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Pollution at the nation’s 3,500 ocean, lake and bay beaches resulted in more than 25,000 closing or swimming advisory days last year, 28 percent more than in 2005, and the highest number in the 17 years that records have been kept, according to a new federal report released Tuesday.

he prime culprit was storm water runoff

Another 1,300 days were attributed to sewage spills and overflows.

Many of us celebrate Thanksgiving and just assume since we do that everyone else does as well. The answer to whether Thanksgiving is celebrated nationally or not is that it is. Most families celebrate Thanksgiving each and every year and individuals from all over the country make plans to eat turkey and give thanks. Thanksgiving is a nationally recognized holiday. Kids dont go to school, most businesses arent open, and politics are briefly put on hold. The most important Thanksgiving activities include eating, watching sports, and spending time with family and friends. No matter where you are in the nation you will find that most people celebrate Thanksgiving pretty much the same. Some families will celebrate at lunchtime and others at dinner and still others may go out to dinner or not celebrate at all. But, for the most part, celebrating Thanksgiving is an American tradition and one that all Americans enjoy taking part in. Parades Around the Country Even if you cant travel the entire country to see how Thanksgiving is celebrated you can get a pretty good idea. There are Thanksgiving Day parades all over the country and many of them are televised. One of the most popular and well known parades is the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. This parade has been around for decades and continues to be a hit with New Yorkers as well as individuals around the country who make watching the parade on television part of their celebration. You may choose to attend a parade on Thanksgiving day in your town or perhaps you will choose to watch one on TV. Regardless, parades around the country really make up part of the Thanksgiving culture we have all become so accustomed to. In fact, when you turn the television on Thanksgiving Day you will more than likely see a parade or a football game! Thats just part of Thanksgiving Day culture in our country.

Research has shown that music has a profound effect on your body and psyche. In fact, there’s a growing field of health care known as Music Therapy, which uses music to heal. Those who practice music therapy are finding a benefit in using music to help cancer patients, children with ADD, and others, and even hospitals are beginning to use music and music therapy to help with pain management, to help ward off depression, to promote movement, to calm patients, to ease muscle tension, and for many other benefits that music and music therapy can bring. This is not surprising, as music affects the body and mind in many powerful ways. The following are some of effects of music, which help to explain the effectivene

Chinese people call the panda "Da xiong mao,"

"giant bear cat"

When asked to provide an explanation for his actions Vargas claimed that this so called "art exhibit" was his way of paying respect to his friend who had died recently after he was attacked by two Rottweilers guarding a shop which his friend had been burglarizing.Upon reading through a few of the comments and blogs, I found that there were several threats against the artist, saying that he should be tortured and allowed to die just as the dog. However, no one mentions anything about the spectators. I am in no way defending Vargas's actions, I am however disgusted at the idea that no one attempted to rescue the dog. Pictures show people standing close enough to get a good look yet far enough away to escape any responsibility for the suffering the dog was clearly enduring. The stray dog is more alive today then he was the day he stood as a spectacle of suffering and selfishness. This story has gotten the attention of people everywhere, and rightfully so

What everyone is forgetting is that the controversy around this is exactly what he was getting at with his statement everyone cares about a dog that was going to starve on its own anyways, nobodys cares about the millions of people starving around the world every day or even the dogs starving in his home country its like everyone just saw the words starving dog and immediatly jumped to death threats

Many scientists have specified various reasons for global warming effects on the environment and for human life. It is not easy to point one reason for global warming effects, but recently you might have saw many change in global climate. Global warming effects have various consequences such as glacier volume decreasing, rise in sea levels, shrinkage of Arctic and altered fashion of doing agriculture have been named as direct effects on global warming. Secondary global warming effects are extreme weather events, increase in tropical diseases, changes in the timing of seasonal patterns in ecosystems, and drastic economic impact.

Before many times back, many scientist and researchers were hopping that a positive effect of global warming would be increased agricultural yields(outputs), because of the role of carbon dioxide in photosynthesis which might behave in positive manner, but now it resulting in destructions of several crops. In the area of Iceland, due the rising temperatures which have made possible the widespread sowing of barley easily in an effective manner, which was not possible twenty years from now. The net result is expected to be that 33% less maize—the country's staple crop—will be grown. The reduction in rainfall has turned millions of land into deserts.

Insurance industry has been affected very badly with the risk of insurance; the number of major natural disasters has been increased to 300% since 1960s, and insured losses increased fifteenfold in real terms. According to Choi and Fisher (2003) each 1% increase in annual precipitation could enlarge catastrophe loss by as much as 2.8%.

11% decline in album sales during the first half of 2008

Consumers purchased 204.6 million albums between January and June

single track downloads growing 30% to 532.7 million units in the first half of the year over first half sales in 2007 of 417.3 million units

There are more than 1,000 species of bats in the world! They live on every continent of the world, except Antarctica. Bats do not live in areas where it is very hot or very cold, and there are some remote islands that are not home to bats.

Bats are mammals. They account for more than 25 percent of all the mammals on the earth! Bats are the only mammals that can fly.

Mother bats have one baby in their litter. The baby bats are called “pups.” When a pup is born, it usually has no hair and its eyes are closed. It clings to the mother bat and drinks milk from her. When the pup is about four months old, it learns to fly.

The bat is more closely related to primates.

Bats are fantastic fliers. They are able to truly fly. Bats are the only mammals able to have powered flight.

A bat's body is made for flight. The neck is short, the chest is large and the stomach is narrow. In order to fly a body must have a wide, thin surface. It also needs the power to push through the air.

Worldwide sales of music CDs, records and cassettes fell for the third year in a row

rising Internet piracy in the United States,

7 percent drop in global music sales

The introduction of Western cultural values, which had flooded Japan by the late nineteenth century, led to a dichotomy between traditional values and attempts to duplicate and assimilate a variety of clashing new ideas

Japanese aesthetics provide a key to understanding artistic works perceivably different from those coming from Western traditions.

Within the East Asian artistic tradition, China has been the acknowledged teacher and Japan the devoted student.

Japan entered into its second major prehistoric period, a civilized era known as the Yayoi period.

he name Yayoi is derived from an area Tokyo known as Yayoi, where the first documented pottery from this period was discovered in an archaeological excavation in 1884.

ron and bronze materials are believed to have been exchanged with Japanese envoys either for token tributes or prisoners of war.

It's important to remember that this doesn't mean the stock market returns exactly 10% a year, every year. It's actually unusual for the market to return exactly 10% in a given year. The S&P 500 has only posted a return of between 10.0% and 10.9% four times since 1926 and only returned exactly 10% once, in 1966, according to S&P data that includes dividends.

Stock returns are wild and unpredictable. Since 1927, the S&P 500 stock index has gained 10.4% a year on average. But in any given year it could be up 29.9% or down 9.0% or somewhere in between, says IFA.com.

To do that, it's important to understand the power of diversification and the benefits of owning many types of stocks, from large value-priced stocks to small value-priced stocks. Diversification lets you minimize the risk posed by a single stock or type of stock and lets you still get your share of the market's return.

The capacity to learn, remember, and symbolize information, and to solve problems, exists at a simple level in young infants, who can perform cognitive tasks such as discriminating animate and inanimate beings or recognizing small numbers of objects

Abilities for physical movement change through childhood from the largely reflexive (unlearned,involuntary) movement patterns of the young infant to the highly skilled voluntary movements characteristic of later childhood and adolescence

Whenever we present a state of affairs which is known to be reinforcing at a given drive, we must suppose that conditioning takes place

The bird happens to be executing some response as the hopper appears; as a result it tends to repeat this response.

effect appears to depend upon the rate of reinforcement

A man who calls himself an artist ties a dog to a wall inside an art gallery. No, you heard me correctly - we're not talking about the night janitor who caught the starving animal littering the front steps of the gallery and decided to vent a lifetime of frustration by pulling off a ridiculously cruel stunt. We're talking about a man who calls himself an artist. His name is Guillermo Vargas Habacuc and the year is 2007. Guillermo is one of the artists taking part in an art exhibition that takes place at a Costa Rican gallery - pompously called "Centro Nacional de la Cultura" (National Center for Culture). He pays a bunch of kids to catch the street dog, which he cruelly baptizes "Natividad" (Spanish for "birth"). His aim is to make an artistic statement about the fragility and the misery in which all dogs - indeed, all human beings live, and he achieved just that by letting the dog starve to death tied to a wall, in plain view of the exhibition visitors, some of whom demanded futilely that the dog be released.

The truth is both of them have their advantages and

The big city is the place where all industrial, cultural and educational centers are situated. In big cities you can find museums, theaters, clubs, cinemas, big shops and hospitals, comfortable modern

Apple Inc. has surpassed Wal-Mart to become America’s No. 1 music store, the first time that a seller of digital downloads has ever beaten the big CD retailers.

Video game companies and other software makers are selling more of their products as downloads rather than CDs.

Songs could be downloaded faster than movies or TV shows, both legally and illegally.