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EC LumiSpot LED Fully Adjustable Headlight with 5-way Adjustable Surgical Loupes Set: Our most popular and affordable LED Headlight mounted Surgical Loupes!
Priced hundreds of dollars less than the MegaSpot 6000 our EC LumiSpot LED Headlight with Surgical Loupes is simply the most economical LED system with Surgical Loupes available! Powerful, lightweight and comfortable, our EC LumiSpot provides hands-free, binocular coaxial illumination and visualization. Clear, crisp imaging at 2.5x, 3.0x (most popular) or 3.5x magnification. Loupes adapt to any pupil distance, intrapupillary can be set quickly and simply, allowing for multiple users. May be used with or without prescription glasses. Intense, white shadow free light at 5 Watt, 80,000Lux, 6,000°K, with 20,000 hours of life! The dual adjustable headband quickly conforms to individual sizing, creating a comfortable, fully stabilized system, allowing the users to work for extended periods with little to no fatigue. Comes complete with Lithium ion rechargeable battery kit, wall transformer and custom aluminum carrying case. Also includes our quick study guide "Getting to Know Your Loupes" to help the practitioner transition from otoscope to loupes. As a bonus receive, at no charge, a pair of clear lens glasses with mount for Surgical Loupes.
EC LumiSpot Surgical Loupes Specifications/Features:
EC LumiSpot LED Headlight Specifications/Features:
We've done it again! Go Hands-Free with our new EC SlimLine Surgical Loupes with LED Light: Simple, powerful and sporty! Identical to the Seiler but at an incredible price!
Our lightweight fully adjustable EC SlimLine Surgical Loupes with powerful LED lighting system offer exceptional resolution and the brightest light at an incredible price! Allows freedom of movement and looks great on - due to our attractive, streamline profile! Flip-Up design eliminates having to take loupes on and off allowing for easy visual contact with patient. Comfortable, our lightweight system weighing less than 4 ounces, has an adjustable gel nose bridge that conforms to differing widths. One knob adjustment adapts to any pupil distance, intrapupillary can be set quickly and simply, allowing for multiple users. Clear, crisp imaging at 2.5x, 3.0x (most popular) or 3.5x magnification. Intense, white shadow free light at 50,000Lux, 6,000°K, with 30,000 hours of life! Comes complete with Lithium rechargeable battery kit, wall transformer and custom case. Also includes our quick study guide "Getting to Know Your Loupes" to help the practitioner transition from otoscope to loupes.
EC SlimLine Surgical Loupes Specifications/Features:
EC SlimLine LED Light System Specifications/Features:
EconoLine Surgical Loupes: Our most affordable Stand Alone Surgical Loupes!
Compare the price of our EconoLine Loupes - hands down the most economical 5-way adjustable Surgical Loupes available! Comes complete with carrying case.
EconoLine Surgical Loupes Features:
Beware: All Loupes are not created equal.
Understanding quality differences before purchasing, can save the professional frustration, eye strain, mistakes and money.
Loupes have rapidly become a preferred way of "seeing" in the medical, dental and veterinarian sciences. It is critical that the loupes portray an accurate, precise, distortion free view. With the flood of inexpensive and inferior quality loupes on the market, many professionals are confused. Loupes may look identical but have varying degrees of optical quality and clarity. Figure A is the original view by the naked eye, Figure B shows the view through inferior quality loupes, Figure C shows the view through high quality loupes. The most common signs of poor quality loupes are low resolution, chromatic aberration and spherical aberration:
Resolution is defined as an optical system's ability to form distinguishable images of objects separated by small distances and the ability to recognize fine detail. This is a must in medical, dental and veterinarian sciences.
Chromatic aberration refers to color distortion. Because each color has a different wavelength, uncorrected optics cause the various wavelengths to focus at different points in space. The first color to fall out of focus is blue. Notice the blue haze just to the side of the black lines in figure B. Tissue and color rendition is critical for any practitioner.
Spherical aberration refers to the images flatness. When viewed through loupes, an object that exhibits spherical aberrations would appear to be curved or spherical also depicted in figure B. Distortions of any kind are unacceptable especially in tight areas such as the ear canal.


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JACK & JONES VINTAGE CLOTHING celebrates craftsmanship and takes great pride in producing high quality products. By reviving authentic vintage items and reproduce washes, trims and fabrics with reference to specific periods in time, we aim to capture the true soul of jeanswear.
JACK & JONES VINTAGE CLOTHING offers a selection of exclusive products. By using the best qualities, adding unique details and ensuring a complementing blend of authentic jeanswear and contemporary styles, we create the perfect vintage look with a sharp and modern twist.
With respect for tradition but with an insistence to develop and take it a step further, JACK & JONES VINTAGE CLOTHING makes garments for cool and masculine personalities who value the classic virtues of jeanswear like Americana and rock'n'roll.

subset: commoncrawl


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Acute Malnutrition
Routine nourishment allows humans to secure the energy their bodies need to support vital organ functions, cell development, and tissue maintenance. Acute malnutrition occurs when the body doesn't receive this nourishment and exhausts its energy reserves: the body begins to consume its own tissues in search of the nutrients and energy it needs to survive, targeting muscle and body fat first. The body's metabolism begins to slow, thermal regulation is disrupted, kidney function is impaired, and the immune system's capacity is diminished. The greater the loss of muscle and other tissue, the less likely the chances of survival.
Moderate Acute Malnutrition
Moderate acute malnutrition greatly increasing morbidity rates—an individual's risk of death—by introducing serious deficiencies that compromise a person's immune system, leaving them more susceptible to illness and disease. These deficiencies include anemia (from a lack of iron), goiter (from a lack of iodine), and xerophthalmia (from a lack of vitamin A), as well as scurvy, pellagra, beriberi (from a lack of vitamin B), and rickets (from a lack of vitamin D).
Severe Acute Malnutrition
Acute malnutrition's most extreme form—a deadly condition if left untreated—severe acute malnutrition afflicts an estimated 17 million children worldwide, and results in the loss of 1 million children under five every year. This loss of life is all the more tragic because severe acute malnutrition is predictable, preventable, and treatable. This condition takes one of two forms, although it's not clearly understood why an individual develops one versus the other:
(1) Marasmus
Characterized by a significant loss of weight and muscle tissue, children suffering from marasmus look almost elderly, their skeletal bodies losing any equilibrium between weight and height. Their bodies' vital processes have become severely compromised: metabolism has slowed, thermal regulation is disrupted, intestinal absorption and kidney function are diminished, the liver's capacity to synthesize proteins and eliminate toxins is reduced, and the immunological system doesn't function properly, meaning less resistance to illness and disease. Even if a child manages to survive its bout with marasmus, the damage is done and the deficiencies sustained can never be overcome.
(2) Kwashiorkor
Kwashiorkor, a Ghanaian word meaning "the sickness the older child gets when a new child is born," is characterized by bilateral edemas (swollen tissue) on a child's arms, legs and face—and these children often appear full-faced despite being so malnourished. Beneath these edemas, the muscles have been severely weakened, causing excruciating cramping and muscle pain, and as is the case with marasmus, children with kwashiorkor suffer from significant damage to the functioning of their internal systems.
Diagnosing Malnutrition
A Diminished Weight/Height Index
- A weight/height measurement below 20% of the mean indicates moderate acute malnutrition.
- A weight/height measurement below 30% of the mean indicates severe acute malnutrition.
Presence of Bilateral Edemas
An abnormal accumulation of liquid in one's extremities.
Middle Upper Arm Circumference
An anthropometric measure frequently used during emergencies is the measurement of a child's upper arm—the MUAC, or Middle Upper Arm Circumference. Anything less than 12.0 cm indicates a child's life is in danger from acute malnutrition.
Hunger, or undernutrition, results from the insufficient intake of macro- and micro-nutrients. It can lead to chronic malnutrition or the severe wasting associated with acute malnutrition.
Action Against Hunger is the world's hunger specialist and leader in a global movement that aims to end life-threatening hunger for good within our lifetimes. For 40 years, the humanitarian and development organization has been on the front lines, treating and preventing hunger across nearly 50 countries. It served more than 21 million people in 2018 alone.


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Rocksalt Newcastle
Wine and Dine on the Marina! Only $29 for a Seafood Antipasto Board and Bottle of Wine for Two People. Feast on King Prawns, Char-Grilled Mussels, Squid and Octopus, Blue Eye Cod Brandade and Warm Sourdough. Plus Share a Bottle of K.N Williamston Shiraz. Valued at $70
- Highlights
- Fine Print
- Company
- Reviews
Invite a friend out for a delectable spread at Rocksalt Newcastle, an iconic eatery right on the waters of the Newcastle Marina
Dine on a beautiful seafood antipasto plate with king prawns, char-grilled mussels, squid, octopus, Blue Eye Cod brandade and warm sourdough bread
Share a bottle ofK.N Williamston Shiraz to complement the flavours of the seafood spread
Available for lunch Monday-Saturday and dinner on Friday and Saturday nights
What We Like
Enjoy your spread in the dining room or soak up sunshine while you dine on the boardwalk
Buy a voucher for yourself and up to five to give as gifts
Offer expires on 10 June 2014 (bookings must be made by 27 May 2014)
Valid for lunch Monday to Saturday and dinner Friday to Saturday. Not valid public holidays or special event days
Bookings are absolutely essential and subject to availability
Voucher valid for two people (dine-in only)
Maximum of one voucher per booking, table or group (maximum two people)
Members can purchase one voucher for themselves and multiple vouchers as gifts for different recipients
24 hour cancellation policy applies, non-attendance and late cancellation voids voucher
Must be 18 years or older to consume alcohol
Not valid in conjunction with any other offer and not redeemable for cash
Redemption instructions can be found on your voucher
We shared the seafood platter which was outstanding, and the waitresses provided the best service we have had in Newcastle for quite some time. I would love to go back!"Urbanspoon
This was the best restaurant experience I've had in years. Food was superb - the fish especially, totally fresh, you can just tell! Highly recommended."Urbanspoon


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Late umpire Bell's impact went beyond diamond
It was a moment like many others, where you meet a new face and know -- instinctively -- that you'll never see this person again.
But I could not have been more mistaken about my first and only lengthy encounter with former big league umpire Wally Bell. I only wish fate could have brought us together one more time.
It was a moment like many others, where you meet a new face and know -- instinctively -- that you'll never see this person again.
But I could not have been more mistaken about my first and only lengthy encounter with former big league umpire Wally Bell. I only wish fate could have brought us together one more time.
Now, after Bell's tragic death at age 48 on Monday, that will not happen.
I was 15 years old in the spring of 1984, and my passion for baseball was in full bloom. For a little more than a year, I had been a regular guest on a Friday night sports talk show on WKBN AM in Youngstown, Ohio. The host, Steve Hook, and I would play trivia games with the listeners and then we would chat about whatever was topical in sports.
One Friday, I arrived at the station early to find Hook doing a segment with a local man who had just finished umpiring school and was heading for the New York-Penn League to begin his pro career. He was from nearby Austintown, and his name was Wally Bell.
As Hook chatted with Wally, I knew this: The odds against him ever making the big leagues were astronomical. With umpiring careers lasting as long as 30-plus years and only (at that time) about 52 MLB positions, young umps faced a grueling test just to advance to the high Minors.
The segment ended and I shook Wally's hand, and I can remember having this very thought: "He is going to disappear into the baseball wilderness, and I'll never know what became of him."
Nine years later, I was working for a newspaper in Ashtabula, Ohio, about an hour north of Youngstown. As I went through the baseball wire stories one March evening, I noticed a blurb about new umpires who had been hired by MLB to fill positions created with the addition of games necessitated by the birth of the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins.
To my amazement, one of those umpires was Bell.
I immediately flashed back to that day at WKBN -- and marveled how Wally had beaten the odds.
Three years later, I attended a Pirates game at Three Rivers Stadium where Bell happened to be the home-plate umpire. Between innings -- in a largely deserted park -- I walked to the first row behind home plate and called out to Wally through the screen, asking if he remembered our meeting more than a decade before.
He looked bemusedly at me, shrugged, and returned his attention to the game.
As the director of communications at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a dream job I landed in 2008, I always thought I might run into Wally again. With this story in my back pocket -- just waiting to be told -- I figured it was bound to happen.
It was not to be.
But Bell's triumphs -- his three All-Star Games, seven Division Series, four League Championship Series and the 2006 World Series -- live on in Cooperstown, where every umpire to ever don the gear is documented in a file in the Museum's Giamatti Research Center. And the next time I think something just can't be done, I'm going to take a walk through the Plaque Gallery and into the Library for a peek at the clippings that record Wally's professional life.
That kid from Austintown surely beat the odds. A better legacy would be hard to find.
Craig Muder is the director of communications for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.


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I am afraid of spiders. I am afraid of tight spaces and heights, afraid of the cold, afraid of dying and afraid of not being good enough.
I am so terrified of rejection that I will put off and procrastinate and excuse my way out of every opportunity I am given, because in my head, opportunity is only a chance to show everyone how much you can't do.
Because of that awesome little personality quirk, I currently have very organized kitchen cabinets and sparkly grout and an inbox that looks like the Library of Congress is archiving it. My dogs have been double-bathed and the leaky faucet in the kitchen has been tinkered with and half of the holes my insane beagle has chewed in the fence have been patched and I've helped the kids start to build a skate ramp with the leftover wood and none of that is going to get me a new job, so today I forced myself to sit down and write out my résumé.
I wrote a résumé today.
I've never done that before. Ever.
Five years ago I was a waitress. A good waitress. A really great fucking waitress. Every year before that, since I was 17, I was a waitress. You can write a résumé when you are a career waitress, but that's kind of like showing up at a punk show in a sweater vest and penny loafers.
I was very proud of the fact that I waited tables, because it is extremely difficult work that requires high levels of mental agility, physical stamina, excellent service skills and a tolerance for alcohol high enough to make a pirate blush.
But mostly, there was no fear in it. I can wait tables in my sleep. It's easy for me, and I knew that so long as I kept up on my French Reds, I'd never, ever fail at it. I aimed just high enough to respect myself in the morning and plenty low enough to never worry about rejection.
I had no idea that I could, or would ever, write, let alone write marcom. The most I'd ever written were witty sandwich-boards that paired sexy adjectives with sultry wines and smoky jazz for Friday night happy hour crowds. Even though that's *totally* marketing, you don't get to call it that in the restaurant business...you call that opening sidework. It does you absolutely no good, it just makes five minutes of your 10 hour shift a little more interesting.
But it turns out that I can write, and rather enjoy marketing/online advertising, and now I have to find out if I'm *actually* any good enough at either to get another job doing one or the other or some amalgamation of both. Now it is time to put myself on a piece of paper in 10-point Times New Roman and ask people to tell me I am good enough for them.
I would rather re-caulk every shower in the house than lay myself bare on résumé paper.
But I did it anyway. I spent all day dissecting what it is I do, what it is I hope to do, and what exactly it is I am so afraid of. Today, I did one thing that scares me. Today, I wrote a résumé. Tomorrow, I am going to see where it takes me.
I am afraid of spiders. I am afraid of tight spaces and heights, afraid of the cold, afraid of dying and afraid of not living up to my own potential.


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Apps Are Not Coffee
from the advanced-economic-concepts deptJameson Ahern points us to a fantastic discussion by Josh Lehman, explaining why it's silly to argue that people are irrational for spending $4 or more on a cup of coffee*, but not $0.99 on digital content or apps. As with nearly all cases of seemingly "irrational" behavior in economics, the truth is that you just need to better understand the marginal benefit that people are getting and the true marginal costs, which often go way beyond the dollar amount. Lehman points out a few key examples, with the focus on trust & certainty, as well as the difference in the competitive market.
For the first point, he notes that you know exactly what you're getting with a Starbucks cup of coffee and how much you'll enjoy it:
I know I'll like my cup of coffee. It will fully meet my expectations. For the $4 I spend I don't expect it to change my life. I don't expect it to even last beyond its last drop (and a trip to the bathroom later). It's an experience I can fully trust will be pretty much the same each time. There's no gamble here. Ask me if I'd like to drop $4 on a cup of your new "Instant Refresher Juice 1.0″ and there's a very good chance I'll pass. Or, maybe I'll ask for a free sample to see if your $4 Instant Refresher Juice 1.0 is as good as Starbucks Coffee. In short, I know what I'm getting for $4 and I'm getting that same experience every time I hit the drive thru.What he's really pointing out here is that there's a much bigger cost to your content than just the $0.99 it's being offered for. It's the risk of not getting any actual value out of it. And since people are, quite naturally, loss averse, they're much more hesitant to spend under such circumstances. This is completely rational behavior.
He also points out the general nature of the market, and whether or not there are reasonable "free" alternatives:
When you walk up to the counter of your local coffee shop you are not asked, "would you like a cup of our free coffee, or would you like to select from our paid options?". If Starbucks gave out free coffee every day there would be mile-long lines at the drive thru. If the free coffee was anywhere close to as good as their paid stuff people would abandon the paid en masse. Some would pay maybe because they felt bad, as a freeloader. Others would pay because they preferred the options available to them in the paid column vs. the free. Now imagine the free selection at starbucks was nearly as large, or larger, than the paid selection: Welcome to the App Store.In other words, as we've explained for years, the nature of the wider market really matters. In competitive markets, price gets driven down towards marginal cost. There are ways to prevent that -- and one is to build up brand value through things like trust and certainty (see the point above). So while there are cheaper alternatives, or even in many cases "free" alternatives at people's workplaces (contrary to Lehman's suggestion that there are no such alternatives), people still flock to the one they know and trust. But if there are lots and lots and lots of free alternatives, then you have to work much harder to justify the price. In some cases, for some people, you can. But the market situation between coffee and apps is not very close at all.
Lehman makes some other points as well, but the key one is that these are totally different markets with different factors playing on pricing. Comparing them in absolute dollar terms misses the full costs and full benefits associated with the purchase.
* Moreover, despite the "$4 coffee" being an oft-repeated trope about Starbucks, it's not really true. The biggest cup of coffee at Starbucks costs a little over $2. The drinks that are pricier than that are generally about nine-tenths milk, and milk is much more expensive than coffee. Indeed, the drinks that so many people think are a "ripoff" are not where Starbucks makes the majority of its money—they tend to be much lower-margin items than the plain coffee, because milk and whipped cream and fancy syrups are all high-cost and expensive to store. Is Starbucks still "expensive"? Maybe so -- but anyone who opens that discussion by talking about the "$4 cup of coffee" demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the business functions (and even of what's on the menu).
Filed Under: apps, coffee, digital content, economics, price


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For a 5 month update, check out: "The Standing Desk Experiment 5 Months in"
For about the past year or two, I've been working on improving my "state of being" for lack of a better term - focusing on more productivity, health, etc - I think everyone goes though this at one point or another. Various events of the past year - an incoming second kid, badly dislocating/injuring my knee and rehabilitating that, realizing that being an overweight, unhealthy geek probably wasn't in my, or my families' long term interest and seeing my little girl grow up faster than anything I've ever seen (see this excellent post by Merlin Mann - "Cranking") has triggered me to make a series of changes, the most recent of which is directly interesting to a lot of you - I've switched over to a standing desk setup at work.
I've spent a lot of time since last november going to a local Bikram Yoga studio - that, combined with a drastic change in diet has allowed me to lose a fair amount of weight, and my knee which had been bothering me got dramatically better. However - recently despite losing almost an entire teenager in weight, being more active, getting better shoes, etc, etc my knee and back started acting up again. I had been seeing article and friends talking about standing desk setups and how they helped them - but I mean, I'm a hacker, and I have an amazing chair - it's my job to sit 12+ hours a day right?
No. My job is to get things done, something I can't do if I'm miserable because of a stupid knee injury and back pain despite all of the other work (yoga, losing weight, exercise) I've been doing. So, I started doing a lot of research. Interesting (or fortuitously enough) around this same time an article in the New York Time "Stand Up While you Read This" came out that really made me ask myself if maybe there was a better way. I also found out that sitting with my knees bent/in a chair was contributing to how inflamed and painful my injured knee was. Time for a change.
Throughout the years I've seen people in various jobs have standing rigs - I always sort of laughed and wandered back to the comfort of my comfy chair - but now, as of last week - I've joined the league of "odd people" standing there at hacked together standing desk. I'm always one to experiment so I absconded with a table from a nearby lunchroom and a monitor stand it really hack the basics together.
The important thing was ergonomics: The monitor should be right at eye height (or just below) and the keyboard should allow my elbows to be at a 90 degree angle, or right thereabouts. Luckily, I have comfy shoes thanks to Superfeet insoles I have to wear because I unreasonably obey everything my Dr. says. All told it took me about 10 minutes to set everything up and start rocking the new setup.
I'm pleased to say that after starting the experiment Monday morning at 9am, I pushed through the entire week, only sitting about 1.5 hours in total during the workday, and without any ill effects. In actuality, I found that certain things immediately improved. For the first few days my feet and my knees and my back were bothering me, which is to be expected. You don't go from rocking a chair 8+ hours a day to standing and typing without some pain. The surprising bit of pain came from my shoulders/arms/neck - apparently I had grown more accustomed to resting my elbows on my armrests and desks then I had realized. Out of all the other minor aches and pains - these were the worst by far.
On the positive side - I noticed (as did my lovely wife) that my posture immediately got better. I feel like I gained two inches in height this week alone! Also, my energy levels increased almost immediately - I felt less lethargic, I didn't suffer from the post lunch "nap attack", all in all I felt a lot more active and energized. I also felt that I was more engaged in the tasks I was working on - I was less distracted, more zero'ed in on each chunk of work I was banging on, That said - for the first few days, there were times all I could think about were my feet (discomfort) and the fact I was standing.
In order to resolve the mild discomfort, I've acquired a padded "anti-fatigue" mat designed for people who work (standing) in kitchens all day, which I'll throw into the mix next week to see if it helps me adapt into this. I'm taking the "kill the habit with fire" approach - most people I know or know of who use standing setups tend to swap between standing and sitting for various periods throughout the day however I'm working on breaking myself in to just standing for prolonged periods first before I "spoil" myself by sitting.
Ultimately - the result of the week 1 experiment is:
- Knee pain: Greatly reduced. In fact, my injured knee feels great, except when I sit with it bent for an extended period of time, such as at home.
- Greater focus: I feel more deeply engaged in the tasks that I'm working on.
- More active: I joked about this on twitter, but the fact is, is that I'm not standing still - I'm constantly moving/fidgeting/etc. I feel more active overall, and it shows. I also find myself dancing a little bit when working and listening to good music. Much to the amusement of my wife and coworkers.
- More social: My officemates may hate this part, but given I'm "already up" - rather then send an email, or IM, it's much easier for me to just go over and talk to them, which means I'm moving even more.
- Improved posture: My posture improved nearly overnight. Shoulders back, standing up straight. It feels great.
- Improved Yoga: I'm able to hold / go into certain stances that I could not before, I think this is due to posture/back improvements as well as better balance. There a stance I haven't been able to pull off (I couldn't balance/finalize the pose) for some time which I was able to this week - toe stand, I'm pretty jazzed.
- RSI: Most of the time (when I'm not on a laptop) I use a split ergonomic keyboard and a trackball due to RSI - even with those, long periods in front of the machine can cause some discomfort. Standing seems to have improved my posture/ergonomics enough that it stopped bothering me.
The next step is to consider/request an actual standing desk setup that isn't a hack - right now my stolen kitchen table is a bit small and wobbly, which means that when I really get typing the monitor starts dancing along with me. The main adjustable desk options I've found are:
- The Geekdesk
- Steelcase Adjustables
- The Anthro elevate/series
- Edit: Another option: Ergo Depot Heavy Duty
- Edit: Another option: Table Legs MD (site seems off to me, they appear to just be a reseller, but they do show lots of options) via greg newman
- Edit: Another option for those of you who can not get a new desk, and want to modify your existing one is the Ergotron workfit.
Of these, I think the Geekdesk is the most straightforward, and the one I've heard the most positive reviews about. I have to say - as someone using a Mac Pro, the attachments that the Anthro series offers (tower cradles, etc) are very, very attractive. As it is, with the Geekdesk I think I would need some longer DVI/USB cables and to set the tower on the floor (I know - first world problems, eh?).
Overall - the experiment seems to be going well. I'm looking forward to seeing how week two pans out - I'm going to keep myself in the "break in/don't relent" phase until standing is the defacto method my body wants to use to work. After that I think it'll be "safe" to chill in a chair every so often. I'm interested in hearing about your experiences and recommendations as well, so drop me a comment or email and let me know if you've tried this out/do it and have any recommendations.
For additional reading, see:
- This podcast (Build and Analyze Episode 21) has a good bit on standing desks vs. exercise balls
- "How Do you avoid sitting down all day" - Lifehacker
- "How and why I switched to a standing Desk" - Gina Trapani
- "Are you sitting down, Why a stand up desk might save your life" - Mashable
- "Standing Desk Tips" - Boing Boing
- "Can't sit for too long - there's a desk for that" - New York Times
- "Sitting down makes you fat" - Treehugger
- "Why your desk job is killing you slowly" - Men's Health (HN Link)
- "Your Office Chair is Killing you" - Businessweek (HN Link)
- "Sitting all Day: Worse for you than you might think" - NPR (HN Link)
- "Build an Adjustable standing desk with a pipe and a kee klamp" - via greg newman
And here is the hacker news link for this post.
And finally, here's the obligatory picture of me rocking the setup:
For a 5 month update, check out: "The Standing Desk Experiment 5 Months in"


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Please note this item is made to order. For pre-order details, please click HERE.
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Tue, 18 April 2006
Graduation rates in Des Moines schools are dropping, but Jonathan Narcisse says it's worse than you think. Then, what do we want to say to the Rev Fred "Billy-Bob" Phelps? He gets a bit piece of Iowa's mind.
Direct download: mickelson-2006-04-18.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:47am CDT


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Suspect ID'd in deadly Ohio school shooting
CHARDON, Ohio - A teenager described as an outcast at a suburban Cleveland high school opened fire in the cafeteria Monday, killing one student and wounding four others before he was chased from the building by a teacher and captured a short distance away, authorities said. A student at the school identified the suspected gunman to CBS News as T.J. Lane.
Law enforcement sources tell CBS News that, a day or two ago, the suspect told classmates something of his plans, but those classmates didn't take him seriously.
Another student who saw the attack close-up said it appeared that the gunman targeted a group of students sitting at a cafeteria table and that the one who was killed was trying to duck under the table.
A bullet grazed Nate Mueller's ear.
"You see glasses of your friends laying all over the place, there's people screaming, everybody's running in different directions and you're just trying to get out," Mueller said.
His friend was killed. The junior was waiting in the cafeteria for a bus to take him to a nearby school where he was studying computer science.
Panicked students screamed and ran through the halls after gunfire broke out at the start of the school day at 1,100-student Chardon High, about 30 miles from Cleveland. Teachers locked down their classrooms as they had been trained to do during drills, and students took cover as they waited for the all-clear.(Scroll down to listen to emergency audio recordings from the scene.)
One teacher was said to have dragged a wounded student into his classroom for protection. And distressed parents thronged the streets around the school as they heard from students via text message and cellphone long before official word came of the attack.
Two of the wounded were listed in critical condition, and another was in serious condition.
1 dead in Ohio school shooting; Suspect detained
The suspect, whose name was not released by officials because he is a juvenile, was arrested near his car a half-mile away, the FBI said. He was not immediately charged. The Geauga County Sheriff's Office said that the suspect turned himself in after being chased out of the school by a teacher, CBS News has learned.
FBI officials would not comment on a motive. And Police Chief Tim McKenna said authorities "have a lot of homework to do yet" in their investigation. But 15-year-old Danny Komertz, who witnessed the shooting, said the gunman was known as an outcast who had apparently been bullied.
"I looked up and this kid was pointing a gun about 10 feet away from me to a group of four kids sitting at a table," Komertz said. He said the gunman fired two shots quickly, and students scrambled for safety. One of them was "trying to get underneath the table, trying to hide, protecting his face."
The slain student, Daniel Parmertor, was an aspiring computer repairman who was shot while waiting for the bus for his daily 15-minute ride to a vocational center. His teacher at the Auburn Career School had no idea why Parmertor, "a very good young man, very quiet," had been targeted, said Auburn superintendent Maggie Lynch.
"We are shocked by this senseless tragedy," his family said in a statement. "Danny was a bright young boy who had a bright future ahead of him."
Parmertor's teacher at Auburn Career School had no idea why Parmertor, "a very good young man, very quiet," had been targeted, said Auburn superintendent Maggie Lynch.
Officers investigating the shooting blocked off a road in a heavily wooded area several miles from the school. Federal agents patrolled the muddy driveway leading to several spacious homes and ponds, while other officers walked a snowy hillside. A police dog was brought in.
A U.S. official said that a preliminary report shows the suspect fired eight shots, CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports. The FBI and local police have conducted an extensive search of the home where the suspected shooter lived. (The house belongs to the suspect's grandparents.)
Agents were looking for computer files, phone records, notes and possible weapons, Orr reports. Police are trying to establish a motive for the shootings and are looking for evidence that could show how much planning went into the attack. They are looking through emails, social network postings, and other communications to determine what the suspect may have shared with friends or associates about his intent.
One law enforcement source says the suspect "is cooperating" with police.
Teacher Joe Ricci had just begun class when he heard shots and slammed the door to his classroom, yelling, "Lock down!" to students, according to Karli Sensibello, a student whose sister was in Ricci's classroom.
A few minutes later, Ricci heard a student moaning outside, opened the door and pulled in student Nick Walczak who had been shot several times, Sensibello said in an email. Ricci comforted Walczak and let him use his cellphone to call his girlfriend and parents, Sensibello said. She said her sister was too upset to talk.
Heather Ziska, 17, said she was in the cafeteria when she saw a boy she recognized as a fellow student come into the cafeteria and start shooting. She said she and several others immediately ran outside, while other friends ran into a middle school and others locked themselves in a teachers' lounge.
"Everybody just started running," said 17-year-old Megan Hennessy, who was in class when she heard loud noises. "Everyone was running and screaming down the hallway."
Rebecca Moser, 17, had just settled into her chemistry class when the school went into lockdown. The class of about 25 students ducked behind the lab tables at the back of the classroom, uncertain whether it was a drill.
Text messages started flying inside and outside the school, spreading information about what was happening and what friends and family were hearing outside the building.
"We all have cellphones, so people were constantly giving people updates about what was going on, who the victims were, how they were doing," Moser said.
The school had no metal detectors, but current and past students said it had frequent security drills in case of a shooting.
Anxious parents of high school students were told to go to an elementary school to pick up their children.
Joe Bergant, superintendent of schools in Chardon, a town of about 5,100 people, said school was canceled Tuesday and grief counselors would be available to students and families.
"If you haven't hugged or kissed your kid in the last couple of days, take that time," he said.


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From skunk cabbage to salmon, learning about traditional tribal foods connects youth to a healthy forest
by Administrator June 23rd, 2011
This guest article is authored by Kelly Sprute, Public Affairs Specialist, USDA – Forest Service, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Everett, Wash. office
Eating skunk cabbage leaf salmon or stinging nettle soup doesn't sound like an entrée at a local restaurant, but Pacific Northwest Native Americans have eaten these foods for centuries.
"I liked the stinging nettle soup but the aftertaste numbed my tongue," said Samantha James, Ferndale High student and Lummi member. "It felt like my tongue was asleep. I tried to talk but no one understood me," she said. Samantha learned about nettles and other traditional native foods at the Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Wash. She enjoyed the salmon wrapped in skunk cabbage, it was juicy and tender, but the leaf stunk.
Samantha's interest in native foods and heritage led her to participate in the college's Saturday Science Academy. High school students meet with college students every second Saturday of the month to learn about a science, from physics to astronomy. This month the academy took a trip to Boyd Creek Interpretive Trail on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest to help open the ADA accessible trail.
Here Samantha and the students did trail maintenance: hacking away encroaching shrubs, brushing off winter debris from the boardwalk and cleaning moss-covered signs; but what they took away was more than sore muscles and blisters. They learned about a healthy forest ecosystem and made another connection to their tribal heritage and the land.
Boyd Creek is a salmon-spawning creek that feeds into the North Fork Nooksack River. The Lummi Reservation sits at the mouth of the Nooksack River. "Many of the kids have never been out to the headwaters of the Nooksack," said Lindsay Taylor, volunteer coordinator with the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association. "Most of them don't realize how far the salmon travel to spawn. From ocean to Boyd Creek is over 60-river miles," she said.
Taylor explained to the students that spring-Chinook salmon are now waiting in the river before traveling to their spawning grounds. "They come into the river around March or April and settle in deep, cool, calm pockets of water until the fall," she said. "Spring Chinook spawn higher up the river than fall runs," she said.
Salmon need clean, cool water to survive. Planting native shrubs and trees along the waterways help shade the water, keeping soil and runoff from entering the system. "Salmon cannot breathe in cloudy murky water. It would be like us trying to breath in a smoke filled room," said Taylor.
Salmon lay eggs in a nest in gravel called a 'red.' The gravel provides safety for the eggs and allows water to flow through, giving oxygen to the nest. After a month or so the eggs hatch, in two months they are 'fry' and are eating macro invertebrates and insects. A female can lay 3,000 eggs in a red. "The ocean provides more food for salmon and plenty of room to grow," said Taylor.
Salmon are a keystone species in northwest forest ecosystems and provide a food source for bears, eagles and other plants and animals. Gravity pulls everything downstream towards the ocean. Salmon swim upstream and bring with them marine nutrients. "Trees use the decaying salmon carcass for fertilizer. Nitrogen and phosphorus are two basic building blocks for the development of life," said Taylor. "Trees along a salmon-baring stream grow three times faster and have traces of Omega 3 amino acids in their system," she said.
Salmon are not only a food source but a way of life for tribal fisherman. First Salmon ceremonies celebrate the return of the salmon, signifying the tribe will eat for the next year Taylor told the youth.
"Most salmon spawn within 100 yards from where they are born," said Taylor. "Here at Boyd Creek you will be able to watch. We need to take care of their habitat from forest to the ocean," she said.
Kelly Sprute's email is ksprute (at) fs (dot) fed (dot) us
Northwest Indian College
Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association
Lummi Nation
Nooksack Indian Tribe
Swinomish Indian Tribal Community
Recipes for stinging nettle soup
Skunk cabbage salmon


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Just In Time For Mother's Day: 10 Uterus Cakes
This Mother's Day, why not surprise mom with something REALLY surprising?
"It's supposed to be a uterus.
Yep, what could thrill Momther more than an edible version of the thing you broke on your way out? (Er...sorry again about that, Mom.) And since uteri come in so many flavors (ew), here are nine more "inspirational" uterus cakes to really get those creative juices flowing. (Ewwwwsorry.)
Evil jester laughs at your feeble attempts to serve ice cream:
See it? SEE IT??
Hunchbacked Basketball Player Can Dribble No Longer:
Aw. Playa' got served.
Bullwinkle? Is that you?
Ok, while I agree with Bonnie Burton that everything really is better with googly eyes, I still have to draw the line at making letters out of staples. Yowch.
"But, Oh-Cakey-Goddess-of-Most-High-Snark-and-Random-Sprinkles" you're saying, because you're finally using my proper title, "What I REALLY want to see is a tiny cake crawfish inside a cake uterus!"
Well, ok, but only because you asked politely.
What's that? You want two slices? Yeesh. You're so shellfish.
Hey, remember that time when Dobby from Harry Potter tried to stifle a really, really big sneeze?
"Accio CHOOIEE!!"
(I know; that was a real "light bulb moment" for me, too.)
Gosh, all this pink is getting kind of monotonous, don't you think?
Here, this should help:
And that's how everyone learned that Jeannie was actually born a Smurf.
And now, a little "poetry:"
Q: "Why did the lady blush during her sonogram?"
A: "Because she saw a fallopian!"
Some people give their uterus a cute little pet name:
(I'm seeing a cross between a Snork and a Fraggle. Please tell me I'm not the only one.)
Lola? Aw, that's sweet.
I bet Crampy McClots-a-Lot could kick Lola's butt.
And finally, the balloon-animal uterus you never knew you needed:
You know, I never thought I'd like a uterus cake, but I've really taken a shine to this one.
Thanks to Laura A., Anony M., Erica O., Tanya S., Isabella, Dawn M., Sarah M., Nicki R., Sarah U., & Shelley T. for all the pro-creations.


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How to Upgrade Online to Windows 8
With Windows 8, Microsoft lets you upgrade to a new operating system online: After you purchase the program online, Microsoft sends it to your computer through the Internet. After you run through a few steps, Windows installs itself over your existing Windows version.
Upgrading online requires a fast broadband Internet connection, which rules out some customers. And even with a fast connection, the process takes much longer than upgrading with a DVD. However, upgrading online costs less than buying a DVD, and it's an easy way to upgrade tablets and laptops that lack DVD drives.
Through January 31, 2013, Microsoft offers a $39 online upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, a substantial savings over the regular price. As part of the online upgrade special, Microsoft also lets you upgrade to a free copy of Windows Media Center, which lets you play DVDs and record TV shows through an attached tuner.
Follow these steps to upgrade online to Windows 8 from a computer running Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP:
Visit the Windows 8 upgrade website, click the Download Windows 8 button, and purchase the upgrade.
Microsoft collects your credit card information and begins sending the program's installation file to send your computer. (The upgrade price increases after January 31, 2013.)
When Internet Explorer asks whether you'd like to Save or Run the incoming download, click the Run button.
Clicking Run tells the installation program to begin the installation immediately. When the program first runs, it checks your computer for compatibility and lists any issues it finds.
Read the compatibility issues.
The program sums up the problems your computer may have with the install, including how many of your programs and devices won't work.
To see exactly which programs and devices aren't compatible, click the See Compatibility Details link. The Compatibility Details page appears, listing every problem. To see more information about the problem listed on that page, click the problem's adjacent More Details link.
After reviewing the information, click the Next button.
Windows lists a 25-character string of numbers and characters. Write it down and store it in a safe place. This is your product key, and without it, you can't install Windows. You may need the product key later if something goes wrong.
Write down the product key and click the Next button.
Your computer begins downloading a copy of Windows 8 and then unpacking the downloaded files. (You can continue to use your computer for 15 to 45 minutes while this process takes place.)
Choose how to install Windows 8.
After downloading itself to your computer, the online installation program lets you choose one of three ways to upgrade to Windows 8:
Install now: Designed for the impatient, this option begins installing Windows 8 as soon as you click the Next button. If you choose it, move to Step 6.
Install by creating media: Designed for the cautious who prefer backups, this more technically challenging option lets you save the installation file on a flash drive, or onto your computer for burning to a DVD on your own.
Install later from your desktop: Designed for the tired, this lets you save the installation file to your computer. The program places a convenient installation link on your desktop. If you choose this option, click Close to close the installation program. Later, when you're ready to upgrade, click the desktop link called Install Windows, and that brings you back to this very step.
Depending on your choice in the preceding step, click Next or Close.
Read the 12,000-word License Terms, select the I Accept the License Terms check box, and click the Accept button.
Select the information you want to keep from your old Windows version.
Depending on your particular Windows version, you see several options describing what information Windows 8 will keep from your old computer.
No matter which Windows version you own, choosing the first listed option always preserves as much information as possible from your old computer.
Click Next.
When you click Next, the program checks to see whether you need to perform any additional tasks, perhaps restarting your PC, before moving to the next step.
Click the Install button.
Windows 8 lists your choices made in the previous step. (Click the Change Selection link to revisit those choices if you want to do some double-checking.)
When you click Install, Windows 8 begins installing itself, restarting your PC several times during the process.
As your computer restarts, you may see a message onscreen saying, Press any key to boot from CD or DVD. Don't press any key. Instead, just let Windows 8 run unattended.
Click the preferred background color for your Start screen and then click the Next button.
On the Background Color bar, click the color you want for the background of your Start screen. (You can always change this later from the Start screen's PC Settings screen.)
Click the Use Express Settings button.
Clicking Express Settings tells Windows 8 to turn on its security options, automatically installs drivers for newly plugged-in gadgets, lets your home or office computers share files, lets apps know your name and account photo, and lets Windows know your location, helpful when accessing maps and other location-aware apps.
Or, if you prefer to approve these choices one-by-one, click Customize instead.
Enter your current password and click the Next button.
Required when upgrading from password-protected accounts, this lets Windows know that you're not trying to break in.
Sign in with a Microsoft account, if desired, or click Skip to use your existing account as a local account on Windows 8.
To create a Microsoft account now, click Next. To stick with your current account — which you can convert to a Microsoft account later, if you want — click the Skip button.
Windows finalizes your settings and then leaves you at the Start screen.
To add a free copy of Windows Media Center before January 31, 2013, right-click any Windows 8 screen's bottom-left corner and choose System from the pop-up menu. When the Control Panel's System page appears, click the View Details in Windows Activation link near the page's bottom. Then click the Add Features to Your Edition button.
For more information about Windows 8, explore Windows 8 For Dummies, available online.


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BAXLEY, GA. | As winter storm moved to the southernmost coast of Georgia Wednesday, Georgia Department of Transportation crews moved with it spreading gravel on bridges in advance of dropping temperatures.
The snow and ice storm that closed every school in the state did its worst in the Atlanta metro area. The worst seen in Southeast Georgia was some light icing on bridges and light snow and sleet.
DOT spokeswoman Jill Nagel said the worst icing was in Chatham County and in the area of Appling, Toombs and Tattnall counties.
"As soon as the sun came up, everything just iced over,'' Nagel said.
The sun was up but hidden behind thick clouds that dropped an icy rain and sleet in Waycross, Baxley, Brantley County and, by early afternoon, Glynn County.
About 2:20 p.m. snow that was so light it might not have qualified as a flurry was falling in Brunswick.
Nagel said things had begun to thaw out by mid afternoon in most of Southeast Georgia and "We're holding our breaths tonight."
The National Weather Service said temperatures across Georgia are expected to drop to freezing on the southern barrier islands and into the 20s inland.
That could mean that water that remains on the roadways could freeze into so called black ice which is extremely hard to see.
DOT crews spread gravel on all the bridges on the St. Simons Island causeway Wednesday afternoon and were moving on to other bridges in the area.
Nagel said there were no road closures in the area, but the DOT said a lot of bridges and roads were icy around Tifton and other areas of Southwest Georgia.
Terry Dickson: (912) 264-0405


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Best Digital Cameras for Grandparents
Grandma and grandpa have lots of (little) reasons to be taking pictures, so a good camera is essential to preserving all those memories. These cameras are all great in low light and fast, so they will capture excellent shots of the grandkids. But, these cameras are also easy to use and small enough to travel. Here are our top suggestions for grandparents, or anyone looking to snap lots of photos of little ones with minimal fuss, from compacts to beginner's mirrorless cameras.
- Order by:
- Price
- Title
- Grade ▼
- Release Date
Canon EOS Rebel T6i
The Canon EOS Rebel T6i and T6s boasts the highest resolution the popular EOS line has seen yet, thanks to a 24.2 megapixel APS-C sensor. The T6i model is designed for affordability, while the T6s is a flagship model for more advanced users.Both o...
Grade: A Price: $549.00
Nikon COOLPIX P900
If one thing can rescue the point-and-shoot camera market from the smartphone, it's a good zoom. And if there's one camera with a good zoom on the market right now, it's the Nikon Coolpix P900. The camera giant just breezed past the 50...
Grade: A- Price: $597.00
Nikon D3400
Nikon's 3300 is a solid beginner's DSLR and now the manufacturer is expanding on that with the D3400. The latest entry-level DSLR from Nikon wraps up much of the same features as the 3300. So what's new? Nikon has added Bluetooth...
Grade: A- Price: $796.00
Nikon COOLPIX A900
The Nikon COOLPIX A900 is a small camera with a big zoom and even big video capabilities with 4K.While the A900 looks like a typical point-and-shoot and uses the standard 1/2.3" sensor, the 35x optical zoom is hiding in a pretty small camera....
Grade: A- Price: $397.00
Nikon D3300
Nikon's entry level DSLRs have always been an excellent option for beginners—My first DSLR was actually the D3000, back in 2009. The D3300 is Nikon's latest addition to the line and has proven to be a solid shooter for novices.But al...
Grade: A- Price: $409.00
Canon EOS Rebel SL2
Four years after announcing what was at the time the world's smallest DSLR, Canon is finally bringing a much-needed update to the aging Rebel SL1. Meet the Canon EOS Rebel SL2, an affordable, compact DSLR that offers a solid feature set for be...
Grade: B+ Price: $574.00
Fujifilm XQ2
The Fujifilm XQ1 impressed us last year with category-leading speed--with a brand new processor, the XQ2 pushes that even further.While you don't see a jump in burst speed in the tech specs, the Fujifilm XQ2 has an updated processor, the EXR P...
Grade: B+ Price: $299.00
Olympus PEN E-PL8
The Olympus PEN E-PL8 may be one of the manufacturers' more affordable options, but it's still a serious shooter with a stylish, compact body and solid features.Using the same Micro Four Thirds sensor, the E-PL8 offers 16 megapixel resolut...
Grade: B+ Price: $449.00
Olympus SH-1
Basic point-and-shoots are compact and travel easily, but often lack zoom and speed. Enter the Olympus SH-1, a compact camera that packs in a pretty solid zoom along with excellent speed, wrapped up in a sturdy, retro-styled body.Because the Olymp...
Grade: B+ Price: $349.00
Nikon Coolpix S9900
Zoom is a big deal—but it also makes for a big camera. The Nikon Coolpix S9900 doesn't offer the 83x optical zoom of their P900 superzoom, but it packs a nice 30x optical zoom in a package that travels easily.The S9900 is a bit faster th...
Grade: B+ Price: $250.00
Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W810
Fewer manufacturers are spending time on developing point-and-shoots, especially sub-$100 budget compacts. Sony has continued to offer a handful of models and the W810 comes in as their most budget freindly for 2014. The saying you get what you pa...
Grade: B Price: $109.00
Fujifilm X-A3
The Fujifilm X-A3 re-wraps the company's higher-end options into a cheaper camera, bringing Fujifilm-quality images to a $600 price tag. But budget cameras should always be approached with caution — what did Fujifilm take out to reach ...
Grade: B- Price: $399.00
Nikon COOLPIX B500
The Nikon B500 is designed for simplicity. It joins the ranks of the decreasing number of cameras that use AA batteries. There aren't any manual modes, but a solid handful of automated scene modes. But, the simple camera features a 40x optical...
Grade: B- Price: $227.00
Canon PowerShot ELPH 360 HS
Canon introduced two budget compacts early in 2016 and the ELPH 360 is the better of the two options. For $50 more, the 360 offers a better sensor, more zoom, and faster performance over the $159 ELPH 190. The Canon ELPH 360 captures images with a...
Grade: C+ Price: $189.00


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hci g
hci g
Special | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | ALL
interaction design (ID)
mechanisms for accessing and manipulating the elements of an information design to facilitate the user's goal selection, action planning, and action execution
interaction language
The commands used to instruct an interactive information artifact such as a word processor or a heating controller. These commands are a form of notation, but typically what the user can see as feedback is the effect of the command rather than the command itself. For example, in a word processor's interaction language, giving the command Delete Word deletes a word; in the same word processor's macro language, however, giving the same command Delete Word inserts the appropriate symbols into a program. See also notation.
joint action
Both people involved in a joint action intend to do their part and believe that the joint action includes their and the other person's part. (See the text for a more formal and comprehensive definition.)
A level of visibility (in the cognitive-dimensions framework) at which any required subset of components can be viewed simultaneously. It is an essential requirement for certain cognitive strategies, such as design by modification of existing material, or for checking consistency of form across instances of similar components. See also visibility.
A standard operator in a keystroke-level model (KLM), K represents the act of striking a key on an input device like a keyboard or a mouse. The duration depends on the device and the skill of the user. A variety of quantitative estimates can be found in Card, Moran, and Newell (1980b, 1983).
keystroke-level model (KLM)
The simplest GOMS technique. It provides standard keystroke-level operators (D, H, K, M, P, and R) with estimates of duration and rules for placing the M (mental) operators. It abstracts away from the goal hierarchy, multiple methods, and selection rules found in other GOMS techniques. More information can be found in Card, Moran, and Newell (1980b, 1983).
See keystroke-level model.
latent semantic analysis (LSA)
A statistical theory and method of identifying word meaning through analysis of context of word use.
learning as development
A view of learning that emphasizes the triggering and maturation of skills (versus their acquisition through practice). Some versions construe this as biologically prefigured (Piaget), and others construe it as socially mediated (Vygotsky). In this view, people are not understood not only in terms of what they are but in terms of what they are becoming.
See latent semantic analysis


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Undergraduate Degrees, Majors and Concentrations
HIST3520 - Immigration History
Summer 2019
Immigration remains one of America's most vexing issues today and understanding its history is more vital than ever before. This course examines immigration as a force throughout American history. Students will analyze the historic background of several critical issues, such as immigration policy, ethnic and race relations, the changing meaning of "whiteness," "the melting pot," "multiculturalism," and nativism. Special attention will be paid to Western Pennsylvania's unique immigrant history, but this class will examine immigration from a national perspective as well. Additionally, a variety of projects will enable students to examine their own ethnic heritage.
3 Credits
Schedule Book for All Active and Available Future Terms, Course starting with HIST3520
No Courses Found


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LONG BEACH, Calif. – It was cold inside the Pyramid on Thursday night and the freezing temperatures, unfortunately, seeped onto the UC Santa Barbara bench.
The Gauchos shot a frigid 27.8% on the night and though they held Long Beach to under 50 points with another strong defensive night, the shooting woes were too much to overcome in a 46-34 loss. The defeat drops UCSB to 7-9 overall and 2-3 in the Big West. The 49ers, meanwhile, improved to 8-11, 3-3.
UCSB never led and went through two prolonged scoring spells in the first half to dig a hole that proved too big to climb out of. The Gauchos didn't score their first points until 15:05 to play and then finished the first half scoreless for the final 5:18. At the break, Long Beach held a 10-point advantage.
While the second half was closer and Santa Barbara showed a lot of spirit, especially defensively, the team could not turn that into points and couldn't push the deficit into single digits.
Nicole Nesbit led the Gauchos with 11 points while Destini Mason added seven.
The Gauchos return to action on Saturday with a 4 p.m. game at Cal State Northridge. The game can be heard live in AM 990 in Santa Barbara and worldwide by clicking here with the pregame show starting a half-hour before tip-off.


text:
- Inside Athletics
- Tickets
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Radford jumped out to an early lead when Latrice Lee scored on a pass from Megan Horan four minutes into the match. The Bucs tied the match when a Radford foul led to a penalty kick by Miller in the seventh minute.
The Bucs continued to battle as they extended its lead to 2-1 when Miller again found the back of the net from 40 yards out on passes by Jordan Monty (
Miller recorded her final goal of the night, at the top of the box with four minutes remaining in the match, on a cross from Kelly Brinkman (
It is the first ETSU hat trick since former Buc Emily Fulcher netted three against
For the match, the Bucs outshot the Highlanders, 10-4 and earned six corner kicks.
"In the first half we came out a little bit sluggish," said head coach Heather Henson. "We were able to overcome that and were able to play within our system. Terri's play today was phenomenal, but she had a lot of support from her teammates on the field. Because of that support she was able to finish the attack."
The Bucs will open up A-Sun action next week as they take on the Ospreys of North Florida on September 28. The game is set to begin at 4 p.m. For all ETSU women's soccer action, visit www.ETSUBucs.com.


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10/15/18 by Lyon Real Estate
The Lyon Cares Foundation announced today that Sacramento SPCA is the recipient of a $5,000 grant. Sacramento SPCA is dedicated to fostering a loving and compassionate community for animals and people by providing assistance, creating lifelong relationships, and saving lives.
Operated by Lyon Real Estate, the Lyon Cares Foundation offers time, talent, and treasure to local nonprofits that make their communities a better place. Funds are raised through escrow and payroll contributions by Lyon agents and staff in addition to Lyon's annual Golf Tournament.
"This generous grant will provide food and medical care for animals that are waiting to find their new home – an apt gift from a business that helps people find homes," said Sacramento SPCA CEO Kenn Altine.
"It gives us great pride to give this grant to Sacramento SPCA," said Lyon Real Estate President Pat Shea. "They are doing very important work."
In 2018, each of Lyon's 14 offices, in addition to their headquarters office will be giving two $5,000 grants to organizations of their choice, totaling $150,000. Lyon's Folsom office chose Sacramento SPCA to be the recipient of their grant.
About Lyon Cares Foundation
The Lyon Cares Foundation provides time, talent, and treasure to local nonprofits that make their communities a better place. Our partner in giving is the Sacramento Region Community Foundation. In 2017, Lyon Cares gave grants totaling $160,000 to 32 organizations in the Greater Sacramento Area and will be giving grants totaling $150,000 in 2018.
About Lyon Real Estate
Lyon Real Estate is the leading independent real estate brokerage company in Greater Sacramento. We are proud to be home grown, locally owned and internationally known. Lyon has served the area for over 70 years. In 2017, the company closed 7,333 transactions worth a total of $3 billion in sales volume. Lyon Real Estate has 950 agents in 17 offices located throughout the region. The company is a member of the Leading Real Estate Companies of the World®, the largest network of premier locally-branded firms, as well as LeadingRE's Luxury Portfolio International® program. In addition to its real estate services, Lyon Real Estate offers RELO Direct, a global relocation program. For more information about Lyon Real Estate, click to GoLyon.com and follow us on Facebook.com/LyonRealEstate.


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- Home
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1914 To 1938 Stock Dodge Brothers
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Unnatural Increase?
From at least the Axial Age (800-200 BCE) until the late eighteenth century, most organized efforts to influence the size of populations aimed at boosting it. Women have been extolled, pressured, or coerced into having children early and often, whether or not they would have timed their own childbearing that way if left to their own devices (contraceptive or otherwise). But let's consider for amoment the strategies that have gained the greater attention since the time of Thomas Robert Malthus: the kind designed to slow demographic growth by reducing family size and birthrates.
The first true promoter of actually acting on population issues appears to have been Francis Place, a self-educated son of the English working class.Married at age 19 to a woman two years his junior, Place fathered 15 children and lived in poverty. In latemiddle age he became the world's first birth control theorist and propagandist. In an 1822 book onMalthus's population principle, Place proposed substituting contraception for late marriage to moderate birthrates. Not content to let the book plead his case, the author wandered the streets of London and northern English industrial cities, posting anonymous handbills arguing that large families risked the health of mothers and children, caused economic anxiety and suffering, and led to low wages because large cohorts of workers flooded labor markets. If couples would just use the sponge, Place suggested, they could solve these problems. Place also stressed a value that underlies mainstream population policies up to the present: control of births not by government or other outsiders, but by women and couples themselves, "so that none need to have more [children] than they wish to have."
Not surprisingly, civic groups and civil authorities challenged many nineteenth-century writers on population as purveyors of indecency. The tracts and books were, after all, discussing sexual intercourse. In the late 1870s, procontraception activist Annie Besant and attorney Charles Bradlaugh published Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy for the British market and were quickly charged with spreading obscenity. Their trial turned into a publicity bonanza for birth control. Prosecutor Hardinge Gifford called Fruits "a dirty, filthy book" and added that "no decently educated British husband would allow even his wife to have it. The object of it is to enable a person to have sexual intercourse, and not to have that which in the order of Providence is the natural result of that sexual intercourse." Besant and Bradlaugh were convicted and sentenced to six months in jail, but the verdict was reversed on appeal. That judgment effectively ended contraception's legal status as obscene in the United Kingdom. Sales of books on contraception soared into the hundreds of thousands throughout Europe and North America. The Besant-Bradlaugh trial helped launch a slowing of demographic growth within England and Wales that continued for decades. Births peaked around the time of the trial at about 35 per 1,000 people per year and then slid down a steady slope to 17 per 1,000 per year by the 1930s.
Not only in England but in several European countries and as far away as Brazil and Cuba, organizations calling themselves Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian Leagues sprang up in the early 1880s to promote wider use of contraception. In Germany, physician Wilhelm Mensinga developed a hollow half hemisphere of rubber with a watch spring threaded around its rimto hold it over the cervix. This device, soon known as the diaphragm, was easier to use and more effective than anything then available. In the Netherlands, the country's first woman physician, Aletta Jacobs, established centers for instructing midwives in how to teach contraceptive methods to women in their homes. The need for such instruction is an ironic indicator of the folk wisdom that midwives must have lost since the Middle Ages-including, perhaps, the memory of their predecessors' persecution in the witch trials. Nonetheless, with Dr. Jacobs's medical supervision as a defining feature, these centers mark the origin of reproductive health education and provision as practiced today.
Variable Winds
Across the Atlantic, the winds of change blew in the opposite direction. In a uniquely American development, a Protestant moral arbiter named Anthony Comstock crusaded for laws to criminalize as obscene the advertising and sale of contraceptives. A receptive U.S. Congress in 1873 rushed through passage of what came to be known as the Comstock Act to accomplish these objectives. For the District of Columbia and federal territories, the act banned even the possession of contraceptives. Comstock himself was deputized as a special agent of the Post Office Department, authorized to inspect suspicious mailings and to make arrests. State laws along the same lines as the federal one soon followed and, in some northeastern states where the Catholic Church wielded political influence, legislatures prohibited physicians from prescribing or even advising on contraception.
Comstock was virtually a caricature of the malemoralist, righteously determining that women should bear all the children whom God and their husbands sent their way. But his nemesis appeared within a few decades. Margaret Sanger was driven just as powerfully by the opposite idea: that women should determine for themselves if and when to have children, based not on abstinence but on birth control. Earlier and more energetically than any other single individual, she honed and promoted the idea that women freely choosing when to become pregnant would improve not only their own lives, but humanity itself. That conviction led her to the conclusion that the spread of birth control would slow or end world population growth-and also that it could improve the genetic quality of the human species. In this complex and ambiguous legacy, she represents to some extent the equally complex and ambiguous history of modern population policy itself.
Trained as a nurse, Sanger worked with immigrant women on New York's Lower East Side and witnessed the impacts of unplanned childbearing and unsafe abortion. Thus began Sanger's lifelong commitment to make birth control-two words she was the first to link together, in hermonthly newspaper The Woman Rebel-available to any woman who wanted to use it. By 1916, after visiting clinics in the Netherlands, the descendants of Aletta Jacobs's training centers, Sanger had set up the first birth control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Though she spent a month in a jail cell the next year, her prosecution for promoting birth control yielded a legal victory in the state and a political one nationally. The court case led to an exemption under the NewYork state Comstock laws by which physicians could provide contraception for medical reasons. That exemption led to the spread of legal birth control clinics under the supervision of doctors, first inNew York and then elsewhere.
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and opened the doctor-operated Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau under league auspices. In 1939 the bureau and league merged, and three years later the new organization was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1948 Sanger helped to found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which became the International Planned Parenthood Federation four years later.
Sangermade important contributions to the field of demography as well. In the two decades or so after WorldWar I, demography was not yet a well-established scientific discipline, and the topic of conception control still carried the whiff of smuttiness among the era's mostly upper-class scholars. Fromher own backers Sanger raised private funding and, through that, gained scientific support for a first ever conference on world population. The meeting, held in 1927 in Geneva, Switzerland, led eventually to the establishment of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a still-thriving association of demographers.
On the Radar
To the surprise of demographers and campaigners for birth control, the decades that followed World War II saw the most dramatic increases in population the world had ever known. In industrialized countries, the combination of returning soldiers and the prosperity of postwar reconstruction yielded baby booms no demographer had foreseen. U.S. fertility rates approached four children per woman by the mid-1950s, having bottomed out at little more than two during the Depression.
The larger influence on global demographic trends, however, was the growth seen outside of North America and Europe. Public health initiatives introduced in the remaining and former European colonies were reducing death rates dramatically-by 30 to 50 percent in some countries. Vaccinations, improved water supplies, sanitation, roads and railroads to move crops to markets, food and fertilizer aid, hygiene education, and more than a few applications of the pesticide DDT-each of these steps, large and small, slashed away at the high rates of infant and child death that for centuries had clamped down population growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Birthrates, too, were rising modestly in some places, making their own small contributions to growth. Improved health and nutrition are the most commonly cited reasons for this, but a loss of traditional contraceptive methods may have played a role as well. Within a decade of WorldWar II's end, populations were growing by more than 3 percent a year in many of Europe's colonies and in newly independent nations. The world's growth rate exceeded 1.8 percent.
Without intending to, industrialized countries themselves had helped bring about this rapid demographic expansion. Public health measures introduced from Europe and North America to keep infants and children alive had the side effect of boosting family size and hence population growth rates in the rest of the world. Less-developed countries were struggling to adjust to numbers and densities of people they had never experienced and for which they were scarcely prepared. But reversing this process without giving up the effort to boost child survival was a problem. How could people in wealthy countries promote the use of birth control in poor ones? The topic was always awkward, and often taboo. The influential Roman Catholic Church forcefully opposed "artificial" contraception, which effectively eliminated modern methods. Religious leaders in Islamic countries reacted more diversely but often with just as much hostility. So it could not be the West (or, as it came to be called later,"the North") that pushed for the world's first policies aimed to pull down soaring population trajectories. Instead, it was national governments in Asia and North Africa.
In 1948, Japan's diet (parliament) legalized contraceptive sterilization and abortion. News stories depicting the horrors of botched illegal abortions in the wake of Japan's defeat had mobilized public and political support for making both options legally available. The country's total fertility rate began what must have been the most precipitous fall the world had ever seen, from roughly four to two children per woman in less than a decade. Within a few years of this postwar reproductive revolution, the country became a manufacturing and trade powerhouse that drove the phrase "made in Japan" into every corner of the industrialized world. Much later, in the 1990s, economists would recognize that such rapid fertility decline could produce a "demographic dividend" by reducing the proportion of dependent children and allowing more of the wages of working parents and the revenue of governments to flow toward long-term investments rather than short-term consumption.
By 1955, India, Taiwan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Egypt had taken tentative steps to slow the growth of their populations by establishing programs through which married couples could secure methods to prevent unwanted pregnancy. The strategies followed in the steps of the neo-Malthusians and Margaret Sanger: Offer all married adults family planning information and contraceptives. Couples will use them. Fertility and population growth rates will fall. Sanger's prewar visits to Japan and India and the colonial exposure of India and Egypt to British thinking may have played some role. So, no doubt, did the visits of Western experts sponsored by U.S. foundations.
But it would take much more than this to bring the governments of industrialized nations into direct action on world population. In the United States, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 openly disavowed a government role, despite the recommendations of a presidential commission: "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility," he told a press conference when a reporter asked about the commission's recommendation. "The problem of birth control [is] not our business."
The president's stance did not prevail, however. Rapid world population growth had become a palpable worry tomany typical newspaper readers, including typical newspaper-reading bureaucrats and politicians. Even the Catholic Church couldn't stop the gathering momentum of U.S. concerns about population growth. John F. Kennedy, the former Massachusetts senator and first Catholic president, gave a green light to federal government action on world population. Like the national programs of India and Egypt, the U.S. program of international family planning assistance started out small and tentative. But within a decade the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was supervising a US $125 million program (worth over $585 million in 2007 dollars) to distribute U.S.-made contraceptives to countries around the world.
Beyond U.S. shores, the 1968 United Nations Tehran conference on human rights established for the first time a basis in rights for the provision of family planning to all. In the same year, Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb was published, helping tomark an enduring divide between those who celebrated individual childbearing decisions as the basis of sustainable population and those who despaired about the demographic future no matter what options were available to childbearers.
In 1970, the U.S. Congress voted to offer family planning services to Americans with low incomes. Some supportive congressmen included the growth of U.S. population among the arguments for passage. The new law (Title X of the Public Health Service Act) brought within view and in her own country Margaret Sanger's dream of universal access to birth control. Federal largesse for family planning services, however, came nowhere near eliminating unintended pregnancy in the United States. Then, as now, nearly half of all pregnancies were wanted later or not at all by the women involved. But the new program undoubtedly contributed to the fall of U.S. total fertility rates from 2.5 children per woman in 1970 to fewer than 2 by 1980. Later Congresses were less enthusiastic about the program, however, which helps explain why U.S. fertility later rebounded, reaching 2.1 children per woman today.
The United Nations, USAID, and many of the world's governments operated on the assumption that women able to decide at any given time whether to become pregnant would end up on average having two children. Even as early as the late 1960s, when Ehrlich and others were writing pessimistically about population growth, evidence was accumulating that this assumption was valid. Nearly 40 years later, the close correlation between access to effective contraception and average family sizes of two children or less still holds true.
Means and Ends
In 1969, the United Nations launched a Fund for Population Activities to consolidate monies from donor governments and distribute them to family planning programs in poor countries. For a decade or more, there wasn't much data to prove this was a canny strategy. Organizing, promoting, and providing family planning services is detail work, and the U.S. government paid for reams of technical reports to work out the minutiae.
The 1960s had seen the invention of the oral contraceptive pill and the IUD, revolutionary contraceptives that for the first time in human history assured reversible prevention of pregnancy without actually interfering with sex itself. But there were side effects to be considered, and training sufficient personnel to counsel users was a significant challenge. More and more women (and some men) showed up at clinics around the world, and many took home the contraceptives and started to use them. Still, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s fertility and population growth rates in all but a few countries weren't changing enough to measure.
Ethical standards fromthe beginning stressed voluntarism in family planning programs, but in practice some promoters of family planning stretched the meaning of the word. Early on, a concept known as information, education, and communication, or IEC, evolved to help guide the promotion of contraceptive services. But the line in IEC campaigns that separated the benefits of contraception for clients from aggressive marketing and sometimes heavy-handed propaganda on the benefits of small families was never easy to draw. Pressured to show results, some programs and staff in parts of India and Bangladesh offered incentives to couples considering contraception. Most such incentives were fairly innocuous and arguably reasonable. Without a few rupees for bus fare, for example,many women found it impossible to visit a health clinic that might evaluate problems in pregnancy as well as help them prevent one.
Any money moving from family planning clinics to clients, however, risked the appearance of payments to prevent pregnancy. There's no convincing documentation that such incentives ever amounted to much more than small change. Some critics have nonetheless argued that potential clients in certain Asian programs outside of China,where examples of coercion are well documented even in recent years, felt browbeaten or even bribed into using contraception.
In India in 1976, family planning authorities, operating under a federal state of emergency, rounded up at least some men-it has never been clear how many-in low-income, high-fertility rural areas and forcibly vasectomized them. When the Indian government later offered compensation to men and women who could document having been forcibly sterilized during this period, few men and no women stepped forward, though fear of stigmamay have discouraged potential claimants. But the incidents were enough to make the newspapers, alerting readers to the family planning movement's excesses. India's national family planning programhas never quite recovered, and the stigma contributed to the defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and her party at the polls the next year.
In Bangladesh and Indonesia, women who sought to have IUDs removed from their uteruses, or Norplant rods from their upper arms, sometimes found to their dismay that physicians had received insufficient training or lacked experience in taking out the devices. In Peru, Mexico, and Brazil, physicians sometimes made their own decisions about what their patients needed-and surreptitiously tied the fallopian tubes of women just after childbirth.
In the context of large family planning programs in dozens of countries, such tactics were the exception. Much more common were clinics in which women's preferred contraceptive methods suddenly became unavailable, forcing them to choose a less desirable or inappropriate alternative or to give up on contraception altogether. Or poorly paid workers in poorly staffed clinics failed to give clients the personal attention they deserved and the contraceptives their circumstances warranted. These limitations are anything but history. When I traveled in Kenya in late 2006, I heard the stories of poorly supplied and staffed reproductive health clinics that were little different from those I had heard in other countries 15 years earlier. If anything, in the wake of the shift in health spending toward HIV treatment and prevention in Kenya, family planning services in the country have deteriorated- a story matched, increasingly, elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
Despite the half loaf of imperfect programs, however, the neo-Malthusianmodel of "population control" actually began to work. Population was not really controlled, of course. It never is. But gradually, and then at accelerating speeds in several countries, use of contraceptives went up, average family size went down, and population growth rates slowed. The mostly Roman Catholic island nation of Malta followed Japan's track to replacement fertility in the 1960s. Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and Colombia experienced comparable fertility falls in the 1970s and 1980s. From the late 1980s to 2005, Iran's fertility plummeted from nearly six children per woman to two, after the country's Shia Muslim government ordered contraceptive counseling and provision for all newlyweds. And if Mexico once was characterized by large families, it is no longer: average fertility hovered in 2007 around 2.2 children per woman, leading some Mexican leaders to worry about population aging and even future decline. Stories of family-size decline are similar in Morocco, Indonesia, andmany other countries still considered part of the developing world.
Defying the expectations of economists, countries didn't even need to get wealthier to become less fertile. Cuba, its economy in tatters throughout the 1960s and 1970s, ended the latter decade with a fertility rate of two children per woman, half the rate at the time of the 1959 revolution. Per-capita incomes barely budged in Bangladesh as fertility fell from five to three children per woman from the 1980s to today. The story was similar in Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Kenya,where government commitment to family planning proved a far more important force for fertility decline than rising per capita income. Pioneers setting up new family planning clinics often were surprised to find crowds of women waiting in line, anxious to begin using contraception as soon as possible.
By the 1980s it was obvious that women and many of their partners wanted later pregnancies and fewer of them. Where governments introduced family planning programs, contraceptive use rose almost immediately, followed not long after by falling fertility and population growth rates. The correlation among the three-government commitment to family planning programs, contraceptive prevalence, and completed family size-is more consistent than the commonly cited one between girls' average years of completed education and how many children they end up having.
The use of contraception expanded by 75 to 80 percent on average every decade beginning with the 1960s. Today more than three-fifths of reproductive-age women or their partners use contraception, a proportion made more impressive by the fact that another fifth of such women at any given time are either trying to get pregnant, are already pregnant, or are not engaging in heterosexual intercourse. One result of all this planning of families is that their size has shrunk in every part of the planet. The average woman gave birth to five children in 1965. Today the average is just over half of that.
One Hand Clapping
Organized family planning is now in many ways a victim of its own success. Its adversaries remain the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, joined by some evangelical Christian and Muslim leaders, and male political elites that see women's control of their own sexuality and childbearing as threats to dreams of national power.
"They plan…to block our growth," wrote the editor of El Salvador's Diario de Hoy of U.S. family planning advocates back in 1963,"slashing the wombs of Latinmothers, castrating Latin males, before we have grown sufficiently or taken possession of the vast empty lands of the continent." Four and a half decades later, family planning services remain rare and underfunded in El Salvador, abortion is punitively criminalized, and the country's population hasmore than doubled since the editorial was written, from 3 million to 7 million people. Archaeological excavations suggest that people living 14 centuries ago in what is now El Salvador atemore diverse diets and occupied sturdier andmore comfortable housing than domost of those in the country today. An additional 2 million or so Salvadorans now live in the United States, where they have taken possession not of vast empty lands, but of apartments that are often crowded and jobs that are often poorly paid.
The U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion severed the population and family planning field from its early hopes of public acceptability. The Catholic hierarchy effectively directed its political influence against modern contraception and the contention that human population could ever grow too large-scientific views to the contrary. After Ronald Reagan tapped George H.W. Bush to be his running mate in the 1980 presidential election, Bush told a friend there would be nomore talk about population and family planning. Reagan built much of his political base among Americans embittered by legalized abortion, and Bush exploited the same base for his own ends when he succeeded Reagan as president- as did his son, the later President George W. Bush. Much of that base refuses to accept the logic that widespread use of birth control prevents abortions, preferring to believe that contraception just encourages sex, which ends up causing more abortions when contraception fails.
Hostility to family planning among U.S. leaders spreads like an infection among governments, sapping energy and funding from programs that could lead to both healthy reproduction and demographic stability. But poor leadership isn't the only problem. Few people are aware that easy access everywhere to good family planning services is most of what's needed to achieve a sustainable world population. As growth has slowed, news media worldwide-once influential in bringing the "population explosion" to public attention-have turned their attention to the seemingly fresher story of population aging and decline. Fully 45 percent of the world's population lives in countries in which total fertility rates are below their population-specific replacement fertility rates, according to Population Action International. Unless fertility rebounds or immigration surges, these populations are poised to stop growing once today's child bearers grow old. Some countries are already losing population. If the story is population decline, for popular media that find nuance and internal contradiction challenging to convey, it can't also be population growth.
If they think about population growth at all, most policymakers tend to see it as a twentieth-century worry that never matched its crisis billing and is no longer an issue. The topic couldn't fade fast enough formany advocates of women's interests. Family planning suffers from its long association with "population control," a concept some see as an embarrassing relic of patriarchal attitudes long ago discarded. Rather than consider a strategic alliance with environmentalists and others who still express concern about human numbers, most advocates today prefer to leave population out of the picture altogether, discussing contraception as simply one aspect of women's reproductive health. Such views work their way into governments and related bodies and carry weight in international discussions and negotiations.
To some extent, the world's governments consciously chose to think of family planning removed from population growth. In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development convened in Cairo to consider world population. The conference adopted the view that women, rather than population per se, should be the focus of "population policies," and representatives of almost all the world's governments agreed tomake family planning universally available by 2015 and to significantly expand assisted birth, improve maternal and child health, and prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The agreement foresaw global spending of about $11.5 billion a year in 1994 dollars (nearly $16 billion in 2007 dollars) tomake family planning fully available in developing countries.
Spending has never approached even half that level, however, and the goals expressed by the Cairo conferees not only haven't been accomplished, they aren't even agreed on any more. Once most opinion leaders concluded by the mid- to late 1990s that population growth was no longer a pressing issue for the world, concern for women's health failed tomotivate much more than paltry increases in funding for reproductive health-until the global HIV/AIDS pandemic was recognized and addressed. In 2000, when the United Nations governments crafted a set ofMillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDGs) to take a big dent out of global poverty by 2015, most negotiators were weary and wary of the arguments on abortion that grafted themselves onto all discussions of population and reproductive health. The religious right argued that the very phrase reproductive health was code for abortion rights and amounted to a wink and a nod to promiscuity among teenagers. The entire concept was excluded from the MDGs, only to be squeezed into supporting language later by advocates who realized almost too late how badly they had been blindsided.
By abandoning the argument that slower population growth is one benefit of reproductive health services, these advocates let slip a line of reasoning that at least captures the attention of distracted public and policy audiences. In 2006, President George W. Bush proposed cutting U.S. international family planning assistance from $436 million in the subsequent fiscal year to $357 million. An assistant administrator at USAID cited increases in spending to combat HIV and malaria, along with a program to reduce sexual violence in Africa, as evidence that the president had offered "a much better budget than we've had in the past for women's health." On that turf, his argument was plausible, and no reproductive health advocates challenged him. But family planning is about not just women's health, but about all the options that women, their partners, and their children can enjoy in life. And it's about sex, and about a vision of human numbers steered by wanted rather than unwanted pregnancies. These broader connections have largely faded from the discussion, and the case for reproductive health is weaker as a result.
In some of the places where population growth chugs on most rapidly, demographic debates are more alive than ever. But to the extent that policymakers in wealthy countries are thinking about population at all today, the talk is mostly of subsidizing childbearing domestically or attracting the best and brightest immigrants from developing countries. Unless governments focus on creating the conditions by which births result from the conscious decisions of women and their partners to parent a child, there's no reason to be confident that global family size will fall to a two-child average. Even if it does, the grand, one-time-only experiment-how many of us can the Earth and we ourselves sustain?-will continue, for a few decades at least, in the only available laboratory, the only available home.