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Elizabeth Amrien

New Eastern Europe - The Lingering of the Past - 12 views

  • The idea that Eastern Europe was, or is, a passive recipient of influences coming from the West is not the way life works; there is always an encounter, often an uncomfortable one. In one of Father Józef Tischner’s essays there's a beautiful passage in which he says that the encounter is a moment that initiates a particular drama, the course of which cannot be foreseen. I think that what happened in 1989 was not the filling of an empty space but rather that kind of encounter.
  • Krytyka Polityczna.
  • notion of a socially engagé intelligentsia who believes that ideas are to be lived.
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  • One of the things that made Solidarność so remarkable was that "Solidarity" was not just a slogan or a philosophy: the movement involved an empirical overcoming of long-standing divides between right and left, Catholics and Marxists; workers and intellectuals.
  • What the various totalitarian experiments tell us quite clearly is that most people most of the time are formed by the circumstances in which they find themselves. That does not mean that individual personality variables do not exist, or that there will not always be exceptions. There will always be extraordinary people like Władysław Bartoszewski, who seems to have emerged from childhood with an uncanny moral lucidity. But as a general rule: if you put people in bad circumstances, you will not, on a large scale, get good outcomes.
  • I wanted to write about historical periods prior to1989. But I was, of course, personally experiencing the post-Communist period: as I was sitting in the archives reading about the 1930s, I was also living in the 1990s. So I had this dual experience of discovering the past along with the present.
  • The Taste of Ashes is about how the past lingers and about what the afterlife of totalitarianism has been.
  • One of the first, most naïve questions I wanted to understand was: Why was there no “happily ever after”?
  • I thought that coming to Eastern Europe would be like arriving at a non-stop party, that everybody would be celebrating his or her liberation. Of course, it was nothing like that. The 1990s were in some ways not very happy times at all. There was a sense that now people were suffering and being exploited in entirely different ways from the ways in which they had suffered and been exploited under communism. And there was a sense of the past as tormenting.  
  • In some ways this book is my attempt to explain why the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was not a fairy tale's happy ending.
  • I think this kind of attempt to find a safe place for ourselves in the world will always fail. There is something rootless about the human condition.
  • The idea that Eastern Europe after communism was an empty space to be filled with things borrowed from the West is not convincing.
Martin Burrett

GDPR and Education - 5 views

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    "New rights and responsibilities regarding personal data are set to be released in Europe on 25th May 2018 under the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For individuals, new rights are given by knowing what information organisations hold about you, and what they can do with it. Organisations have new obligations, including ensuring permission has been given to hold such data and responsibilities about the way the data is held. The changes affect everyone, including schools, educational companies, and individuals."
Ed Webb

BBC NEWS | Europe | Swedes miss Capri after GPS gaffe - 0 views

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    A great example of over-reliance on technology and under-reliance on critical thought.
Nathan Hopson

Thoreau - Walking - Webtext - 41 views

  • When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
    • Nathan Hopson
       
      West = new + free, East = old + constrained Not a reference to world history, but to the American context (West = frontier). The Americas were the West (to Europe) and the West was America (as Turner/Billington argue).
  • I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.
    • Nathan Hopson
       
      See above...
Michele Brown

StepMap - Create your personal map for free - 10 views

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    StepMap enables you to create maps for free and to search for maps in the map directory. In the map directory you can find maps for Africa, Asia, Australia/Ozeania, Europe, North America and South America. You can add images, videos, audio files and much more to your personal map. Categories in the map directory include Travel Routes, News Maps, School Maps, Fan Maps, Political Maps as well as Historical Maps.
Glenn Hervieux

Nat Geo MapMaker Kits - National Geographic Society - 34 views

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    Complete set of 11 map kits that students and teachers can use. Easy to assemble. The kits offer United States political and physical maps, world political and physical maps, maps of Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, Australia and Oceania, polar region maps, and maps of New England.
Sonja Phillips

Two Billion Miles: interactive video story - 76 views

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    Take a journey from Africa through Italy to Europe - if successful, you might be able to stay. If not, you could be deported or worse.
thebda

Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its ed... - 45 views

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    "We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our system, so it prepares our children for the future with the skills that are needed for today and tomorrow"
collettmegan

How Cyclone Yasi compares around the world | Latest news on the Queensland Floods | New... - 21 views

  • with storms of the past - it's bigger than Larry, more powerful than Tracy.  Hours after landfall, it was still a category three and had been forecast to still be a category one even when it reached Mt Isa, more han
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    " IF you're struggling to grasp the magnitude of Tropical Cyclone Yasi, consider this: it is so large it would almost cover the United States, most of Asia and large parts of Europe. "
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    Cyclone Yasi is about to strike land in North Queensland as I enter this post on the evening of 2 Feb 2011. This is a good comparison and visualisation that other teachers could use in their classroom to explain to students.
kjopowicz

Europe's economic crisis is getting worse not better, says Caritas report | World news ... - 10 views

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    Survey shows increase in the number of new poor in seven countries and challenges the official European Union discourse
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    Survey shows increase in the number of new poor in seven countries and challenges the official European Union discourse
ingramhistory

BBC News - Iran: EU oil sanctions 'unfair' and 'doomed to fail' - 0 views

    • ingramhistory
       
      Read and answer this question
  • Iran had "failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme", British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a joint statement.
James Spagnoletti

Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views

  • The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
  • Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
  • At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
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  • Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
  • Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
  • Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
  • n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo
  • To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
  • nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
  • Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
  • he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
  • The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.
  • They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
  • Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
  • Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
  • he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
  • Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.
  • Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
Kate Pok

OWS's Beef: Wall Street Isn't Winning It's Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone - 0 views

  • Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout: To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer... When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street. But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.
Jennie Snyder

Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? : The New Yorker - 36 views

  • Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly
  • Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century.
  • The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846.
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  • nsisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery.
  • The idea spread like a contagion, travelling through letters, meetings, and periodicals. By mid-December, surgeons were administering ether to patients in Paris and London. By February, anesthesia had been used in almost all the capitals of Europe, and by June in most regions of the world.
  • On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw.
  • Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.
  • There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Some people criticized anesthesia as a “needless luxury”; clergymen deplored its use to reduce pain during childbirth as a frustration of the Almighty’s designs.
  • Yet soon even the obstructors, “with a run, mounted behind—hurrahing and shouting with the best.” Within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery.
  • Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. It was the single biggest killer of surgical patients, claiming as many as half of those who underwent major operations
  • nfection was so prevalent that suppuration—the discharge of pus from a surgical wound—was thought to be a necessary part of healing.
  • In the eighteen-sixties, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister read a paper by Louis Pasteur laying out his evidence that spoiling and fermentation were the consequence of microorganisms. Lister became convinced that the same process accounted for wound sepsis.
  • Lister had read about the city of Carlisle’s success in using a small amount of carbolic acid to eliminate the odor of sewage, and reasoned that it was destroying germs. Maybe it could do the same in surgery.
  • During the next few years, he perfected ways to use carbolic acid for cleansing hands and wounds and destroying any germs that might enter the operating field.
  • The result was strikingly lower rates of sepsis and death.
  • Far from it.
  • Surgeons soaked their instruments in carbolic acid, but they continued to operate in black frock coats stiffened with the blood and viscera of previous operations—the badge of a busy practice.
  • hey reused sea sponges without sterilizing them.
  • It was a generation before Lister’s recommendations became routine and the next steps were taken toward the modern standard of asepsis—that is, entirely excluding germs from the surgical field, using heat-sterilized instruments and surgical teams clad in sterile gowns and gloves.
  • Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogica
  • The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail.
Thieme Hennis

Homepage - Youth on the move - European Commission - 8 views

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    EU program aimed at youth (unemployment, skill development, intercultural exchange, etc.)
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