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'Ata: five more mysteries
Last month I flew from New Zealand to Tonga with my family. About half an hour before the end of the journey a tiny, dark green island appeared in the westward-facing windows of our aircraft. Two fang-like rocks rose beside the island, and white water recoiled silently from its high cliffs.
I was soon shouting excitedly, jumping out of my seat, pacing up and down the aisle of the aeroplane, and leaning over strangers' meal trays, as I searched for the best view of the island. One of the strangers looked at me strangely. "I'm sorry if I seem overexcited" I told her. "I'm just very interested in the island out that window. It's called 'Ata and I've been researching its history, but I've never seen it before". The stranger smiled unenthusiastically, and I retreated to my seat feeling chastened.
Over the past few weeks, though, I've realised that I'm not the only person who is fascinated by the tiny island that sits in the ocean between New Zealand and the inhabited parts of the Kingdom of Tonga.
When I gave a lecture in Nuku'alofa about the raid on 'Ata by nineteenth century whalers-turned-slavers from Tasmania and New Zealand, the audience was larger and more enthusiastic than I'd expected. Well over two thousand people have read the text of my lecture, in the fortnight since I posted it on this blog. Many Tongans have shared a link to the lecture on facebook, and over at the Proud to be Tongan facebook group three hundred and twenty-four people have 'liked' the lecture. I've had e mails and other messages from dozens of people who want to talk about 'Ata. I'm very grateful for this response.
The lecture I gave in Nuku'alofa focused on the slave raid of 1863, and the way it forced the abandonment of 'Ata, but there are many other, less tragic aspects of the island's history that are both fascinating and - to me, at least - mysterious. In this post I'd like share five questions about five different parts of 'Ata's history. Perhaps some of the same readers who have been giving me insights into the slave raid of 1863 can help me to answer these questions.
1. What happened to the people who made 'Ata's pots?
In 1921 the anthropologist Edward Gifford visited 'Eua, the island where survivors of the slave raid on 'Ata had been resettled in the 1860s. These survivors told Gifford stories about the history of 'Ata, and helped him draw up an 'Atan genealogy. Gifford published the stories and the genealogy in his 1929 book Tongan Society.
Gifford was told that 'Ata had been populated by three separate small groups in the eighteenth century. According to one story Gifford heard, the first of these groups of settlers discovered a small number of 'aboriginal' inhabitants on the island, and burned them alive in a cave.
When the archaeologist Atholl Anderson surveyed and excavated 'Ata in 1977, he discovered the remains of a village that had been established sometime around the eighteenth century. But Anderson also found shards of pottery, of the sort made by the Lapita people who settled Tonga as long as three and a half thousand years ago.
An archaeologist named William Dickinson has tested the fragments of pottery found on 'Ata, and found that they were made from local soil, rather than imported from another part of Tonga.
Anderson and Dickinson's research suggests that at least a small number of people were living on 'Ata long before the eighteenth century. What happened to these first 'Atans? Did they die out or emigrate before later groups arrived, or were they usurped by the settlers who arrived around the eighteenth century? Did their memory survive in the story Gifford heard about a group of indigenes who perished in a cave?
2. Did 'Atans have distinctive physical features?
Some of the Pacific's smallest islands are more isolated from the rest of the world today than they were in the nineteenth century, before the advent of air travel and container shipping. Often nineteenth century mariners would use remote islands like 'Ata as navigational aids, and sometimes they would stop at these islands to gather supplies or make repairs.
Some remote islands boasted surprisingly cosmopolitan populations, as men who had arrived on sealing or whaling or naval vessels settled down and produced children. Michael King has noted that the Chatham Islands, which sit in the cold and empty ocean between southern New Zealand and South America, were home to people from around the world in the first half of the nineteenth century.
There is evidence that outsiders were entering 'Atan society in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The genealogy that Edward Gifford published includes references to unnamed white men, and in 1836 the whaler WB Rhodes reported that a white man was living on the island with a local wife. In an article published by the Otago Daily Times in 1892, a visitor to Tonga named Robert Paulin described some of the refugees from 'Ata:
The appearance of some of the Atta [sic] men I met in Tonga made me think they had white blood in their veins. One, whose good services as a cook made pleasanter many of the pleasant days I spent in Tonga, might sit for a portrait of an old Spanish don - over 6ft high, with high narrow forehead, long face, aquiline nose, keen, dark eyes, thin lips, peaked beard, black, almost straight, hair, long neck, and spare muscular frame, hands and feet very small and neat. This man, nearly 60 years old, used to say that long ago a ship came to Atta [sic] and put some white men on the island, and he was descended from one of the men thus left.
Some of the descendants of 'Ata I talked with recently on 'Eua insisted that their ancestors had looked different from other Tongans. Several claimed that 'Atans tended to have brown rather than black hair.
The genealogy published by Edward Gifford suggests that cross-cousin marriage was much more common on 'Ata than in the rest of Tonga. If a few outsiders settled on the island and produced children, might these outsiders' physical traits spread quickly through the population, given the frequency of cross-cousin marriage?
3. Did Charlotte Badger visit 'Ata?
Charlotte Badger was a thief, a pirate and, in all likelihood, the first white woman to live in New Zealand. Badger grew up in Britain but was sent to New South Wales at the beginning of the nineteenth century after being convicted of breaking into a house. In 1806 Badger, her baby daughter, and a group of other, mostly male convicts were put on a ship called the Venus, which was headed for the penal town of Hobart. The prisoners took over the ship, and sailed it across the Tasman to New Zealand, where British law had little purchase. During the rebellion Badger is supposed to have dressed as a male and whipped the captain of the Venus. Later she apparently robbed another ship of its stores at gunpoint.
Badger and several other colonists settled in the Bay of Islands, close to a Maori community. Badger was offered passages back to New South Wales, but she maintained that she would rather live amongst Maori than be hanged by her own people for helping to steal the Venus.
But Badger may eventually have left New Zealand, and visited 'Ata on her way to a new home. In 1826 a whaling ship called the Lafayette stopped at 'Ata, where its crew were told that another ship had visited about a decade earlier. According to the 'Atans who talked to the Lafayette, the earlier ship's passengers had included a woman and her daughter. The mother was tall and fat, and her daughter was about eight years old. The mother had told the 'Atans that she and her daughter were fleeing from Maori.
Christine Badger was a large woman, and her daughter would have been about eight years old in 1816.
Many stories claim that Badger eventually settled in more northerly parts of Tonga, or else went on to America, but no evidence has emerged to clarify her fate.
4. Was 'Ata a last refuge for Tonga's pagans?
In 1854 Charles St Julian, a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald and advisor to the Kingdom of Hawa'ii, published an article called 'The Friendly Islands'. Near the end of his text St Julian turned his attention to 'Ata, which he described as a 'rather barren spot' with a population of one hundred and fifty. St Julian said that 'Ata was 'still heathen', and claimed that Tupou I intended either to 'bring back' its people or else to 'convert them to Christianity'.
By 1854, Tupou I had used guns and the Bible to unify Tonga under his rule. Only two years earlier he had besieged and defeated the Tongatapu villages of Pea and Houma, whose people had rejected both his right to rule Tonga and his Methodist faith. Until 1852 some of the people of Pea and Houma had held on to Tonga's old, pre-Christian religion. They visited godhouses where kava-drunk priests channeled the voices of ancient deities like Hikule'o, and they danced in ways that upset Tupou I and his missionary mentors.
If St Julian's article is correct, then 'Ata was the last stronghold of paganism in Tonga. And oral history suggests there may have been some connection between 'Ata and the siege of Pea.
According to the stories that Edward Gifford collected on 'Eua in 1921, 'Ata's village was named Kolomaile, and was divided into three sections, which were named Hihifo, Auloto, and Pea. The name Pea referred, Gifford was told, to the village of Pea on Tongatapu.
Another of Gifford's informants, who had links to the Tu'i Tonga dynasty, told a story set in the year 1852 that linked Pea to 'Ata. According to the story, a god named Moalaleki resided in Pea, and helped to protect the village. But this god became angry when a cup of kava that should have been drunk by a warrior named Sialevaila was given to another fighter. He deserted Pea and went to 'Ata, bringing with him a kava root. The 'Atans already had houses and priests devoted to a couple of other deities, but they happily accepted Moalaleki, chewing and drinking the kava he had brought.
On the very day that Moalaleki left Pea, Tupou I began his siege of the village. Tupou I's military campaign was, according the story Gifford heard, punishment for the treatment of Sialevailea and the loss of Moalaleki.
Is it possible that the story Gifford heard about Moalaleki and Pea recorded, in an imprecise and metaphorical manner, the flight of a group of refugees from Pea to 'Ata? Did some of Tonga's embattled pagans seek refuge from Tupou I's crusade, and from infighting in their own village, on the kingdom's remotest island?
By the time of the 1863 slave raid 'Ata boasted a Methodist church, which missionary John Thomas describes visiting in his History of Tonga, but the date and manner of the islanders' conversion from paganism to Christianity are obscure.
5. Why weren't the fakaongo interned on 'Ata?
By the middle of the 1880s King Tupou I and his powerful Premier, the former missionary Shirley Baker, had turned against the Methodist church, denouncing it as an agent of British imperialism. Tupou left the international Methodist movement and founded his own Free Church of Tonga, which he ordered his subjects to join. Most Tongans obeyed their king, but a minority refused. These dissenters were called fakaongo, or submissive ones, by Tupou I and his supporters. Hundreds of fakaongo were beaten, and some were driven off their plantations. After six young men tried and failed to assassinate Shirley Baker in February 1887, the Tongan government announced that the fakaongo would be sent into exile.
According to an article that appeared in an Australian paper in March 1887, many fakaongo were visited at their homes by police on the 20th of February and told to prepare for deportation to 'Ata. Some fakaongo who had not been sentenced to deportation applied to the government for permission to travel with their fellow Methodists to 'Ata.
In April 1887 Australian newspapers published a letter from James Moulton, a Methodist minister who was resisting Baker and Tupou I's attempts to drive his church from Tonga. Moulton explained that a group of fakaongo had recently left Tonga on a ship. The government had persistently told the fakaongo that they would be sent to 'Ata, but the vessel had instead taken them to Fiji.
'Ata had been uninhabited for decades, but its tiny size, rough coast, and lack of food would have doomed many of the fakaongo. The persecution of Tonga's Methodists had upset many people in Australia and New Zealand, and Tonga's government may have been worried about the response from the British Empire if the fakaongo were left to die on 'Ata.
Perhaps Shirley Baker avoided populating 'Ata with fakaongo because he wanted to turn the island to some other, more profitable purpose. According to an article published in 1889 in the New Zealand Herald, Baker negotiated with a number of palangi who wanted to lease the island and turn it into a sheep station. New Zealanders had run a huge sheep farm on 'Eua for much of the 1870s and '80s, until they fell out with Baker, whom they accused of wanting to take over their business.
In 1890, after pressure from Britain and the international Methodist movement, Baker was deported from Tonga, and the fakaongo returned from Fiji.
[Posted by Scott Hamilton. Thanks to Hayden Eastmond-Mein for the first image.]
posted by Skyler at 8/21/2015 09:10:00 pm 145 comments
Dorothy Morris and the 'glorious Crusade': a discussion with Mark Derby
[Over the years Kiwi historian Mark Derby has been an irregular, irreverent, and valued guest of this blog. In 2008 and 2009 I described Derby's research into New Zealand's long-neglected connections to the Spanish Civil War; in 2009 I posted his tribute to a very hairy American anarchist named Franklin Rosemont; and in 2012 I asked him questions about The Prophet and the Policeman, his assured and eerie study of the 1916 invasion of the Ureweras by New Zealand police. Recently I asked Mark some questions about his latest book, which takes him back to Spain.]
SH: Your new book Petals and Bullets tells the story of Dorothy Morris, the New Zealander who nursed in Spain during that country's Civil War. Kiwi Companeros, your earlier study of New Zealand participants in the Spanish Civil War, had a local publisher, but Petals and Bullets has been brought into the world by Sussex Academic Press, in collaboration with the Canada Blanch Centre for Spanish Studies.
How easy has it been to write about a New Zealand character, and the Kiwi milieux that made her, for what you know will be a primarily northern hemisphere audience? Some Kiwi writers have perceived a conflict between local subject matter and international audiences. There has sometimes been a sense that the peculiarities of New Zealand - the vernacular expressions and mountain ranges and historical events and cuisine and so on that we take for granted, but that may be mysterious to outsiders - require either extended explanation or excision...
MD: You are quite right that this book derives from my earlier work on each of the New Zealanders known to have taken part in the Spanish Civil War. They included the wonderfully determined and capable nurse Dorothy Morris who was born in Cromwell but grew up in Lyttelton and trained as a nurse in Christchurch in the early 1930s. Dorothy Morris spent six months, from February to August 1937, as a battlefield nurse working with a mobile medical unit serving the International Brigades. After that she spent two years, until forced to leave Spain because of the advance of Franco's forces, running a hospital for children in Murcia, a Republican-held region in southern Spain. Her patients were mainly the children of refugees from elsewhere in Spain, as far as away as Barcelona in the north, who had been forced to relocate because of fighting and/or starvation in their own districts.
All I could find out about Dorothy Morris for my earlier book came from a few newspaper articles, apparently based on letters she had written to her family from Spain, and which they then passed on to the papers. However, a few years after that book appeared, I learned from one of Dorothy's relatives that she had written a large number of letters and that most of these were still in the family's possession. I was able to read them, and was astonished at their vividness, power of expression, and (considering the restraints of wartime censorship) how frank and independent-minded they revealed her to be. I later learned that Dorothy had several years of university education before she trained as a nurse, and that she spoke French and Spanish well, and this unusual background was reflected in her correspondence with her family.
There were a number of frustrating gaps in the career revealed in the letters, and I tried, in an on-and-off fashion over several years, to fill these by approaching Spanish Civil War researchers in various countries for specific information. Then suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I was approached by Paul Preston of the London School of Economics, my personal favourite among historians of the civil war. He assumed I was working on a biography of Nurse Morris, and offered to publish it in the series of which he is the general editor. This seemed an opportunity too good to pass up, so I worked more systematically on my material and delivered a manuscript to the UK late last year.
A New Zealand edition of Petals and Bullets (the title comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda) will be published by Potton and Burton in September, but for everywhere else, the book is published by Sussex Academic Press. This has meant writing simultaneously for a New Zealand readership, which can be assumed to know something of places like Cromwell, Cathedral Square and the Port Hills, and an international one. However, the problem is not as great as it might appear, because only a small proportion of the book is set in New Zealand. Dorothy left this country in the 1930s and did not return permanently for almost fifty years. In between she worked in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, in Spain, southern France, the Middle East and west Germany. That range of settings made it easier for me to address a multinational readership.
SH: Your book arrives at a time when Spain and several other southern European nations are suffering economic and political crises. Do the Spanish Civil War and the other great conflicts of the 1930s have lessons for the crowds on the streets of Madrid and Athens? And do you detect a willingness, amongst today's Europeans, to consider the '30s?
MD: Although the book hasn't been on sale long, it's already apparent from the response that the Spanish Civil War continues to exert a fascination for people in many countries. I think this has to do with the very clearcut and partisan political positions the civil war fostered. Dorothy Morris described it to her family immediately afterwards, in typically intemperate terms, as "a most glorious Crusade… where I encountered some of the finest people, I feel sure, in the world - some of the craziest as well."
I think it's very likely that the truly desperate and polarising economic circumstances of countries such as Greece and Spain mean that people in those countries, and elsewhere in Europe, find the civil war period inspirational for them. Another point people such as Paul Preston have made is that my book shows that, despite the huge corpus of published history on the Spanish Civil War, there is still significant and valuable material to be explored. One of the reasons I decided to proceed with this book was to make Dorothy Morris's letters available to the international research community which I knew would be eager to read them.
SH: Your book The Prophet and the Policeman included a detailed portrait of a very unpleasant man. You documented top Kiwi cop John Cullen's prejudices against trade unionists, Maori, and Dalmatians, and his role in the farcical and deadly expedition into the Ureweras in 1916. The protagonist of your new book seems much more likeable. What are the challenges involved in writing about people towards whom you have strong negative or positive feelings? Is if necessary for you to repress those feelings, or can they be helpful?
MD: I found myself very much enjoying and admiring the character of Dorothy which emerged from her letters. I'm sure I would have enjoyed knowing her, even though she evidently became an alarmingly stroppy and ferociously opinionated old battle-axe in her final years.
It is certainly easier, in general, to write with energy and enthusiasm about a historical figure that you can admire, but I also think it's vital not to subjugate the rigors of history to the requirements of biography. That is, it's necessary to stick to the archival record even where it's indistinct or apparently contradictory, and not to invent or massage the research material to fit the narrative. This can be difficult when working with relatives of close friends of your subject, whose support may be essential, but whose criteria and expectations may conflict with the writer's obligations to objectivity and accuracy. I feel fortunate that I came under no such pressures from Dorothy's family and friends. They may well have disputed, or even disliked, some of my findings about her, but that did not prevent them from giving me absolutely vital material, and I'm most grateful for that.
SH: What are you researching at the moment? You've been a prolific author for years: can we expect another book soon?
MD: I'm now working haphazardly on several other book ideas, all in their early stages, and i have no idea which of them, if any, will evolve in to the next full-scale project. But until that stage is reached I'm not going to spell out any of the current plans. This is not out of any wish to with-hold information - it's just that the only thing I'm superstitious about is talking up a project before it's really underway.
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
posted by Skyler at 8/18/2015 02:47:00 pm 57 comments
The slave raids on Tonga: documents and a discussion
[Here's the text of the public lecture that I gave, with considerable help from Maikolo Horowitz and from Nadia Fifita, last Monday night at the 'Atenisi Institute in Nukua'lofa.
I was preparing to give the lecture when my oldest son's temperature rose suddenly, and he began coughing uncontrollably. While Cerian and I rushed Aneirin to Vaiola Hospital, Maikolo, who is the Dean of 'Atenisi and MCs at its public lectures, began to read the text of my talk to the fifty or so people who had gathered to hear me. Our perpetually generous friend Nadia Fifita drove to the hospital, picked me up, and brought me back in time to witness Maikolo reading the concluding paragraph of my lecture. Maikolo looked and sounded younger and healthier and altogether more convincing than me, and I wondered whether I should consider allowing him to impersonate me on a more regular basis.
After the formal part of the talk, an often emotional discussion began, as audience members shared stories, asked questions about the material that I'd found in New Zealand archives, and pondered the possibility that some of the Tongans taken by the raiders in 1863 returned to the South Pacific. Later Nadia drove me back to the hospital, where I spent the night with Aneirin, who had been diagnosed with pneumonia but soon recovered with the help of antibiotics. I was very grateful to Nadia, to Maikolo, and to the audience: their patience and generosity made what could have been a shambles into a fascinating and moving evening.]
The slave raids on Tonga: discussing five documents
I am a palangi scholar who usually studies and writes about palangi culture and history. I love Tonga and have tried to learn a little about the country, but I don't speak Tongan, and don't consider myself an initiate of Tongan culture. I'm not here, then, to offer Tongans a lesson in their history and its interpretation, but to share information I have discovered in the archives and libraries of New Zealand.
I taught at the 'Atenisi Institute in 2013, and took my students on a field trip to 'Eua Island. On 'Eua we listened to stories at kava circles, and one story we heard concerned the tiny and rugged island of 'Ata, which sits eighty nautical miles south of Tongatapu at the southern end of the Kingdom of Tonga. We were told that 'Ata had been uninhabited for a century and a half, ever since a ship stole many of its people and took them to South America, where they were enslaved. King Tupou I had moved the survivors of the raid to the larger and safer island of 'Eua, where their descendants still lived in the village of Kolomaile.
I read Henry Maude's excellent book Slavers in Paradise, which describes the kidnappings of thousands of Pacific Islanders from dozens of islands by slave ships bound for Peru in the early 1860s. I was fascinated to learn from Maude that the ship which depopulated 'Ata sailed from New Zealand, and included a largely New Zealand crew as well as an Australian captain. Maude explained that the ship also visted Niuafo'ou, and took thirty men from that island.
There were different stories on 'Eua about the fate of the 'Atans who had been taken to Peru. Some locals suggested they had all died; others claimed they had not only survived but flourished, establishing a Tongan society somewhere in South America. One storyteller told me that South American 'Atans sometimes returned secretly to 'Eua, where they distributed money to their relations.
When I returned to New Zealand in 2014 I decided to look through the archives there – through old newspapers, shipping records, missionary letters, diplomatic papers, and so on – to see what they had to say about the raid on 'Ata. I wanted to know about the fate of the kidnapped 'Atans, and I also wanted to know more about the men who did the kidnapping.
I was assisted in my research by Kenneth Tuai, a descendant of the survivors of the 'Atan slave raid who lives in Auckland, by Christine Liava'a, the head of the Pacific section of the New Zealand Genealogical Society, by 'Atenisi's Lose Jenner-Helu, and by the senior New Zealand historian Mark Derby, who spent time in Tonga in the late '70s and remains fascinated by the kingdom.
Earlier this year a panel of New Zealand journalists, scholars, and publishers gave me the D'Arcy Residency, an award that will allow me to live on Auckland's Waiheke Island and write a short book about New Zealand's involvement in the nineteenth century Pacific slave trade. I'll be heading to Waiheke in a few weeks, and the book will be published next year.
I have just sent a week on 'Eua sharing some of the documents I've collected during my research with descendants of 'Ata. In Kolomaile my wife and I had lunch with the Masalu Halahala, who is regarded as a direct descendant of the first settlers of 'Ata; near Ohonua, at the other end of the island, I talked with Paula Vehi, who is recognised as the Tupouata, or chief of 'Ata.
I have brought back many stories from 'Eua.
Tonight I wanted to share a few documents that together tell some of the story of the slave raids on Tonga and their aftermath. I'll hand out five documents, one at a time, and comment on each of them.
Here is an advertisement that appeared in El Comercio, a Peruvian newspaper, in 1863. The ad asks for help tracking down a young slave who has escaped from his owners into the streets of Lima, Peru's capital city. Let me recite it:
LOST POLYNESIAN - Wednesday at 5 o'clock in the morning a boy of 12 years of age, called Carlos and one of those recently arrived on the ELIZE MASON, left the house of his patron on Marcelo Street, No. 60. He is dressed in blue coloured cotton trousers and a light shirt. Will the person in whose custody he may be found please be so kind as to advise the occupant of the store at Number 75 Arvohia Street, where a reward will be given.
This advertisement and others like it were discovered and translated by Grant McCall, an Australian anthropologist who visited Peru in the 1970s looking for descendants of Polynesian slaves.
Why were Polynesians being bought and sold and hunted through South American streets a century and a half ago? Nineteenth century Peru was ruled by a tiny group of whites, the descendants of Spanish colonists. The ruling class owned plantations and mines, and needed cheap labour for them. Peru's indigenous people lived largely outside the direct control of the white elite, and couldn't be persuaded to toil in mines and on farms for meagre wages. The country had for a while imported African slaves, but this trade was outlawed in 1856.
In 1862, after a campaign by business owners, Peru's parliament voted to allow the 'recruitment' of labourers from the Pacific Islands. Islanders would supposedly be invited to sign 'contracts' that promised them freedom and a lives as 'colonists' in Peru in return for three years of almost unpaid labour there. The contracts of islanders could be bought and sold.
A fleet of ships soon sailed from Callao, the port of Lima. Instead of convincing Pacific Islanders to sign contracts freely, the crews of these ships usually kidnapped whomever they could find. More than three thousand men, women, and children were taken from eastern and western Polynesia and from Micronesia. More than fifteen hundred came from Rapa Nui alone.
After they were unloaded at Callao, captive islanders were bought by businessmen and put to work on plantations and as domestic servants. The first shipment of slaves arrived on a vessel named the Adelante in 1862. The men from the Adelante were sold for two hundred pesos; the women fetched one hundred and fifty pesos; children changed hands for one hundred pesos.
The Pacific Island slaves soon began to die of diseases associated with poor housing and hygiene – diseases like tuberculosis and dysentery. Others seemed to die from despair. Slaveholders began to complain that they had wasted their money on the islanders.
Here is an entry that the whaler WB Rhodes made in his logbook on December 5th, 1836, the day he visited 'Ata in search of fresh food and water. Rhodes describes the difficulty of landing at 'Ata, which is virtually unprotected by reefs and almost surrounded by high cliffs, and notes the steepness of the trail up to the island's only village.
Rhodes visited a pagan godhouse, talked with 'Ata's chief, and traded with the islanders. He claims that 'Ata has only been settled twenty years, but oral histories talk of the arrival of a founding group in the eighteenth century, and archaeologists have discovered that Lapita pottery was being made two thousand years ago on the island.
Rhodes' logbook entry shows that 'Ata was a thriving community in 1836, and that its people commonly and confidently traded with outsiders, and even sometimes welcomed outsiders permanently into their midst. 'Ata was still a pagan island when Rhodes visited, but its people had become Christians before 1863. They raised a Wesleyan church and a school, and were visited by several clergymen, including John Thomas, who gives a description of the island in his History of Tonga.
On 'Eua many stories are told about the supposed immorality of the inhabitants of 'Ata. Descendants of 'Ata are informed that their forebears were happy to let whalers carry away the island's women, in return for a few nails or the odd axe. But Rhodes' words contradict these stories. He writes that:
What few girls there are [on 'Ata] are very good-looking. They are not to be procured except by those masters who have often visited the island. Indeed there are only two that have been allowed; and they are considered as wives and kept taboo'd. Captain Brin is the person who first succeeded, and has to pay pretty handsomely to support his lady. She is a fine girl and daughter of the chief. One white man has resided on the island five years and is married to a young native girl.
Rhodes claims that 'Ata had only about seventy-five inhabitants in 1836, but by the time of the raid in 1863 the island's population had reached about three hundred.
For me, reading WB Rhodes' account of 'Ata is like looking at one of the rediscovered wall paintings that depict life in ancient Pompeii in the years before that city was buried by a volcanic eruption. Rhodes shows us a world that will soon be destroyed.
I don't like this face, but I have spent hours staring at it. I look at it for the same reason that I might study the faces of Hitler or Stalin. I want to discover, in the face's details, some insight into its owner's crimes – some explanation for what he did, and some clue as to how he felt about what he did.
The photograph I've given you shows the face of Thomas James McGrath, master of the ship that took away so many 'Atans and Niuans in 1863. It was shared by Arthur Brown, McGrath's great-great-great grandson. In an e mail to me, Brown called his ancestor 'a particularly bad and nasty man'.
Thomas McGrath's father Michael was an Irishman who reputedly took part in an armed uprising against Britain's colonial rule over his homeland. In 1809 Michael McGrath was deported to New South Wales, where he was soon in trouble.
When he was still a baby Thomas McGrath was placed in an orphanage. At the age of sixteen, Thomas was caught burgling a warehouse, and deported to Tasmania. After serving his term of imprisonment there he married and began working on the whaling and trading ships that sailed out of Hobart. McGrath became a master of ships, and went on long voyages across the Pacific, but he did not always avoid disaster. In 1859 and 1860 he wrecked two different ships off the same piece of coast on New Zealand's Chatham Islands.
At the end of 1861 McGrath took a ship called the Grecian out of Hobart on a search for whales. The Grecian was owned by a wealthy Hobart family, and McGrath and his crew of twenty-seven were expected to return within a year.
McGrath spent 1862 sailing around New Zealand and into the tropical Pacific, and at the end of the year brought the Grecian to Wellington, where he sold the oil he had taken from several whales. McGrath should have returned to Hobart with the Grecian and the money he had acquired. Instead, he painted the Grecian black and white, so that it resembled a warship, and sailed back to the Chatham Islands, where he recruited a new crew.
I want to hand out an excerpt from a statement by John Turner, one of eight men who refused to help Thomas McGrath raid 'Ata for slaves. Turner's statement was published in a number of Australian and New Zealand newspapers at the end of 1863.
Turner had joined the Grecian in the Chatham Islands expecting to help McGrath hunt for whales in the cold waters around New Zealand. Soon, though, McGrath took the ship north, toward the tropics. On the 17th of May 1863, when the Grecian was floating somewhere between the Kermadec Islands and 'Ata, McGrath told the crew that they should help him catch slaves rather than whales, because slaves were more profitable.
After Turner and his colleagues refused to help McGrath they were dumped in Samoa, where they eventually received shelter and help from British diplomatic representatives. Turner and the other rebels were soon joined in Samoa by John Bryan, who seems to have been the cook on the Grecian. Bryan had asked to leave the ship after witnessing the raid on 'Ata, and had been dumped in the Fijian port of Levuka.
Turner uses Bryan's first-hand account of the raid on 'Ata in his statement. Bryan described how McGrath invited the 'Atans aboard the Grecian to trade, encouraged the islanders to go below deck, then pulled hatches closed over them.
Bryan's is one of six published accounts of the raid on 'Ata that I have collected. The other five were all based on stories told by the survivors of the raid, and were collected and published many years after the event. Many of these stories, and many stories told on 'Eua today, blame Paula Vehi, the chief of 'Ata, for helping McGrath enslave his people.
Vehi, who apparently knew some English and acted as an interpreter when whaling ships called at 'Ata, is supposed to have persuaded his fellow islanders to board the vessel, knowing that they would be taken away, in return for money. But neither Bryan's account of the raid nor Turner's article as a whole makes any mention of an 'Atan traitor. The 'Atans were accustomed to paddling and swimming out to trade with visiting ships, and would not have suspected what McGrath was about to do. There was no need for one of their own to deceive them; McGrath and his crew did a good enough job.
Turner said that most of fifteen or so men who stayed aboard the Grecian and helped him raid 'Ata were Maori recruited in the Chatham Islands. These Maori may well have belonged to Ngati Mutunga, an iwi from the Taranaki region of New Zealand that in 1835 invaded the Chathams and enslaved its indigenous Moriori people (Ngati Mutunga invaded alongside another northern Taranaki iwi, Ngati Tama, but most of the members of Ngati Tama had left the Chathams by 1863). Slavery was not abolished on the Chathams until 1862, the year before McGrath attacked 'Ata.
In a two-part article about 'Ata and its history published in the New Zealand Herald in 1903, Walter Parker, a palangi who ran a sheep station on 'Eua for many years, said that the men who came to 'Ata in 1863 were short and dark-skinned. Parker may have heard stories about the events of 1863 from the 'Atan refugees who settled in 'Eua.
After his raid on 'Ata McGrath took the Grecian west into the southern Lau group, where he seems to have tried unsuccessfully to lure some locals aboard, then stopped at Levuka, where he got rid of Bryan, then headed north to Niuafo'ou, where he persuaded thirty men to board his vessel by promising to find them work in Fiji. McGrath soon headed east, toward South America.
The kidnapped Tongans would have been kept in the hold of the Grecian. They probably slept either on the floor or on wooden shelves attached to the walls of the ship. Slavers often fed their captives rice cooked with the help of a large boiler.
Somewhere on the way to South America McGrath met the Peruvian ship the General Prim, which was hunting for slaves. He sold his captives to the master of the General Prim. On the 19th of July, 1863, the General Prim arrived at Callao with one hundred and one male and seventy-three female passengers.
McGrath's raids on Tonga have to be put in some historical context. In 1863 the American Civil War was in its second year, as Confederate troops fought for their sacred right to keep slaves. In New Zealand, thousands of British and colonial troops had invaded Maori territory in the Waikato and Taranaki regions of the North Island. On the continent of Australia, colonists were fighting with Aboriginal peoples and kidnapping Melanesians to work on their new sugar plantations.
In Confederate America, New Zealand, and Australia, newspapers and politicians could argue enthusiastically that darker-skinned people were inferior to whites, and therefore deserved to be conquered and dominated. Alfred Domett, who was the Prime Minister of New Zealand in 1863, considered Maori a backward race that 'must be ruled with a rod of iron' until they had learned the necessity of white 'domination'.
By the time the Tongans arrived in Callao, the Peruvian government had already abolished the law allowing the enslavement of Pacific Islanders. Several powerful foreign governments had condemned the Peruvian slave trade and, as we noted earlier, slave owners had found the Pacific Islanders disappointing.
Instead of being sold and put to work, the Tongans were placed in a warehouse near the Callao waterfront where hundreds of other Pacific Islanders were already held. The Peruvian government had promised to return the islanders to their homes, and had sent them to the warehouse to wait. In the crowded building diseases spread quickly.
On the 2nd of October 1863 a group of four hundred and twenty-nine Pacific Islanders, including an unknown number of Tongans who had survived two and a half months in the warehouse at Callao, left Peru on the Adelante, the same ship that had brought the first Pacific slaves to Peru in 1862. The Adelante's captain had been ordered to return his sick passengers to their homelands, but he sailed north and dumped them all on Cocos, an uninhabited island near Costa Rica. A Peruvian warship came to Cocos to retrieve the islanders a few weeks later, but only thirty-eight of them were left alive. These survivors were left by the warship in Paita, a port in the far north of Peru. We do not how many, if any, of the thirty-eight survivors were Tongan.
The letter I've handed out appeared seventy years ago in the Pacific Islands Monthly, a journal published in Sydney and aimed at palangi residents of the tropical Pacific. It was written by Frederick Goedicke, an elderly and very wealthy German who had long ago set up a plantation on the island of Foa and married into the Helu family there.
In his letter Goedicke remembers meeting a Tongan man at a horse race held by Maori on an Auckland beach in 1894. The man had identified himself as Isileli Latu, and had explained that he was an 'Atan who had been kidnapped, taken to South America, and made to work there for fifteen years. Latu said he had escaped to Auckland, where he had married and settled. Goedicke's letter was found by an Auckland researcher named Lois Webster, who showed it to my friend Christine Liava'a.
There are three details in Goedicke's letter that make me believe the story it tells.
Horse races were held on the beach near the Auckland Maori settlement of Orakei every Christmas day in the 1890s, so it is quite possible that Goedicke encountered Latu in the way he claims.
Goedicke reports Latu as saying that, during the raid in 1863, the hatches of the slave ship were pulled over the 'Atans after they had gone below deck. John Bryan gave the same detail in his first-hand account of the raid.
Latu is of course a common Tongan name, but it was perhaps especially common on 'Ata. In an 'Atan genealogy produced by the anthropologist Edward Gifford in the 1920s the name is ubiquitous. 'Atan descendants have told me that they think Isileli Latu sounds like a credible name for one of their ancestors.
There are, admittedly, some confusing details in Goedicke's letter – he talks, for instance, about Isileli Latu working in Chile, rather than Peru – but these details can perhaps be blamed on the fact that Goedicke was remembering a conversation he had held more than half a century ago.
Since Isileli Latu married and had children in Auckland, it is possible that there are dozens or even hundreds of New Zealanders who have, even if they do not know it, 'Atan blood flowing through their veins.
There is some evidence that another Tongan returned from 'Ata. A former slave ship named the Barbara Gomez was given the job of returning a load of Pacific Islanders to their homes. Many of the passengers on the ship were sick, and the captain of the Barbara Gomez disobeyed his orders and dumped them on the islands of Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti.
According to JL Green, a missionary who arrived on Rapa Iti in 1864, one of fourteen skeletal men who was landed by the Barbara Gomez on Rapa 'Iti was from Niuafo'ou. Almost half of Rapa Iti's population was killed by diseases that the freed slaves brought, and by 1865 there were only twenty adult males alive on the island. But nine of the fourteen former slaves survived, and they have descendants on Rapa Iti today.
In 1936 a French yachtsman named Alain Gerbault visited Rapa Iti and met a woman called Tupou, who said that she was descended from a former slave who had been taken from Niuatoputapu to South America. Rapa Iti is a very remote island, whose six hundred or so inhabitants are rarely visited by anyone except French civil servants. If a Tongan visited the island, though, he or she might encounter some long-lost relations.
Caving in Nuku'alofa
It was marvellous to bend, crawl, climb, and gasp through the complex of bright caves that Adam Douglass, the On the Spot collective, the Seleka Club, and two hundred volunteers have created at On the Spot's headquarters in central Nuku'alofa and called Vataulua.
Imagine a tropical Lascaux Cave, in which visual discussions of political and social issues of the twenty-first century, like police violence and religious intolerance, sit alongside the shamanic motifs - forests, wild beasts, hunters - that ripple across the walls of ancient caves, and you'll have a sense of the power and mystery of Vataulua. My oldest son enjoyed crawling with a torch to the secret room where the shadows of sharks and whales purused each other across dim walls.
I reviewed the show that Sally Richardson did with On the Spot back in 2013, when I was last in Nuku'alofa; it was great to return to the collective's headquarters and find more magic. I'll write a proper review of Vataulua as soon as I'm back in Auckland and have recovered from the Tongatapu flu epidemic.
Becoming one beast
My poem 'Notes on the Creation of the World' has been published in an issue of the Aussie literary journal Cordite devoted to New Zealand writers. The poem is dedicated to my friend Visesio Siasau, because it was inspired by his campaign to restore the pagan gods of ancient Tonga to prominence.


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Q: Define X=R\{k} and define ⋆ to be the operation such that x⋆y=(x−k)(y−k)+k. Does this satisfy closure? Define X=R{k} and define ⋆ to be the operation such that x⋆y=(x−k)(y−k)+k. Check each of the four axioms of a group (closure, associative, identity, inverse). Which of them hold? Is (X,⋆) a group.
It says that X can't contain the number k, thus X would be a group only if x ⋆ y != k. But theres a k in the definition of the operation. does that mean that it automatically isnt closed? if not, why ? because ive found that x ⋆ y = k if and only if x =k or y = k which is impossible in the first case which means it is closed.  also, can an inverse or identity be not in the set by chance ?

A: As you said the result of $x\star y$ can only be $k$ if $x=k$ and $y=k$, but since that's not allowed you can conclude that $x\star y = k$ is impossible, thus $(X,\star)$ is closed.
To finde the identity element $1_\star$ you have to solve
\begin{align*}
x \overset{!}{= }x \star 1_\star = (x-k)(1_\star-k)+k
\end{align*}
for $1_\star$ which should result in $1_\star = k+1$ (which is not $k$).
In order to find inverse elements you have to solve
\begin{align*}
k+1 = 1_\star \overset{!}{= }x \star x^{-1} = (x-k)(x^{-1}-k)+k
\end{align*}
for $x^{-1}$ which should result in $x^{-1} = \frac{1}{x-k}+k$ (which can never be $k$)
In order to check for associativity you have to check that
\begin{align*}
((x-k)(y-k)+k)(z-k)+k = (x\star y)\star z \overset{!}{=} (x-k)((y-k)(z-k)+k)+k
\end{align*}
which will turn out to be not true.

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"The Unlimited Potential of the Choice"
Father Time looks at how the Fibonacci numbers relate to the unlimited potential we have based on making win-win agreements. He explains that if you refuse to make a win-win agreement, you run out of energy, which can prevent you from being able to create your project.
"Sacred geometry... The spiral shape demonstrates win-win agreements and the energy that is given off... and how it continues to multiply as it goes forward."
This is the fourth booklet of the Time Series, which explains the nature of Absolute and Relative Time.


A significant number of countries are enduring violent conflict and political repression, which has led to killings, torture, gender-based violence and a violation of the human rights of their citizens. This has divided societies and polarized communities which undermines the stability and cohesion of societies.
The TRC was responsible for three specific tasks: to discover the causes and nature of human rights violations in South Africa between 1960 and 1994; to identify victims with a view to paying reparations; and to allow amnesty to those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human rights violations.
The TRC established a platform that enables victims, survivors and perpetrators of violent conflict and political oppression to establish a historical record of the human rights violations of the past through truth-telling.
This process of truth-telling records the events in a society as a first step towards establishing the foundation for dialogue to build bridges between deeply divided groups in a society. The TRC delivers a restorative form of justice and accountability, which increases the likelihood of promoting peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.


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Cat-Like Hearing with Device Trillions Times Smaller Than Human Eardrum
Hearing Devices
Date: 2018/03/30 (Rev. 2019/04/12)
Case Western Reserve University* - case.edu
Synopsis : Case Western Reserve University researchers achieve cat-like hearing with device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum.
Cat-like hearing - Device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum.
Human eardrums normally have dynamic range of about 60 to 100dB in the range of 10Hz to 10kHz.
Case Western Reserve University researchers achieve cat-like 'hearing' with device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University are developing atomically thin "drumheads" able to receive and transmit signals across a radio frequency range far greater than what we can hear with the human ear.
But the drumhead is tens of trillions times (10 followed by 13 zeros) smaller in volume and 100,000 times thinner than the human eardrum.
The advances will likely contribute to making the next generation of ultralow-power communications and sensory devices smaller and with greater detection and tuning ranges.
"Sensing and communication are key to a connected world," said Philip Feng, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and corresponding author on a paper about the work published March 30 in the journal Science Advances. "In recent decades, we have been connected with highly miniaturized devices and systems, and we have been pursuing ever-shrinking sizes for those devices."
The Challenge with Miniaturization
Also achieving a broader dynamic range of detection, for small signals, such as sound, vibration, and radio waves.
"In the end, we need transducers that can handle signals without losing or compromising information at both the 'signal ceiling' (the highest level of an undistorted signal) and the 'noise floor' (the lowest detectable level)," Feng said.
Illustration of ultrasensitive optical interrogation of the motions of atomically thin drumhead nanoelectromechanical resonators (made of atomic layers of MoS2 semiconductor crystals) - Image Credit: Case Western Reserve University.
While this work was not geared toward specific devices currently on the market, researchers said, it was focused on measurements, limits and scaling which would be important for essentially all transducers.
Those transducers may be developed over the next decade, but for now, Feng and his team have already demonstrated the capability of their key components-the atomic layer drumheads or resonators-at the smallest scale yet.
The work represents the highest reported dynamic range for vibrating transducers of their type. To date, that range had only been attained by much larger transducers operating at much lower frequencies-like the human eardrum, for example.
"What we've done here is to show that some ultimately miniaturized, atomically thin electromechanical drumhead resonators can offer remarkably broad dynamic range, up to ~110dB, at radio frequencies (RF) up to over 120MHz," Feng said. "These dynamic ranges at RF are comparable to the broad dynamic range of human hearing capability in the audio bands."
New Dynamic Standard
Feng said the key to all sensory systems-from naturally occurring sensory functions in animals to sophisticated devices in engineering-is that desired dynamic range.
Dynamic range is the ratio between the signal ceiling over the noise floor and is usually measured in decibels (dB).
Human eardrums normally have dynamic range of about 60 to 100dB in the range of 10Hz to 10kHz, and our hearing quickly decreases outside this frequency range. Other animals, such as the common house cat or beluga whale (see illustration), can have comparable or even wider dynamic ranges in higher frequency bands.
The vibrating nanoscale drumheads developed by Feng and his team are made of atomic layers of semiconductor crystals (single-, bi-, tri-, and four-layer MoS2 flakes, with thickness of 0.7, 1.4, 2.1, and 2.8 nanometers), with diameters only about 1 micron.
They construct them by exfoliating individual atomic layers from the bulk semiconductor crystal and using a combination of nanofabrication and micromanipulation techniques to suspend the atomic layers over micro-cavities pre-defined on a silicon wafer, and then making electrical contacts to the devices.
Further, these atomically thin RF resonators being tested at Case Western Reserve show excellent frequency "tunability," meaning their tones can be manipulated by stretching the drumhead membranes using electrostatic forces, similar to the sound tuning in much larger musical instruments in an orchestra, Feng said.
The study also reveals that these incredibly small drumheads only need picoWatt (pW, 10^-12 Watt) up to nanoWatt (nW, 10^-9 Watt) level of RF power to sustain their high frequency oscillations.
"Not only having surprisingly large dynamic range with such tiny volume and mass, they are also energy-efficient and very 'quiet' devices", Feng said, "We 'listen' to them very carefully and 'talk' to them very gently."
The paper's co-authors were:
Jaesung Lee, a Case Western Reserve post-doctoral research associate;
Max Zenghui Wang, a former research associate now at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China;
Keliang He, a former graduate student in physics, now a senior engineer at Nvidia;
Rui Yang, a former graduate student and now a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University;
Jie Shan, a former physics professor at Case Western Reserve now at Cornell University.
The work has been financially supported by the National Academy of Engineering Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Award (Grant: FOE 2013-005) and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (Grant: ECCS-1454570).
Cat-Like Hearing with Device Trillions Times Smaller Than Human Eardrum - Case Western Reserve University researchers achieve cat-like hearing with device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum.
FCC: Hearing Aid Compatibility for Wireless Voice Technology - FCC agreement between consumer advocates and industry associations as pathway to 100% compatibility for wireless devices.
Bluetooth Technology for Hard of Hearing People - The opportunity to work with bluetooth technology is something people who are hard of hearing now have the opportunity to pursue.
Rechargeable Batteries for Hearing Aids - New rechargeable battery technology means hearing aid wearers never need to remove or touch the hearing aid batteries.
Full List - 46 Documents
*This information is from an external source (Case Western Reserve University). Disabled World makes no warranties or representations in connection therewith. Content may have been edited for style, clarity, and/or length. If you are connected with this page and want it corrected/updated please contact us.
Journal: Disabled World. Language: English. Author: Case Western Reserve University. Electronic Publication Date: 2018/03/30. Last Revised Date: 2019/04/12. Reference Title: "Cat-Like Hearing with Device Trillions Times Smaller Than Human Eardrum", Source: Cat-Like Hearing with Device Trillions Times Smaller Than Human Eardrum. Abstract: Case Western Reserve University researchers achieve cat-like hearing with device 10,000,000,000,000 times smaller than human eardrum. Retrieved 2019-07-18, from https://www.disabled-world.com/assistivedevices/hearing/drumhead.php - Reference Category Number: DW#159-13366.
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Peace and joy are mine.
Each morning when I open my eyes, a true sense of peace and joy fills my spirit. I feel this way because I go to bed each night with a thankful heart.
I know what it means to have peace. Peace means having faith and remaining calm even in the midst of turmoil. I know that when I look more closely at my situation, there is always a spark of positivity.
Tough times can challenge my peace of mind. I dig deep within my soul to find the fortitude to persevere.
Joy is possible in my life because I maintain a peaceful disposition.
I avoid distractions and focus on the things that bring me true happiness. I laugh heartily with my friends and family. I know that even in the midst of a challenging time, the source of our happiness still remains.
I encourage everyone to treasure the joyous moments in life. I encourage them to use those memories to keep things positive. I am proud of my commitment to a life of happiness and harmony. I am encouraged by my inner strength each time I rise above the rough patches.
Today, I am convinced that all is well when my soul and heart are joyfully at peace. I commit to living each day to the fullest.
1. What else can I do to develop an indomitable spirit?
2. What tactics can I use to ensure I return to a place of peace after a difficult experience?
3. How do my loved ones factor into my life of peace and joy?


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"Glee" gets bilingual–sort of!
1 Comment Posted by teachersactup-Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor on February 12, 2012
I can't believe it–finally Glee addressed "Mr. Shuster's" status as a so-called Spanish teacher at the high school–one who can't and/or doesn't speak Spanish! Ricky Martin comes and saves the day as "David Martinez, a night school adult Spanish teacher (see Hulu.com for the show if you missed it). Mr. Shu enrolls in Mr. Martinez' class to improve his Spanish (and get a "tenure track" job at the high school) and learns that "by 2030, the majority of Americans will use Spanish as their first language." After class, Mr. Shu (MS) and David Martinez (DM) have this conversation:
DM: No entiendo, tu eres maestro del español pero estás tomando clase de español
MS: Could you maybe say that a little slower, I think your accent is throwing me off. Where are you from?
DM: Ohio. But my parents are from Chile and we only spoke Spanish in the house growing up.
Mr. Shu's gaff that an "Ohio accent" is difficult to understand is an early comic moment that foreshadows the many blunders the Glee Club director/Spanish teacher will make regarding the language, culture, and identity of Latino USA. In class Mr. Shu declares the Glee Club will sing songs written or performed by someone of "Latin descent or performed bilingually." He explains:
Mr. S: Where do you think you'll you be by 2030? Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you're gonna need to speak Spanish. The reality is by 2030 more people on this planet will be speaking Spanish than any other language.
Mr. Shu (mis)ventriloquizes his own Spanish teacher's wisdom and suddenly he moves the significance of Spanish in the U.S. to world dominance (Look out English! Look out Chinese!) Despite the exaggerated statistics, I agree with Mr. Shu's central message: "The world is changing, our culture is changing, and that needs to be reflected in here [in U.S. high school]."
Who would think Fox TV's Glee club would be talking about Spanish as a vital language of our (inter)national future?! –that by the show's end Mr. Shuster would hand over his Spanish position to Ricky Martin and decide to go for a history position instead (my colleagues in Social Studies education should also have a field day with this episode!).
Well, as readers likely know by now, I prefer to remain on the positive, rather than cynical, side. "Latin music" for Glee club ends up meaning a mostly English version of the Gypsy Kings "Bamboleo," Madonna's "Isla Bonita," and Elvis's "Satisfy me" with one English-Spanish tranlated line. Although the hour long show is depressingly filled with the hyperbolic "hot Latin" (Okay, Ricky Martin is indeed eye and ear candy) and filled with stereotypes, Santana plays the critical cultural reader and educates her defensive educator.
Santana [to Mr. Shu]: You went from La cucaracha to a bull fighting mariachi! Why don't you just dress up as the Taco Bell Chihuahua and bark the theme song to Dora the explorer? You don't even know enough to be embarrassed about these stereotypes that you're perpetuating!
David Martinez invoked Lorca's concept of "duende" had me over the top with GLEE! Okay, so duende was given short shrift, quickly and mistakenly translated as dwarf and pawned off as Ricky Martin's sexual energy. He explains duende through a bilingual performance of "I'm sexy and you know it":
David Martinez:
Cuando hago mi entrada, this is what I see
Todo el mundo para pa' mirarme a mí
I got passion in my pants and I ain't afraid to show it, show it, show it,
show it.
I'm sexy and I know it
Soy sexy y lo sabes
Hey, checalo.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle yeah (x4)
To the wiggle man, así menealo man yeah
Soy sexy y lo sabes.
Do I wish the show's writers would have included some discussion of the term "duende" coined by Spanish civil war poet, Federico Garcia Lorca–you bet. Lorca called the duende, "an emotive and poetic logic rather than a disembodied rational logic" (Hirsch, 1999, p. 13). Duende's etymological root comes from duen de casa [not dwarf!], "master of the house," a house that is filled with emotion and death. I wrote in Teachers Act Up (p. 80): "Like the flamenco singer or bullfighter whose dark improvisational arts place them closer to death, duende allows one to succumb to mystery, and absorb its carnival of hunger, desire, sin, and sunlight." It's NOT reduced to "passion in my pants."
But we critical academics can't remain all tied up in what isn't all the time. We must recognize the slow celebratory moments of cultural shift and laugh outloud when the show makes fun of a U.S. Adult Spanish student whose goal is to learn enough Spanish to say "Stop using my toilet to my maid" (hello, "The Help"). The show illuminates U.S. Americans' backwardness through great doses of humor and irony. By the end, this same adult student is awarded "best conjugator" and gives thanks to her teacher:
Adult Spanish learner: Thank you Sr. Martinez. Thanks to you, Claudia knows now "to go" before she comes to work.
Oye (Yiddish groan not Mexican command "listen!").
Mr. Shu is awarded "most improved" as he celebrates his fiancé getting the covetted "tenure track" position at the school and hands over his Spanish classroom to Ricky Martin. Should I worry about the effect of this show, reinforcing Fox viewers' understanding that diversity means the White English-only speaking guy (or woman–see the show's take on Sue Sylvester) loses his credibility and his job to more qualified women and minorities? Or will viewers' feel invited to sing along to bilingual lyrics by their favorite all American heros, gyrate their stiff hips to global Spanish rhythms, and rethink their attitudes towards cultural and linguistic knowledge. Maybe it is important for English speaking Americans to take World Language & Spanish language education seriously? English speaking Americans do great damage to U.S. students' future potential if they are "protected" from integrated schools, linguistic diversity, and the struggles inherent in learning different ways of being in a multicultural world. And while we may be cultivating critical geniuses like Santana–at what price? We can't hope that minority youth will trade in their anger and cynicism in light of ignorance and symbolic violence against cultural and linguistic "others." Until we pay more attention to world language education and -yes- history, we will never create learning environments that nurture respect, humility, inquisitiveness, and care.
In the meantime, who else saw the show?! Responses?!! LA Times blog on it, in case you'd like a review of the various narratives. Any other links to other "Gleeks" writing with loving criticism of the show?
← The Politics of the Language(s) We Speak (Or Don't)	Promotion to Full Professor (wow!) →
One response to ""Glee" gets bilingual–sort of!"
Mr. Schu's Message & The White Hero Narrative
Misha, this is such a FABULOUS analysis of The Spanish Teacher! You give us so much to consider. I especially appreciate your positive view. This episode absolutely opens the door for English speaking Americans to take seriously World Language education and to consider the consequences of segregating children from ways of being in a global, multilingual society.
I agree with your take on Mr. Schu's message for his students and Fox viewers. Yes, despite his misinterpretation of David Martinez' statement, Mr. Schu wants everyone to know that the US is not a monolingual country and that we must embrace this fact and prepare young people for the future.
To have Mr. Schu deliver this message to viewers is important. As Sue Sylvester reminds Emma, Will is good/positive member of mainstream America; this is why Sue wants his sperm. Mr. Schu counters many of the oppressive/negative views of the dominant class that are often voiced by Sue in the show. He might even help some Fox viewers to suspend/overcome their disbelief about the importance of the Spanish language in the US through his own struggle to try to figure-out what's true and to "do the right thing."
So, I LOVE the way Santana stands up to Mr. Schu and lets him know that he doesn't know enough to recognize that he is perpetuating stereotypes! -Although he's a good guy, Mr. Schu has A LOT to learn just like many other Americans!
With Santana's words in my head, the next scene in which Mr. Schu offers David Martinez his job looses a little steam for me – even though Mr. Schu comes to realize that his students deserve to learn from a teacher who has a passion for teaching Spanish.
Dare I say… It is only because Mr. Schu plays the role of the White Hero that David Martinez is even afforded the opportunity of daytime work. Hero Schu lobbies Principal Figgins to hire the son of immigrants – immigrants who had to lie about their citizenship to obtain an education.
I suspect that the GLEE writers may have been trying to make a political statement about current legislation that denies undocumented immigrants access to public education. This statement was not as polished as David Martinez' teeth. 😉
I am really curious about the writers' decision to make David Martinez the son of Chilean immigrants.
How would it have been received is he was, in fact, Mexican American or Puerto Rican like Ricky Martin himself? Is being from Chile more sexy and exotic? Does it permit Fox viewers to take a tourist's stance that distances them enough to be voyeurs rather than members of the same national community? I'd like to tease this apart a little more.
As for the musical selections, I was disappointed, too. I could not believe that Ricky Martin & Naya Rivera sang a duet of Madonna's La Isla Bonita. –This is such a tourist song!
I am actually surprised that Ritchie Valens' La Bamba didn't make the playlist. It might have appealed to viewers as a classic part of the American cannon of rock and roll music.
That's it for now, but I am still processing… On a different note, do you think that GLEE writers will reinforce that Santana's dad is a doctor? (Santana mentions this in Britney Spears episode.) This could be very interesting.
Thanks again, Mish for encouraging us to think more critically about GLEE and to recognize that one of American's most favorite shows is thinking differently about linguistic and cultural literacy.


The Psychology Department is centrally located in the lower level of the Monsignor William G. Barry Library on Barry University's main campus. All undergraduate and graduate psychology classes and psychology labs are housed in this facility.
Barry University is conveniently located between the cities of Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. It is easily accessible from both Ft. Lauderdale International and Miami International Airports, the Florida Turnpike, or I-95.
The University is located at 11300 NE Second Avenue, Miami Shores, Florida 33161.


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L'Università tecnica di Delft (in lingua originale: Technische Universiteit Delft), conosciuta anche come TU Delft, è la più grande e antica università tecnica olandese, situata nella città di Delft, nella provincia dell'Olanda Meridionale. Con otto facoltà e numerosi istituti di ricerca, ospita più di 26.000 studenti tra corsi di laurea triennale (BSc, Bachelor of Science) e magistrale (MSc, Master of Science), oltre 2.900 dottorandi e circa 6.000 impiegati tra professori, ricercatori e collaboratori accademici.

La TU Delft è considerata uno dei più prestigiosi istituti di ricerca al mondo; si posiziona costantemente tra le cento migliori università secondo diverse classifiche tra cui il QS World University Rankings, nonché tra le prime dieci in: architettura, ingegneria aerospaziale, ingegneria civile e strutturale, ingegneria meccanica e ingegneria dei trasporti.

L'università fu fondata l'8 gennaio del 1842 da re Guglielmo II dei Paesi Bassi come Accademia Reale (Koninklijke Akademie van Delft), con lo scopo principale di formare i funzionari pubblici per le Indie Orientali Olandesi. Il curriculum di ricerca ed educazione della scuola si espanse rapidamente, facendola diventare prima una Scuola Politecnica nel 1864 (Polytechnische School van Delft), un Istituto di Tecnologia nel 1905 (Technische Hoogeschool van Delft), ovvero una università a tutti gli effetti e infine cambiandone il nome in Università tecnica di Delft nel 1986.

Tra le persone che hanno l'hanno frequentata vi sono i Premi Nobel Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes e Simon van der Meer.

L'Università tecnica di Delft fa parte di diverse federazioni di università, come CESAER, IDEA League, UNITECH e 3TU e aderisce ai progetti europei ATHENS ed Erasmus.

Storia

Accademia Reale (1842–1864)

L'Università tecnica di Delft fu fondata l'8 gennaio del 1842 da Re Guglielmo II dei Paesi Bassi come Accademia Reale per la formazione di ingegneri civili, per servire sia la nazione che l'industria, e dei tirocinanti del commercio. Uno degli scopi dell'accademia era di formare i funzionari pubblici per le colonie della Compagnia olandese delle Indie Orientali. Il primo direttore a capo dell'accademia fu Antoine Lipkens, il costruttore del primo telegrafo ottico olandese, conosciuto con il nome stesso di 'Lipkens'. I primi edifici ad ospitare l'Accademia Reale furono quelli di Oude Delft 95, a Delft. Il 23 maggio del 1863 venne promulgata una legge che impose una regolamentazione dell'educazione tecnica nei Paesi Bassi, riconducendo così l'Accademia sotto le regole dell'istruzione secondaria.

Scuola Politecnica (1864–1905)
Il 20 giugno del 1864 l'Accademia Reale venne sciolta con un Decreto Reale, per fare spazio alla Scuola Politecnica di Delft (). La scuola appena creata si occupò di formare ingegneri in numerosi campi e architetti, figure molto richieste durante il periodo di industrializzazione del XIX secolo.

Istituto Tecnico (1905–1986)
Ancora una volta una legge, emessa il 22 maggio 1905, cambiò il nome della scuola in Istituto Tecnico di Delft (), evidenziando la vocazione accademica della formazione offerta. Il Politecnico divenne così un'università vera e propria, e da quel momento poté rilasciare titoli accademici. Il numero di studenti in quel periodo arrivò a circa 450. L'inaugurazione ufficiale del nuovo istituto avvenne il 10 luglio del 1905 alla presenza della Regina Guglielmina dei Paesi Bassi. Il primo preside del nuovo istituto fu J. Kraus, ingegnere idraulico. L'attribuzione dei pieni poteri giuridici avvenne solo il 7 giugno del 1956. A quel tempo la maggior parte degli edifici universitari erano ancora dentro il centro della città di Delft, mentre altri si trovavano sulla riva del fiume Schie, nel quartiere di Wippolder.

Le organizzazioni studentesche crebbero insieme all'università. La prima venne fondata il 22 marzo del 1848: si trattava della Delftsch Studenten Corps, che scelse come sede il caratteristico edificio Sociëteit Phoenix in Phoenixstraat. A questa associazione seguirono la de Delftsche Studenten Bond, fondata il 30 ottobre 1897, e la KSV Sanctus Virgilius, fondata il 2 marzo 1898. Nel 1917 Gerrit van Iterson creò il Giardino Sperimentale per le Tecniche di Coltivazione (), oggi conosciuto come 'Giardino Botanico del TU Delft'. Sempre in quel periodo avvenne la prima nomina di una docente donna, Toos Korvezee.

Università tecnica di Delft (1986–oggi)
Dopo la fine della Seconda guerra mondiale, il TU Delft conobbe una rapida espansione in ambito accademico. L'organizzazione universitaria ispirata allo Studium Generale era diffusa in tutte le università dei Paesi Bassi, inclusa quella di Delft, e si prefiggeva di promuovere un sapere libero e facilmente accessibile nei campi della cultura, della tecnologia, della società e delle scienze. In risposta al crescente numero di studenti, nel 1974 venne organizzata la prima Settimana di Accoglienza per gli Studenti del Primo Anno (, OWEE), che da quel momento divenne una tradizione del TU Delft.

Il 1º settembre 1986 l'Istituto Tecnico di Delft cambiò ufficialmente nome in Università tecnica di Delft, per sottolineare la qualità della formazione e della ricerca fatta dall'istituto. Fra le altre espansioni, nel 1987 venne fondato l'istituto Delft Top Tech, che forniva un'educazione gestionale professionale ai dipendenti delle aziende maggiormente tecnologiche. Il 1º settembre del 1997 le 13 facoltà vennero raggruppate in 9 macro-facoltà, per migliorare l'efficienza della loro gestione in una fase di espansione dell'università. Nei primi anni novanta, dal momento che la grande maggioranza degli studenti erano di sesso maschile, l'università cercò di far aumentare il numero delle studentesse fondando una commissione per emanciparle. Da allora cominciarono le giornate Anche le ragazze studiano Tecnologia (). Negli anni successivi le funzioni di questa commissione vennero suddivise fra più istituti.

Dal 2006 tutti gli edifici universitari si trovano al di fuori del centro storico cittadino di Delft. Alcune costruzioni anche relativamente recenti, come il dipartimento di Scienza dei materiali, vennero vendute e in seguito demolite nel 2007 per far spazio ai nuovi edifici della scuola superiore Haagse Hogeschool. Una più stretta collaborazione fra il TU Delft e le altre università dei Paesi Bassi di scienze applicate ha poi permesso di accentrare fisicamente a Delft alcuni istituti olandesi. Nel settembre 2009 l'Università delle Scienze Applicate della regione de L'Aia e l'Istituto delle Scienze Applicate di Rijswijk si sono trasferiti a Delft, nelle immediate vicinanze dell'università, all'angolo fra Rotterdamseweg e Leeghwaterstraat.

La compagnia online di notesharing Studocu è stata fondata in questa università, da degli studenti della facoltà di ingegneria.

Il 13 maggio del 2008 l'edificio della Facoltà di Architettura venne distrutto da un incendio, forse scatenato da un corto circuito in una macchina per il caffè causato da una tubatura idrica fessurata. Fortunatamente la biblioteca della facoltà, contenente migliaia di libri e mappe nonché pezzi unici di architettura fra cui sedie di Gerrit Rietveld e di Le Corbusier, si salvò. Attualmente la Facoltà di Architettura si trova nella vecchia sede centrale dell'università.

Nel 2007 le tre università tecniche dei Paesi Bassi TU Delft, TU Eindhoven e l'Università di Twente hanno dato origine a una federazione universitaria, chiamata 3TU, diventata 4TU nel 2016 con l'aggiunta dell'Università di Wageningen.

Il logo del TU Delft

Nel corso degli anni il logo della TU Delft è cambiato in alcune occasioni, insieme al nome ufficiale. Dagli anni 2000 il logo è basato sui tre colori dell'università ciano, nero e bianco. La lettera "T" sorregge una fiamma stilizzata, un riferimento alla fiamma che Prometeo portò dal Monte Olimpo all'umanità, contro il volere di Zeus. Per questo motivo Prometeo viene a volte considerato il primo ingegnere della storia, ed è un importante simbolo per l'università. La sua statua si erge al centro del campus del TU Delft, il Mekelpark, recentemente rinnovato.

L'Università mantiene comunque ancora attivo il logo originario, utilizzandolo per occasioni più formali o talvolta per pubblicazioni ufficiali. Esso è di forma circolare con al centro la fiamma di Prometeo, e ai suoi lati gli scudi dei Conti d'Olanda a sinistra e della Municipalità di Delft a destra. Lungo il bordo esterno invece è presente la dicitura in maiuscolo Technische Universiteit Delft con l'aggiunta dell'anno di fondazione in numeri romani.

Campus
Inizialmente tutti gli edifici dell'università erano situati nel centro storico della città di Delft. Questo cambiò nella seconda metà del XX secolo, con il loro spostamento in un'area dedicata più a sud. L'ultima costruzione a lasciare il centro di Delft fu la biblioteca universitaria, che venne trasferita nell'attuale edificio progettato dello studio Mecanoo nel 1997. Il 12 settembre 2006 venne approvato il progetto della nuova area centrale, il Mekelpark, dando il via alla trasformazione dell'area intorno a Mekelweg (il viale principale del campus universitario). Il nuovo parco ha così rimpiazzato la principale arteria di accesso, deviando il traffico automobilistico sui lati esterni del campus e rendendo l'area centrale accessibile solo a piedi, in bicicletta e in autobus, e con la prevista attivazione di un prolungamento del tram 19 nel 2022.

Mekelpark

La nuova area centrale dell'università venne chiamata Mekelpark per onorare la memoria del professore Jan Mekel, combattente per la resistenza durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, che fu giustiziato dai Nazisti il 2 maggio del 1942 a Sachsenhausen. Il Mekelpark venne aperto il 5 luglio 2009 e sostituì i vecchi parcheggi, le piste ciclabili e la stazione di servizio che alla fine degli anni cinquanta erano stati costruiti in mezzo alle facoltà. Il viale principale, lungo 832 metri, ha facilitato lo spostamento tra una facoltà e l'altra. Entrambi i lati del viale sono stati arredati con panchine in pietra, per una lunghezza totale di 1547 metri.
Alcuni degli edifici che circondano il Mekelpark meritano una citazione particolare.

Aula
L'edificio "Aula" fu disegnato dallo studio di architettura Broekbakema, fondato dagli ex-studenti Jo van den Broek e Jacob B. Bakema. Venne ufficialmente aperto il 6 gennaio 1966 dal primo ministro olandese Jo Cals, e si tratta di un esempio classico del brutalismo architettonico. Apre simbolicalmente il Mekelpark e ospita la mensa principale dell'università, oltre a un piccolo negozio, aule di lezione, sale auditorium, un centro congressi e gli uffici amministrativi dell'università. In questa struttura si tengono tutte le cerimonie di consegna delle lauree, comprese quelle honoris causa, e gli incontri del senato accademico.

Biblioteca

La nuova biblioteca universitaria, completata nel 1997, fu progettata dallo studio di architettura Mecanoo, basato a Delft, e si trova dietro l'edificio "Aula". Il tetto della biblioteca è ricoperto da un manto erboso, che agisce da isolante naturale. La struttura si solleva dal terreno su un solo lato, permettendo di raggiungerne la sommità semplicemente camminando sul prato dal lato opposto. La biblioteca ha al centro un cono in acciaio che la attraversa dalla base fin oltre il tetto, dandogli così la sua caratteristica forma. Il muro opposto all'Aula è interamente realizzato con vetrate. La biblioteca vinse il premio olandese National Steel Prize nel 1998 nella categoria realizzazione di costruzioni in acciaio e ibride.

Centro Sportivo e Culturale
Il Centro Sportivo e Culturale (X TU Delft) si trova in Mekelweg 10, all'estremità meridionale del Mekelpark. Progettato dall'architetto Vera Yanovshtchinsky, fu aperto nel 1995 e rinnovato tra il 2017 e il 2019.

Musei del TU Delft
I musei associati all'università sono tre: il Science Centre Delft, il Museo di Mineralogia e Geologia Beijerinck e l'archivio Kluyver.

Facoltà
La TU Delft comprende otto facoltà. Vengono riportati anche i nomi originali in olandese e le abbreviazioni tra parentesi:

 Ingegneria meccanica, navale e dei materiali ()
 Architettura ()
 Ingegneria civile e Scienze della Terra ()
 Ingegneria elettrica, Matematica e Informatica ()
 Disegno industriale ()
 Facoltà di Ingegneria aerospaziale ()
 Tecnologia, Policy e Management ()
 Scienze applicate ().

Note

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Delft
Architetture di Delft

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Indian DTH Community Forums › Technology & Web Services › Telecom › Mobiles and General Telecom News
General News: Lenovo Vibe K4 Note Launched in India: Price, Full Specifications, and More
General News Lenovo Vibe K4 Note Launched in India: Price, Full Specifications, and More
[Image: lenovo_vibe_k4_note.jpg]
Lenovo on Tuesday launched the much-anticipated successor to the popular K3 Note smartphone in India, the Vibe K4 Note. Priced at Rs. 11,999, the Lenovo Vibe K4 Note will be available exclusively from Amazon India in its first flash sale on January 19, with registrations beginning Tuesday.
The company also launched a Lenovo Vibe K4 Note bundle with AntVR virtual reality headset, priced at Rs. 13,299. The first few flash sales will only feature the Lenovo Vibe K4 Note VR Bundle, at a special price of Rs. 12,499. The VR headset features a standalone price of Rs. 1,299. It will be available in its Tuxedo Black colour variant.
Running Android 5.1 Lollipop with a light-version of the company's Vibe UI skin on top, the dual-SIM dual-4G Lenovo K4 Note bears a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) IPS display with a pixel density of 401ppi, and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The company claims a 1000:1 contrast ratio, and features like user-controlled colour balance. It is powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT6753 SoC, coupled with 3GB of DDR3 RAM. The Vibe K4 Note bears a 13-megapixel rear camera with PDAF autofocus, an f/2.2 aperture and dual-tone LED flash, apart from a 5-megapixel front-facing camera.
The Vibe K4 Note comes with 16GB of inbuilt storage that's expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). Connectivity options include 4G LTE, A-GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, and FM radio. The 9.1-mm thick Lenovo Vibe K4 Note weighs 158 grams, and sports a 3300mAh battery with fast charging that's rated to deliver up 265 hours of 3G standby time, and 22 hours of 3G talk time.
The company announced that a premium leather cover, as well as wood covers would be launched soon. The smartphone also sports dual-front speakers, alongside Dolby Atmos audio. One of the highlight features of the handset is its fingerprint scanner, placed below the camera module on the rear panel. Sensors include a digital compass, accelerometer, proximity sensor, and ambient light sensor.
The company is also touting the TheaterMax technology on the Vibe K4 Note, which converts regular content to immersive VR content.
"More than 50 percent of digital content is consumed on mobile devices today, and smartphones continue to be people's' primary personal entertainment device. We expect the proportion will continue to grow in the future and the expectations of newer, more sophisticated functionalities along with it. Lenovo TheaterMax, powered by Lenovo VR, sets us apart with our commitment to design cutting-edge smartphones that meet the needs of consumers at an extremely friendly price-point," said Sudhin Mathur, Director- Smartphones, Lenovo Group.
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If you're a coach or personal trainer, your state government may soon force you to get licensed and operate within their "Standards of Practice."
Certain organizations are lobbying state governments to make their certification and license mandatory for everyone who trains clients.
Approval will be determined by a board, which may not approve of the way you train clients, i.e. using deadlifts or full squats.
Don't think your state government will leave you alone to coach the way you know best. They'll try to make you train your clients the way the NSCA and the ACSM tell them you should.
There are good and bad professionals within every profession that requires a license, and a license doesn't guarantee competence.
This article is for the professionals. But the rest of you can read it, if you promise to think along with us.
It's been suggested that state governments should control the practice of exercise prescription through programs of state licensure.
If this plan is enacted in your state, this would mean that you would need a license granted by your state to practice strength coaching or personal training.
It would mean that you would have to pass an examination procedure developed by the entity assigned the task of deciding what you can and cannot do as a licensed trainer.
What's Wrong With Having Standards?
If your State Board of Exercise Prescription Examiners (SBEPE, to save time) decides that full squats are bad for the knees, presses are bad for the shoulders, and deadlifts are bad for the back, then full squats, presses, and deadlifts will be presumed to be Bad, and will be excluded from the Standard of Practice established by the SBEPE.
I have a serious problem with my state government making such decisions, which they would be quite likely to do given the probable makeup of such a state board.
In the District of Columbia, where this legislation has already been passed, the Board of Physical Therapy is in charge of developing the "Standards of Practice" document.
Physical Therapy is concerned with the rehabilitation of injured or disabled people, and their approach is based on rehab. Very soon in DC, Physical Therapists will be in charge of all exercise prescription.
Those of us who have had experience with Physical Therapists must immediately ask what government-approved and Physical Therapy-administered training and exercise in DC will be composed of – and perhaps most importantly, what it will not be composed of.
Do Workouts Require Government Approval?
There is a national organization whose sole purpose is advocating the process of state licensure of exercise professionals.
The Coalition for the Registry of Exercise Professionals (CREP, again saving time) is a coalition of the ACSM, the NSCA, ACE, NETA, the NCSF, the Cooper Institute, and the Pilates Method Alliance (PMA).
Operating the US Registry of Exercise Professionals (USREPS), CREP actively advocates state licensure.
From their website, "CREP encourages public policy to establish strict standards based on NCCA-accredited certification of qualified exercise professionals, up to and including registry and/or licensure, so the profession may be recognized and trusted as part of the healthcare continuum."
It appears as though a profession may only be recognized and trusted if the government says it's okay.
That's pretty interesting, in a disgusting sort of way, but this organization also seems fixated upon NCCA accreditation as the threshold for certifying body competence.
The National Commission for Certifying Agencies is the accreditation body administered by another organization called the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE), which accredits personnel certifications.
ICE itself is accredited by the American National Standards Institute, and ANSI also accredits organizations which provide personnel certifications. For example, CrossFit is accredited by ANSI, and not the NCCA.
If you're confused by all this self-serving complexity, good.
You should realize that neither ANSI nor NCCA actually examine the content of the curricula of the educational organizations they accredit. They are almost exclusively concerned with office procedures and bureaucratic detail.
Our organization, the Aasgaard Company, has had some experience with this process in an attempt to obtain accreditation for our Starting Strength Seminar.
After a couple of years, we decided to just let our seminar attendees, our coaches, and their clients decide for themselves how good a job we're doing.
At no point during the process were we asked about full squats – or anything having to do with exercise, training, safety, equipment, science, biomechanics, physiology, kinesiology, physical education, or any other aspect of any activity in which our credentialed professionals are actually engaged. Nothing.
Not one question or request for documentation regarding what we actually do professionally, just lots of questions about how we run the office and who keeps the keys.
And this arcane, byzantine maze of voluntary private bureaucracy proposes to be the only allowable interface between your profession and the even more byzantine and coercive bureaucracy of your state government.
The difference between certification by one of these accredited organizations and state licensure is that certification is voluntary and licensure is not.
You voluntarily select a certification based upon your perception of its value to your practice.
If you wisely choose ours over the drivel administered by the NSCA, for example, you have chosen based upon your assessment of the two organizations, their materials, their examination procedures, their maintenance of certification policies, and their ultimate value in the marketplace of the strength training profession.
If your state forces you to get a license and operate within the "Standards of Practice" developed by the SBEPE, things will be different.
Guess who will be on the SBEPE: Orthopedic Surgeons, Physical Therapists, Exercise Physiologists, and members of the NSCA, ACSM, ACE, NETA, NCSF, and the Cooper Institute.
What do you suppose the Standards of Practice document will contain?
What will happen to you if you continue to squat, press, and deadlift with your clients and athletes? What will happen to your practice if you don't get a license?
It actually boils down to one salient fact: The member organizations of CREP are lobbying state governments to make their certifications mandatory for persons practicing exercise prescription.
They're trying to create a market for their certification products that doesn't currently exist within a voluntary system, and it bothers them not one tiny little bit to use the government to force you to pay them for something you have not chosen to buy.
State licensure is primarily concerned with creating artificial markets and limiting competition.
An astute observer once wrote, "The market is quite capable of ensuring competence, but the state is much better suited to restricting the number of other people competing with you."
Hairdressers, manicurists, surveyors, nurses, geologists, landscapers, interior decorators, bug sprayers, irrigators, insurance salesmen, real estate salesmen, social workers, speech pathologists, veterinary assistants, private security guys, pharmacists, architects, athletic trainers, and massage therapists, as well as Physical Therapists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers all enjoy the protection from undue competition that licensure provides.
And countless "professional development organizations" benefit from the business provided by a captive audience.
You have been told that licensure – although it cannot guarantee competence – at least provides a minimum baseline of entry-level competence for a profession. Well, folks, so does voluntary certification.
The public has enough sense to ask for references, even when choosing from among licensed professional landscapers.
But under the current system of licensure protectionism, the public cedes a measure of its prudence to the government's perceived authority.
There are bad doctors, lawyers, and interior decorators, and there always will be, licensed or certified. But with the State's imprimatur, many people stop thinking and begin trusting.
I'd rather be evaluated by potential clients for my experience and competence than merely trusted because the SBEPE says I'm just as good as the kid who graduated from PE school last year with his NSCA-CSCS credential, and who actually believes that full squats are bad for the knees like the Standards of Practice says.
I'd rather be free to practice what I've learned in 38 years of making people stronger than be forced to operate according to the tenets of physical therapy/rehab-based exercise promulgated by the NSCA and the ACSM.
Again, the District of Columbia has already passed this legislation.
And over the past six years Massachusetts has moved in this direction suggested by CREP with their HBs 209, 1005, and 185, along with Maryland's HB 747, New Jersey with SBs 695 and 731, California's SB 1043, Texas's HB 3800, and Georgia with SBs 441 and 204.
Florida HB 1257, SB 984, and SB 1616 have all sought to establish precisely the SBEPE structure I referred to earlier.
North Carolina has already enacted some rather confusing legislation regarding the professional provision of nutrition information that can potentially impact a coach's ability to help his trainees with dietary advice.
If you think that state governments will leave you alone to coach the way you know best, you are making a serious mistake.
They have tried, and will continue to try, to make you train your clients and athletes the way the NSCA and the ACSM tell them you should.
It's best to know of these things beforehand, so that you can make your voice heard before the Squat Nazis formally take over the profession.
Note: Thanks to Brodie Butland for his help in preparing this article.


text:
Jean Carlos Rodríguez Quiñones (born 27 May 1999) is a Cuban football player. He plays for Pinar del Río.

Club career
He made his Cuba national football team debut on 23 June 2019 in a 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup game against Canada.

References

External links

Living people
1999 births
Cuban footballers
Cuba international footballers
Cuba youth international footballers
Association football midfielders
FC Pinar del Río players
2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup players
People from Pinar del Río Province


Welcome to the Matt Simpson Make-up Artistry website. Based centrally within the West Midlands in Staffordshire, he is in the perfect location to travel to destinations both locally and nationally. In addition to working in Feature Film, Television and Theatre, Matt is also available Commercial/Editorial projects and Private Clients (including Bridal and Prom). Please Get in touch with any questions or booking enquiries.