Ivy League university. My program of study was science writing, but that was a tiny subspecialty within a larger MFA (master of fine arts) program dedicated to creative writing. That's what they asked me to teach, and the notion terrified me. I had no idea what I'd say to a roomful of aspiring poets and novelists. As it turned out, though, many of these kids were in fact aspiring doctors, scientists, and engineers who needed humanities credits. So I decided to teach basic expository writing. The university's view was that these kids had done enough of that in high school. Mine was that they hadn't, not by a long shot.
I began by challenging their reverence for published work. Passages from books and newspapers became object lessons in editing, a task few of my students had ever been asked to perform in a serious way. They were surprised by the notion that you could improve material that had been professionally written and edited, then sold in bookstores or on newsstands. Who were they to mess with the work of the pros?
I, in turn, was surprised to find this reverent attitude even among the budding software engineers. They took it for granted that programs were imperfect texts, always subject to improvement. But they didn't see prose in the same way. They didn't equate refactoring a program with editing a piece of writing, as I did then and still do.
When I taught this class more than twenty years ago the term "refactoring" wasn't commonly applied to software. Yet that's precisely how I think about the iterative refinement of prose and of code. In both realms, we adjust vocabulary to achieve consistency of tone, and we transform structure to achieve economy of expression.
I encouraged my students to regard writing and editing as activities governed by engineering principles not unlike the ones that govern coding and refactoring. Yes, writing is a creative act. So is coding. But in both cases the creative impulse is expressed in orderly, calculated, even mechanical ways. This seemed to be a useful analogy. For technically-inclined students earning required humanities credits, it made the subject seem more relevant and at the same time more approachable.
In the pre-Internet era, none of us foresaw the explosive growth of the Internet as a textual medium. If you'd asked me then why a programmer ought to be able to write effectively, I'd have pointed mainly to specs and manuals. I didn't see that software development was already becoming a global collaboration, that email and newsgroups were its lifeblood, and that the ability to articulate and persuade in the medium of text could be as crucial as the ability to design and build in the medium of code.
Nowadays, of course, software developers have embraced new tools of articulation and persuasion: blogs, wikis. I'm often amazed not only by the amount of writing that goes on in these forms, but also by its quality. Writing muscles do strengthen with exercise, and the game of collaborative software development gives them a great workout.
Not everyone drinks equally from this fountain of prose, though. Developers tend to write a great deal for other developers, but much less for those who use their software. Laziness is a factor; hubris even more so. We like to imagine that our software speaks for itself. And in some ways that's true. Documentation is often only a crutch. If you have to explain how to use your software, you've failed.
It may, however, be obvious how to use a piece of software, and yet not at all obvious why to use it. I'll give you two examples: Wikipedia and del.icio.us. Anyone who approaches either of these applications will immediately grasp their basic modes of use. That's the easy part. The hard part is understanding what they're about, and why they matter.
A social application works within an environment that it simultaneously helps to create. If you understand that environment, the application makes sense. Otherwise it can seem weird and pointless.
Paul Kedrosky, an investor, academic, and columnist, alluded to this problem on his blog last month:
Funny conversation I had with someone yesterday: We agreed that the thing that generally made us both persevere and keep trying any new service online, even if we didn't get it the first umpteen times, was having Jon Udell post that said service was useful. After all, if Jon liked it then it had to be that we just hadn't tried hard enough. [Infectious Greed]
I immodestly quote Paul's remarks in order to revise and extend them. I agree that the rate-limiting factor for software adoption is increasingly not purchase, or installation, or training, but simply "getting it." And while I may have a good track record for "getting it," plenty of other people do too — the creators of new applications, obviously, as well as the early adopters. What's unusual about me is the degree to which I am trained, inclined, and paid to communicate in ways that help others to "get it."
We haven't always seen the role of the writer and the role of the developer as deeply connected but, as the context for understanding software shifts from computers and networks to people and groups, I think we'll find that they are. When an important application's purpose is unclear on the first umpteen approaches, and when "getting it" requires hard work, you can't fix the problem with a user-interface overhaul or a better manual. There needs to be an ongoing conversation about what the code does and, just as importantly, why. Professional communicators (like me) can help move things along, but everyone needs to participate, and everyone needs to be able to communicate effectively.
If you're a developer struggling to evangelize an idea, I'd start by reiterating that your coding instincts can also help you become a better writer. Until recently, that's where I'd have ended this essay too. But recent events have shown me that writing alone, powerful though it can be, won't necessarily suffice.
I've written often — and, I like to think, cogently — about wikis and tagging. But my screencasts about Wikipedia and del.icio.us have had a profoundly greater impact than anything I've written on these topics. People "get it" when they watch these movies in ways that they otherwise don't.
It's undoubtedly true that an audiovisual narrative enters many 21st-century minds more easily, and makes a more lasting impression on those minds, than does a written narrative. But it's also true that the interactive experience of software is fundamentally cinematic in nature. Because an application plays out as a sequence of frames on a timeline, a narrated screencast may be the best possible way to represent it and analyze it.
If you buy either or both of these explanations, what then? Would I really suggest that techies will become fluid storytellers not only in the medium of the written essay, but also in the medium of the narrated screencast? Actually, yes, I would, and I'm starting to find people who want to take on the challenge.
A few months ago I heard from Michael Tiller, who describes himself as a "mechanical engineer trapped in a computer scientist's body." Michael has had a long and passionate interest in Modelica, an open, object-oriented language for modeling mechanical, electrical, electronic, hydraulic, thermal, and control systems. He wanted to work with me to develop a screencast on this topic. But it's far from my domains of expertise and, in the end, all he really needed was my encouragement. This week, Michael launched a website called Dynopsis.com that's chartered to explore the intersection of engineering and information technologies. Featured prominently on the site is this 20-minute screencast in which he illustrates the use of Modelica in the context of the Dymola IDE.
This screencast was made with Windows Media Encoder 9, and without the help of any editing. After a couple of takes, Michael came up with a great overview of the Modelica language, the Dymola tool, and the modeling and simulation techniques that they embody. Since he is also author of a book on this subject, I asked Michael to reflect on these different narrative modes, and here's how he responded on his blog:
If I were interested in teaching someone just the textual aspects of the Modelica language, this is exactly the approach I would take.
But when trying to teach or explain a medium that is visual, other tools can be much more effective. Screencasts are one technology that could really make an impact on the way some subjects are taught and I can see how these ideas could be extended much further. [Dynopsis: Learning by example: screencasts]
We're just scratching the surface of this medium. Its educational power is immediately obvious, and over time its persuasive power will come into focus too. The New York Times recently asked: "Is cinema studies the new MBA?" I'll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we'll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles — consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement — will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.


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The Rise of the Tick
Carl Zimmer walks into the woods to find out why these tiny beasts are skyrocketing in number—and outsmarting scientists with every bite
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I'm tailing a Ford pickup truck along the eastern bank of the Connecticut River. When we reach a sign for Lord Creek Farm, the pickup turns off the road and I follow up a dusty driveway. We park in the shadow of an enormous red horse barn, next to paddocks full of jump gates, where riding lessons are under way.
I get out of my car and climb into the passenger side of the pickup. It's driven by Scott Williams, a wildlife biologist from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven. Williams, 38, has the poise and scale of a bear standing upright. He wears a faded peach T-shirt that reads, DO I LOOK LIKE A @&#@& PEOPLE PERSON? Next to him is Megan Floyd, 24, and riding in the bed in back is Michael Short, 51, both research technicians.
Williams drives us across the farm, past freshly groomed meadows, and into the forest. The morning is magnificent, the sunlight slipping through gaps in the canopy. But we're not here to admire the scenery. We're here on a hunt, and our quarry is the black-legged tick. If you want to find black-legged ticks, you could not ask for a more spectacularly infested piece of land than Lord Creek Farm.
"You get absolutely astronomical abundance here—maybe 1,000 ticks an acre," Williams declares. He sounds both appalled and delighted.
Lord Creek Farm holds another attraction for Williams: it is located in the town of Lyme. As in Lyme disease, caused by bacteria known as Borrelia burgdorferi. As in the town where Lyme disease was first discovered in the late 1970s, before it was recognized across the United States, from New York to California. Today, a quarter of a century after its discovery, Lyme, Connecticut, is still a great place to study Lyme disease. Seventy percent of the ticks on Lord Creek Farm are infected with Borrelia. I'm hoping one of them doesn't find me today.
Williams, Floyd, and Short climb out of the truck and grab blue plastic crates from the back. I follow Williams into the woods, walking over jewelweed, wine raspberries, and Japanese barberry, which stabs our legs with hypodermic thorns.
Barberry was brought to the United States in the late 1800s as an ornamental plant, and it has swept across the forests of 32 states. The plant grows into a man-size umbrella. Its branches dip down to the ground and begin to lay new roots, which become plants of their own. Williams and his colleagues have found that Japanese barberry also creates the humid conditions that let ticks thrive.
"It's really depressing," says Williams, looking down the slope. "The earth curves, and you still see barberry."
Williams and I wade toward a tree tied with a blue ribbon. Nearby is a low orange flag, next to which is a gray metal Sherman live trap. Williams picks up the trap and tips in the door. No one's inside. He walks to the next flag.
That trap is also empty. It takes four visits before he finally says, "Aha!" He tips the trap toward me, holding the door open. A white-footed mouse huddles at the base, calculating its best option for escape.
After checking 60 traps, Williams, Short, and Floyd emerge from the forest. Between them they've gathered eight mice—a low number, Williams notes. He sets his blue crate on the truck bed and pulls out three white plastic folding chairs. Short and Floyd bring out a plastic table and snap open its legs. It looks as if they're going to have a picnic, but the equipment they put on the table dispels the impression: a box of syringes, a bottle of isoflurane, blue plastic gloves. They're actually going to perform a surgery of sorts.
"You might get to see us do some mouse CPR," says Williams.
He turns to Short. "I'll do data," he says. "You want to be in the hot seat?"
"I'll be in the hot seat," says Short.
Short sits down next to the crate of traps, soaks a cotton ball in isoflurane, and drops it in a ziplock bag. Tipping open a trap, he pulls out a mouse by the tail and slips it into the bag. The mouse scrambles around until the isoflurane vapors knock it out. In a few seconds it is asleep, its lungs rising and falling gently. Short pulls the mouse back out by the scruff of the neck and gets to work.
"Mice go out quickly and come back quickly," says Williams. "That gives you a two-minute window."
The first thing Short does is bring the mouse close to his nose so he can inspect its ears. "Two ticks," he announces, holding the mouse out to Williams.
Williams takes a close look for himself. "One larva, one nymph," he says.
The larva is a wisp of an animal about the size of a grain of salt, hatched within the past few weeks. Once a tick larva emerges from its egg, it immediately begins searching for a host. Scientists call this behavior questing, although a questing black-legged tick doesn't have a lot in common with Sir Galahad. It just finds a good place to wait—on a stem of jewelweed, say, or a branch of barberry—in the hope of snagging onto a passing mammal.
The mouse that Williams holds picked up its questing tick larva on a walk through the woods. Once the tick larva recognized it had attached to a host, it crawled onto the mouse's fur, made its way to an ear, where blood vessels run close to the skin, and began to drink blood.
A larva will drink for a few days, fall off, molt, and grow to be about twice as big. This next stage is known as the nymph stage.
The nymph that was clamped onto our mouse's ear likely hatched a year ago and, after its larval meal, dropped off and survived the winter. In the summer, it reemerged to find a new host. Now it's having the second meal of its life. Once it has finished feasting for a few days, it will drop off, molt, and become an adult. The adults quest once more for a host, but the males also search for a mate. After a female tick mates, it lays a few thousand eggs on the forest floor. Males and females both have a two-year life span.
There's a fair chance that the nymph on this mouse's ear is carrying Borrelia, which it is injecting into the mouse's bloodstream. Ticks are born free of Borrelia; the larva on Short's mouse may well be getting infected at this very moment. For Borrelia, mice are a bridge from one tick to another.
Short needs some blood from the animal, but its rodent vessels are too small to get a draw. He will have to go for the heart. He flips the mouse on its back and feels for its sternum. With a free hand, he picks up a thin syringe and guides the needle upward underneath the rib cage. In one smooth motion, the needle plunges into the mouse's beating heart. After a moment, a few drops of blood flow into the syringe.
"It's a lot easier with a deer," says Williams. "You go for the jugular, and it's like a hose of blood. With the mice, if you don't go straight in and straight out, you'll scramble their insides."
Short pulls the syringe out, leaving the mouse no worse for wear. He hands the syringe to Floyd, weighs the mouse on a hanging scale—17 grams—and punches a metal tag into its ear. Short finishes up just as the mouse starts to wiggle awake. It's still getting its bearing as he drops it back into its Sherman trap and lets the door snap shut. (He'll release it later.) Floyd transfers the mouse's blood into an ampoule, which she puts into a baby blue Igloo cooler sitting by her feet.
When Floyd, Short, and Williams get back to New Haven this afternoon, they'll hand the cooler over to a serologist, who will examine the eight blood samples for signs of antibodies. The mouse Short just impaled may turn out to be carrying Borrelia. And it may also be carrying other microbes that can make us sick. It may even carry pathogens that are entirely new to science. Ticks are champions at spreading diseases, expanding in both poor countries and rich ones, and delivering an extraordinary menagerie of bacteria, protozoans, and viruses. In a 2010 report on the dangers of ticks, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, declared the animals, with what sounds almost like admiration, "the Swiss Army knife of disease vectors."
It's startling to look at the graphs of tick-borne diseases over the past few decades. They're mostly going in the wrong direction. The research on Lyme disease is fairly recent, sparked in the mid-1970s after a cluster of children around Lyme developed fever and aches. They were diagnosed with juvenile arthritis—a peculiar diagnosis for so many children in one place. Their parents searched for an explanation, and eventually Allan Steere, a doctor at Yale, figured out that they suffered from an infectious disease. The fact that they all came from a rural part of the state suggested that an insect or some other animal had delivered the infection. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, an entomologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discovered corkscrew-shaped bacteria in black-legged ticks from Long Island. He exposed the bacteria to serum from people with Lyme disease and discovered that their antibodies swarmed around the microbes. That was a sign that these bacteria—which would later be named Borrelia burgdorferi after him—were the cause of Lyme disease.
Since Burgdorfer's discovery, Lyme disease has spread relentlessly. New York and other northeastern states started recording new infections in the eighties. In the Midwest, Lyme disease came to light around the same time in Wisconsin and began radiating out from there. Today it can be found as far west as California, as far south as Virginia, and to the north across the border into Canada. Each year, 38,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with the condition. The list of symptoms includes fever, aches, fatigue, and, if left untreated for a length of time, arthritis, heart arrhythmia, and neurological damage. Lyme disease is rarely fatal.
The lone star tick's saliva contains a protein that, injected into a person, can trigger a violent allergy to meat. Meanwhile, dog ticks and Rocky Mountain spotted ticks carry proteins that can cause a condition called tick paralysis.
While Lyme may be the best-known disease carried by ticks, it's hardly the only one. In 1893, for example, veterinarians discovered that ticks harbored an amoeba-like pathogen that killed cows by the thousands. Babesia, as it came to be known, can also make people sick; the first case of human babesiosis was recorded in 1957 in Yugoslavia. Babesiosis causes a lot of the same symptoms as Lyme disease, such as fever, fatigue, and aches, as well as plenty of its own—like drenching sweats, nausea, and anemia.
Cases of babesiosis have been on the rise, following the same geographic pattern that Lyme did in the 1980s. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started tracking babesiosis in 2011 and has since recorded 847 confirmed cases, along with 277 probable cases.
Both Babesia and Borrelia can be carried by the same black-legged tick, which means that a single bite can give you both. In fact, black-legged ticks can carry at least half a dozen pathogens, and that list is growing. In a January 2013 report, Yale scientists linked another species, Borrelia miyamotoi, to New Englanders sick with virus-like symptoms. They estimate that 4,000 Americans will be infected with it this year.
Other species of ticks in the United States carry their own menagerie of pathogens and havoc-wreaking proteins. The lone star tick, which lives in the Southeast and the Midwest, carries bacteria called Ehrlichia. Infection with Ehrlichia is rarely fatal, but the pathogen can cause fevers and aches and even kidney and lung damage. The lone star tick's saliva also contains a protein that, injected into a person, can trigger a violent allergy to meat. Meanwhile, dog ticks and Rocky Mountain spotted ticks carry proteins that can, on rare occasion, cause a condition called tick paralysis. A victim's legs start to go limp, and then the paralysis rises like a tide over the next few days. The cure is amazingly simple: remove the tick and the saliva runs out. Within an hour, a person will start to recover. But if it doesn't occur to anyone to look for the tick, the tide of paralysis will keep rising. The speech slurs, the breathing shallows, and the victim dies.
Ticks have been around for about 300 million years, according to evolutionary biologists, and today there are 878 known species, found on every continent. If you travel to Antarctica and walk along its coasts, you will find seabird ticks, Ixodes uriae, waiting on the frigid stones to attack any penguin that comes waddling by.
Tick species differ in size, shape, and color. Some are drab, while others have beautiful braided patterns of white and black on their backs. But in the all-important matter of getting a meal, they're pretty much the same. A questing tick will find a good place to wait for a host. Many species have no eyes, but they can monitor vibrations in the ground and sense body heat, smells, and wafts of carbon dioxide. When a promising animal passes by, a tick reaches out with its legs, which have little hooks to grab hold.
Once a tick finds a host, it creeps along until it finds a good patch of skin to dig into—typically a place where the blood vessels run close to the surface and where it's hard to be scratched away. It latches on with two of its legs, angles its back end in the air, and cuts open the skin with a mouth that looks like a Sawzall. Into the wound the tick inserts its barbed, tube-shaped mouthpart. The barbs make it hard for the tick to be removed; certain tick species lock themselves in place even more effectively by squirting out liquid cement, which forms a hardened cone around its mouthpart.
The shredded capillaries in its host's skin gush out blood, forming a tiny subterranean pool. The tick draws up this blood slowly. One slurp may last as long as 20 minutes. After each drink, the tick reverses the flow and squirts saliva into the wound.
Tick saliva is an invertebrate magic potion. Normally, our body would quickly harden the blood pool with clots, but the tick's saliva contains a protein that coaxes our own bodies to slice those clots apart. Other saliva proteins command the torn blood vessels to stay open wide to allow fresh blood to pour into the pool. Still others fend off the immune system and prevent us from feeling itchy.
Over the course of a few days, a feeding tick cycles between drinking and drooling. Its body swells. From larva to fully engorged adult, a female tick will grow to 2,880 times its original size. Try to imagine a human baby ballooning to the size of a small humpback whale—by eating only three meals over the course of two years. Such is the life of a tick.
Once a tick has had its fill, it dissolves its cement cone, pulls its mouthpart out of its host, and falls to the ground. While ticks may be best known as bloodsuckers, they spend most of their lives as starvers. Dehydration becomes a huge threat to their survival; many ticks desiccate before reaching the next stage in their life cycle. To keep from dehydrating, ticks will hide in humid spots on the forest floor. They also produce a spongy material that they gather around their mouthparts to absorb water from the air. Blizzards are a blessing to ticks; the snow insulates them from the cold air and can freeze-dry them into a state of suspended animation for weeks.
It's a pretty grim existence, but as an evolutionary strategy it shows no signs of going out of style.
Williams has contracted Lyme disease at least three times over the course of his career. "It takes my wife to tell me," he says. The symptoms come on quietly, disconnected. "If I get a knee ache, I take some Tylenol. I get grumpy. I get a fever at night," says Williams. "She's the one who says, 'You've got Lyme.'" He has a month's worth of antibiotics on standby.
Each time a tick saws into Williams's skin, it may also unload microbes. Borrelia burgdorferi dwell in the guts of ticks. As soon as the tick takes in its first drop of blood, the corkscrew-shaped bacteria begin multiplying, slowly drilling their way out of the tick's gut and through its body until they reach the salivary glands. (Their long journey means that if you carefully pull off a black-legged tick within 24 hours of getting bitten, you'll almost certainly avoid getting Lyme disease.)
When the tick switches from drinking blood to spraying saliva, the bacteria travel from the blood pool into the torn capillaries surrounding the wound. From there they can spread through Williams's bloodstream. The bacteria pick up Williams's own enzymes along the way, using them to cut their way out of the blood vessels and into the surrounding tissues—be it cartilage around a knee or the muscle of the heart. Borrelia fuels its journey with the sugar floating through Williams's body and hijacks his amino acids to build its own proteins.
Along the way, Borrelia also makes Williams sick. The bacteria don't directly harm him—they inject no toxins into his cells—but they lead his immune system on a devastating chase. Some immune cells fight disease by engulfing invaders, like the Blob. Borrelia is so fast that it can outswim these monsters. Other immune cells gather intelligence to kill Borrelia, grabbing proteins and bringing them to the lymph nodes, where they manufacture new immune cells targeted to Borrelia.
But Borrelia can outfox these special forces, too. Some of the immune cells make antibodies that grab onto Borrelia and act as a beacon for other cells. The bacteria produces proteins of its own that destroy these antibodies first. To escape immune cells that recognize Borrelia by their surface proteins, Borrelia shucks off their old surface proteins and builds new ones, like a fugitive changing his wig and coat. The assassin cells, still relying on their obsolete profile of Borrelia, search for the bacteria in vain.
Our immune system produces inflammation as it chases after Borrelia, which causes the symptoms of Lyme disease. It's that inflammation that is responsible for the telltale pink bull's-eye on the skin around the bite, as well as the fevers and aches. If the disease isn't caught soon enough, the inflammation can spread to the joints, causing severe pain and arthritis; to the heart, causing rhythm abnormalities; and to the brain, causing neurological damage and memory disorders.
The sooner Lyme disease is diagnosed, the more likely antibiotics can deliver a clean kill to Borrelia and stop the symptoms. Steven Kotler, a 46-year-old journalist and Outside contributor in Chimayo, New Mexico, knows all too well what happens when the bacteria go unnoticed for a length of time. The first sign that he had Lyme disease came in 1999, as he was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where he was living at the time. "My left thigh cramped up so much I had to pull over," he recalls. His life spiraled down from there; he began losing weight—eventually dropping 50 pounds—and ended up spending almost his entire day on the couch, too exhausted and in too much pain to get up. "I was crippled," Kotler says.
Kotler had traveled to Madagascar the year before, so his doctors searched for worms and other parasites in his stool. They found none. In his 2006 book West of Jesus, he listed some of the diseases he was informed he had—including the flu, schizophrenia, lupus, leukemia, and strep throat. When Kotler heard about Lyme disease, which had not yet become familiar in California, he suggested it as a possibility to one of his doctors. After all, he had come down with his symptoms not long after he had gone to Long Island for a wedding. Perhaps he'd been bitten by a tick. "You don't have Lyme," his doctor told him. "You have AIDS."
It took a year for Kotler to get properly diagnosed, and he was placed on antibiotics for months. Afterward, many of the symptoms continued to plague him, including intense fatigue and a sometimes uncontrollable mood. It wasn't until 2011 that Kotler felt back in the neighborhood of normal. Still, the damage had been done. "If I met you before I got Lyme, there's a chance I won't remember you," he says.
It's hard to appreciate just how many ticks are out there. We usually encounter them one at a time, worriedly plucking lone individuals off our skin. The best way to reckon with the sheer number of ticks is to do what tick scientists do many times a year: go into the woods and perform a tick drag.
I did my first tick drag last fall in a forest just outside Millbrook, New York. My mentor was Andrea Goth, 26, at the time a project leader at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies. She handed me a one-meter-square piece of cream-colored wide-wale corduroy. She had looped one end of the cloth over a wooden rod, which had a rope tied to each end. I laid the cloth flat on the forest floor and used the rope to pull it in a straight line for 100 meters.
When I got to the end of the transect, I wrapped a bungee cord around a young tree and hung the tick drag at shoulder height. It took a while to distinguish between black-legged tick larvae and bits of dirt. Pro tip: dirt doesn't crawl.
Once you can see tick larvae, the cloth starts to swarm with them. I began grabbing the larvae with fine tweezers, the pressure of my fingers pushing their legs out to the side. I dumped each one into a tiny alcohol vial.
"I'm up to 28!" I called out. Goth was standing a few trees away, systematically plucking off larvae and nymphs from her own tick drag.
"Be glad it's not 280," she replied, not taking her eyes off her collection of ticks.
The sheer volume of black-legged ticks in the eastern United States is staggering, but it's even more mind-blowing when you consider their history. Up until the mid-1900s, biologists found them only at the eastern end of Long Island and a few islands off the coast of Massachusetts.
Ticks themselves are awful travelers. During the months that they spend living on the ground, they may move a few yards. But when ticks climb aboard a host, they can travel for miles—especially on the deer that the adult ticks prefer.
Many experts think it's no coincidence that black-legged ticks and deer have similar histories of expansion. During the 19th century, white-tailed deer nearly disappeared from the eastern United States as farmers plowed under most of their forests. In Connecticut, the population dropped down to a dozen or so animals in the entire state. "It was big news if someone saw a deer," says Kirby Stafford, chief entomologist at the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station.
From larva to fully engorged adult, a female tick will grow to 2,880 times its original size. Try to imagine a human baby ballooning to the size of a small humpback whale—by eating only three meals over the course of two years.
Once the farms began to be abandoned in the early 1900s, and as developers planted delicious shrubs around suburban houses, deer populations expanded. Now there are about 120,000 deer in Connecticut alone. They presumably cast a shower of black-legged ticks in their wake.
When the cause of Lyme disease was first worked out in the early 1980s, the solution to the problem seemed obvious: get rid of deer. As the deer population dropped, so would the incidence of Lyme. But when wildlife managers put this solution into practice, it often didn't work. That failure led scientists to a deeper understanding of the ecology that fuels the black-legged tick boom.
Black-legged ticks may prefer deer as adults, but as larva and nymphs they end up on smaller animals—probably because they can't climb as high as adult ticks can. All told, black-legged ticks have been plucked off of some 175 species. They feed on birds, which can airlift them to new territory. And small mammals, like white-footed mice, nurture the younger generation of ticks.
Some of them also sustain Borrelia. The only way for the bacteria to endure is for older ticks to infect Borrelia-free larvae. Since deer don't pick up many larvae, their Borrelia doesn't spread very far. White-footed mice, on the other hand, can become covered in larvae and nymphs. Better yet, their tiny bodies can build up huge concentrations of Borrelia, which doesn't seem to make them sick.
Other hosts actually drive down tick numbers. Disease ecologist Rick Ostfeld and his colleagues at the Cary Institute have found that opossums are disastrous for black-legged ticks. Their immune systems kill off the pathogens that carry Lyme far more effectively than other species' do, and they carefully groom their skin and devour any ticks they come across. A single opossum may kill 5,000 ticks every week.
Some species may even be able to control tick numbers and infection prevalence not by killing the ticks but by killing their favorite hosts. That is the new argument that Taal Levi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cary Institute, put forward in a 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. After the morning tick drag, I sat down with Levi at a picnic table outside the institute to hear about the history of foxes.
Foxes were originally very abundant in the eastern United States, where they feasted on small mammals like white-footed mice. But the past few decades have not been good to them. "Fox harvests in the Northeast have declined substantially," says Levi.
A number of studies suggest that coyotes have been responsible for the decline. Originally, foxes coexisted with wolves in the eastern and midwestern United States. Once wolves were eradicated, coyotes expanded from the Midwest to take their place. Coyotes kill foxes or scare them out of range.
Levi and his colleagues built a mathematical model of how these changes can affect rates of Lyme disease. When foxes disappear, the model suggests, numbers of small mammals like white-footed mice boom, feeding a growing population of ticks and their pathogens. For evidence, Levi points to historical records from sites across the Midwest and eastern United States. In some places, Lyme disease rates have gone up even though the deer population has not. But the rates in those places match up nicely with a decline in fox numbers.
Meanwhile, Williams and his colleagues at Lord Creek Farm are testing another idea about what's driving Lyme disease. It occurred to Williams and his colleague Jeff Ward back in 2007. One day, while they were clearing a stand of Japanese barberry, they noticed something strange. "We said, 'Wow, we're really getting hammered with ticks,'" Williams recalls.
Williams and Ward speculated that the Japanese barberry was creating a miniature environment that favored ticks. So they began collecting tick specimens from barberry-infested sites around Connecticut, as well as from barberry-free sites. They also got rid of some barberry stands.
The results were striking. When the scientists dragged the barberry sites, they found 140 infected ticks per acre. Where they killed the barberry, they found only 40 ticks. And when they dragged places that were free of barberry, they found only ten.
"Look in there," Williams says to me as we walk back to the truck at Lord Creek Farm. He points to an explosion of barberry. "Look how dense it is. Underneath that nastiness it's really humid. A tick can hang out there and wait for a host."
Williams and his colleagues have put humidity sensors in Japanese barberry stands to see how comfortable it is for a tick. For 23 or even 24 hours a day, it's humid enough for questing and mating.
It's too early yet for Williams to say how important Japanese barberry has been to the spread of Lyme disease. But he thinks it could be remarkable. He and Ward once dug up a map showing the distribution of Japanese barberry.
"We overlaid the Lyme disease data map over it," says Williams. "It's amazing how well it lines up."
Last year I got to experience Lyme for myself. Or at least I think I did.
I began to feel unaccountably odd, with twinging aches around my shoulders and armpits. My doctor thought I seemed fine, but he raised his eyebrows when I mentioned that I had just taken my family on a weekend trip to Shelter Island, off the eastern end of Long Island. We'd spent a lovely afternoon hiking in the beautiful, tick-ridden Mashomack Preserve. Later I discovered that Mashomack is famous in the history of ticks: it was inside a tick collected on the preserve that Willy Burgdorfer discovered Borrelia.
My doctor prescribed antibiotics and sent me for a Lyme disease test. It seemed odd to me that he'd do both at the same time, rather than waiting for the test results before putting me on the drugs. But I went ahead and started taking doxycycline.
Ten days later, I went to my follow-up appointment. I felt fine. My doctor sat on a chair, resting a laptop on his thigh, and looked at my results on the screen.
"Well, you tested positive on the first test," he said. "On the second test, you tested negative. Which is typical."
The clearest sign that people have Lyme is that bull's-eye of inflammation that forms around the tick bite. But many people don't develop a ring, and others get it and fail to notice before it fades. Less than a third of people who get diagnosed with Lyme disease ever recall getting bitten by a tick. Those of us who feel odd but have no clear sign of Lyme must rely on a pair of unreliable tests.
In the first test, antibodies to Borrelia proteins are mixed into blood. If the antibodies grab onto the proteins, it's time for the second test. That involves subjecting them to an electric current. Borrelia proteins travel at a distinctive pace compared with our own.
Even if the diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne diseases was more effective, we wouldn't be able to eradicate them entirely. We humans are just a sideshow for ticks and their pathogens.
It's a lousy way to diagnose a disease. The first test frequently delivers false positives, because the antibodies are too eager to grab onto proteins other than those of Borrelia. The second test frequently delivers false negatives, because the proteins fail to turn up in the right spot. So I may—or may not—have gotten Lyme.
Unfortunately, my experience is fairly typical when it comes to tick-borne diseases. The diagnosis is clumsy, the treatment often crude. One obvious way to deal with Lyme disease would be to give people a vaccine. And several drugmakers started developing Lyme vaccines not long after the disease was recognized. SmithKline Beecham brought a vaccine to market in 1998.
The vaccine fared poorly. It couldn't be given to children, who are particularly prone to ticks, and in adults it provided only about 80 percent protection. Stories about arthritis-like symptoms caused sales to plummet, and SmithKline Beecham abandoned production. We are now in the strange situation where you can get your dog vaccinated for Lyme but you can't get vaccinated yourself.
Even if the diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne diseases was more effective, we wouldn't be able to eradicate them entirely. We humans are just a sideshow for ticks and their pathogens. The real action is happening out in our backyards, in our nature preserves, in abandoned lots behind strip malls. It's there that ticks are proliferating on the animals that thrive in our landscapes. Instead of human medicine, perhaps we should try ecological medicine.
A number of researchers are doing just that. They're building contraptions that can be filled with food for deer, mice, and other tick hosts. As the animals wiggle into the devices to eat, they rub against tick-killing ointments. Other researchers have put out vaccine-laden mouse bait, which would cause the mice to kill bacteria before they can spread to new ticks. Perhaps eliminating barberry would cut down on the tick population and reduce the rate of infection. Some researchers still think that wiping out deer should be part of the solution. And others have found fungi that can kill ticks in laboratory tests.
Entomologist Kirby Stafford has overseen tests of a number of these methods in Connecticut. Some work better than others, but at this point he doesn't expect a panacea. "We're never going to rid Connecticut of Lyme disease," he says. "That's the reality."
Stafford, Williams, and their colleagues now have a grant from the CDC to try a kitchen-sink approach. In some sites, they'll rip out barberry, apply tick-killing medicine, and vaccinate mice all at once. In others, they'll leave out one or more treatments to see if their success changes. "You can tease out which treatment is having an effect," Williams told me.
After Williams, Short, and Floyd finish their work at Lord Creek Farm, they plan to drive half an hour to set new traps in a forest in North Branford. Before leaving, Floyd leans out of the truck, holding out her thumb.
"Look," she says, wiping it on Williams's palm.
I can barely make out a mobile dot. "It's like a moving freckle," says Floyd.
We're looking at a black-legged tick nymph, possibly loaded with some of Lord Creek Farm's Borrelia and who knows what else. It tips forward and swiftly clamps into Williams's skin. He tries to get his massive fingers around it as Floyd points out another nymph creeping up his arm.
Williams starts to curse as he gets rid of the two ticks. He then begins a full-on self-inspection, hoisting a boot on the rear bumper of the truck, smacking his legs.
"Sometimes," he says, "you still get the heebie-jeebies."

subset: commoncrawl


text:
McCoy's injury continues a trend for Seahawks
May 28, 2013, 9:50 AM | Updated: 9:57 am
By Danny O'Neil
What should be one of the best opportunities in Seattle's offense has turned out to be one of the worst jobs.
It is one of the most inexplicable realities for Pete Carroll's Seahawks because this is a franchise that has tried so very hard to have a dangerous No. 2 tight end.
Seattle's plans for its No. 2 tight end again went awry when Anthony McCoy tore his Achilles tendon last week. (AP)
It was true in 2011 when Seattle signed Zach Miller as a free agent and hoped to pair him with John Carlson. At least that was the plan until Carlson suffered a season-ending shoulder injury during training camp.
And in 2012, Seattle traded for Kellen Winslow only to waive him a week before the regular season started after he refused to take the paycut the team believed he had committed to.
Now, it's Anthony McCoy, the sixth-round pick who was entering his fourth season, an undeniable talent who had been maddeningly unpredictable with a penchant for dropped passes. And now McCoy is out, having suffered a torn Achilles tendon during offseason workouts.
The injury leaves Seattle with Luke Willson, the fifth-round pick who was Rice's back-up tight end last year. He is the fastest tight end on Seattle's roster, but someone who only caught nine passes as a senior. Sean McGrath is the next likely in line.
So why's that such a big deal? We're talking about the back-up tight end, but that gets to the heart of why it is so important with Seattle's offense.
The Seahawks want to run the ball first and foremost, which is one of the reasons Miller has been so valuable to the team even as his receiving totals declined from his first four years in Oakland. Putting a second tight end into the formation forces defenses into a decision: Load up against the run with the extra blocker or honor the fact that two tight ends gives the Seahawks an extra pass-catching threat.
For the third consecutive season, Seattle's plans for the player at that No. 2 tight end have changed. It doesn't mean it won't work out for the Seahawks. What it does mean, though, is more pressure has been placed on Willson to contribute immediately.


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This is Lauryn Hill in Newark today arriving at court for her tax evasion trial. The federal government says she owes $1.5 million after not filing tax returns for several years. Here's her explanation about why she didn't bother paying taxes:
"Over-commercialization and its resulting restrictions and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of the individual. I did not deliberately abandon my fans, nor did I deliberately abandon any responsibilities, but I did however put my safety, health and freedom and the freedom, safety and health of my family first over all other material concerns! I also embraced my right to resist a system intentionally opposing my right to whole and integral survival.
My intention has always been to get this situation rectified. When I was working consistently without being affected by the interferences mentioned above, I filed and paid my taxes," she wrote. "This only stopped when it was necessary to withdraw from society, in order to guarantee the safety and well-being of myself and my family."
I just want to point out that Lauryn wasn't living in a cave during her time away from the taxes. I'm also pretty sure that she showered and used a modern toilet and was not involved in a car accident from driving around on unpaved roads with no street signs. She's full of sh-t.
I love her.
BECAUSE she is nuts. Like straight up crazy. I wish sometimes she could hold her crazy together more effectively to perform and record but I guess that's the point - on the occasions when her sh-t is right, it can be brilliant. Quite literally:
"I'll be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone."
Nina was an artist of another time and therefore of all time. I wonder if Lauryn too belongs to another era. (She should totally pay her taxes though.)
PS. If you are unfamiliar with Nina Simone's music, please, iTunes RIGHT NOW. I promise you, it will be a discovery.


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Google must respect the European Union's 'right to be forgotten' court ruling on all its sites, not just those it says target EU countries, the French data protection authority has ruled, giving the company 15 days to comply.
The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) ordered Google to remove the affected search results on all its domains, including google.com, or face a fine of up to €300,000 (about $337,000). So far, Google has only removed such results from those of its sites it says target EU users, including google.fr or google.de. French residents need only click the "Use Google.com" link on the google.fr homepage to have access to unfiltered search results.
The dispute began over a year ago, when the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) gave people the right to request removal of search results for queries including their names, if the results are inadequate or irrelevant.
This means that E.U. residents who want to remove a search result displayed on a search of their name can ask a search engine to delist it. The search engine must review the request and grant it if the proper conditions are met. If the search engine does not comply, they can lodge a complaint with their local data protection authority.
In France that authority is the CNIL, which has received hundreds of complaints from people who were denied a delisting by Google, the authority said Friday. After assessing the complaints, Google was ordered to delist several search results and was expressly told to do so on all its domains, not just on European domains such as google.fr or google.de, the CNIL said.
Just half of the requests approved
So far, Google has received over 55,000 requests from France to remove over 168,000 URLs, of which it removed almost 48 percent.
"In accordance with the CJEU judgement, the CNIL considers that in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing," the CNIL said, adding that the results should for instance also be delisted on the .com domain.
Search results should be delisted for French citizens using Google wherever they are and whatever the extension is, a CNIL spokeswoman said.
Google has been delisting search results only on its European domains and not on google.com, arguing that the ruling should apply to European searches and not worldwide.
"The ruling focused on services directed to European users, and that's the approach we are taking in complying with it," the company said, adding that it aims to strike the right balance in implementing the ruling and has been working closely with data protection authorities. The company has said that over 95 percent of queries originating in Europe are on local versions of its search engine.
Google can determine if a query on the .com domain comes from a European IP address, and already uses this technique to redirects users to local search engines—although it offers users that are not logged in to a Google account a link on the local page to return to the Google.com domain.
Google did not immediately respond to questions about why it doesn't delist search results if the .com domain is accessed from a European IP-address.
Meanwhile, Google appears to block search results made on European search domains made from abroad. From Japan for instance, searches made on .fr and .de domains showed a message that some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe.
If Google does not comply with CNIL's order, the authority will draft a report recommending the CNIL's committee in charge of imposing sanctions for violations of the French data protection law to impose a sanction. The highest possible sanction for the first step ins such a procedure is €150,000, which later can climb to €300,000, the CNIL spokeswoman said.


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Despite having a large portion of their state's economy saved by the Federal Government's auto bailouts, lawmakers in Michigan are preparing to express concerns and discontent over the White House's rumored new fuel economy standards. In case you're not already aware, it is believed the White House will push CAFE standards to 56.2 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025, nearly doubling today's standards.
In an article entitled "Michigan Lawmakers Prepare Letter on Fuel Economy Rules", published in the Detroit Free Press, Aaron M. Kessler writes:
It currently remains unclear whether the letter will specifically take on the 56 m.p.g. target by 2025 that the White House wants, or raise more generalized concerns.
As the Free Press reported Tuesday, Michigan's congressional delegation gathered this morning to decide whether to publicly join the fuel economy debate. Michigan's members of Congress had mostly remained silent in public as the negotiations have continued in recent weeks.
While this article seems to be rather ambiguous, if you read between the lines it's obvious to see that the Michigan lawmakers will oppose the large raise in fuel economy standards, mostly because they will be inconvenient to some of the largest businesses in Michigan.
You see, state and local governments are not immune to being "persuaded" (read: in bed with) corporations, and will do whatever is in the company's best interest.
Despite the fact I believe simply raising the fuel tax would achieve a greater reduction in fuel consumption, I'm still all for raising fuel economy standards. Unfortunately, it appears that Michigan lawmakers will take the stance of going with neither.
What are your thoughts? Should Michigan lawmakers oppose? Are you tired of our governments putting the best interests of corporations first? Leave your comments below or share this post via the social sharing buttons – especially Facebook and Twitter.
Related articles
- Fuel Economy vs. Fuel Taxes – Which Will Do More? (dailyfueleconomytip.com)
- Wheels: Criticism of Looming Fuel-Economy Standard Hits the Airwaves (wheels.blogs.nytimes.com)
- Report: Automakers airing ads attacking proposed 56 mpg fuel standard (autoblog.com)


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SAID THIS PRAYER TO THE NATION, FOR COUSIN HO AND ALL PEOPLE AND ALL SPECIES AND ALL LIFE….(i was grateful to Obama for giving me this platform…:)
"Mitakuye Oyasin….All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer….
To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.
To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.
To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.
To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.
To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.
To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.
To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.
You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.
Thank you for this Life. AHO!"


text:
HALL, GEORGE BENSON, lumberman and businessman of the region of Quebec; b. 1810 at Amherstburg, U.C., son of George Benson Hall, an officer in the Royal Navy, and Angelica Fortier; d. 4 Sept. 1876 at Montmorency, Que., and buried 7 September in Mount Hermon cemetery at Quebec.
George Benson Hall was of Irish descent and was an Anglican; his father had come to Canada with the British troops sent to defend the colonies during the Anglo-American War of 1812, and had assumed command of one of the ships under General Isaac Brock*'s orders in the Great Lakes.
The circumstances that brought his son to the Quebec region are unknown. It seems that Hall merely wanted to take advantage of the commercial exploitation of timber, which in the 19th century was being carried out on a large scale in the province of Quebec. But when in 1842 Great Britain revoked the preferential customs tariff formerly granted to the Canadas, and began to buy Baltic timber which was sold more cheaply, Hall was one of those who saw the expansion of the lumber industry as the answer. And Hall was doubly served by circumstances. The 1854 reciprocity treaty created favourable conditions for sawmill owners by opening to them a large, safe market in the United States. Furthermore, in 1843 Hall had married Mary Jane Patterson, only daughter of Peter Patterson*, from whom he inherited an important business undertaking. By harnessing the power of the Montmorency Falls, Patterson had started the lumber-milling industry in the Quebec region. Conducted on profitable lines, the exploitation of commercial lumber had been so extensive that on 27 May 1844 Patterson had been able to purchase the seigneury of Beauport for £8,300.
Thus favoured, Hall increased his commercial activities in the Quebec region and beyond. Over a period of 25 years, using his intelligence and energy, he bought sawmills which he made prosperous, and obtained new land grants in all the regions of Canada East, even on the upper Matawin River where in 1869 he set up a farm to supply his lumber camps with agricultural produce. At his death in 1876 he was acknowledged to be one of the most active and one of the richest lumbermen in Canada. According to The storied province of Quebec, "The Hall Mills at Montmorency were the greatest in the world." His business then passed into the hands of his son, Peter Patterson Hall (1851–1910), one of his ten children born between 1843 and 1863.
For Quebec City, Hall was a valuable citizen: he opened a lumber business there in 1851, and, as an alderman, took part in the government of the town from 1853 to 1862. But it was the region of Montmorency Falls and the parish of Beauport that particularly benefited from Hall's activity. In 1876, 800 families of this region owed their livelihood to his lumber business. Consequently, immediately after his sudden death the municipal council of Beauport held a special meeting, and, in the form of unanimous resolutions, the citizens of Beauport acknowledged George Benson Hall as "one of the greatest benefactors of the parish," and "the protector and father" of all the socially underprivileged of Beauport. In the opinion of the editor of the Morning Chronicle of Quebec, Hall was "one of Quebec's most prominent and enterprising citizens . . . particularly esteemed for the benevolence and kindness of his character."
AJQ, Greffe de E. G. Meredith, acte de vente des héritiers Hall à L.-A. Sénécal, 7 juin 1883. AVQ, Procès-verbaux du conseil. Documents concernant la construction, la pose de la pierre angulaire et l'inauguration solennelle du nouvel hôtel-de-ville (Québec, 1896). Le Canadien (Québec), 7 sept. 1876. L'Événement (Québec), 7 sept. 1876. Morning Chronicle (Quebec), 6 Sept. 1876. Raoul Blanchard, Le Canada français; province de Québec; étude géographique (Montréal, 1960). Storied Quebec (Wood et al.), I, 402; IV, 400. P.-B. Casgrain, "Le Kent-House; rectification historique," BRH, XIX (1913), 5–9.
© 1972–2023 University of Toronto/Université Laval
Cite This Article
Andrée Désilets, "HALL, GEORGE BENSON (1810-76)," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed October 2, 2023, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hall_george_benson_1810_76_10E.html.
The citation above shows the format for footnotes and endnotes according to the Chicago manual of style (16th edition). Information to be used in other citation formats:
|Author of Article:
|Andrée Désilets
|Title of Article:
|Publication Name:
|Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10
|University of Toronto/Université Laval
|Year of publication:
|Year of revision:
|Access Date:
|October 2, 2023


text: Metron of Cedar Springs, located at 400 Jeffery, would like to invite the community to our annual Fun Day on August 6, 2011, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Activities for the day include: cake walk, face painting, sand storm, sucker tree, ring toss, bucket bonanza, duck pond, bounce house and an obstacle course. Entertainment will be the Firestorm Professional Demo Team at noon and the Gitchell's at 1:00 p.m. Raffle tickets will be sold from 11-2. Drawing will begin at 2:15. There will also be plenty of food for all to enjoy! This is a great opportunity for the family to have fun and also visit with our residents. Hope to see you August 6.


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Radionuclide Ventriculography or Radionuclide Angiography (MUGA Scan)
- Updated:Nov 6,2012
Quick facts
- A MUGA scan is a test using a radioactive tracer (called a radionuclide) and a special camera to take pictures of your heart as it pumps blood.
- The test measures how well your heart pumps with every heartbeat.
- The test is called "multi-gated" because a gamma camera takes pictures at specific times during each heartbeat.
- The test may be done while you stay still (resting scan), exercise or both.
- The test measures your ejection fraction, which is the amount of blood pumped out of the heart during each heartbeat (contraction). It's usually expressed as a percentage. For example, an ejection fraction of 60 percent means that 60 percent of the total amount of blood in the left ventricle when it is full is pumped out with each heartbeat. A normal ejection fraction is between 50 and 75 percent.
- Chest pain (angina)
- Trouble breathing
- DizzinessTiredness
"My doctor told me that the MUGA scan showed my heart was actually pumping better than he thought. But he said one artery might be the cause of all my chest discomfort. So he scheduled me for an angiogram that will check that out." Jocelyn, age 58.
During the MUGA scan, a small amount of a radioactive substance or tracer (called a radionuclide) is put into your blood. The tracer attaches to your red blood cells. A gamma camera takes pictures of your heart. This lets doctors see the blood inside your heart's pumping chambers (ventricles). The pictures are taken at the same time during each heartbeat (ECG-gated). A computer analyzes the pictures. The pictures show if areas of your heart muscle aren't contracting normally and show how well your heart pumps blood. These tests are often done while you're resting and exercising. A stress (exercise) test gives your doctor a better idea of how well your heart handles work. It helps your doctor decide the kind and level of exercise right for you.
What are the risks of a MUGA scan?The radioactive substance you receive is safe for most people. Your body will get rid of it through your kidneys within about 24 hours. If you're pregnant or think you might be pregnant, or if you're a nursing mother, don't have this test. It could harm your baby.
How do I get ready for my test?
- For a "resting" scan, your doctor may ask you to avoid drinks containing alcohol or caffeine such as coffee, tea or soft drinks for several hours before the test.
- For an "exercise" scan, don't eat or drink anything except water for 4 hours before your test. Wear comfortable, loose-fitting clothing and comfortable shoes.
- Your doctor will explain any changes in your medicine that you may need to make to prepare for the scan.
- Specially trained technicians usually perform the scan in hospitals or clinics.
- During the scan, the technician places small metal disks (electrodes) on your chest, arms and legs. The disks have wires that hook to an electrocardiograph machine to record your ECG. The ECG tracks your heartbeat during the test.
- An intravenous line (IV) is put into a vein in your arm. Doctors give the radionuclide through the IV line. For a "resting" scan, you will lie on a table with a special camera above it. The camera will take many pictures of your heart while you're resting.
- For an "exercise" scan, will generally walk on a treadmill or ride a stationary bicycle until you reach your peak activity level. Then, you'll stop and again lie on a table while the gamma camera takes pictures of your heart. In some labs you may lie on a table and pedal a specially mounted bicycle. As you pedal, the camera will take pictures of your heart.
- The tests take between 1 and 2 hours.
What happens after a MUGA scan?
- You can usually go back to your normal activities right away.
- Drink plenty of water to flush the radioactive material from your body.
- Your doctor who sent you for the test will get a written report of the test results. Make an appointment to discuss the results and next steps.
- Why are you doing this test rather than a different one?
- What do I need to do to get ready for this test?
- When will I get the results of my test?
- Will I need to have more tests after this?
- Will you get enough information if I can't exercise very long?


text:
Hudson, Braves confident in 'overlooked' rotation
With focus on bullpen and new additions, starters criticized but 'under the radar'
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- With the offseason addition of the Upton brothers, the Braves gained a potentially potent lineup that has garnered widespread attention. At the same time, the team's bullpen has been widely regarded as the game's best.
Consequently, the Braves rotation has been overlooked and deemed suspect by those who see some weakness at the back end. But as Tim Hudson and the rest of Atlanta's starting pitchers prepare for the upcoming season, they understand that they could heavily influence the team's goal to reach the World Series.
"I think our rotation might fly a little bit under the radar, and I think we're better than what most people are giving us credit for," Hudson said. "If everything goes well and everybody stays healthy, I think we potentially can be really good. We need some guys to take another step forward."
Hudson stands as the undisputed leader of Atlanta's relatively inexperienced starting rotation. With 405 career starts, he has totaled more than 100 starts more than the combined total of each of the other four projected starting pitchers. That is also nearly 200 more than the rotation's second-most experienced member, Paul Maholm, whose resume includes 216 career starts.
With Hudson, Maholm, Kris Medlen, Mike Minor and Julio Teheran, the rotation has the potential to be quite successful. But much of that potential will be influenced by whether Medlen and Minor are capable of repeating last year's second-half success.
Medlen was baseball's most dominant starter for a long period of time last season, as he posted a 0.97 ERA in the 12 starts he made after transitioning from the bullpen to the rotation. Minor produced the third-best ERA among all big leaguers dating back to July 1. And Teheran is just one year removed from being considered one of the game's elite pitching prospects.
If all three pitchers prove effective, the Atlanta rotation could prove to be quite deep. But it is impossible to overlook the fact that not one of these three pitchers has made more than 55 starts in their career. In fact, Minor is the only member of this trio to total more than 30.
"We're obviously counting on some young guys to continue to grow and develop," Braves general manager Frank Wren said. "But we feel good about the where we are pitching-wise."
The Braves will enter this season with essentially the same rotation they possessed after acquiring Maholm from the Cubs just before last year's Trade Deadline. The difference is Teheran will replace a pair of injury-plagued pitchers in Ben Sheets and Tommy Hanson, who were easily the rotation's weakest links when they were healthy enough to pitch after August's arrival.
Despite the struggles Sheets and Teheran experienced, Braves starters combined to lead the National League with a 2.67 ERA during the season's final two months. The Phillies ranked second with a 3.27 mark.
The staff's overall success was aided by Minor's impressive midseason turnaround, as he compiled a 6.20 ERA through June and posted a 2.21 ERA during the season's final three months.
"I don't know if we really have a number five guy in our rotation," Hudson said. "I think we have some guys who can pitch ahead of that spot from a talent standpoint. Do we have a shutdown number one guy? That remains to be seen. But I think we have some guys who can beat anybody."
Targeted to be the fifth starter, Teheran saw his status as one of the game's top prospects tarnished last year when he posted a 5.08 ERA in 26 starts with Triple-A Gwinnett. But the mechanical adjustments he made late in the season proved effective, as he posted a 3.23 ERA in seven starts during the Dominican Winter League. The 22-year-old hurler allowed just two hits while completing 16 2/3 scoreless innings over his final three starts.
"We need him to take what he has been able to do in the Minor Leagues and winter ball and bring it to the big leagues," Wren said. "If he does that, we'll be in great shape."
While Teheran is just beginning his career, the 37-year-old Hudson is at least approaching the end of his own. At the same time, he is still proving to be one of the game's most dependable starting pitchers. Dating back to 2010 -- his first full season back from Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery -- Hudson has gone 49-26 with a 3.19 ERA. Roy Halladay is the only National League pitcher with more wins (51) during this stretch.
"We've got Tim Hudson leading us and we all know what he can do," Braves closer Craig Kimbrel said. "He goes out there and wins 15-plus games a year. We all saw what Kris [Medlen] did at the end of last year."
While there are some questions about how some of the rotation's more inexperienced members might perform, there is no question the Braves' rotation will gain value from the veteran presence Hudson will provide.
"I think you have to have it," Wren said. "You have to have somebody who can speak from experience about the highs and lows. You want them to be able to keep everyone grounded and help them through those rough times. Huddy is the true leader of our pitching staff without a doubt."


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Loretto, KY (January 12, 2011) – In April of this year, Bill Samuels, Jr., will retire as President of Maker's Mark®,the world's oldest operating bourbon distillery and a National Historic Landmark, and transition into the new role of Chairman Emeritus for the iconic global brand. His son, Rob Samuels, who was appointed Chief Operating Officer in October 2010, will lead the Maker's Mark organization going forward. The announcement was made by Matthew J. Shattock, President & Chief Executive Officer of Beam Global Spirits & Wine, Inc.
"Bill Samuels reinvented the way bourbon was marketed at a time when the industry needed it most," Shattock said. "He forever changed the bourbon industry while building Maker's Mark into a global brand and staying true to his family's commitment to handcraftsmanship. We're pleased that Rob Samuels, as Maker's Mark Chief Operating Officer, will follow in his footsteps, as Bill travels throughout the world on behalf of the brand as Chairman Emeritus."
Bill Samuels, Jr., has been at the helm of Maker's Mark for 35 years, and has overseen the growth of the brand from a Kentucky "cult" bourbon into a national icon that gave rise to the modern era of bourbon. Mr. Samuels is the son of Maker's Mark Founder, Bill Samuels, Sr., and the seventh generation to continue the family's tradition of bourbon making first started in Kentucky by Robert Samuels in 1784. Since taking over the business from his father in 1975, Maker's Mark has experienced double-digit growth year-on-year, and the Maker's Mark Distillery has become one of the Commonwealth of Kentucky's most popular tourist destinations, attracting more than 100,000 visitors annually from the world over.
"A lot has changed in the spirits industry since we first started selling Maker's Mark, but I've made sure all along that the way we craft our bourbon has remained the same as when we first started," said Mr. Samuels. "Our heritage and craft is what makes us unique and ensures our quality."
Samuels continued, "Now that we've achieved the milestone of one million cases as a brand, it's the perfect time to transition the day-to-day running of Maker's Mark to Rob, who will carry on our family traditions. I look forward to taking on this new role and meeting with our brand fans in markets around the world."
Bill Samuels, Jr., will officially step down as President and transition to Chairman Emeritus on Friday, April 15th during the Maker's Mark Mile, a Grade-1 thoroughbred horserace held at the historic Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington, Ky., which will be the 15th and last year for the running of the race. A private event will be held the following day at the Maker's Mark Distillery in Loretto, Ky., for brand Ambassadors and invited guests to celebrate the retirement of the venerable bourbon baron.
Together with his father, Bill Samuels, Jr., created the premium bourbon category. A true pioneer and innovator, Mr. Samuels has forged a rich and enduring legacy, without ever intending to do so. From the brand's tongue-in-cheek advertising campaigns, to the industry pioneering brand Ambassador Program and the engaging Distillery visitor experience, Mr. Samuels helped transform Maker's Mark from a bourbon into a lifestyle. Last summer, Mr. Samuels introduced what may well become one of his most defining contributions, Maker's 46, the highly acclaimed first new bourbon from the Maker's Mark Distillery in 52 years.
Growing up the son of a bourbon maker, and with Jim Beam as his godfather, everyone expected Mr. Samuels to work in the whisky industry. Always the contrarian and, to the surprise and consternation of many friends and family, Mr. Samuels decided to pursue other interests. He studied rocket science at the Case Institute of Technology and UC Berkley, and then went on to Vanderbilt University, where he earned a law degree before eventually deciding to join the family business and take on the marketing and promotion of what was then an emerging local "cult" bourbon.
Said Mr. Samuels, "My career has been an incredible journey and, over the last 43 years, I have always stayed true to my fundamental belief that the most successful way to build Maker's Mark is one brand fan at a time and to let brand fans become our most influential advocates. I have no doubt that the future of Maker's Mark is in the best of hands with Rob at the helm as COO and that the best is yet to come as the brand's popularity continues to swell both in the U.S. and internationally."


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It's crazy good.
To celebrate, I made a three layer cake. (Next year, the four-layer cake will be a monster! :)
And, of course, I turned to my favorite new book, Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman.
Smitten Kitchen has the recipe and a photo was on the Martha Stewart show (I'm soooo bummed I forgot to set my DVR for her show on bloggers!)
Making this cake could actually make you lose weight! Really.
See, the cake is sooo heavy. Like 15 pounds of cake heavy. If you just carry it around with you, you'll totally burn calories. I practically worked up a sweat bringing it into work! (And if you are planning to travel with it, you might want to throw in some dowels to keep it all together).
So far, I've made the Chai cake and Strawberry shortcake from Alisa's book...next up, the Ginger Mango Lime Curd cake.
Have a great weekend!


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Andrew Revkin writes in the New York Times about a recent world bank report that finds that the world bank is not lending in ways that invest in natural capital or resilience (The report is online at worldbank.org/oed). However, there is increasing awareness that that is a big problem. Remember that if you want to make efficient investments or buy stocks now, always take the help of a leading online trading platform like RoboMarkets. Revkin writes that the report states that:
it was vital for the bank and its partners to intensify their focus on measurable environmental protection, given rising vulnerability to environmental risks and the increasing flow of financing for projects related to climate change.
"They need to begin to see the inextricable link between sustaining environment and reducing poverty," Vinod Thomas, the director-general of the evaluation group, said in an interview. "It is clear now from the Amazon to India that if environmental sustainability is not raised as a priority then all bets are off."
… Cheryl Gray, the director of the review group for the World Bank, said the lack of consistent internal tracking of the environmental facets of projects was an indicator of how much work needs to be done.
The World Bank Group approved its first set of common environmental standards in 2001, for the first time making environmental stewardship part of its core mission of reducing poverty.
But the new evaluation found a persistent lack of environmental focus in each step along the lending chain — from the priorities that shape development projects to the environmental standards and monitoring required in the field.
Revkin also asked the report's authors about World Bank's lack of investment to reduce or mitigate disaster damage. On Dot Earth Revkin quotes
Vinod Thomas, the director-general of the World Bank Group's independent evaluation group, said a recent report on the Bank's work on disasters found the same problem. "The bank has done well on the reconstruction side," he told me. "But even where disasters recur, the preventive side gets neglected, for political reasons. Reconstruction gets photos."
Things appear to be improving, though, Mr. Thomas said, partly because analysts for the bank and its lending partners are running the numbers on the economic benefits of resilience. "The rate of return on prevention can be 4 to 12 times the investment," he said.
Often, he noted, there is no inconsistency between environmental conservation and resilience to disasters. He cited the example of maintaining coastal mangrove forests as a buffer against flooding. Communities bounded by mangroves persist while those exposed to the waves vanish. There's no need to crunch numbers to figure that out.


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Ascent, the high priest when the ark was at Shiloh (
1 Samuel 1:3
, 9). He was the first of the line of Ithamar, Aaron's fourth son (
1 Chronicles 24:3
; Comp.
2 Samuel 8:17
), who held that office. The office remained in his family till the time of Abiathar (
1 Kings 2:26
, 27), whom Solomon deposed, and appointed Zadok, of the family of Eleazar, in his stead (35). He acted also as a civil judge in Israel after the death of Samson (
1 Samuel 4:18
), and judged Israel for forty years.
His sons Hophni and Phinehas grossly misconducted themselves, to the great disgust of the people (
1 Samuel 2:27
-36). They were licentious reprobates. He failed to reprove them so sternly as he ought to have done, and so brought upon his house the judgment of God (
). The Israelites proclaimed war against the Philistines, whose army was encamped at Aphek. The battle, fought a short way beyond Mizpeh, ended in the total defeat of Israel. Four thousand of them fell in "battle array". They now sought safety in having the "ark of the covenant of the Lord" among them. They fetched it from Shiloh, and Hophni and Phinehas accompanied it. This was the first time since the settlement of Israel in Canaan that the ark had been removed from the sanctuary. The Philistines put themselves again in array against Israel, and in the battle which ensued "Israel was smitten, and there was a very great slaughter." The tidings of this great disaster were speedily conveyed to Shiloh, about 20 miles distant, by a messenger, a Benjamite from the army. There Eli sat outside the gate of the sanctuary by the wayside, anxiously waiting for tidings from the battle-field. The full extent of the national calamity was speedily made known to him: "Israel is fled before the Philistines, there has also been a great slaughter among the people, thy two sons Hophni and Phinehas are dead, and the ark of God is taken" (
1 Samuel 4:12
-18). When the old man, whose eyes were "stiffened" (i.e., fixed, as of a blind eye unaffected by the light) with age, heard this sad story of woe, he fell backward from off his seat and died, being ninety and eight years old. (see
Eli, Hebrews eli, "my God", (
Matthew 27:46
), an exclamation used by Christ on the cross. Mark (
), as usual, gives the original Aramaic form of the word, Eloi.


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Khūzestān, also spelled Khuzistan, formerly ʿArabestān, geographic region in southwestern Iran, lying at the head of the Persian Gulf and bordering Iraq on the west. It is notable for its oil resources.
Khūzestān comprises a southeastern extension of the Mesopotamian plain and includes part of the forested Zagros Mountains to the northeast. These mountains are drained by several rivers, the most important being the Kārūn, which flows into the Shaṭṭ Al-ʿArab, and the Karkheh Kūr River. These and other rivers have built up large alluvial fans and partially saline mud flats that merge into a zone of tidal marshes near the Persian Gulf. An isolated ridge (Hamrin Hills) borders the piedmont with its large gravel plains.
The plains of Khūzestān have a desert climate, and they are excessively hot and dry in the summer. Rainfall, which is concentrated in the winter, ranges from 12 to 20 inches (300 to 500 mm) in the plains and increases in the mountains. The climate allows for the irrigated cultivation of date palms, citrus and other fruit trees, wheat, barley, cotton and rice, sorghum, sesame, melons, and vegetables. Sugarcane, oilseeds, indigo, and pulses were introduced into the region's agriculture during the 1970s.
More than half the population are Arabs who live in the plains; the rest are Bakhtyārīs and other Lurs (peoples of West Persia), with many Persians in the cities. Some of the Bakhtyārīs and Lurs are still nomads.
Oil exploitation in Khūzestān began in 1908, when oil was found at Masjed Soleymān, and it developed into the country's foremost industry under the Pahlavi dynasty. Petroleum production was from seven fields but mainly from Āghā Jārī (Āqā Jarī). All the fields were connected with the refinery at Ābādān. At full production, the Khūzestān oil fields contributed more than three-fourths of the total natural-gas production of Iran. Kharg Island off Bushire (now Bandar-e Būshehr) became Iran's main petroleum export terminal after 1961.
A dam was completed in 1962 on the Dez River upstream of Dezfūl, and irrigation projects on several other rivers attracted people to Khūzestān from other parts of Iran. The area subsequently experienced a major growth in rural population and in agricultural production near the city of Ahvāz. Khūzestān's industries produce paper, cement, petrochemicals, processed foods, and light-engineering products. A road network links Ahvāz with Dezfūl, Khorramshahr, Ābādān, Bandar-e Būshehr, and Bandar-e Khomeynī (formerly Bandar-e Shāhpūr). A railway line runs through the western part of Khūzestān, linking Ahvāz with Dezfūl and Ābādān. Sūsa (now Shūsh) and Choga Mish are important archaeological sites.
The area that is now Khūzestān was settled about 6000 bce by a people with affinities to the Sumerians, who came from the Zagros Mountains region. Urban centres appeared there nearly contemporaneously with the first cities in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium. Khūzestān came to constitute the heart of the Elamite kingdom, with Sūsa as its capital. Beginning with the reign of the legendary Enmebaragesi, about 2700 bce, who (according to a cuneiform inscription) "despoiled the weapons of the land of Elam," Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Kassite, Neo-Babylonian, and Assyrian invasions periodically crossed Khūzestān in response to Elamite involvement in Babylonian politics; the campaign of Ashurbanipal in 646–639 bce destroyed the Elamite kingdom and its capital, Sūsa. Incorporated into the Assyrian empire about 639, Khūzestān next passed under Achaemenid control at the collapse of Assyria; and after Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539, it became a satrapy (province) of the Persian empire, with Sūsa serving as one of the Persians' three great capitals.
Alexander the Great took Sūsa shortly after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331, and from 311 to 148 Khūzestān was a satrapy (named Susiana) of the Seleucid empire, with its capital at Seleucia on the Eulaeus River. It passed firmly into Parthian control between 148 and 113 bce and then under Sasanian rule about 226 ce. It was a frontier zone between the Roman-Byzantine and the Parthian-Sasanian empires and finally was taken by the Arabs about 642. It was part of the Safavid and Qājār dynasties that successively ruled Iran.
In the 20th century the region's prosperity revived with development of oil fields, the building of the Trans-Iranian railway, and the expansion of ports at Ābādān and Khorramshahr. In an attempt to annex the oil-rich region while Iran was still disorganized by its Islamic revolution, Iraq's armed forces in 1980 invaded and occupied the western half of Khūzestān, including the city of Khorramshahr, and bombed the oil refineries at Ābādān. But Iran's resistance quickly stiffened, and the Iranians had recaptured the region by 1982. The economic rehabilitation of the region and the revival of oil and natural-gas production there gained momentum only after the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988.


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App Description
Archery is a classic game of bow and arrow to practice your shooting skills.
Draw the bow back, aim the arrow at center of the can of soda and release to shoot the arrow.
A new difficult level is awarded every time you shoot the center of target.
* Precise physics effect
* Challenging and addictive game play
* Helps to increase concentration
* Compete to set global high scores
* Game Center Leaderboard and Achievement support
* Universal Build - Play across multiple iOS devices
Get your bow loaded with arrow and go on shooting...
App Changes
- August 01, 2015 Initial release


text:
First, the good news: Microsoft has extended the end-of-life date for PCs that come pre-installed with Windows 7. Now for the bad news: It won't matter to you unless you're willing to splurge on a business machine, as the stay of execution only affects computers pre-loaded with Windows 7 Professional.
Computers packing the consumer versions of Windows 7—Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate—still have a date with the chopping block on October 31, as we reported last year.
Microsoft officials said erroneous information about Windows 7's death sentence was posted online in December, but most of the details about the system remain the same in the end-of-sales chart updated today on Microsoft's website (and first reported by ZDNet). Allowing Windows 7 Professional PCs to stick around for a yet-to-be-established amount of time is Microsoft's only new tweak.
The shift doesn't mean much for everyday people in the market for a Windows 7 machine. For all of HP's talk of bringing Windows 7 back by popular demand, the vast majority of Windows 7 PCs available today are already business-focused machines.
Kill your darlings
The extended deadline for computers packing the business-level version of the operating system comes as little surprise. While Microsoft has managed to sell 200 million copies of Windows 8, business users fleeing from the XPocalypse due to befall upon the world when Windows XP hits end-of-life status in April are largely turning to Windows 7. Extending the end-of-sales date for Professional PCs alone lets Microsoft assuage IT fears while still shepherding everyday users towards Windows 8 (which itself is becoming more desktop-friendly by the day).
Shad Larsen, Microsoft's senior business program manager, told ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley that the extension was unrelated to Windows XP's demise, however. Office 2003 will be officially abandoned on the same day as Windows XP, April 8.
The end of mainstream support for Windows 7—read: no more general patches and fixes—is still scheduled for January 14, 2015. Once that date hits, Microsoft will continue to provide security fixes for Windows 7 through 2020. Sales of boxed copies of Windows 7 technically bit the dust in October 2013, though you can still find plenty on retail sites like Newegg and Amazon. Sounds like you'd better stock up if Windows 8 isn't your thing.


text:
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text:
By Vicki Brown, Word&Way Associate Editor
"If anyone had asked me 10 years ago what I would be doing, I would never have guessed I'd be doing this," Gerald Harvey of Sedalia declared.
But Harvey sees his role as national commander of the American Ex-Prisoners of War Association as an extension of his missionary career — a way to minister to POWs as a former POW himself.
The association grew out of World War II, when wives and mothers of prisoners and soldiers missing in action in the Philippines and Japan decided to try to send letters and gifts to them. Some of those soldiers decided to begin meeting together for support after they returned home.
The ex-POW association is open to former imprisoned American soldiers, their wives and children and interned civilians from "any war, any place, at any time," Harvey said.
Former POWs reach out to one another for support. Members use the organization as a way to get information out to other ex-POWs about benefits available to them and as a means to work for additional government assistance. But attracting those eligible for membership sometimes is a daunting task. In fact, Harvey had not wanted to join at first.
"There are at least 10,000 who haven't been contacted," he explained. "Often they are very negative when they are first contacted. They don't want to have anything to do with it or with the government."
For some, even considering the possibility of joining such an organization dredges up painful, often horrific memories. "I was that way," he added. "You have to break down their resistance and be persistent. Most don't want to talk about it."
A radio operator and gunner on a B-17 bomber, Harvey was part of a squadron assigned to bomb an oil refinery in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on Feb. 16, 1945. Flak from the explosions ripped through two of the plane's engines.
The crew decided to try to nurse the plane to England and tossed out everything they could to lighten the strain on the remaining engines. Too badly damaged, the plane crashed into the North Sea.
They managed to nab one life raft. Designed to hold about five individuals, the raft took on water as nine men climbed in. They survived 12 hours in freezing water up to their waists before making shore and being captured by Germans.
Although Harvey shares that part of the story — it's included in Jimmie Dean Coy's "Prisoners of Hope: A Gathering of Eagles, Book Three" — he rarely will talk about his prison camp experiences.
Although he had been approached by members of the Sedalia ex-POW chapter, he didn't want to get involved. "I didn't want anything to do with any military organization," he said.
Then he received a letter from a former crew member.
Association members from across the country gather each year for business and fellowship. A member himself, the crewman decided to try to entice the rest of the crew to join him.
Harvey did and was impressed. He joined the national organization and decided to try out a local meeting.
"They made me feel welcome — like a long-lost brother. There was no drinking or cursing, and they closed with prayer," he explained.
Members encouraged Harvey to take advantage of the organization's benefits, including spending time with a psychologist who encouraged him to write down his memories and to share them with his family at some point.
A William Jewell College graduate, Harvey earned master of divinity and master of theology degrees at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a doctor of ministry degree at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
"I had taken lots of counseling, so I understood why the psychologist said I should write the memories down. I didn't do that until I joined the ex-POW association. I didn't realize how much help is available," he said.
A few years later, he shared those memories with his five daughters.
A pastor of churches in Missouri and Kentucky, Harvey and his wife, Eunice, served 25 years with the Foreign (now International) Mission Board in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
His involvement in the ex-POW association is ministry, he said. He serves as chaplain of the local chapter and state organization. "So I wear a cross," he said. "Whenever I go to chapter meetings around the country, the cross immediately opens doors.
"People will stop you and talk to you. They tell you their problems because they know you will not put them down," he explained.
As national commander, Harvey attends as many state annual meetings and individual chapter meetings as he can.
"I listen to problems and try to help," he said. "It's not that I'm all that smart, but I have heard the questions. Some don't go to church at all. There are some from every faith. But they don't hesitate to talk because they know you were a POW and you are a Christian. It's my ministry…an extension of what I've been doing all my life."
And his photography is part of that ministry. He took all the photos included in the ex-POW association's 2006 calendar.
Harvey had gotten hooked on photography while in high school and had sold some of his work. Early in his mission career, he sent a couple of snapshots he had taken across the country to the FMB. That led to photographic assignments in 107 countries with his work appearing in and on the covers of several publications, including the board's magazine, "The Commission."
While he is grateful for the opportunity to serve other former POWs at the national level, he remains concerned about individuals. He answers every letter and e-mail he receives and always responds to phone calls.
And he wants to let all ex-POWs know about the benefits to which they are entitled. "Tell them to contact me," he said.
Harvey can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com. (02-09-06)


text:
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