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"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy."
Letter of James 3: 17
I will take this verse in reference to the foundation of life. How does Wisdom relate to human Life? The relation between Wisdom and human Life is as that of a mother towards her child. What would the child profit from if the mother was ignorant? We can never reach that profound, inner understanding of human Life. It has a double meaning - a wider and a narrow sense. In a narrow sense it is transient Life, in a wider sense it is eternal Life.
We said that the relation between Wisdom and Life is like that of a mother to her child. Therefore, you would be incapable of beginning your life unless Wisdom takes the role of a mother. Apostle James defines Wisdom, defines one of its qualities, one of its attributes, which is namely - Purity. If there is no Purity, there is no Wisdom. The same way as a mother who does not love her child is not a mother. So, if we have Purity inside us, we have Wisdom. This is the first connection and all success in Life depends on this Purity and Clarity. Clarity and Purity are synonymous. That is, if our eyes do not possess purity and clarity, then what are we to do if we begin on a long journey? We would come upon many hindrances, of course. Therefore, if you have obstacles in your life, it shows that wisdom lacks its main attribute - Purity.
So we should elevate Purity. It is also necessary in science. All Great teachers who have come to enlighten the world have had this Purity, i.e. have possessed Wisdom's main quality. Purity suggests that there should never be any desire and passion in the human soul. One of the main characteristics of Life are Passions. They stand like a hoop around our brain. Situated three fingers above the ear are the human feelings and emotions. People who love literature have emotions. Feelings make up the highest level of human life. By feeling I mean that a man is listening, i.e. to have feelings means to hear. In a Divine sense to feel means to hear, to experience the slightest nuances of feeling that a man is capable of. When eating, when reading, when writing we enjoy what we experience and feel. This is Life; beyond these experiences everything is invisible.
James says that the main quality of Wisdom is Purity. And then, Wisdom is peaceful, its surface is still, calm and unruffled. What kind of people get unsettled? The people in whom passions prevail, people who exist at the base of their brains - above their ears. This area of the brain is connected with the olfactory centre, and when you pass by a restaurant you feel like eating some meat and having a drink. So you come down from a higher level and start thinking of having some chicken, beef, some wine and other stuff, and when all this fills your mind, your Wisdom is gone. Then woe to the cook who has not prepared a good meal! Half of all troubles stem from this little centre in the brain. This is Epicureanism. Such people could say that Life has no meaning. A person should be a scholar or a banker in order to feed that part of the brain. And after feeding it for fifty, sixty, one hundred or more years, it finally breaks, the watermill falls apart, loses its trade and people go to another watermill.
Since we have come here on earth, we should aspire to reach our inner Divine life. Only within it can we be happy and blessed, that is, as far as we can follow the Divine law. Many people stumble from the words of this message. When James spoke, he had the Divine spirit, he had a revelation and that is why he spoke those words. Many have read the Bible, but do not understand it. In order to understand it, they should have experienced what the apostles had; they should have the apostle's spirit, soul and mind.
Some say: "I want." Good, but there are three things that one needs: first - to search, second - to understand things, third - to apply them. This is equivalent to what Christ says: "Ask, seek and knock." If you do not seek, you will not find. These three elements should unite, in order for man to understand the main cause of things. A good gardener should first of all have knowledge of the soil, then plant a tree, plough its soil and after a few years it will give fruit. The same applies to Divine Life, we plant a thought and after a while it gives fruit. You will plant the Divine desire in your heart, and plant the Divine thought in your mind. But before you plant them, your mind and heart should be pure and peaceful. Man should exempt himself from the greed existing in the world.
I will tell you a story, which originated thousands of years ago. This took place during the reign of the ancient king Harun On Rashid. He had the habit of disguising himself and visiting the city, in order to see how his people lived, and whether there was law and order. He was generous and performed good deeds. One day, he met a beggar and gave him a golden coin. The beggar told him: "My lord, if you slap me on the cheek, you will do me a lot of good." The king did not want to comply, but since the beggar insisted, he ordered one of his men to slap him. The king found it strange that the beggar would want to be slapped and invited him to the palace to inquire about the reasons behind his wish. The beggar began telling the story of his life. He had been the son of a rich merchant and after his father's death he had bought about eighty camels and thus became rich himself. On one of his journeys he had met a dervish, who had told him he knew of a great treasure and needed the camels to transport it, and in the end they would divide the treasure between themselves. The merchant agreed, they put the treasure on the camels' backs, but the dervish took a small box filled with some kind of oil, and hid it. They began dividing the treasure and the merchant asked the dervish to give more camels to him and keep less for himself, since the dervish, being a spiritual man would not need many material possessions. The dervish agreed, gave up most of his camels and kept only ten. After some thinking the merchant asked again: "Give me all the camels, keep only one." The dervish again agreed. Then the merchant asked for the last camel and got it, but had noticed the dervish hiding the little box and asked what was in it. The dervish replied that it contained an ointment which had the following effect: if you rub your left eye with it, you can see all the treasures in the world, if you were to rub your right eye, you would go blind. The merchant asked him to rub his left eye with the ointment and indeed saw the treasures of the world. Then he wanted to put ointment on his right eye, the dervish refused to do that, warning him that he would turn blind. Thinking that he would be given the ability to see even more, the merchant kept on insisting. Finally, the dervish put some of the oil on the merchant's right eye, and he became blind. He started yelling and crying and the dervish said to him: "Since you were so greedy, you should suffer all the consequences." So the beggar ended his story and said: "That is why I want you to slap me. And everyone else who wants to do me good I ask to do the same, i.e. to put ointment on my right eye."
Thus God has rubbed one of your eyes. In men it is the left eye, in women the right one, however; they want both their eyes rubbed. This is how people go blind - this is the way they sin. The Knowledge and Wisdom that God gives us, we cannot obtain from Life. Life on earth is clearly determined - man has an inner striving to elevate his soul. By 'elevate' I mean to enter the other world and take the elements needed for his existence. For example, the human heart has desires, but some desires are poisonous, and when they enter the human soul, they destroy it. For instance, how insatiable is the desire to be rich. And the richer one gets, the harder his heart gets, in the end it gets so hard that it breaks. The extreme end of this condition is the body becomes fragile. In social life such greed leads to isolation from people and then ruins the person. A person lives while he is surrounded by relatives and friends, to live individually means to be outside God. If we live in disharmony with people, we live in disharmony with God. You say: "I hate him." - Thus you hate God too. You say: "I will steal his money." -Thus you steal from God too. These are negative states and vice versa-if you do good, you do good to God too, you work with Him.
Wisdom comes from above, to teach us, the children of God, to seek true Knowledge. Many want to learn, but are dissatisfied and say: "Why has God done this?" I say, if you have started judging Him, then you do not understand God. If something bad happens to you, do not ask why it happened in that way, but say to yourself that it is for your own good. When we assume that things in the world are not harmonious, that means that we don't understand them. For instance, in America there are desert areas, where people walk, raise a lot of dust then think that everything around them is enveloped in dust, and they do not realize that they are the ones who raised it. The same happens with your thoughts and desires - you have raised a lot of dust around them. Let your Wisdom be pure and peaceful, let the dust settle and only then you will understand the profound meaning of your soul. For two thousand years now, people have preached about Wisdom, but it appears not to have influenced them. Rather, it has not influenced those who are here on earth, but has affected those who are in Heaven.
Some say: "I want to live." Good, but try to utilize Life properly. Those who want to go to Heaven should understand the inner Divine Wisdom. What is the reason for that? I would like to see one church in the world, where the priest preaches out of Love. Now he preaches, because he has a wife and children, but says: "I preach in the name of God." You do not preach in the name of God, but because your wife pushes you to. A teacher says: "I preach in the name of God." You do not preach in the name of God, either, you do that for your wife and children. I do not mean to say that this is bad. For instance, a preacher gathered some ideas, put his lecture together well, hoping that he will make more money, but his audience did not give him as much as he thought he deserved, they put less value on his speech and in his next lecture he began reproaching those who did not give him money. A lecture in which money plays a great part is not pure. I speak of clergymen who claim to be servants of God. That title should match the person's purpose. Everyone should do their job so that it matches their title. For example, someone says that he sells clothes, and indeed that is what he does. We should be pure and sincere. And if I do not preach the Truth, I will say: "Pardon me, for I preach only half the Truth. Today I preach only for money, because I need it, one day I will preach for free."
James uses the word wisdom in a wider sense. Many Christians say: "I want to understand the Divine Wisdom." Are you prepared to give everything for God? Christ said to deny yourself, which means to give all riches you have on earth to the poor, work together with them and teach them labour and perseverance. Some people point at Carnegie's achievements. Funny are those people who consider Carnegie to be an ideal. To be rich is a burden. There is the saying of the donkey, which was carrying icons and crucifixes on his back, wherever it went everyone was bowing, and it thought that they bowed at it. You might be in Carnegie's position and be a donkey. People's respect for you should be respect for your Spirit and Wisdom. Your head should not be filled with Biblical verse and sentences; they should be in your soul where they would form a Divine tissue. This is the purpose of true Christianity. Someone might tell me: "You do not preach well." I have nothing against the order of today; however, the pants of a five year old do not fit a ten year old child. And since humankind has grown up, we need new things, new order, and new thoughts. The little girl can play with dolls, and that will be fine, but when a grown up girl does the same I will tell her: "You need live dolls; you should view life in a different way." When a little boy plays with a toy horse, that is fine, but when a man does the same, I will tell him that he needs a real horse. The horse is the human mind, and the doll is the human heart.
When the mother gives birth to her child, she gives birth to her heart in order to educate it again. And when an old man cannot educate his heart he should die. That is why God has said: "Until a man becomes a child, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Man should see his heart go through rebirth - it should become small. By "small" it is meant a flexible element, capable of evolving properly and not losing the elasticity of Life. A woman says: "I gave birth to five children." Good, but did you rear them? "No." Then you haven't learned the purpose of Life. Another would say: "I haven't given birth to a child." You should give birth. The Wisdom that comes from above says: You should give birth and your child should be peaceful. It is good that you have children, but sometimes you worry, get annoyed, then become red with anger, and your head aches, your stomach or your lungs too, and you say: "Hurry, call a doctor, I am going to die." How do you know that you are going to die? That means that we don't understand the relations and interconnections among which we exist. Everyone, in whom Wisdom is not pure and peaceful will die, will decay. That means that in the invisible world there are other laws, according to which hard matter should turn into soft matter, so that it becomes suitable for Life. Because of these new conditions our body should become subject to that law. Every one of us should sacrifice their body, as the flower sacrifices its petal, in order to produce its seeds. This means that we should let go of our petals.
Nowadays people want to live in the physical world, but they do not consider that world to be the best one. In the Physical world, your view of the Invisible world is that of a child in its mother's womb - it lives in its small surroundings and to it that is the whole world but when the child is born, these surroundings, this body should be sacrificed, it should die. Therefore, in comparison with the Spiritual world, this world is only a womb and that is why man feels confined and uncomfortable. Some say: "I want to set the world straight." There is no need to set it straight, you should come out of your mother's womb. Sometimes the child moves inside the mother, but does not want to come out. Even when labour begins, he still refuses to, so they call for midwives to take him out, that is why the mother screams, and yells. In the same way, we don't want to come out, and God is pulling us. We should go out of the physical world and enter the Spiritual one, which offers better conditions for our evolution. Now you look at your body and say: "After some years I will lose all this." Or you look at yourself in the mirror and notice that you have grown old. I say: You will come out of your mother's womb. Christianity is a science, which shows how people should go out of this world. It is a narrow passage - narrow so that only one person (at a time) can go through it.
So, one should remember, that Purity in the heart and in the mind is a quality and an essential attribute. Striving to be rich is right, but the fortune that we acquire must be placed where it won't be lost. We should not be poor. Some cite: "Blessed are the poor of spirit, because theirs is the Kingdom of heaven". That does not mean that man should be poor, rather it refers to the man that is immortal, who has understood Life. The Kingdom of God belongs not to the poor, but to those whose hearts bear no thought of robbing the world, who are always content, ready to sacrifice themselves, complain of nothing, and to whom everything is good. If you should send them to hell, they will feel good there, if you send them to heaven, they will be good there too. Such are the poor of spirit. Some say: "I want to be poor of spirit". Fine, you can be that right now. But if you say that with a smile, that would show that you still want to live a little. If you have lived a month in your mother's womb, then you have some more time to live, if you have lived there for two - three months, then you have some more to live, if you have lived there four, five, six, seven or eight months, you have more time to live. However, if you have lived there for nine months, you must immediately come out, and if you don't, you will die in your mother's womb. When a time comes for a person to die, he must come out.
So when man dies, the soul is born. It should leave its physical body and remain with its ethereal one. After a few days, it will shed its second body too and will enter into its Astral body, i.e. the purgatory, until it is purified. When it has purged itself, it will leave its Astral body and will ascend to its Mental body - a much finer one and a garment that does not tear easily. And when it reaches Heaven, the soul arrives at the so called buddha state – that is: a man who is fully awakened and understands the Divine Wisdom and Love. In this state of awareness, there is no memory of any earthly suffering that man has gone through; there are only pleasant memories of what has happened on earth. And from this height, man will be able to see why things happened this way.
The people of today do not understand themselves. Some say: "I, too, know Christ." I ask him: "Have you ever been out of your body?" - "No, I haven't." So you do not know Christ. And when Christ says: "I am the Way and the Truth", He means the ability of man to know how to exit his present surroundings and how to come back. If now a Christian starts to go out of his body, he faints, and doctors are called to help him. Let him come out of his mother's womb. For example, if someone is suffering, let him be, do not bother him, let him suffer. This is a great blessing, in suffering he experiences what nobody else, who is not in his position, could. Therefore, only to those who suffer, does God reveal Himself, to those who eat and drink, God remains an unknown being.
Through the suffering people undergo today, God reveals Himself to them. Some are fighting at the warfront, others are recovering, i.e. two forces are simultaneously at work - one is destructive, and the other one heals. Thus, conditions are created for people to live well together. For instance, two people who previously did not agree, now meet at the warfront and become close. So, until he is born from his mother's womb, a man cannot understand the outside conditions. According to the same law, if we do not enter into the inner world, we would not discover what God thinks. This is definite. Passions are short lived - they might rise as a fire, but then die down and give way to tranquillity. Sometimes when you get angry, and you get mad at something, your face turns red, after half an hour you start feeling tired and say to yourself: "What a headache!" So, that passion produced an adverse reaction. Tomorrow, you will get angry again, and again a negative reaction will follow. A wolf catches a sheep, and is raging until it has eaten it, and knowing that after that he will suffer for it, he goes to sleep. Often, men too, after having a quarrel with their wives, go to the pub, in order to forget everything, and say: "The passions of my wife will not kill me." After they sober up, however, the suffering starts anew and they go back to the pub. Passions create drunkenness. Forces should be found, that will uproot them. Passions should be controlled, and then they will be removed. If you let a swine into a garden it will create a mess. But you can't blame it for that. Tame your passions!
Nowadays, people say: "I want to free myself from my passions." Good, but when you free yourself from them, what will be left? You should get to work like an industrious woman, and solve the riddle of all such passions. Don't ask why they are given to you, but try to tame them. That is what people today do too. The Iskar River has caused a lot of trouble up to day, but people have now made it work for them, they have brought it into Sofia, where they use the power of its waters to generate electricity. In such a case you will not say: "God, rid us of the Iskar River!" if you want to rid yourself of your passions, you will become dry, because they are your springs. The basic law should be found to put passions to work, to give them mental diversity, to turn emotions into feelings, feelings into happiness, happiness into bliss, and bliss into harmony, and into merging with God. You cannot be happy, until you know what the relation between emotions and feelings is. When we say that a man cannot be happy, we mean that he doesn't know how things in the world work. However, there are happy people, too, who can take the sorrows of the unhappy. Many people come to me and I take their worries, take their passions and tell them: "Now get to work!" The swine should be restrained; passions should become noble and turned into sheep, i.e. into emotions, and then should be transformed into feelings. Then I am thankful to God that he has given me work to do, since even the happy people sometimes feel bored. And to be happy means to help people. Do not be sorry that there are people who suffer, but be thankful to God for everything. And in thanking we will come to that true understanding. Thank God for your money; be thankful for being robbed too. Now there are many examples of this. For instance, many people gain some weight and people say: "Look how much better he looks!" But the next day the same man suffers an apoplectic stroke and they say: "How is it possible that such a strong and healthy man died?" Don't be sorry for that, now he has become healthier. Another man is ill and then he recovers, that means that he has been reborn. You should not be worried by those minor things. Always say: "I have been sent with a mission", and you will feel instant joy.
Now, I will relate this line of James' message with Christ's parable of the father who goes to his two sons. One of them had said that he would go to the field, but didn't; the other one said that he wouldn't go, but repented and went to the field. There are people who go to church but do not do God's will, and there are people who say that they do not want to serve God, but actually do. The latter are the real Christians. That is why Christ says: "The last on earth, will be first in heaven." The new teaching does not come for the church but for the great sinners, for the worldly people. Let those who belong to a church not presume and say to themselves, that we have Abraham as our ancestor. God says: "from these stones I can raise up children to Abraham." That shows that there should be no sectarianism, we should not claim, that we are this or that. You need to search and apply. How, someone will ask. - First of all Wisdom should be pure and peaceful; then it should be gentle, willing to yield. But everyone will ask: what is the way, through which we can enter and then exit. To a person who does not possess these qualities of Wisdom, I will not reply. You might say that this is cruel. It is not cruel, why talk to a deaf man when he will not hear me? Someone might say: "You are being haughty." By the word "I" I mean God. If you are pure, that Divine "I" will tell you everything. When a child says to me: "I will tell you", I will stop and answer: "Speak, Lord, I am listening." For instance, someone has planted a garden and I go into it, I notice whether it is rectangular or elliptic, what is the shape of its flowerbeds, what kind of flowers are planted there, are they white, red, yellow, what is their size and so on. After I have taken a look at all of that, I will tell you what kind of person planted the garden. If I have a letter, I will tell you about the culture of the person who has written it. Some exclaim: "Look at the hats women wear!" I like looking at the hats women wear, and at the clothes men are wearing, because all this is a sign of culture.
The teaching of Christ is the teaching installed in you. Open your libraries and you will find your books. If you want to enter into the higher state of Life, you will have to find St. Peter - he will give you the keys, he will give you the book of Christ. If you want to move to the lower worlds, you should go down, and in hell you will find Christ. St. Peter has one key, Christ has the other. There are two Testaments, when you read both, you will understand them and will see what the Wisdom that comes from above is. Why doesn't wisdom remain above? There are reasons for that. It comes down, because of you, it is a mother and a father, and it is food and comes down for us. Only after you acquire this Wisdom, you will find your Father, you will see what God is. You will find Wisdom that is pure, peaceful and gentle, and then you will find the inner meaning of God, you will discover what He is. When you get in touch with the Angels, in your Spirit and in your mind a new Light will shine, you will hear such music, as you have never heard before, and you will say: "There is a meaning in life; this is the profound meaning of Life."
Now all of you, who are listening to me, apply Purity. Stop assuming, you are pure and strive toward Purity. Someone says: "I am pure enough and peaceful enough." No, you should be absolutely pure and peaceful. By peaceful, I mean the most intense forces in power, in the world. The Light that comes from above is peaceful, but does the most amazing things. By peaceful I mean the force that will urge you to work and think. I will not teach you how to think, but I will give you an incentive, that will encourage you to work. I would like to take you for a walk sometime, so that you can see what a wonderful feeling one experiences in the midst of Nature. In it one senses the Divine Mind, Wisdom, Power, Love, which are at work., which come down and say: "God, how Great You are!"
I always want to know more. I am not saying that I know a lot, because today we have one vision of things, the next day we have a different one, a different understanding. Therefore, in Life we should see the Divine harmony. Someone might say: "I am growing old." The earth is growing old too. If it wasn't growing old, it would not possess such beauty. The ravines, the valleys, the rivers, the mountains-these are her wrinkles. When a man has wrinkles, he has greater expression. Those lines going upward or downward, reveal what kind of person he has been, i.e. every line has its meaning. Today, the artists and photographers use the brush to smooth the lines. They do not know what is valuable. For example, such a book as the Bible, today you can buy at a very low price or you will see somebody wrapping various goods in it. We, today's people, take the Divine and wrap our cheese in it, then wonder at our lack of culture. With Divine Wisdom we should wrap our minds, hearts, and souls, and then we will be strong and powerful people.
There comes a transformation in social life. Changes occur in today's science, various theories emerge. For instance, until some years ago, science considered the elements simple and indestructible, scientists thought they had reached the ultimate limit of division. However, nowadays science which advances faster than religion, succeeded in splitting atoms into ions.16 They say, for example, that in the hydrogen atom there are 700 ions some of which are positively charged and others negatively. So there too, exist men and women who quarrel, i.e. there are 350 men and 350 women. In an atom of oxygen there are 11 220 ions - that is 5 500 positive and 5 500 negative ions. An atom of natrium contains around 16000 ions, that of radium contains around 100 000 ions. Some day science might reach a point where the division of the ion will be possible. I will make the following comparison: if an atom was the size of the "St. Cyril and Methodius" church, then an ion would be as small as a hazelnut. There is great space between ions. When we talk of a fourth dimension, we mean in space.
That is why Christ says: "Until you become a child, until you become small, you will remain a fool." The path of progress is, knowing how to become small, i.e. to know the forms through which one could pierce the world. Big people are not accepted above. Some think that at the second coming of Christ, they will be resurrected with their present bodies, which weigh 150 kilograms. No, man will be resurrected in a specific way he should have an insight, then a Divine body will come in man, which will be capable of becoming so small, that it would go through all worlds, or so big that it would fill all worlds. We should learn to become small, and we should not wish to rob the world. This world is for us, for as long as man wishes. Gradually man will go through all worlds, all planets and then again will start coming down. That is why they say, that Life is a movement from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery towards the centre. This is the inner meaning of Life, which is moving from Love to Wisdom and from Wisdom to Love, from Truth to Wisdom and from Wisdom to Truth, from Righteousness to Love and from Love to Righteousness, from Righteousness to Truth and from Truth to Righteousness, from Righteousness to Good and from Good to Righteousness. Do you understand the meaning of this? This is the space between whole worlds. When we say "Good" that is a whole new world. Righteousness and Love, these, too, are great worlds. Some ask what Wisdom is. Wisdom is to enter its world and live in it.
Then you will discover how great it is to live there.
Now, I want this Wisdom to be pure and peaceful for everyone and when you leave here, I want you to be able to share it not through words but by contact. One cannot share with others something that he doesn't have within himself. Wisdom is shared through Wisdom, Love is shared through Love. We should love everyone, without thought of ourselves. And then everybody will love you. If they do not want to love you, there will be a conflict; when all people start loving, there will be harmony. For example, one hundred musicians gather to form an orchestra, and they have to choose a conductor. If they start fighting over whom to choose they will come to no decision, and there will be no harmony in their work.
In your soul turn to God, He is Life. He is in you and the insight that He will give you, you owe to Him. If Life is viewed thus, a great transformation will come in the world. The Wisdom that is coming into the world is God, it is Christ. Christ is coming down from Heaven. What a multitude of Great souls are following Him! They say to people: "Come witness the Divine!" They bring Purity, Peace, and Divinity. Some ask when this Peace will come. It is coming, I see in humankind a great procession - They come and sing. And when they arrive, there will be harmony in the world, and Peace and Love. This is the second coming of Christ. There will not be an end to the world, but the world will be purified.
I wish that all of you greet Christ thus. With gladness and joy await Him! Let that Wisdom from now on be felt. Now the human soul would have to be examined. You have never studied it before. Now you will learn what a priest, clergyman and a teacher is. Now the Divine Wisdom is coming to teach us the language of things. And for us everything will transform into harmony.
29 Oct, 1916, Sofia 17
16 Ions-this most probably refers to the elementary particles, according to science of the first half of the twentieth century.
17 The lecture "Wisdom" was first published in the compilation "In the Beginning Was", Sofia, 2003
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Forget what I said before: IE6 is a goner
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Boy, is my face red.
Back in March I wrote a post about developing for IE6 without much compromise, citing its 20% market share as reason enough to maintain support.
I'm happy to report that, as of today, that article's importance has plummeted dramatically.
Last week, the folks behind news aggregation site Digg revealed that nearly 70% of IE6 visitors had no choice as to what browser they were using, and that IE6 usage was most prevalent from work rather than home. Although Digg's audience is admittedly more tech-savvy than that of the entire web, it validates a broader report by CNET stating that 60% of the enterprise market still maintains support for this out-of-date (and insecure) browser. The article further states that, according to Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish, "IT control trumps technology populism."
The struggle has remained the same since the 2006 release of Internet Explorer 7, with developers and companies eager to escape the IE6 productivity vacuum but stuck doing so for a sizable market segment frozen in time by corporate-mandated bureaucracy. Where reason and persistent whining have failed, only two solutions seem possible:
- Microsoft must introduce a new version of Windows with features essential to the enterprise (trojan horsing the latest Internet Explorer in the process)
- Large and influential web presences must phase out support, forcing IT managers to upgrade or risk an influx of costly support requests
With poor performance (and a healthy dollop of FUD) plaguing Vista from the outset, my hopes for Windows 7 making the first scenario a reality are understandably modest. Lucky for us, the second option yields far less pessimism.
You see, YouTube is phasing out support for the eight-year-old browser. Let me repeat that: YouTube. You may have heard of it. Alexa says it's the third most popular site on the entire freaking Internet. It's owned by the most popular site on the Internet. You can't get much larger (and more influential) than that; few online properties have more visitors to lose from such a decision.
We knew the demise of IE6 was only a matter of time, but when a content behemoth like YouTube announces they're going to run (slow motion) into the wide open arms of today's web, it's an understatement to say the pace has picked up significantly.
It's about damn time.

subset: commoncrawl


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Comfort Suites Peoria, Peoria
Comfort Suites Peoria1812 W. War Memorial Dr.
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text:
- Section 1: Introduction
- Section 2: Before even considering doing a wingsuit BASE jump
- Section 3: So you still want to wingsuit BASE
- Section 4: You now have some wingsuit BASE experience, what's next?
- Section 5: Conclusion
- Appendix A: Specific wingsuit drills to practice from the plane
- Appendix B: Relevant entries from "the list"
- Appendix C: Some considerations for wingsuit site selection
Download Full Article in PDF
1. Introduction:
We have all seen the amazing videos of people like Robert, Yuri and Loic flying their wingsuits. It is natural to want to follow in their slipstreams but let us make sure we do so safely and with adequate preparation.
This document is intended as an initial information source for BASE jumpers interested in starting wingsuit BASE.
This document is not an instruction manual. It does not contain rules, only advice.
Wingsuit BASE is more dangerous than normal BASE jumping if the jumper does not conduct adequate preparation.
If you choose to pursue wingsuit BASE you are strongly recommended to seek instruction from an experienced wingsuit BASE jumper. There is no substitute for one to one coaching.
A wingsuit allows for incredible freefall delays and horizontal distances to be achieved, almost eliminating the chance of striking the object you jumped off, the number one cause of BASE jumping fatalities.
But jumping a wingsuit also has some serious drawbacks:
- The wingsuit restricts your physical movement making exits harder to perform i.e. difficult to climb down to the exit point, easier to go unstable and then harder to recover.
- The wingsuit complicates deployment and prevents you from controlling your canopy immediately after opening.
- The wingsuit jumper must carefully assess the terrain he intends to fly over as the eventual opening point and landing area will be different than for a normal BASE jump and will also depend on flight performance.
Experienced BASE jumpers who use ground rush as an altitude indicator must exercise caution during their initial jumps. The low fall rate and high horizontal speeds can fool the jumper that they are higher than they actually are. The wingsuit ground rush for a minimal canopy ride is a lot less intense than for normal freefall.
- The wingsuit jumper must also pay attention to his altitude when flying down a talus or over sloping terrain. The jumper often focuses on the airspace they are flying towards, giving the illusion they have lots of altitude available (e.g. looking at the valley floor in front of them).
In this situation the jumper must remember that the critical altitude is the immediate vertical elevation they have over the talus or slope. The wingsuit jumper must always ensure sufficient altitude for a safe deployment - bear in mind that as soon as the PC is released the wingsuit jumper will stop flying and drop vertically approx. 200'+ as the canopy deploys.
- Experienced wingsuit BASE jumpers may attempt to make jumps that would be otherwise impossible without a wingsuit. The jumper must be absolutely sure of his own capabilities and those of his equipment when undertaking jumps that allow little margin for error.
2. Before even considering doing a wingsuit BASE jump you should be:
An intermediate BASE jumper:
- With minimum 50 BASE jumps (but more jumps are strongly recommended!)
- Cool under pressure, very comfortable in the BASE environment
- Always performing solid exits, also when exiting with arms by your side
- Have good sub & terminal tracking skills
- Have excellent canopy flying skills and landing accuracy
- Have consistent record of stable deployments and on-heading openings
An intermediate wingsuit skydiver:
- With minimum 50 wingsuit skydives (but more jumps are strongly recommended!)
- Who wears a wingsuit as if it were pyjamas, not feeling physically restricted by the fabric
- Always able to find the PC quickly and cleanly, with good on heading openings
- Well practiced at recovering from instability
- Able to unzip arm wings instantly after deployment - like 2nd nature
- Familiar using arm and leg cutaways in freefall and under canopy immediately after opening
- Able to fly the suit comfortably without "potato chipping" achieving reasonable fall rate and forward speed
- Ideally have performed some wingsuit balloon jumps to simulate the exit & sub terminal flight
- See Appendix B for specific flight drills to practice whilst jumping the wingsuit from the plane.
A person who has read all the incident reports, analysed the contributing factors and accepted that wingsuit / BASE jumping is worth the risk of serious injury & death.
3. So you still want to wingsuit BASE? Let's talk about specific preparation:
First thing, it is strongly recommended to start wingsuit BASE using a low performance wingsuit i.e. Birdman Classic, GTi or similar. Once you have 10+ good wingsuit BASE jumps you could consider jumping with a higher performance suit.
The following items are strongly recommended:
- A 1 or 2 pin BASE container for wingsuit BASE. The high speed airflow over the container and high deployment angle excludes the use of a Velcro rig.
- A normal terminal pack job i.e. symmetrical, mesh slider packed "up" (large or fine mesh depending on personal preference).
- ZP pilot chutes, the size depends on your canopy, between 34" – 38". The PC should NOT have a hackey handle (or heavy handle). With a hackey PC handle there is the possibility of the bridle wrapping around the base of the handle. A heavy PC handle could contribute to PC hesitation.
The following items are recommended:
- A container with "dynamic corners" or open corners.
- A suitable helmet, goggles and low profile protective pads.
Back to the dropzone:
- Perform 20 hop-n-pops using your low performance wingsuit and a sensibly sized 7 cell main, or even better your BASE canopy in a skydiving rig. (The 20 jumps can count towards the 50)
- Work your deployment altitude gradually down to USPA minimum of 2200', open by 2000'
(Discuss this with your CCI / DZO first, some dropzones may enforce a higher pull altitude)
- If you have any instability, deployment or opening problems go back to full altitude jumps until they are rectified, use a BMI if necessary.
During these 20 hop-n-pops think about your emergency drills for the following situations, bearing in mind the reduced altitude and time under canopy:
- Unstable exit
- Handle inside of pouch /BOC
- Hard pull
- Floating handle
- PC in tow
- Premature deployment
- Horseshoe malfunction
- Line twists
- Line over
- Water landing
- Jammed zip
Now to a far away land:
It is strongly recommended to go to one of the following well known "high" locations for your first wingsuit BASE jumps. Become familiar with the object performing normal BASE jumps, getting to know landing areas and outs, obstacles, rock drop, winds, talus / ledges etc.
|Carl's Huge wall in Northern Norway:
|Good vertical rock drop
Huge LZ
Good access
|Not many sheep and it rains a lot
|Norwegian Fjord in Southern Norway:
|Good vertical rock drop
Medium sized LZ
Good access
|Very expensive beer
|Italian Terminal wall:
|OK vertical rock drop
Small LZ (assume Heli LZ)
Good access
|Wind / turbulence can be a problem
|Swiss Fungus:
|Good vertical rock drop
Large landing area
|Access is difficult, requiring high fitness level and basic climbing skills
Once you are comfortable with the site, pick a day when you are feeling 100% and the weather conditions are perfect to make your first wingsuit BASE jump.
Advice for your first wingsuit BASE jump. What to focus on?
- Being current! Make sure you get current at wingsuit skydiving and BASE jumping in the weeks running up to your first jump.
- Pack yourself a nice terminal opening, attach the wingsuit correctly with the PC packed in the BOC with the correct tension (not too loose or too tight). Perform a full gear check before the hike, avoid "exit gear fear" syndrome, as you will already be under pressure.
- Exit in a nice head high position, student style, with you arm wings open and your leg wing closed, your arm wings will help you balance and remain head high. 1-2 sec after exit slowly extend your leg wing and start to trim the suit as you feel the air speed picking up. Premature exposure of the leg wing can cause you to go head low – be warned! Better to be head high.
- If you should go head low, stay calm! Bring your head up and if the object allows it, try to stay parallel with the surface and build up some speed to allow you to pull up out of the dive more easily. You may wish to consider this possibility when selecting the site of your first few wingsuit jumps.
- After you have extended the leg wing focus on flying the suit efficiently away from the object pulling nice and high – don't rush, take time to reach, grip and throw the PC. The PC throw should be vigorous to clear the burble the suit makes behind you. Remember to keep your body symmetrical at all times during deployment to help maintain on heading performance.
- It is recommended to learn to deploy from full flight as the BASE environment rarely allows enough altitude to collapse your wings and fall vertically prior to deploying. This also has the advantage of keeping the airflow over your body fast & clean reducing the chance of pilot chute hesitation. Deploying from full flight implies keeping your leg wing inflated and only collapsing your arm wings for the moment required to locate the PC. As your canopy reaches line stretch it is better to close your leg wing as it can catch air causing your body to twist.
Your first 5 - 10 jumps should focus on a stable exit, flight and deployment, once you have these survival skills you can start to think about flight time and distance.
4. You now have some wingsuit BASE experience, what's next?
Once you have become a competent wingsuit BASE jumper you could consider:
- Jumping a higher performance suit
- Jumping from lower objects, for example the higher exit points in the legal Swiss valley.
- Jumping camera
- Performing 2 ways +
- Opening up new objects
- Aerials
- Your imagination is the limit! Make sure there is video!
Trying to land any of the current wingsuit designs is only recommended for the terminally ill.
You want to jump a higher performance wingsuit:
So you have done approx. 10+ good wingsuit BASE jumps with a low performance suit and you now intend to jump a higher performance suit.
Assuming you have trouble free experience flying the higher performance suit from the plane you can go ahead and use it for BASE.
Treat your first wingsuit BASE jump using the higher performance wingsuit the same as your first wingsuit BASE jump.
You want to jump a wingsuit that has a leg pouch PC:
If you intend to use the leg pouch PC (e.g. S3 or Phoenix Fly wingsuit) - it is strongly recommended to perform the following ground and skydiving preparation.
Prior to jumping the leg pouch PC perform a couple of thousand practice pulls on the ground. Be able to find the handle, regardless of body position with your eyes closed. Do 300 practice pulls a night for a week or so, simulating full flight then deployment.
When packing the PC into the leg pouch assure that the Birdman or Phoenix Fly guide lines are followed. The PC should not be too loose or too tight. It is strongly recommended to bar tack the Velcro sleeve to the bridle - check that you leave enough free bridle between the bar tack and pin to ensure the Velcro is completely peeled before any tension is applied to the pin. Failure to do so can cause PC hesitation.
Don't mate the male-female Velcro over each other 100% when the suit is brand new, let the them overlap 50% to the side for the first few dozen jumps until the Velcro is slightly worn. For more details on assembling and packing the leg pouch PC system please refer to http://www.interone.net/learn/basepc.html.
Perform at least 10 skydives with the system, using a wingsuit or BASE bridle, start with normal altitude jumps, performing dummy pulls in flight and then pulling high to give yourself extra time. Assuming you have no opening problems or issues finding the PC handle quickly & easily you can work down to lower altitude deployments.
Treat your first wingsuit BASE jump using the leg pouch the same as your first wingsuit BASE jump.
5. Conclusion
Following these guidelines does not make wingsuit BASE jumping a safe activity.
Wingsuit BASE is still a relatively new discipline. It requires jumpers to develop new skills, new muscle memory, new judgement and new understanding. Respect it.
This document is by no means the final word on wingsuit BASE jumping, always seek advice and guidance from other experienced wingsuit jumpers and share what you discover.
By taking part in this activity you are in effect a "test jumper", we all still have a lot to learn….
Let's be careful out there
Long Flights
James Boole
Craig Poxon
Robert Pecnik
Simon Brentford
Gray Fowler
Yuri Kuznetsov
Steve Schieberl
Per Eriksson
The authors of this document accept no responsibility, financially or otherwise for any loss, serious injury or death that occurs as a result of any persons following the advice contained within this document.
BASE jumping and wingsuit BASE jumping are extremely dangerous activities carrying risk of serious injury or death. Performing the activities described in this document with out becoming an expert skydiver and completing dedicated BASE / wingsuit training will likely result in a demonstration of natural selection.
Appendix A
Specific wingsuit drills to perform whilst jumping from the plane:
- Barrel rolls
- Front flips
- Back flying
- Flying and pulling with left arm wing closed (i.e. to simulate blown wing)
- Pulling out of steep dives quickly (i.e. bad exit)
- Dropping knees
- Turning with minimal altitude loss
- Carving turns
- Arching, de-arching
- Deploying from full flight
- Flying with one bootie off
- Turning only with legs
- Turning only with arms
Appendix B – Wingsuit fatalities
#67 Kirill Kiselev, September, 2002
Age: 27, from Ekaterininburg, Russia.
Cliff Jump (Wing Suit)
Vikesaxa (Eiksdalen Valley) Norway
I received this report from a close friend of Kirill who witnessed or heard most of the jump. Kirill has 500 skydives with 20 being with a wing suit, and 30 BASE jumps, with 2 being with a wing suit. This fatality began with an inadvertent low pull from a man who didn't do low pulls. His friend believes Kirill encountered a stability problem late in the flight. The friend, along with authorities, inspected Kirill's body and gear at the hospital. Kirill had opened his canopy, the slider is at the links. Both toggles are still stowed. The wing zippers are closed and the swoop cords are still over his fingers. The wing fabric between his legs is torn. His broken neck and one broken leg suggest opening and impact occurred at about the same time. The report intimates failure of the wingsuit material between Kirill's legs caused a stability problem at pull time. By the time Kirill stopped trying to overcome the situation and deploy, it is too late. Kirill is the first BASE jumper to die flying a wingsuit on a BASE jump.
#68 Rob Tompkins, September 12, 2002
Lysbotn, Norway
Cliff Jump (Wing Suit)
This is the second wing suit BASE fatality. Rob has 247 BASE jumps with 92 being with a wing suit on the day he died. A report states: "For the last month, Rob had his eye on a particular jump between launch points 4 and 5. We looked at it, doing rock jumps and basically studying the jump. There are two launch points next to this particular jump, one with a 7-second drop and the other with an 8-second drop. Rob jumped the 7-second launch point 10 times always doing a reverse gainer. The place he's looking at now, he dubbed the, "RT Hjørner," and has a rock drop time of 5-seconds. We analyzed this site on video and with other wing suit pilots. In my opinion, the jump is not achievable - and I repeated this to Rob. Other wing suit pilots said the same thing. Rob is convinced he can do it including a reverse gainer. After 7 seconds of freefall Rob impacted the talus ledge. He never tried to deploy his pilot chute, knowing that this would not save him. Rob believed he could out fly the ledge right up until he died. Rob is remembered as a good man, full of respect, and kind to everyone."
#69 Lukas Knutsson, October 11, 2002
Cliff Jump (Wing Suit)
Engelberg, Switzerland (Cold Steel)
Lukas has a good launch and good flight with his wingsuit and pulled high over the landing area. This is the third BASE wing suit fatality. Despite a powerful pull the pilot chute ended up in the turbulence behind him. In the burble the pilot chute spun around very fast. Lukas notices the deployment is hesitating and collapsed his wings and rolled to one side to clear the pilot chute. At this point the pilot chute achieved bridle stretch but the bridle had entangled with the pilot chute so badly the pilot chute is almost totally collapsed. Lukas did rollover to the other side and struggled hard to get the canopy out of the container. However, the container remained closed to impact. Lukas is a very experienced long time BASE jumper (this site is now called "Cold Steel" in his honour) and he will be missed by the entire BASE community.
#75 Gabi Dematte, August 13, 2003
Cliff Jump (Wing Suit)
Gasterntal, Switzerland
Cliff Strike & Impact
The following report is from one of Gabi's many friends. "Gabi went to jump alone, like she did very often. Getting away from the crowds in Lauterbrunnen she went to another valley known by only a very few jumpers. She couldn't out fly a ledge with her wings. Which is awkward, because she kicked ass with those wings. She did not attempt to pull. Gabi was a very good jumper, and a super nice person. I was lucky to get to know her and I will treasure her contribution to my existence. For me, it was nice to jump with another woman. It was special and it did not last long enough. Lauterbrunnen valley is empty and quiet now." Gabi is the fourth BASE wing suit fatality."
#80 Jeff Barker, July 5, 2004
Age: 32
Cliff Jump
Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest
Jeff is jumping with a wingsuit and he failed to clear a outcropping in freefall.
#81 Duane Thomas, August 21, 2004
Age: 35
Cliff Jump
Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland
Duane, a Kiwi with a quick smile, is a well known and experienced BASE jumper. The following is from an eye witness. "The jump is witnessed by two British jumpers and two Swiss jumpers. One Brit watching, and videoing, from the exit point, the other three watching from the LZ. This is Duane's first wingsuit BASE jump, and his first jump ever with a leg mounted pilot chute pouch. Prior to this jump Duane prepared by making 50 aircraft and 2 hot air balloon wingsuit skydives. Duane had a good exit and a good flight. Everybody saw him reach for and locate the pilot chute at what the witnesses said is a reasonable altitude. He then kept his hand there and continued in freefall. The speculation is the lack of normal ground rush (like the type he is used to when not wearing a wingsuit) might have fooled him. The Swiss are yelling at him to pull and he finally did so, at what they said is about 30-feet above the ground. The canopy lifted out of the pack tray but is no where near line stretch when he impacted in a full flight position. According to the Swiss there is no fumbling around, or looking for the pilot chute handle - all the witnesses agree on this. He reached and located the pilot chute, but just took to long to deploy it. A hard pull cannot be fully discounted at this time, but all the witnesses believe he just waited too long." This is the sixth BASE wingsuit fatality since the first one occurred in September of 2002.
Reproduced with the kind permission of Nick Di Giovanni #194. The complete list can be viewed at:http://www.basefatalities.info or http://hometown.aol.com/base194/myhomepage/base_fatality_list
Other wingsuit incidents:
Patrick de Gayardon
Geoff Peggs or
Dwain Weston
Appendix C – Wingsuit site selection
You want to open up a new object jumping a wingsuit:
So you have become a very competent wingsuit BASE jumper and you intend to open up an object that has never been jumped with wingsuit. Here are some factors to bear in mind.
- Make sure the vertical rock drop gives you enough altitude to launch the suit and get flying with a little extra in case you have a poor exit.
- The altitude profile of the object will also affect your decision. Use tools like rock drop, laser range finder and GPS to accurately measure the object.
- When estimating the horizontal distance that can be achieved from an object remember to factor in the altitude loss from exit and deployment.
- You may also wish to consider the conditions at the exit point and whether it is practical to put on the wingsuit there.
- Booties offer little traction when wet or muddy, be careful that you have good ground to stand on for your exit
- A wingsuit takes several seconds to start generating significant lift and forward speed. Therefore jumping a wingsuit from below 1500' offers very little benefit in terms of freefall time and object separation (but it adds some colour to the jump).


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SAMJ: South African Medical Journal
versão On-line ISSN 2078-5135
versão impressa ISSN 0256-9574
SAMJ, S. Afr. med. j. vol.102 no.2 Pretoria Fev. 2012
PHC re-engineering may relieve overburdened tertiary hospitals in South Africa
Morongwa Caroline MohapiI; Debashis BasuII
IMPH Hospital Management student. School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
IIMSc (Med), MPH, MBA, MMed, FCPHM (SA), PhD (Med). Department of Community Health, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital and University of the Witwatersrand
Under the National Health Insurance, a hospital is expected to provide service to patients based on its category. However, in reality the tertiary hospitals offer every level of care, resulting in poor quality of care and over-expenditure. The Polokwane/Mankweng Hospital Complex is a provincial tertiary hospital that delivers tertiary care as well as dealing with some secondary and primary care cases. This study evaluated the hospital casualty department in the Polokwane/Mankweng Hospital Complex. A sample of 250 patients' records was selected by simple random sampling from a cohort of 14 113 patients who attended the Polokwane Hospital Casualty Department during the 1-year study period. Most patients were admitted in the casualty department as a result of injuries (25%). Only 20% (N=51) of the patients were referred from other health facilities. Half of the patients could have been managed at a regional or district hospital. The overall expenditure for the casualty unit during the 1-year study period was R10 321 401.42 and the combined unit cost was estimated at R731.34 per single emergency care patient excluding the capital costs. Referral systems must be strengthened to manage patients at regional and district level to reduce the burden on the Polokwane/ Mankweng Hospital Complex. It is hoped that the Primary Health Care (PHC) Re-engineering Policy will address this by strengthening the referral system in PHC facilities.
Under the National Health Insurance, a hospital is expected to provide service to patients based on its category, e.g. tertiary hospitals should provide specialist level services (provided by regional hospitals, subspecialty care, and critical care under the supervision of a specialist) and should receive referrals from regional hospitals not limited to provincial boundaries.1 Therefore regional and district hospitals should be able to cater for other levels of care. In reality, the tertiary hospitals offer all levels of care, resulting in poor quality of care and over-expenditure.2 Providing basic services in a tertiary hospital casualty department creates problems for the casualty department and for the entire healthcare system.3
The Polokwane/Mankweng Hospital Complex (comprising two hospitals situated 30 km apart in Polokwane and Turfloop) is a provincial tertiary hospital1 that delivers tertiary care and deals with some secondary and primary care cases. This complex will be home to the new medical school4 and is one of the six flagship hospitals to be built in the next few years.5 The province has five regional hospitals that refer healthcare users to the complex, and 30 district hospitals, most of which, because of the proximity between them and regional hospitals, prefer to transfer patients directly to the complex. During 2006/2007, the number of casualty consultations at the complex reached a total of 41 768.6 This huge patient load affects the quality of care in the hospital casualty department and increases their staff workload. This problem needed to be quantified and addressed before the hospital complex is converted into a fully fledged tertiary hospital.
We aimed to evaluate the hospital casualty department in the Polokwane/Mankweng Hospital Complex in terms of caseload, influencing factors and implications on resource utilisation.
A cross-sectional study design was used. A retrospective record review between April 2008 and March 2009 extracted information from various sources of hospital information systems. A sample of 250 patient records was selected by simple random sampling from a cohort of 14 113 patients who attended the Polokwane Hospital Casualty Department. Data were collected on variables relevant to the functioning of and resource utilisation in the casualty unit of this complex. The project was approved by the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical).
Clinical profile. Approximately half of the patients were from the age group 25 - 44 years. More male patients were referred than female. Patients with medical aid bypassed the referral system more often than those without medical aid.
Most patients were admitted in the casualty department as a result of injuries (25%), a similar finding to a study in Mpumalanga.7 Other common conditions were maternal conditions (7%) and cardiovascular diseases (6%) (Fig. 1).
Referral. Only 20% (N=51) of the patients were referred from other health facilities; 45% (N=112) of the patients were discharged, and 5% (N=13) were transferred back to the referring hospital, which implied that they could be managed at a regional or district hospital. Similar trends of non-emergency patients visiting the emergency department occur in other parts of the world.8-10
Almost half of the patients arrived after hours (18h01 - 06h00), indicating the need for after-hours services in primary healthcare (PHC) facilities as well as district and regional hospitals.
Cost. The overall expenditure for the hospital casualty department during this period was R10 321 401.42 (R954 168.45 for pharmacy products, R177 261.16 for other consumables and R 1 866 233.25 for laboratory tests). Personnel expenditure was R7 323 804.
Unit personnel cost per patient was estimated at R518.94 (70.96% of total recurrent cost), while the unit costs for the pharmaceuticals, stores and laboratory tests were R67.23 (9.24%), R12.56 (1.72%) and R132.24 (18.08%) per patient, respectively. Overall the combined unit cost was estimated at R731.34 per single emergency care patient excluding the capital costs.
Appropriate measures to interface between tertiary institutions and other levels of care to provide seamless healthcare at affordable costs for patients and the system seem inevitable. Without these, Polokwane Hospital, and in particular the casualty department, would be used inappropriately by patients as an alternative to other providers of healthcare, namely provincial and district hospitals and other PHC units. This would be at the expense of other patients truly requiring care at a tertiary hospital. The PHC re-engineering11 policy will, it is hoped, address this by strengthening the referral system in PHC facilities.
1. National Health Act (Act 61 of 2003): Regulations: Categories of hospitals. 2011. Government Gazette, 554(34521). [ Links ]
2. Tanner M. Strengthening district health systems. Bull World Health Organ 2005;83(6):403. [ Links ]
3. Kobusingye OC, Hyder AA, Bishai D, Hicks ED, Mock C, Joshipura M. Emergency medical systems in low- and middle-income countries: recommendations for action. Bull World Health Organ 2005;83(8):626-631. [ Links ]
4. Department of Health. Human Resources for Health South Africa 2030. Pretoria: Department of Health, 2011. [ Links ]
5. National Health Act (Act 61 of 2003): Policy on National Health Insurance. Government Gazette, 554(34523). [ Links ]
6. Limpopo Department of Health and Social Development. Final Limpopo DHSA 2008/09-11 Annual Performance Plan - Vote 7. 2009. www.dhsa.limpopo.gov.za.../final%20DHSD%202008-9-11%20APP%20Vote%207 (accessed 7 June 2009). [ Links ]
7. Nkombua L. The practice of medicine at a district hospital emergency room: Middleburg Hospital, Mpumalanga province. South African Family Practice 2008;50(1):65. [ Links ]
8. Bezzina A, Smith P, Cromwell D, Eagar K. Primary care patients in the emergency department: who are they? A review of the definition of the 'primary care patient' in the emergency department. Emergency Medicine Australasia 2005;17(5/6):472-479. [ Links ]
9. Gentile S, Vignally P, Durand A, Gainotti S, Sambuc R, Gerbeaux P. Nonurgent patients in the emergency department? A French formula to prevent misuse. BMC Health Serv Res 2010;15;10:66. [ Links ]
10. McGuigan T, Watson P. Non-urgent attendance at emergency departments. Emergency Nurse 2010;18(6):34-38. [ Links ]
11. Department of Health. Re-engineering Primary Health Care in South Africa: Discussion document. Pretoria: Department of Health, 2010. [ Links ]
Accepted 24 November 2011.
Corresponding author: D Basu (firstname.lastname@example.com)


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Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days.
So, a year after AWS's major outage, has the leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service and cloud provider made changes necessary to prevent another meltdown? And if there is a huge repeat, are enterprises prepared to cope? The answers are not cut and dried, experts say.
[ Also on InfoWorld: IT engineers ponder fix to dangerous Internet routing problem. | In the data center today, the action is in the private cloud. InfoWorld's experts take you through what you need to know to do it right in our "Private Cloud Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Also check out our "Cloud Security Deep Dive," our "Cloud Storage Deep Dive," and our "Cloud Services Deep Dive." ]
RELATED: Five tips for surviving a cloud outage
REMEMBER WHEN? Amazon EC2 outage calls 'availability zones' into question
In part, it's difficult to answer these questions because AWS is notoriously close-lipped about the inner workings of its massive cloud operations, which not only had an outage last April, but suffered a shorter-lived disruption in August. What's more, it's hard to get a read on individual cloud customers' private plans, although industry watchers such as IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick say many enterprises have a long way to go to be fully isolated from provider shortfalls.
"Some folks had their bases covered, for others, it hit them pretty hard," says IDC analyst Stephen Hendrick, recalling last year's AWS outage. "There are certainly lessons to be learned, the question is whether customers want to do what it really takes to protect themselves."
First, a recap of what happened last year: A few weeks after AWS's outage, the company released a post-mortem report detailing what caused the disruption and steps the company took immediately following. Basically, human error started the chain reaction of events. In the wee hours of the morning of April 21, 2011, while attempting to upgrade the East Coast region of the company's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service -- a storage feature that links in with the company's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) offering -- part of the EBS network was switched to a lower capacity infrastructure that wasn't prepared to handle the traffic of the EBS system. The EBS nodes attempted to rectify the problem themselves, causing a network traffic jam that soon spilled over into another AWS feature, the Relational Database Service (RDS), another log storage offering. In all, about 13 percent of the EBS nodes in the affected area were impacted by the outage, and after the four-day event, 0.07 percent of the impacted data was permanently lost.
Experts say AWS has made improvements to its system since then, but it's unclear just how substantial those are. For example, in the post-mortem report the company says it audited its change process and increased the use of automation tools when making updates to avoid human error. Drue Reeves, a Gartner analyst who tracks the cloud industry and AWS, says the company has boosted its primary and secondary EBS networks to handle high network capacities. "It's made EBS more resilient," he says. "They've taken some steps to rectify the situation to make sure this instance doesn't happen again, but that doesn't mean we won't have other outages."
The company says it has taken steps to ensure that problems in one area don't spill over to bring down other services, and Amazon says it has made it easier for customers to build fault-tolerant systems using AWS products. The company's secretive nature related to the architecture of its cloud operations make it difficult to assess security vulnerabilities though, Reeves says.
AWS promised to be more forthright about outages in the future. During last April's downtime, hours after the event, the company said only that a "networking event" had occurred, frustrating many customers who wanted information on what had happened and estimates on when services would be back up. A spokesperson for AWS wrote in an email that the post-mortem report details a number of changes the company has made: "This included software fixes as well as new features including EC2 Instance Status Monitoring and EBS Volume Status, which provide customers the information they need in order to understand the full health of their resources running in AWS."
The company has also stressed what customers can do themselves to protect against outages. At the crux of this is the idea of availability zones (AZ). AWS has eight global regions where customers can store data, including the U.S. East Coast region, where this outage was centered. Then there are availability zones within each region, which are physically separated, independent infrastructures meant to allow for high availability of data. In what amounted to a polite 'I told you so,' AWS makes clear in the recap of the outage that customers who backed up their data in multiple AZs were less affected by the outage. For customers using the Amazon Relational Database Service, 45 percent who used a single AZ were impacted by the outage, but only 2.5 percent of customers using multi-AZs were, according to AWS. A series of whitepapers and webinars have been sponsored by the company since the outage advising customers of how to architect multi-AZ systems.
Each customer has to do his own risk assessment to determine how much should be invested to ensure high availability of services, Hendrick says. Having copies of data across multiple availability zones can increase costs of using AWS's cloud, he says, perhaps by as much as 50 percent. "I don't know how many enterprises really appreciate what high availability means," he says. A rule of thumb is that the more mission-critical applications and data in the cloud are, the more attention customers should pay to architecting for high availability. For some customers, just a multi-AZ approach isn't enough. "We always store data in multiple zones to avoid [outages]," Jeremy Edberg, senior product developer at Reddit was quoted as saying last year. "The reason it went down is that it failed in multiple zones."
A strategy that goes beyond using a multi-AZ approach within the AWS ecosystem involves storing data across regions, says Reeves, the Gartner analyst. This can be somewhat more complicated because while AWS allows for common APIs between AZs within a single region, separate API calls are needed for using multiple regions. This is the approach Quora has taken since last year's outage. On the question-and-answer social media site, a Quora engineer notes that the company is using a "cross region database replication" strategy to distribute its content.
There are nontechnical steps customers can take as well, Reeves says. Customers can negotiate with providers to guarantee availability and stipulate consequences for not meeting those in service-level agreements (SLA). In AWS's outage case, any customers using the impacted availability zone received a 10-day credit, regardless of whether they experienced downtime.
Still though, there will always be risks and outages, and in a way, Reeves says that's a good thing: It keeps companies and end users on their toes. "I really believe that outages can propel the cloud further rather than hinder it," he says. "If we learn from these mistakes, both customers and providers, and make our systems safer and more secure, that can be a good thing for the industry as a whole."
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social media. He can be reached at email@example.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
This story, "Amazon outage one year later: Are we safer?" was originally published by Network World.


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Greg Miller
Originally appearing here.
Timothy Leary's life is now open to the public. The archives of the one-time Harvard psychologist who became an evangelist for the mind-expanding potential of hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s have found a new home at the New York Public Library, which recently threw a party to celebrate their release.
I was born too late to witness Leary's transition from scientist to counterculture celebrity, and I hoped the archives might offer a little hint of what it was like to be there. So I got myself invited to the opening in hopes of being enlightened.
By Leary standards the party was pretty tame " people sipped wine, a man handed out peacock feathers, a flatscreen in the corner looped strange video games Leary helped develop late in life (he died in 1996). But hints of a wilder past could be found in a glass case that displayed a few artifacts, including a 1960 letter from the beat poet Allen Ginsberg asking Leary if he could score some mescaline for the great abstract expressionist painters Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
A serious scholar " or any curious person " could spend months poring over the archives. But I only had a few hours, so I decided to check out the files from Leary's days at Harvard in the early 60s.
In April I attended the Psychedelic Science conference and wrote an article on the recent resurgence of scientific research on psychedelic drugs. Scientists have become interested once again in these drugs both for what they could reveal about the nature of human consciousness and for their potential to help people with depression and anxiety. Leary pioneered this research. But some of those working on it today blame him for ruining it for everybody else. His later antics, they say, precipitated a backlash that criminalized psychedelics and made it impossible to do serious research on them for decades.
After my article came out, I got a couple emails from Leary supporters, including his stepson Zach, complaining that they're sick of hearing people blame all this on Leary. I met Zach briefly at the party and asked him to elaborate. What squashed the fledgling psychedelic research movement was the cultural and social upheaval of the times, not the actions of any one person, he said. "The fucking sixties happened, man."
It seemed like a fair point. But I was still curious about Leary's early research. Was it actually legit? Would there be tabs of acid tucked inside folders of charts and graphs?
There would not be. For one thing, Leary was having a hard time getting his hands on LSD in those days, assistant curator Thomas Lannon explained as he spread out files for us to look at on a huge wooden table in one of the library's reading rooms. The research mainly used psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, and occasionally DMT, a potent and fast-acting hallucinogen derived from plants. (Grace Slick, the lead singer for Jefferson Airplane, said that if LSD is like being sucked up a straw, DMT is like being shot out of a cannon).
My short tour of the archives did seem to show an interesting evolution.
Lannon laid out stacks of mimeographed research proposals, protocols, and data Leary and his colleagues collected at Harvard. There were highly detailed "session reports" of their subjects' " and their own " experiences on psilocybin and DMT.
In those days, behaviorism was a dominant force in the Harvard psych department thanks to the looming presence of its founding father, B.F. Skinner. Leary rejected this philosophy, which holds that psychologists should concern themselves only with observable behavior and forget about trying to explore thoughts, beliefs, and other internal mental states.
Leary's PhD thesis at UC Berkeley, which he completed in 1950, and work he did in the ensuing years, focused on interpersonal psychology. Unlike Skinner, he was very much interested in internal states, and in the interactions between experimenter and subject, or therapist and patient.
Leary and colleagues took detailed notes on their psychedelic drug sessions, some of which were carefully scripted. Lannon showed me an intriguing and enigmatic script for a DMT session that reads in part:
Minute 12: Open eyes, you are in a world where consciousness has left the robot.
Minute 14: Assemble plastic dolls
Minute 16: Decompose the plastic dolls. Wave vibrations.
In the famous Concord Prison Experiment, Leary and colleagues guided soon-to-be-paroled inmates at a nearby prison through psilocybin trips intended to get them to rethink their ways and become law-abiding citizens. The aim was to reduce recidivism.
"Leary goes to Harvard and he doesn't want to lecture kids and wear fancy outfits, he wants to go into the prisons and teach people how to solve their own problems," Lannon said. "It's kind of a noble scientific ambition at first."
The archives contain detailed records from the prison experiment " fat folders for each prisoner with personal histories, batteries of personality tests and psychological profiles. There are tables of data and statistics. Superficially at least, it looks like a scientific process.
At the same time, other materials in the archive from the same time period tell a different side of the story. Leary may have taken his day job seriously, but at night the experiments got a little wilder.
Lannon spread out a series of black and white photos taken at Leary's rented house in Cambridge. They show a young woman who's clearly tripping. In some photos she's laughing and dancing ecstatically, her hair flying. In a couple, a man is running his fingers through her hair and her face conveys that this is an intensely interesting experience. Like, whoa. In others, she looks far away, wary, maybe even a little afraid.
Lannon showed me a bill for damages Leary received from his landlord in 1961. It goes on for pages. It includes a dining table marred by scratches that "appear to be hammered with tines of fork." It lists broken doors, burnt lampshades, a rug defiled by a dog then rolled up and shoved in the pantry, and " perhaps the most predictable of all: "phonograph speaker " completely blown out."
Leary's session reports of his own psychedelic experiences seem to change during the Harvard years. In the beginning his notes are detailed and neatly handwritten; some of them are typed. Later reports adhere less strictly to reality. In one, filled out in March 1963, just weeks before he got kicked out of Harvard, Leary prints in big block letters. He puts down a question mark for his age and lists his occupation as "ANGEL."
Shortly before getting the boot from Harvard, Leary set up a research foundation called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (or IFIF), which was a kind of early citizen science project in which groups of six to 10 people could apply for membership, take consciousness expanding drugs and report their findings back to Leary. "At this point Leary is still appealing to science," Lannon said.
In March of 1963, Leary wrote to Albert Hoffmann, the Swiss chemist of LSD asking him to send 100 grams (hundreds of thousands of doses) to further this endeavor in the name of science. Hoffmann politely declined.
I told Lannon it sounded a bit like Leary was just using his scientific credentials as a front for getting drugs at this point. "I don't know," he said. "Even if he's just trying to get some acid, it's remarkably well organized."
After Harvard
Even after Leary got the boot from Harvard and decamped to Millbrook, an estate in upstate New York, he continued to carefully script psychedelic experiences for those around him, and he kept taking copious notes.
He collabor
ated with a Harvard physician and an engineer at MIT to develop a device called the Experiential Typewriter, which was intended to help get around a common obstacle in psychedelic research. Leary described the problem thusly in a paper in the Psychedelic Review (pdf): "When you ask a psychedelic subject what is happening, he can't tell you. He looks at you blankly or he gasps 'Wow!'"
The Typewriter looks a little like an old adding machine. It has large buttons with labels to indicate things like bodily sensations, hallucinations, or a sense of entering the void. It creates a paper script that's like a record of someone's trip. (Note that the script below depicts an experiment that ran through the middle of the night).
Is it a scientific instrument or a party trick? It's hard to say.
According to Lannon, the point at which Leary made a final break with the scientific method came when Playboy magazine published a long interview with him in 1966. In it, Leary makes some outrageous claims, including that women commonly have several hundred orgasms during sex on LSD.
Up to that point, Lannon says, psychedelic experimentation (including the long traditions of Indian and South American healers and the earlier writings of Aldous Huxley and other Westerners who preceded Leary) had focused mostly on the intellectual and spiritual aspects of the experience. People taking drugs and having mystical experiences hardly seemed to threaten the fabric of society, Lannon said.
But people taking drugs and having orgies was something else entirely, at least as far as mainstream mid-'60s America was concerned. It was around this time that Leary coined his catchphrase, "turn on, tune in, drop out," and many young people did just that, turning their backs on the traditional values of nuclear families and neat lawns with white picket fences.
It was enough to send conservatives like Richard Nixon into a moral panic. In the early 1970s, Nixon called Leary "the most dangerous man in America" (he later bestowed the same honor on Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers).
A Mixed Legacy
The research Leary did at Harvard was ground-breaking, especially in the context of the times, said Michael Horowitz, who has acted as Leary's archivist and bibliographer since 1970.
"Prior research had been done mostly by the CIA and Army, looking at its potential as a psychological weapon with little regard for the subjects who were often dosed without their knowledge, and by medical doctors who treated LSD as a drug that mimicked psychosis," Horowitz said. "Subjects were given the substance in clinical settings hooked up to instruments."
In contrast, Horowitz says, Leary and his colleagues at Harvard were convinced psilocybin and LSD led to profound insights, and were motivated by the potential for using these drugs to promote positive behavioral change and creative problem-solving.
For another perspective on Leary's scientific legacy, I called Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The picture he painted is mixed.
Leary and his collaborator Ralph Metzner claimed that psilocybin reduced recidivism by half in the Concord Prison experiment. But Doblin published a re-analysis 1998 that makes a strong case that that conclusion wasn't warranted.
Leary and colleagues compared recidivism among the inmates who took psilocybin with another group of inmates from the same prison. But they didn't do a fair comparison. For the psilocybin subjects, they looked at recidivism within 10 months of release, on average. For the control group, they looked at recidivism within 30 months. When Doblin redid the analysis using the same time period for both groups, the effect went away.
"The experiment itself was great," Doblin told me. "The flaw was in the reporting of the results."
Metzner admitted as much in a letter to the journal that published Doblin's re-analysis. "We fell victim to the well-known 'halo effect,' by which researchers tend to see their data in as positive a light as possible," he wrote.
Another famous experiment Leary helped conduct at Harvard, the so-called Good Friday experiment, fared somewhat better. That study described the intense spiritual experiences of divinity students who took psilocybin. Based on follow-up interviews and an analysis of the methods, Doblin concluded that the main findings hold up. But he also found that the researchers left out a disturbing reaction by one subject, who had to be given a calming dose of thorazine.
Failing to report an adverse event in a drug experiment is totally not cool. In fact, it's an egregious lapse of research ethics.
Doblin thinks Leary felt justified in committing these scientific sins because he was trying to counter a wave of anti-psychedelic propaganda that was making vastly exaggerated claims about the drugs' risks " including ultimately unfounded claims that ordinary doses were likely to cause gene mutations, birth defects and cancer.
Even so, Doblin says it's not fair to blame the decades-long lull in psychedelic research entirely on Leary. "He deserves some condemnation, but he also made a fundamental contribution to the scientific study of psychedelics," Doblin said. "He did a lot that was really positive."
Leary Lives On
It's amazing that Leary's archives survive as an intact collection, given that the man was imprisoned or on the run from the law for much of the '60s and '70s. His papers narrowly escaped two fires and were moved from place to place to avoid rumored FBI raids, Horowitz says. When FBI agents dressed as cable TV installers finally seized the files in 1975, Horowitz came up with an ingenious ploy to avoid being held in contempt while testifying before a grand jury that was investigating Leary's 1970 prison escape.
Eventually the feds returned Leary's files, and by 2010 they'd ended up in a storage facility in Livermore, California.
William Stingone, the library's curator of manuscripts and archives made two trips there to comb through hundreds of boxes and decide if they were worth acquiring. "I didn't know that much about Timothy Leary," Stingone told me. "My upbringing was anything but psychedelic."
But the material won him over. "What those boxes radiated was an enormous amount of enthusiasm, industry, and humanity. It became clear that the archive was alive and we had to have it." (The library reportedly paid $900,000 for the archives; Leary's estate donated a portion of the proceeds to the library to help pay for processing the collection).
Leary's archives now join documents from George Washington, Herman Melville, Truman Capote and other literary and historical giants in the library's holdings.
Leary may be best known for his role in the psychedelic movement of the '60s, but in his later years, at the dawn of the internet age he became fascinated by the potential of technology to transform human communication (see the related gallery on video games and other software from Leary's archives). He also became interested in life extension and space migration, which he discussed in an exchange of letters with astronomer Carl Sagan.
Leary's main message " and another one of his famous slogans " was to get people to think for themselves and question authority, said Denis Berry, a trustee of his estate. It's a message that's still relevant today, Berry said. "Let's get out of the rut we're unconsciously following, and start thinking for ourselves and living the life we want to live."
"The archive has the power to allow all of us to continue to engage with Timothy Leary and his life and his thought," Stingone told partygoers at the opening reception. "In a way, Timothy Leary's afterlife can begin."
Wired gives an overview of psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary's archive of written papers, research, and experiences. The ar
ticle points to the prominent of researchers and doctors that presented completed study results at Psychedelic Science 2013, and interviews MAPS Founder Rick Doblin about his studies of Leary's early work and legacy. "Doblin says it's not fair to blame the decades-long lull in psychedelic research entirely on Leary," writes Greg Miller of Wired. "'He deserves some condemnation, but he also made a fundamental contribution to the scientific study of psychedelics,' Doblin said."


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I've got a Windows 7-based ThinkPad T400s with multi-touch capabilities here for review, and while I will have a lot more to say about this (hint: "awesome"), here's some info about what Lenovo is doing around multi-touch on its ThinkPad X200 Tablet and T400s notebook:
Available on ThinkPad X200 Tablet and T400s models, our Enhanced Multitouch panels give you an edge: the ability to work more productively. Natural and intuitive finger-based interaction with files, pictures, charts, data and forms and applications designed specifically for mobile professionals simplifies and speeds daily tasks so you can get more done. More comfortably.
Key features of Enhanced Multitouch technology
- One- and two-finger gesture support, plus same digitizer pen support
- Improved capacitive touch sensitivity and input accuracy
- Pen proximity detection technology
- Improved palm recognition technology
- Up to 9 hrs. battery life
- Starts at 3.69 lbs.
- 270 NIT LED display
One and two-finger gesture support
In addition to familiar digitizer pen input, the Enhanced Multitouch panel supports convenient one- and two-finger gestures:
- Zoom in by pinching fingers together, and zoom out by moving fingers apart.
- Pan vertically or horizontally by moving two fingers up and down or left and right.
- Rotate an image by moving one finger around another.
- Right-click by holding one finger on an object and tapping another finger.
- Flick using quick linear pen or touch movements.
Effortless touch
Get a smoother, easier finger-touch experience. Unlike earlier panels that required physical pressure to make a connection, our next-generation digitizer with improved capacitive touch sensitivity can sense a finger touching the screen. No need to apply pressure!
More accurate input
ThinkPad smart touch firmware adjustments enable smarter touch recognition, so screen input occurs where you touch. It even compensates for panel limitations, like the inability to touch a precise spot on the screen, for an easy, no-fuss experience.
Advanced pen and palm recognition
Our intelligent pen proximity-detection technology and improved palm-rejection technology prevent your hand placement from interfering with writing. When the pen comes within range of the sensor, all finger-touch capability is disabled. When you remove your pen and hand, touch capability is re-enabled.
More soon...


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Pieter Abbeel and Sergey Levine: teaching computers to teach themselves
EECS Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine both appear in a New York Times article titled "Computers Already Learn From Us. But Can They Teach Themselves?" which describes the work of scientists who "are exploring approaches that would help machines develop their own sort of common sense." Abbeel, who runs the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, uses reinforcement-learning systems that compete against themselves to learn faster in a method called self-play. Levine, who runs the Robotic AI & Learning Lab, is using a form of self-supervised learning in which robots explore their environment to build a base of knowledge.