Claiming the Google map listing for your business is a great way to jump straight to the top of the search engine results page for your location based keywords and is very simple to do. Have you ever noticed that the map listings always appear at the top of the search results? Well every business can claim the map listing associated with their company and optimize it effectively and this is a great way to market your website online.
Map listings will only show for search terms that include a location name and so optimizing your Google map listing is the perfect way to build brand awareness in your local area. Here are some easy to implement tips for optimization.
Once you've claimed your listing there will be many different fields for you to fill in regarding all the information associated with your business. In order to get the best from this process you need to fill out as many of these fields as possible so that your potential customers will have all the information they need. Also it may seem like it would go without saying to include your premises address and not your home address but I have seen this done in the past.
In the description section of the listing you will have a certain amount of characters to sell your business as best you can. Here you should include information about the products and services that you provide but remember to use the keywords that you want to be found for. For example if you are a confectionary store in Manchester you should be including phrases such as 'Manchester sweet shop' and 'sweets in Manchester'.
The idea is to make your map listing as appealing as possible so that when it does appear in the search results people are more likely to click on it. A great way to do this is to regularly update it with any special offers or deals that you might be running that could entice people in. Remember to change this when the offer runs out though.
Pictures are great to have on your map listing, especially if your business requires your customers to see the products before they buy them. This is particularly important in say the technology where people may not know what they are looking for purely by its name. Pictures will also make your listing stand out in Google's search results.
Once your map listing is claimed and up and running you can start to ask your loyal customers to write reviews about you in Google's review tool. The more reviews you can get, the better your business will obviously look but also, when you reach five or more reviews Google will start to give your map listing a star rating. This will then improve depending on how many positive reviews you get and will look great to potential customers.
If you are struggling to do your own SEO, be it map listings or general website optimization, then there are plenty of UK SEO companies that will be able to offer their services. SEO is a great way to market your business online but can take a fair amount of effort and time and you may want to seek a little advice before you get started.
Chris Mayhew is a passionate writer working for Marketing By Web. This internet marketing agency offers managed services in SEO, PPC and social media.
Thanks Chris for providing great tips to optimize the local business listing for Google places.. In fact Google business listing optimization can provide us lots of location targeted customers.. i have been trying to get my listing appear on Google but still not get success.. i am doing whatever you said above.. Hopefully it will start appearing within few weeks.
Really excellent tips about Google Local Places. Thanks for sharing for your own thoughts.
Definitely a great internet marketing strategy for any local businesses to boost their positioning in Google.
The review tool is a new one on me, thanks for sharing.
I find keywords extremely important. I also think that if the online special offer is good enough, it could help your business with tons of new customers and people spreading the word.
Thank you for this information. I have many clients that ask about how to optimize Google Places, and your blog article has provided a concise and easy-to-follow method to optimizing your listing. Google Places is more and more important, especially if you have a local business.
Keywords are the way to go, and the trick is to use the maximum number that can describe it the best when thinking about the place. Also don't forget to put the information that people may look for, like contacts and address.
I tend to focus on keywords. Pictures have never really helped us before but maybe that's just because of our product.
Keywords are definitely the main ingredient to thrive in Google listings.
I still have a lot to learn about this matter, but all I know is that it's all about thinking the right strategy.
Google Places is an another source of traffic to you site and this is the first thing we have to do before building citations for our site. This helps to customers to find the business location or service area of business easily. Almost 60% of customer are using Google maps to find the business locations. Also Google providing a plat form to maintain and update places listings. From here we can track all the impressions and clicks which our places listing got in particular time period. And also its tracking which all the keywords lead to our places listing.
Google Places seems to take up all the space above the fold for many many niches in my neck of the woods. I wish I knew the secret to how so many one-location businesses are able to get multiple listings in several local cities. I had a hard enough time getting just one listing.
I think all the tips above are very helpful but for my opinion the most important is the second one : keywords .I have used this technique with my own blog and it worked.


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INEC to deploy 12,000 ad hoc personnel for FCT council election
INEC
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Thursday said it would deploy 12,000 ad hoc personnel for the February 12, 2022 area council election in the Federal Capital Territory.
According to the INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner, Yahaya Bello, INEC would provide a level playing field for candidates participating in the election.
Bello, represented by the Administrative Secretary of INEC in the FCT, Waziri Zannah, stated this during a town hall meeting with women groups and gender-focused civil society organisations in Abuja organised by INEC in collaboration with European Center for Electoral Support.
READ ALSO: Aiteo Nembe oil spill: disputes over outcome of investigation report
While expressing the commission's readiness to conduct a free and fair poll in the FCT, he charged women groups to sensitise and mobilise other women and youth to come out during the election, and vote for their preferred candidates.
"It's high time women to come out en-mass and participate in the electoral process. The commission provides a level playing ground for both women and men and eligible voters.
"INEC will count everyone's vote and will also be transparent in all we do concerning the election. We have everything ready and would be deploying over 12,000 ad-hoc staff," Bello said.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: jboss varia scheduler not working in jboss AS 7 I have a web app (.war) to be deployed to JBoss EAP 6.2.0, and there's a class in the app that implements org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Schedulable. I have put the jar file scheduler-plugin.jar in my WEB-INF\lib directory. I have defined a "scheduler-service.xml"(as shown below) to schedule some task on a daily frequency.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<server>
<mbean code="org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Scheduler"
      name=":service=MyScheduler">
  <attribute name="StartAtStartup">false</attribute>
  <attribute name="SchedulableClass">com.myApp.MyClass</attribute>
  <attribute name="DateFormat">dd/MM/yy HH:mm</attribute>
  <attribute name="InitialStartDate">01/01/1970 00:00</attribute>
  <attribute name="SchedulePeriod">86400000</attribute>
  <attribute name="InitialRepetitions">-1</attribute>
  <attribute name="FixedRate">true</attribute>
</mbean>
</server>

This setup was working all fine on Jboss EAP 5.0.1 but these schedulers do not get triggered in Jboss EAP 6.2.0 on deployment. Any help would be highly appreciated.

A: These are no longer supported. Use the standard EJB @Schedule annotation instead.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Home » Blog of Thomas Law Offices » After Joan Rivers, Should Patients Worry About Ambulatory Surgical Centers?
After Joan Rivers, Should Patients Worry About Ambulatory Surgical Centers?
Published on Oct 2, 2014 at 8:33 am in Medical Malpractice.
The incident that led to Joan Rivers' heart attack occurred at what is called an ambulatory surgical center. Rivers' procedure was an endoscopy, considered a routine procedure, to look at her vocal chords. During this outpatient surgery at Yorkville Endoscopy Center on August 28, she experienced cardiac arrest, and then was transferred by ambulance to Mount Sinai Hospital. She never regained consciousness; the hospital put her into a medically induced coma, and then later on life support before she died on September 4.
So far, there are no allegations of any wrongdoing. The state is investigating the incident and the center announced that its medical director was stepping down.
About 5,000 of these ambulatory surgical centers perform 23 million operations a year. The types of surgeries typically provided include endoscopy, colonoscopy, plastic surgery, removal of cataracts, and rotator cuff treatment.
In a piece on the topic, PBS Newshour interviewed Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg News. Pettypiece said there has been an increase in the use of surgical centers due to two factors:
An increasing number of outpatient procedures – due to technological improvements, many procedures no longer require overnight hospital stays;
Surgical centers charge less – much less. Sometimes they charge half as much as hospitals, probably because they don't have the same overhead.
There is no evidence that surgical centers are less safe. A 2014 study published in the Health Affairs journal found that surgical centers tended to be more efficient overall, performing procedures on average in 32 minutes less time than hospitals.
The main difference from hospitals is that they don't have intensive care units and emergency rooms. This means if complications do arise, patients have to be transported to a hospital. This leads experts to suggest that the primary question patients might want to ask a prospective surgical center is, how close is it to a hospital.
PBS Newshour refers to these facilities as outpatient medical centers, and emphasizes that they are typically owned by the doctors who operate there, rather than a large corporation or a nonprofit organization.
A concern that has been raised is the fact that doctors who share ownership in a surgical center refer more of their patients to their own surgical center rather than a hospital. Some wonder if this is a conflict of interest, but it could also be down to convenience or other factors.
Can Safety Technology Make Trucks Safer?
Safe Driving Tips from AAA


Here is the answer to questions like: Is 86 a prime number? or is 86 a prime or a composite number?
The number 86 is not a prime number because it is possible to factorize it. In other words, 86 can be divided by 1, by itself and at least by 2 and 43. This is a so called 'composite number'.
Is 153 a prime number?
Is 163 a prime number?
Is 161 a prime number?


Docent Dialogue: Docent to Docent, A Docent Double Feature!
Continue reading "Docent Dialogue: Docent to Docent, A Docent Double Feature!"
Learning doesn't stop when you leave the classroom, whether it's for a field trip at the art museum or long after graduation day, and the education department at FWMoA is no exception! Read on to find out how one of our docents learns more about art every day.
With the start of the school year also comes the start of our docent training for the year. What better time to get to know another of our wonderful docents, Marlene Cooper! Marlene's enthusiasm for and love of art is infectious. Read on, and watch a short interview, to see why FWMoA is her happy place and the children she gives tours to are her favorite people.
Art Term Tuesday: What is Art?
In this section of the blog we'll be attempting to define different types of terms as they relate to art and creative expression. Our definitions will be rooted in what's generally accepted among art world peers, but infused with our personal observations. And, in the art world, just as in the "real" world, terms have double meaning. "Value", for example, a common term, refers to the lightness or darkness of a color, or it can express what the art itself is worth. For our first term, however, I hope to define "art," a daunting task to be sure!


P.S. Humphrey Is a Girl - .
It was Bob's turn to take Humphrey, the class hamster, home for the weekend. We all love her.
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A house located in Odivelas, with Arrábida and Lisbon as a landscape to lose sight of. Volumetrically to the North, this is a shy and reserved house, preserving the intimacy that is lived in the interior. To the South this house opens to its exterior areas in dialogue with them. The white volume that connects the floors and balconies, acts almost as a skin that confers unity and coherence to the volume of the house.
In the back, anthracite color planes are used to emphasize the shadow play and to give greater prominence to the white elements. A set of anthracite vertical blades, give this house a very own identity and are used punctually and at different moments. The support walls and the semi-buried lower floor – that corresponds to the garage floor – are covered with black ceramic bricks, this material visually annuls this floor and release the two noble floors of the house, passing the idea that it is lower.


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NAC to send final installment for the purchase of A330 aircraft
Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC), national flag carrier will send the last installment of the second Wide Body aircraft cost worth Rs 8 billion on July 23, 2018. The corporation will send the amount through a loan from Citizen Investment Trust (CIT).
The corporation had sent the first installment of Rs 8 billion for two Airbus A330 aircraft on June 7, 2017. The second installment of Rs 8 billion was sent on Tuesday of last week. The corporation has sent Rs 16 billion in two installments. The amount will be sent to the Ireland -based joint (escrow) of Hifly X and AAR Corporation.
The first Airbus A330 of NAC arrived to Kathmandu on June 28, 2018.
AAR Corporation of America, which has been supplying the aircraft to corporation, has made a negotiation to provide US $ 104.8 million worth of Airbus A330 to the corporation. Rabindra Shrestha, spokesperson of the corporation stated that "We sent the last installment of Rs 8 billion and two day after sending the money, our second Airbus A330 will reach Kathmandu. The corporation sent money to Hifly Company, which proposed to sell aircraft through US Company AAR Corporation. AAR Corporation made a purchase agreement after winning the Global Tender."
For the first installment of the second A330-200 wide-body airplanes, the corporation has borrowed Rs 8 billion half from Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and half from Citizen Investment Trust (CIT) whereas Rs 8 billion for the second installment from the Provident Fund. The corporation will take Rs 8 billion for the last installment from Citizen Investment Trust (CIT). The loan agreement of both 12 institutions for Rs 12-12 billion has already been done.
The two A330-200s, powered by Rolls-Royce Trent 700 engines, will feature a two-class cabin configuration that will seat a total of 274 passengers—18 in business class and 256 in economy class.
According to the corporation, the first Airbus A330 aircraft was delivered under the command of Hi-fly pilots and the second Airbus will delivered under the same pilots. The aircraft will come to Kathmandu directly from the Airbus Factory in Toulouse, France. It takes nine hours to reach Kathmandu from Toulouse. 7 set(14 pilots) are required to operate the Airbus. The corporation has prepared Pilot Maheshworman (MM) Dangol and Shrawon Rijal with 6 pilots. However, 6 of them are not allowed to operate the Airbus. They are permitted to operate Airbus only after operating under the command of pilots (Captain).
The corporation plans to operate the first wide body for regular commercial flights from 1st August, 2018. "The first commercial flight of the first A330 will be operated to Doha, Qatar/Dubai" Spokesperson Shrestha said.
The first long distance flight of A330 (Long Haul ) will be flying to Japan or South Korea, "said Spokesperson Shrestha, for this, three to four months, short distance flights will be conducted to Dubai, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Bangkok, New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. '
Int'l and Domestic airline operators still required to pay airport fee of Rs1.63 arba
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Airfare hiked after NOC increases Aviation Turbine Fuel prices
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Blacktopping project of Patan Airport fails to complete within timeframe
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Dozens of passengers are stranded at Surkhet Airport as passengers of Humla district which is not connected properly…
Operation of NAC's Harbin-Y 12e remains uncertain
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China's 'MA700', competitor for ATR-72 sees its production started
byPathak Anurup
-BEIJING China started production of a new commercial airplane as of the end of December 2017, the turboprop…


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Alanna Lockward (March 23, 1961 - January 7, 2019)
Alanna Lockward at Bebop Berlin 2016 © Miguel Gomez
Born in the Dominican Republic, Alanna Lockward was an author, curator, filmmaker, mentor, mother, friend, and a person with a heartfelt passion for knowledge and for embarking on endeavors requiring new ways of thinking and interacting with the world. As a curator, she specialized in time-based radical narratives, and was an extraordinary figure in the fields of Caribbean scholarship, decolonial theory, and curatorial praxis, all of which she undertook with the boldness of a true trailblazer. This courage propelled Lockward to embark on unusual projects that, while of extreme relevance to her fields of interest, did not necessary conform to institutional norms and expectations and did not seek immediate validation. Many of her projects broke ground for subsequent efforts that have become part of the mainstream. One example of this was the First International Performance Art Festival that she produced singlehandedly from Berlin, Germany, and that she presented in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This single event was the precursor, in many respects, of the new waves of performance art that would emerge in subsequent years in the Dominican Republic. The same could be said about her work on both sides of the Island: the Haitian and the Dominican Republics. Lockward's extensive travels to these neighboring countries were responsible for a great deal of the burgeoning scholarship on bi-national and bi-cultural relations regarding these nations, and gave birth to some of her publications: Marassá and the Nothingness and A Dominican Haiti: Ghost Tattoos and Bilateral Narratives.
One of Lockward's cultural platforms since 1996 was Art Labour Archives, of which she was the Founding Director. Art Labour Archivesfunctioned as a space for theory and political activism. From 2012-2016, she curated the trans-disciplinary meeting BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS, setting precedents for the articulation of decoloniality and Blackness within the European continent and beyond. As a result of her involvement in BE.BOP, Lockward worked with an extensive list of artists from the Caribbean to Europe and to Africa to produce events, performances, festivals, symposia, dance, theater, and publications on several continents. In addition, Lockward was the general manager of the Transnational Decolonial Institute. As a curator she received awards from the Allianz Cultural Foundation, the Danish Arts Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. The Allen Report, her first documentary project on black liberation theology and the transnational history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) was awarded a recognition by the Dirección General de Cine de la República Dominicana (FONPROCINE 2013).
Lockward comes from a family of recognized intellectuals. Her grandfather, George Augustus Lockward Stamers, was an historian, university professor, philologist, writer, journalist, cooperativist and a Gideon Society member. Professor Lockward Stamers was the award-winning author of the history of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and other protestant congregations in the Dominican Republic (Historia del Protestantismo en Dominicana). This intellectual lineage led Alanna Lockward to become a student at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, Mexico City from which she received a Licentiate degree in Communication Science. Later on she received a masters in Art in Context from the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Her thesis focused on materials from the renowned German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, and dealt with the linguistic construction of Black identities: "Counter-reflection of a word field in the Daily Mirror." Lockward was awarded a diploma in Dance Education from the Royal Academy of Dance, and performed with companies such as: the Ballet Clásico Nacional (Santo Domingo), Ballet de Cámara de Jalisco (Guadalajara), Neubert Ballet (New York City) and the Australian Opera (Sydney). She was the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013), Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterlares (1994-2014), as well as of a compilation of investigative work on the history and current challenges between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Santuario 2014). Lockward was a recognized journalist as well, a cultural editor for Listín Diario, a research journalist of Rumbo magazine and a columnist of the Miami Herald and of Acento.com.do. Her many essays and reviews have been widely published internationally by Afrikadaa, Atlántica, ARTECONTEXTO, Arte X Excelencias, Art Nexus, Caribbean InTransit and Savvy journal. In 2014 she was guest columnist of Camera Austria.
In 1988, Lockward was appointed Director of International Affairs at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, in 1998 was designated a selection jury member of the XX Bienal Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo, and as an award jury member of its 26th edition (2011). She was a guest lecturer on critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis and Black feminism at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; the Decolonial Summer School Middelburg; the University of Warwick; Dutch Art Institute and Goldsmiths University of London. She was a panelist at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa; and atDuke, Columbia and Princeton Universities in the U.S. She was an advisor for the MFA and PhD programs of Transart Institute, Berlin-New York; and was an associate of the DFG funded Young Scholars Network Black Diaspora and Germany.
Throughout her years of creative work, Lockward partnered and collaborated with more than 50 cultural organizations around the world, some of which include: Goethe Institute, Togo; National Art Gallery of Namibia, Windhoek; Bienal de La Habana, Cuba; Bienal del Caribe, Santo Domingo; Centro Cultural de la Embajada de España, Santo Domingo; Centro León, Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros;Galerie Bourbon-Lally, Port-au-Prince; Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo; Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City; ARCO, Madrid;Atlántica, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Casa de América, Madrid; Casa América Catalunya, Barcelona; CENDEAC, Murcia; Danish Arts Council, Copenhagen; Documenta 13, Kassel; Dutch Art Institute; Junta de Andalucía, Seville; Matadero Madrid; NGBK, Berlin;Transart Institute, Berlin; Art Basel, Miami Beach; Franklin Furnace, New York; Hemispheric Institute, New York; Longwood Art Gallery/Bronx Council on the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Some of the exhibitions and projects that Lockward curated or helped produce included: Call & Response: BE.BOP.2016 at the Berlin Theater Volksbuehne; Spiritual Revolutions and the Scramble for Africa: BE.BOP.2014 at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse; Decolonizing the Cold" War. BE.BOP.2013 roundtable and screening program Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin; BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS:BE.BOP.2012. roundtable and screening program Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Berlin; Filipa César – The Embassy Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Truestories. Truesuccess, Freies Museum, Berlin; Naturaleza Intervenida, Espacio Iniciarte, Seville, with Juan Ramón-Barbancho, Nilo Casares, and Andrés Isaac Santana, commissioned by Junta de Andalucía; In His Shoes, Prague Quadrennial performance by Nicolás Dumit Estévez, in cooperation with Franklin Furnace, New York; F-Files, Universität der Künste, Berlin; Días Hábiles–Noches Hábiles, Museo del Hombre Dominicano, Museo de Arte Moderno, and the International Performance Showcase, Santo Domingo; Contemporary Art from the Dominican Republic, Museo X-Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City; among many others.
Some of her considerable number of essays include: "Pares & Nones: (In) Visible Equality," published in Small Axe; "Elia Alba. Los Quehaceres del Agua (Water´s Endeavours) / Mónica Ferreras. La Verticalidad del Círculo (The Verticality of the Circle) / Charo Oquet. Una Sirena en el Reino de este Mundo (A Mermaid in the Kingdom of this World)," published in Arte Contemporáneo Dominicano.
Lockward suffered from severe gastric bleeding caused by arteriovenous malformations in the small intestine and died on 2019/01/07 after surgery in Santo Domingo. Alanna Lockward's legacy will continue to live through her publications, the networks that she formed around the world, her bold and uncompromising ideas, and her tremendous influence on people of the most diverse backgrounds in the creative and scholarly fields. She will be greatly missed by many.
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/multimedio/lockward-eng/
https://allenreportdocumentary.wordpress.com/
http://www.alannalockward.com/
https://alannalockward.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/dias-habiles-working-days/
http://www.franklinfurnace.org/research/related/estevez.php
Transart Institute January 31, 2019
"PechaKucha Quartet: Art Experiments by Educators" at CAA NYC
Transart Institute February 6, 2019
Transart MFA Candidate Gabrielle Senza in exhibition - ESCAPE!


Want a Booker T. Club in your area? Click here to get started!
Welcome to the Booker T. Club - Online!
This club is currently under development.
The online Booker T. Club is a 'virtual club,' geared especialy for home schooling youths.
Club members meet online to network and form positive friendships online via video conferencing and events with several opportunities to learn to live and lead with high, upright character.
Stay tuned, or email us here, or call 802-878-3911 for more info now.


The last three days have been a particularly tiring stretch so I am definitely ready to start my weekend early. Like tonight.
Starting things with some sad news, Nunslaughter drummer Jim Konya has passed away. He was originally hospitalized following a stroke, but it looks like things took a negative turn while he was in the hospital. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.
Album sales. Not the busiest week for heavy metal, but a solid showing for Parkway Drive, among others.
Dave Mustaine is selling his 5 million dollar home in the San Diego area. Interesting… but I can't think of a single person I know that could afford it.
In case you missed it, Ghost had put a call out for female fans to dress as nuns to serve booze at their shows. Almost immediately, Lzzy Hale, singer from Halestorm, decided to get on board. Awesome.
CANTO: Updates from Metal Alliance, Gojira, Rivers of Nihil and More!
Coming at you late tonight because it was a long day and I'm exhausted.
Remember when Entombed A.D. was pulled off Metal Alliance yesterday? Well, now it has been confirmed that Metal Alliance Tour 2015 is officially no longer a thing.
We thought we were going to get new Gojira this year. But now it looks like it'll be early 2016. Not ideal, but at least it's still coming.
Rivers of Nihil gave us more positive news in the form of a new single and details regarding August 25th release, Monarchy.
Hey look, Between the Buried and Me and doing things. Here is a new song called "Famine Wolf". Come Ecliptic will be out July 10th.
I don't really care about this band. Or any of you.


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Nothing happens when I click the exclamation point….. what is wrong?
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text:
Triepeolus cameroni är en biart som först beskrevs av Meade-waldo 1913.  Triepeolus cameroni ingår i släktet Triepeolus och familjen långtungebin. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Externa länkar

Långtungebin
cameroni

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Easter and paganism. Part 1
Easter is regularly charged with being derivative from pagan traditions. How much truth there is in that? The short answer is: a little bit, in some respects, but definitely not enough to sustain the general claim. As far as non-Christian influences go, there's a much bigger impact from astronomy and 18th-19th century marketing practices than from any pagan religion.
You might assume that the 'Easter is pagan' claims come from New Atheists like Richard Dawkins. They're certainly happy with the idea. But really it's some brands of Christianity that are the most fervent proponents: the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, sure, but also a number of very small but very vocal fundamentalist groups (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4).
The thing that bothers the Easter-mythbusters isn't (usually) Christians' belief in the resurrection of their central deity. It's more about how the festival is celebrated: eggs, rabbits, and so on. Individually, some of these elements may possibly have been influenced by some form of pagan religion. I'm not here to declare that Easter is definitely non-pagan: just that we don't have evidence for pagan origins, and in many ways, no good reason even to suspect pagan origins. Imagining a link to pagan religion is easy. Finding evidence for that link is another matter.
Incidentally, I did a post on 'Easter and its supposed pagan origins' two years ago, but it was a bit jumbled, and fresh research for me. This is an updated and better-organised version. (Also long, so I'll split it over two posts.)
Kristin Chenoweth as Easter/Ostara (American Gods TV series, 2017)
Claim #1. The name 'Easter' comes from 'Eostre', therefore Easter is pagan
Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday's square grey hand. 'I'm telling you,' she said, 'I'm doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name.'
-- Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001), chapter 11
The English name for Easter is the only thing about the festival where there's direct evidence to support a pagan origin -- and only in two languages, English and German (Easter and Ostern respectively). Sure, those are important languages. But the festival didn't originate in England or Germany.
We have exactly one piece of testimony about Eostre. It is a tract on time reckoning by Bede, a Christian monk writing in Northumbria (northern England) ca. 730 CE. Bede discusses local month names and tells us:
...Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cuius nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.
...and 'Easter-month', which is now interpreted as the Paschal month, since it had the name from a goddess of theirs who was called Eostre, and they celebrated her festival in that (month); now they give the Paschal season a nickname after her name, referring to the joys of the new solemnity with a word customary for the old observance.
-- Bede, De temporum ratione §15
Some people genuinely seem to be under the impression that the Easter festival in the 2nd century Mediterranean was derived from Eostre worship 600 years later in northern England. The absurdity of that should be obvious. Still, just to be explicit:
Easter had existed for centuries prior to Bede, just not with that name. Easter was a part of the Christian calendar in Rome and Anatolia as early as pope Anicetus.
The name 'Easter' isn't just late, it's also a localised anomaly. The vast majority of languages use a name derived from the Hebrew Passover or Pesach via Greco-Latin Pascha: Romance Pâques, Pascua, Paşti; Germanic Pasen, påske, Peaske; Finnish pääsiäinen, Russian Paskha, Welsh Pasg, and so on. Most Slavic languages (except Russian) instead call it a variant of 'Great Day' or 'Great Night'.
Even if the above points weren't true, it's bonkers to imagine that ancient Christians in far-flung places like Constantinople, Syria, and Ethiopia based their most important festival on a very obscure Northumbrian goddess.
It's utter tosh. The modern English name 'Easter' comes from an Anglo-Saxon goddess. But nothing else does -- not the event it's supposed to celebrate, not the theology, not the eggs, not the rabbits. The name 'Easter' is late, localised, and anomalous. This claim of pagan origins would be obviously nonsensical to anyone who speaks any other language.
Side-note: 'Ostara'. Some especially keen mythbusters insist that even Bede's testimony for Eostre can't be trusted. (See Sermon 2008 for more discussion.) Personally I'm inclined to give Bede the benefit of the doubt: he's generally reasonably reliable in reporting what he knows. He may be wrong, but I think it'd be tendentious to assume he's dishonest. Still, it's true that if you take Bede by himself, the evidence for Eostre is weak. If we take him in conjunction with other factors, though, as Jacob Grimm did, the evidence is stronger. It still allows for some interpretations that Grimm didn't account for.
In 1835 Grimm argued that Eostre was an English form of a conjectural Germanic goddess which he called 'Ostara' (1835: 180-2; cf. English translation). The evidence for Ostara can be summed up as follows:
English 'Eostre'. That is, Bede's reference to Eostur-monath and his statement that it is named after a goddess.
German 'ostara'. The Christian Easter festival was called ostara in Old High German: a form of the name appears in the earliest extant German manuscript, the Abrogans (ca. 790 CE: St. Gallen Stiftsbibl. Cod. Sang. 911, f. 226, line 2), and the month of April was called ostarmanoth in Charlemagne's calendar (Vita Caroli Magni §29). (Forms derived from this also appear in Old Dutch, Old Saxon, and some mediaeval Slavonic languages.)
Comparative evidence. Linguistically, Eostre and ostara appear to be reflexes of Proto-Indo-European *h2eusṓs, 'east, sunrise'. This root furnished the names of dawn goddesses in several pantheons: Roman Aurora, Greek Eos, Lithuanian Aušra, and Vedic Ushas (see further West 2007: 217-227).
This isn't exactly compelling. The biggest weakness is that Old High German ostara consistently refers to the Christian festival, not to a pagan goddess. And -- you might want to grab hold of something for this bit -- it may be a British export. Sermon (2008: 341-2) points out that the christianisation of Germany was dominated by English missionaries like St Boniface, well before the earliest appearance of ostara in the Abrogans. It's entirely possible that they brought 'Easter-month' over the Channel with them. If so, point 2 disappears.
So 'Ostara' isn't a robust conjecture. But point 3, the comparative evidence, still stands as reasonably compelling corroboration -- not for Ostara, but for the Northumbrian Eostre. There's a decent likelihood that Bede was telling the truth and talking about an authentic pagan goddess.
Conclusion. Assuming Bede's story is true, we know (1) Eostre's name; (2) that she existed as a goddess in Northumbria sometime before the 8th century; (3) that she had a festival in spring; (4) and, on linguistic grounds, that she may have been a dawn goddess.
However, we know basically nothing else. We can't say how far Eostre-worship extended, how long it lasted, or anything else about her or her cult. (And we certainly don't have rabbits, eggs, or hot cross buns linked to her.)
Incidentally, we may as well take a moment to dispose of the idea that Easter has anything to do with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, as is often claimed by certain very vocal people (*cough* Richard Dawkins *cough*). To argue that you have to have a really reckless disregard for reality. Ishtar had her heyday in Mesopotamia in the 2000s and 1000s BCE, and her name is linguistically Semitic; the name 'Easter' first appears nearly two thousand years later in northern England, and is linguistically Indo-European.
There's dying-and-rising-gods, and then there's dying-and-rising gods. The Greek divinities Aphrodite and Adonis (Attic lekythos, ca. 410 BCE; Louvre)
Claim #2. Jesus is a dying-and-rising god, and that's pagan
I won't deal with this at length because I wrote a post on it back in February 2017, and it's a bit complicated. The upshot is this: resemblances between Jesus and other 'dying-and-rising gods' have been greatly exaggerated.
It isn't really the Easter-mythbusters that latch onto this claim: it's more interesting for 'Jesus mythicists' -- people who refuse to believe that cult-leaders were a real thing in antiquity, and who often operate under the assumption that we have copious official records of court-cases and executions from 1st-century Judaea (we don't) and the absence of such a record for Jesus is something suspicious (it isn't.) Still, let's spare a moment to summarise.
Most supposed 'DRGs' either move annually between the underworld and heaven (the Greek divinities Persephone and the Dioskouroi), or the whole point of them is that they die and stay dead (Egyptian Osiris, Greco-Phrygian Attis). A couple of gods don't fit into tidy pigeonholes (Greek Adonis, the Orphic version of Dionysus). Gods within each of these groups have much more similarity to each other than to other groups. Moreover, ancient believers were happy to equate some of these gods with each other, but definitely not all. We find ancient cults happily equating Osiris with Dionysus, or with a Syrian-Egyptian version of Adonis. But some other equations are later impositions on those cults. No pagan worshipper ever equated Adonis with the Babylonian Dumuzi/Tammuz, for example: that equation was made up by early Christian biblical interpreters. Equations between any of these gods and Jesus are a recent invention, imposed by 19th century thinkers.
In any case, in the very earliest days of the Jesus cult there ought to have been a time when Jesus' followers did not think of him as divine. (That's certainly the picture that the gospel of Mark tries to paint: Mark 2:6-7, 3:12, 3:21-22, 4:40-41, 6:2-3, etc.) If so, that would rule out looking at Christianity as a cult derived from dying-and-rising gods. It is reasonable to assume that it took a non-zero amount of time for Jesus' followers to stop thinking of him as a human and to start thinking of him as God. One possibility that's been suggested is that the transition occurred after his death: he may initially have been considered to be a mortal who underwent apotheosis -- 'god-ification' -- exalted to divine or near-divine status like Enoch, Moses, or Elijah, who were all bodily assumed into heaven according to various traditions. The biblical episode of the Transfiguration strongly implies that at one point Jesus was grouped with these figures: see the earliest version in Mark 9:2-8. (For an accessible statement of this view see Ehrman 2014, chapters 6 and 7.)
Still, even if everyone genuinely, historically, regarded Jesus as divine the instant they saw him, the best parallels for him -- as a divinity who dies once and rises once -- are stories like the Hittite story of Telipinu or the Sumerian story of Inanna's trip to the underworld. They're 1300 to 2000 years too early.
Anyway, like I said earlier, the Easter-mythbusters aren't usually interested in the resurrection itself, but more in the supposed paganism of Easter customs. So let's move back to those.
If calendars were easy to organise, and one solar year were the same as twelve lunar months ... well, we wouldn't have to have this discussion.
Claim #3. The date of Easter is linked to the equinox and moon phases, and that's pagan
'Since pre-historic times, people have celebrated the equinoxes and the solstices as sacred times,' University of Sydney Professor Carole Cusack said. ... 'There's a defined period between March 25 and April 25 on which Easter Sunday must fall, and that's determined by the movement of the planets and the Sun.'
-- Penny Travers, ABC Radio Canberra, 15 April 2017
The date of Easter is not fixed, but instead is governed by the phases of the moon – how pagan is that?
-- Heather McDougall, The Guardian, 3 April 2010
This claim is meant to conjure up visions of Neo-pagan druids gathering at stone circles on the solstice. Contrary to popular belief -- and maybe remarkably, for a claim that comes from a Religious Studies professor at a respectable university -- the idea that equinoxes or solstices have always had deep meaning in pagan religions is a huge exaggeration. Equinox and solstice festivals were not a dime a dozen in pagan antiquity.
In particular, the Romans (who we're especially concerned with here) had no equinox or solstice festivals at all. Until Easter came along, that is. Then, as now, it was astronomers that took the most interest in the motions of the sun and moon -- not priests.
The fact that Easter is linked to lunar and solar events simply reflects the state of the art for calendars of the time. All ancient calendars were lunar or lunisolar. The first truly solar calendars appeared only a few decades before Jesus' lifetime: the Julian calendar, instituted at Rome in 46 BCE, and the Alexandrian calendar in Egypt around 30 BCE. The Hebrew calendar, which determined the date of Passover and so influenced Easter as well, remained lunar until Hillel II led a switch to lunisolar in the 300s CE.
Easter was being celebrated by Christians in Rome by the mid-100s CE. In the 150s there was a dispute between the Roman Christians, led by pope Anicetus, and an Anatolian group called the Quartodecimans, led by Polycarp. The disagreement was over whether Christians should celebrate the crucifixion according to the Hebrew lunar calendar, at the Jewish Passover (on the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan: quartodecimani = '14th-ers'). The Roman Christians, who were predominantly gentiles, preferred to have Easter fall on the right day of the week. Anicetus and Polycarp didn't settle the matter, but they agreed to disagree.
So already in the 150s Christians were deeply interested in the relationship between liturgical observances and the calendar. Many of them were keen to adopt contemporary standards, not stick with ancient traditions. The algorithm we use today for setting the date of Easter is a compromise, putting Easter on a Sunday while preserving some of the lunisolar elements of the Hebrew calendar. It was set down by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, but it reflects a long period of head-scratching that goes all the way back to Anicetus.
(Incidentally, there's been more talk recently about simplifying the algorithm set down at Nicaea in 325. The question continues to be pressing because some Christian denominations still use the Julian calendar, which puts everything out of synch. Apparently the Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Anglican churches have come to a preliminary agreement that would simply put Easter on either the second or third Sunday in April. If it's finalised, this new arrangement could even be put into practice before 2030.)
Next time:
the Easter Rabbit (can be traced back to 17th century Germany),
hot cross buns (18th century England), and
Easter eggs (10th-13th century western Europe).
Ehrman, B. 2014. How Jesus became God. New York: HarperOne.
Grimm, J. 1835. Deutsche Mythologie, 1st ed. Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung.
Sermon, R. 2008. 'From Easter to Ostara: the reinvention of a pagan goddess?' Time and mind 1: 331-343.
West, M. L. 2007. Indo-European poetry and myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Posted by Peter Gainsford at 09:54
Labels: ancient religion, Christianity
Hans 23 March 2018 at 00:49:00 GMT+13
Would this be a good summary for the Eostre part:
1) Easter is a Christian holiday (duh)
2) It got it's English name from a pagan goddess, and perhaps the Anglo-Saxons had a festival in her honour that coincided with Easter
3) It's possible that the goddess and the putative festival were (West) Germanic, but it's also possible that the name was spread by English missionaries to the continent.
On 3): The form ostar- on the continent makes it IMO more likely that there was a West Germanic goddess (I'm not convinced that the continentals would have re-engineered such a form from Eostre), and so only the transfer of the name to the new Christian festival would be due to English influence on the continent, not the name of the goddess itself.
Peter Gainsford 25 March 2018 at 03:01:00 GMT+13
I'd say that's a very fair summary. On ostar-: personally I feel it's about fifty-fifty whether there's a proto-Germanic goddess associated with that name or not. I'm prepared to accept IE origins for Eostre, but the lack of direct evidence for Ostara gives me some doubt. Still, if that argument is at least debateable, I feel I've done my job here!
Spencer Alexander McDaniel 7 April 2020 at 00:43:00 GMT+12
For those who might have come here after having seen a certain meme shared by the so-called "Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason," I have written an article that goes into much greater depth debunking the specific claim that Easter was originally a holiday for Ishtar.
(Ancient Mesopotamian mythology happens to be a particular interest of mine and I always get really annoyed by people who think Easter originated as a festival of Ishtar.)
New Year's Day and the Roman calendar


text:
Hackensack United for Progress: Labrosse Team Admits Embarrassing Record of Failure
March 1, 2017, 5:08 pm | in
Labrosse Team Admits Embarrassing Record of Failure
Hackensack Mayor John Labrosse has kicked off his re- election campaign with a blistering attack on local residents who are not even candidates in Hackensack's upcoming May 9th City Council election.
"It is an unprecedented start of a campaign by an incumbent mayor," said Caseen Gaines, campaign manager for Hackensack United for Progress, a slate of community activists seeking the five seats which are up for grabs in this year's election. "His attempt to distract the voters is clearly an admission by Labrosse of his embarrassing record of failure and his total lack of achievements to highlight," Gaines continued, noting that Labrosse's press release contained 13 false statements.
The Labrosse Administration promised a rebirth for Hackensack through redevelopment, yet all they have to show for their botched efforts is a block-long hole in the ground in the middle of Main Street for the past year. They promised fiscal responsibility, yet ballooned our city's debt by 50 million dollars, an increase of 279%. They promised an end to employee lawsuits, yet have been repeatedly sued by city employees for their unlawful and retaliatory conduct, exposing taxpayers to millions of dollars in settlements.
Mayor Labrosse casually accuses everyone else of corruption, yet ignores his own action of giving back his employer, Hackensack University Medical Center, 47 million dollars of taxpayer money while negotiating a personal raise and promotion from them. He ignores Councilman Leo Battaglia's wife receiving an illegal raise while she was a city employee, resulting in an entire city department suing the city and each employee receiving a settlement of taxpayer money.
Hackensack United for Progress candidates Lara Rodriguez, Jason Some, Michael Williams, Carlos I. Merino and Rommy Buttafuoco have a long history of community service and are eager to restore honest and responsible government to Hackensack. They plan to increase ratables through responsible development and end the reckless borrowing which is destroying Hackensack's future. They plan to hire and promote employees based on merit and put an end to the cronyism and unlawful conduct of the Labrosse Administration.
Hackensack United for Progress is a broad-based coalition of residents, merchants and organizations united to end the chaos and corruption of the past four years and put Hackensack back on the path to success as a community.


Phase I involves non-invasive tests. Non-invasive tests do not require surgery to penetrate the skull, such as craniotomy. Not every patient requires every test available in the Phase I evaluation. Your child's doctor will decide which tests are necessary during the Phase I evaluation.
If your child has been diagnosed with seizures, he or she has already had at least one EEG. Your child's EEGs may have been an hour or so long and performed in an outpatient setting, meaning you didn't have to stay in the hospital to have the EEG.
The purpose of the video EEG in the epilepsy monitoring unit is to record your child's seizures on the EEG while capturing the seizures on video to help the medical team pinpoint the surgical focus. This test requires electrodes which attach to your child's scalp with a special type of glue. Your child will be admitted to the hospital for several days so that the team can get a complete picture of your child's seizures and brain activity day and night.
MRI is a test used to take a detailed image of the brain in order to identify any abnormal areas that could be causing the seizures. It is these abnormal areas which the surgeon might attempt to remove or disconnect if surgery is later recommended. Most centers have powerful MRI machines and special techniques that can find very subtle abnormalities. Your doctor will like order special types of MRI sequences, known as an epilepsy protocol, to capture the right images of your child's brain. Your child will likely need anesthesia or sedation for this test so that they do not move during imaging.
Sometimes abnormalities in a child's brain, such as cortical dysplasia, are very subtle to even the most expert radiologist interpreting the MRI image. It is important to know what kind of MRI machine is being used for your child's MRI.
An MRI is a strong magnet that uses radio waves to send signals to and from the person who is being scanned. These signals are turned into images by a computer attached to the MRI. The magnet strength is measured in a unit called "Teslas," often shortened to "Ts." The higher the "T," the more clear and detailed the image will be. Phase I MRIs are either 1.5T or 3T. 3T is considered best for an epilepsy surgery workup, but there are some circumstances where the 3T machine is not preferred. (Some facilities have 7T MRI, but these are typically used for research only.) It is important to discuss the choice of MRI machine with your doctor when the test is ordered.
MEG is a type of imaging test that locates brain activity and measures magnetic fields created in the brain. This scan is used to produce an image that identifies the source of seizures. Results from the MEG test are then matched up with an MRI. This process creates a map that shows normal and abnormal areas of the brain. A MEG scan may be requested by the neurosurgeon to identify the source of the seizures if other scans are inconclusive.
Some surgical facilities have the capability to determine functional mapping using a combination of transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI. This allows the team to determine where motor function is localized in the brain.
After the Phase I evaluation, your child's medical team will decide the next steps. Sometimes, it is very clear at this point if the child is a good candidate for surgery. Other times, there is uncertainty, and more testing is needed. This next step is called a Phase II evaluation. Phase II involves another video EEG, but this time, the electrodes are directly on the brain or through the brain matter. Because this requires surgery, it is important to discuss potential risks with the team before you proceed.
There are different ways to do Phase II monitoring. All require a craniotomy and electrode implantation on or into the brain. A craniotomy is the surgical removal of part of the bone from the skull to expose the brain. The section of bone, or bone flap, is temporarily removed, then replaced after the brain surgery has been completed.
A subdural electrode grid (often referred to by doctors and families as 'grids') is a thin sheet of material with many very small electrodes in it. The grid is placed directly on the surface of the brain, and a VEEG is performed in an epilepsy monitoring unit. The advantage of the subdural grid is that it can give you a more accurate picture of your child's brain activity because it is directly on the brain, rather than performing the EEG through layers of bone, skin, fat tissue, and muscle as you had in Phase I VEEG.
Depth electrodes are electrodes on small wires that are implanted in the brain and can pick up EEG activity from deep inside the brain.
Sometimes, it is appropriate to implant a combination of depth and subdural electrodes.
Cortical stimulation mapping, also known as functional mapping, is usually performed in patients who have been implanted with subdural electrodes. After seizures are recorded, electrical stimulation is briefly and painlessly sent through the electrodes separately to identify how the part of the brain underneath the electrode functions normally. The purpose of functional mapping is to determine if the area of surgical focus overlaps with areas of the brain that control important sensory, language, and motor functions. If necessary, surgery can be planned to minimize the damage to these functional areas.
Several Phase II tests require the use of sedation or general anesthesia. General anesthesia carries with it a very small risk of death.
Common side effects of craniotomy include some facial swelling. The eye adjacent to the craniotomy incision may swell shut for a few days. Children are often nauseous from the anesthesia and may not eat or drink fluids for a few days.
Research shows that pain can be moderate to severe in 90% of patients the first several days after the procedure. The incision site is usually managed with morphine or similar strong medications for a day or two and then with ibuprofen or acetaminophen. A craniotomy pain plan should be discussed with your child's team prior to Phase 2 monitoring.
Approximately 30% of patients develop chronic headaches.
Depending on the size of the craniotomy, a drain may be placed under the skin to evacuate any fluid build up from the incision site.


Question: Is climbing steps and dancing part of exercise for a pregnant woman?
Question: Please..is climbing steps and dancing part of exercise for a pregnant woman?
Answer: Not recommended until 5 months. If your following fitness, you can go ahead with simple pregnancy exercise such as squats and butterfly.
Answer: Hi. You can climb but it can be a bit risky. As your centre of gravity has shift it can make you fall easily. So either avoid it or have someone on your side to take care of you while you climbing.
Question: Steps climbing is good ?
Answer: Hello dear.. climbing stairs anytime early pregnancy or later pregnancy is safe as long as you consider,but during second or third trimester, because your centre of gravity may be off,it is harder to maintain your balance,when you have more weight in front of your body,it is advisable to avoid more stair climbing during this phase,but in unavoidable circumstances go slowly,and make use of handle to get a better grip for effective safety purpose..


Transparency: should citizens or government take the lead?
Development programmes, even the largest and most ambitious ones, are still implemented by individuals at the local level. Data can both enable these people to do their jobs and serve as a tool to help monitor them and hold them accountable – but only if the information is in a useable form. For a programme to be open in practice as well as in theory, it must not only produce data but also collate and package it for ready use by all stakeholders.
A collaboration between Harvard-based researchers and Indian policymakers has taken one of the world's largest development databases and truly opened it up, revealing details of its implementation to those overseeing it and to other audiences – researchers, beneficiaries, and the public at large. The project offers lessons for governments looking to move from being passively "open" to being actively transparent.
In a 2013 report, the ministry that administers the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MGNREGA, called it "perhaps the largest and most ambitious social security and public works programme in the world." That year, it benefitted as many as 50 million households at a cost of nearly 5 billion dollars (330 billion rupees).
For its impoverished beneficiaries, the interface to this massive programme is often a one-room office not much bigger than a garden shed. There, the day-to-day administrative duties for the village, or panchayat, are up to the gram rogar sayak (GRS), working for 3800 rupees a month (about 50 dollars) in a contracted position with no opportunity for advancement up through the ranks of the civil service.
Reddy Subrahmanyam, who in 2013 was Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) which administers MGNREGA, describes what that meant for the GRS working in a typical panchayat office where "broadband was only a namesake." He says that during the daytime, bandwidth was taken up with other office activities. "What our field personnel used to do was work through the night, because they had to enter the data. During the daytime they would sleep in the office. Then after midnight they'd get their bandwidth, do their work, then leave at 3AM every day."
Harendra Gurjar, a GRS in Madhya Pradesh, kept paper records during the week, then on weekends travelled to the nearest city and did his data entry at an internet cafe.
The result of the huge data collection effort is one of the largest development databases in the world: terabytes of data with more than 200,000 data points flowing in every day – which, when this case study begins in 2013, was all ostensibly accessible by the public via a website.
However, due to the structure of the site, little information was flowing back out. It was all there if you knew where to look, but almost no one did.
"We still hadn't surmounted the problem of addressing the needs of users of different kinds. There are users who are workers; there are users who are panchayat-level administrators; the users who are block, district, state, national administrators; there are academicians who need the data to come up with meaningful hypotheses and test them. And there are activists who want to make sure that the rights that have been given to them through this statute are actually available. All these are different constituencies, their information needs are separate, and we had nothing which would cater to this."
In 2013, Mathew, Subrahmanyam, and others at MoRD began a collaboration with researchers at Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) based at Harvard Kennedy School on what would become the MGNREGA Public Data Portal. In 2014, the project expanded under the auspices of the Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE) programme, funded by UK Aid. In a pilot project aiming to strengthen information systems for use by administrators, the team added dashboards for programme administrators and a micro-data access system, and trained developers at India's National Informatics Centre. The work continues today under separate funding, with interventions to measure and optimize administrators' use of MGNREGA data.
The end goal of this suite of activities is to create smart channels through which information can flow in and out of the database, making India's flagship development effort more efficient, transparent and effective.
MGNREGA became law in 2005 and was implemented starting in 2006, covering the entire nation in 2008. It functions somewhat like the USA's Works Progress Administration – which sought to relieve those impoverished by the Great Depression by employing them in infrastructure improvements – but with far greater reach, affecting the lives not of millions, but hundreds of millions. And while the Works Progress Administration was only a temporary measure, MGNREGA was intended to become part of India's permanent policy landscape: a right to labour granted to citizens.
In guaranteeing every rural household 100 days' annual employment at a minimum wage within 15 days of application, MGNREGA is admirably simple and egalitarian in concept. Anyone can apply for work, but the intended beneficiaries are unskilled rural citizens living in extreme poverty, and for them it serves as a lifeline.
"MGNREGA plays a big role in social protection for individuals whose link to the formal economy is tenuous," says Rohini Pande, Co-Director of EPoD and the BCURE-Harvard Team Lead on the project. "You need a system that is flexible, available in their village, and something that ideally they can turn to quite fast in times of need. The fact that the MGNREGA project is in your village, available near home, is particularly important for women who face mobility restrictions in much of India."
The programme shows a commitment to transparency, right down to a sign posted at every worksite displaying its budget and the going wage. But MGNREGA is also a locus of dispute on questions big and small, from whether it should exist at all, to whether some of its budget should be diverted toward skilling or unconditional cash transfers, down to the programme's acronym (MGNREGS vs. NREGA vs. MGNREGA) and how to pronounce it. Many would prefer the government spend the money elsewhere, and many landlords and leaders in business would prefer to keep rural wages low. Their arguments tend to cite the uselessness of MGNREGA projects (click the button on the right to read more).
Such attacks rarely present supporting evidence, but other criticisms are well founded. MGNREGA has been plagued by leakages and delays in payment, and a World Bank study based on survey data showed that the programme often failed to supply labour to those who requested it, especially in the poorest states. In total in 2009–10, 45 percent of rural households wanted work on the scheme and, of those, only 56 percent got it.
Attacks on MGNREGA in the press.
Despite such problems, the evidence generally supports the Ministry's claims that MGNREGA improves the lives of the rural poor. A major goal at the outset was to raise wages, and a 2013 study showed it did raise them by roughly 5.5 percent in districts where the programme was phased in earlier compared to where it arrived later. Observational studies reviewed in an article by Dilip Mookherjee of Boston University suggest that MGNREGA improves skillsets, decreases child labour and distress migration (moving away from drought or poverty rather than toward some advantage), and reduces poverty.
contradicted claims of pointless hole-digging, suggesting that projects were actually useful, well executed and good for the economy. All strong evidence that MGNREGA is worth the expense.
Since this is a demand-driven programme – meaning the rural poor have to ask for work in order for it to be effective – aspects that decrease that demand will distort its impact. If a poor villager decides not to request work from MGNREGA because she thinks there will be a long wait before she gets paid, it might look like she does not ask because she does not need it. If this happens often enough, policymakers will underestimate the need for the programme.
Given this aspect of MGNREGA and its problems with leakage and payment delays, in 2013 the programme was still at risk of succumbing to its critics. Better monitoring was needed to both help identify implementation gaps and to reliably demonstrate the program's worth.
In other contexts in rich and poor countries, transparency had proved an effective means – not only to improve programmes and prove their worth, but to provide administrators at different levels with a window onto their own programme. But was MGNREGA's commitment to openness having the desired effect, or was it just opening the programme to attack?
Prof. Pande describes her team's initial conversations with MoRD officials. "They were very open to recognizing the fact that, as any programme evolves, you will need to refine and tweak it. If you want to do current evaluations of MGNREGA and get information that you can feed back immediately to improve, how would you do that? In the context of that discussion it became clear that you first need the information to be available, before you can think of using it in a feedback loop."
To understand this, let's return to that panchayat-level administrator, the gram rozgar sevak working into the wee hours inputting data on MGNREGA implementation. These data points flowed into vast datasets. The website providing access to them sprawled over thousands of pages and offered little guidance to the user. As is common across many government data portals around the world, the data tables available on the site had a deeply nested structure that made it difficult to construct datasets across multiple regions – the kind needed for even the most basic analyses – without resorting to time- and skill-intensive data scraping.
"As any programme evolves, you will need to refine and tweak it."
So in 2013, if a district-level manager were to approach the site for information to check on how MGNREGA was working in a certain block or village, she would probably not find the information. And if a GRS sought information on his own performance, he would almost certainly come away empty-handed – particularly if he were not highly educated, as was often the case. Meanwhile the servers were overtaxed and slow. As Santhosh Mathew puts it, the site "was impossible to use for anybody who did not know the website, whose life's only work was not to look at that data."
Building with the user in mind.
The proving ground in what would eventually become a successful collaboration between the Ministry of Rural Development and EPoD was to create the MGNREGA Public Data Portal, an interface designed to serve as a one-stop shop for over 50 indicators deemed crucial for evaluating MGNREGA.
Eric Dodge, Data Analytics Lead at EPoD, began working alongside National Informatics Centre (NIC) technicians within MoRD, often two to a computer because of stretched resources. Their collaboration was tentative at first, characterized by exploration and trial and error. But the similarities of their positions – NIC technicians were embedded within various government ministries including MoRD, much like Dodge was as a researcher – began to inspire a sense of camaraderie. After three weeks navigating political obstacles and several late nights solving technical problems, the group was able to pass basic pieces of data back and forth between the front and back end of the application. They knew that the partnership and the portal could be successful.
Meanwhile, Charity Troyer Moore, Director of EPoD India, managed the relationships with senior officials at MoRD. "Especially when we were starting, I made sure I was in there every few days, putting a face to the project and also listening to hear what issues they were talking about in the office. They know so much more than we do about the programme. They know what the challenges are. So spending as much time with them as possible was a very good thing as we tried to understand how to support them better."
As the project progressed, the EPoD team came to recognize the factors that had caused one of the biggest development datasets to be effectively buried. Predictably, some related to capacity (overstrained servers, few computers), and were hence unavoidable. But others mirrored the website architecture: obstacles that could be overcome with some vision and organizational change. EPoD researchers came up with a list of takeaways that they later disseminated in blog posts and opinion pieces.
With support from DFID India, the MGNREGA Public Data Portal went live in March 2014. For the first time, anyone who wanted to know how MGNREGA was working could log onto a website and, with a few clicks, ask the questions of the data to which they needed answers. Later that year support from BCURE, funded by UK Aid, allowed the team to conduct a pilot project to extend the software to more directly enable users to access and utilize the data. It would make the Portal more suited to the needs of lower-level administrators through a companion set of interactive data visualizations, the Report Dashboards.
These dashboards, in turn, would expand the capacity of these administrators to perform their jobs informed by detailed, accurate data – the administration of which would be delivered into Ministry hands. "One of the key things we wanted was, not to build a system outside the existing government system, but to have something fully integrated that can be maintained by the individuals there," Pande says. "So it was critical that we were able bring technical advice into the ministry: that's what the BCURE funding allowed us to do."
In August 2014, the EPoD team launched these new features to an audience of a few MoRD officials in a room and, via videoconference, state-level administrators from each of about twenty states. They gave a walkthrough of how to create reports, and received polite applause.
Given that modest christening (and the fact that bureaucrats are often set in their ways) the researchers wondered if the Portal would see much use. But in the year following the launch, the Reports Dashboard alone received 150,000 views by over 100,000 users. Meanwhile, NIC technicians, convinced of the project's worth, maintained and updated the Portal, making it more robust and versatile.
It appears that the collaboration has produced a useful product in terms of its features. Subrahmanyam describes how the Portal can benefit the gram rozgar sevak.
"He can track his own performance on a timescale and also his relative performance vis-à-vis other geographical units – other villages – across a number of parameters: provision of work, number of days of employment provided, delays in payment, quantum of work done, type of work done. All of these things can be monitored with the dashboard. He can always see how the unit above him is doing and how the unit below him is doing – other villages, other blocks, the district average and the national average. And the people above him can watch his performance."
But are the administrators at the panchayat, block, and district level using their new tools? All those website hits mean little if the policy actors are not using the information to improve MGNREGA.
"Data needs a narrative, and PDF documents and spreadsheets don't yet tell a good enough story."
"From the data points we're trying to identify workers who have depended on this wage employment for a long period, and try and see whether we can upgrade them from an unskilled category to a skilled category. Once they become a skilled worker, then they don't need to depend on the government."
When asked why he and his team put so much effort into making MGNREGA's data open and accessible, Santhosh Mathew seems surprised by the question. "It's a requirement of the Act!" he says.
Indeed, the legislation behind MGNREGA calls for transparency, and such stipulations are a typical feature in India's policy landscape. But how much impact do they have? India's most conspicuous transparency guarantee, the Right to Information Act (RTI), is easily the most-used freedom of information law in the world with 4.5 to 5 million information requests filed every year. And it is strong, at least on paper: a 2013 ranking of the quality of freedom of information legislation across countries (based on scope, procedures, promotional measures, etc.) placed India in second place, worldwide. However, another index that considers a number of real-world indicators, the Open Data Barometer, puts India halfway down the list at number 39 of 83 countries ranked. Here, India's position is dragged down by the low impact the RTI and other open data initiatives have had in political, economic, and social terms.
The low social impact of India's RTI. Credit: Open Data Barometer.
It may be that across the Indian government, ministries are fulfilling the letter of the law, but not in a way that can create change. This is a challenge even for countries at the top of the Open Data Barometer ranking. The UK, for instance, made raw data on city council spending available online, but the site attracted a mere 200 hits per month. As Ben Worthy of Birkbeck College said in a piece reporting the disappointing numbers, "Data needs a narrative, and PDF documents and spreadsheets don't yet tell a good enough story."
The good news is that online portals can make data tell its stories automatically. And they are possible in countries with limited resources. The MGNREGA project required catalysts – EPoD researchers and funding from the BCURE programme – but as the technology becomes cheaper and better, more governments will be able to actively publish administrative data in a useable format.
Governments are opening their data. Now comes the hard part.
The three layers of buy-in needed for active transparency.


text:
Learning how to better understand the human brain
École universitaire de recherche Marseille NeuroSchool
Marseille hosts the second French community of neuroscientists and neurologists (the Neuropolis federation), the first French community of neuro-biotechs and the third university hospital in Europe. Covering the entire scope of neuroscience, Marseille neuroscience community has received many marks of recognition: 2 labels of excellence for graduate training (A*Midex funding for AMU MSc and PhD programmes), 2 University Hospital Federations (on neurodegenerative diseases and epilepsy), 1 Equipex (Neuro-Imaging), and 13 European (ERC) grants.
In 2018, AMU neuroscience community was awarded a grant of 10 millions euros, over 10 years, for managing a graduate school (NeuroSchool) in neuroscience. Together, the neuroscience BSc, MSc and PhD, in collaboration with Neuropolis, the University Hospital Centre, two Convergence Institutes (CenTuri, ILCB), three private companies, and Ecole des Mines engineering school will:
amplify the initiated educational innovations (problem-based learning, role-playing games, online courses) and introduce new ones (FabLabs, reverse classes, digital tools);
develop training for and by researchby incorporating training further within laboratories, by deepening disciplinary and multidisciplinary courses;
improve the attractiveness of our training by funding foreign PhD students, coordinating with our international partners to award mobility fellowships, financing co-supervised PhDs, establishing double degrees, and creating summer schools and conferences;
stimulate the diversity of the backgrounds of future neuroscientists, for example by forming medical students to the scientific method, while helping neuroscience students to continue in medicine or in clinical research;
improve professional integration by setting up a customised career monitoring and training towards either academic, clinical or industrial research, or scientific communication.
For more detailed information, please consult our presentation leaflet !


Between 1993 and 2017, the American Kantorei, the performing group of Bach at the Sem, presented more than 100 concerts of the music of premier Lutheran composer Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as music of Schütz, Buxtehude, Mendelssohn and other Lutheran composers.
The beloved Bach at the Sem program served proclamation of the church's rich heritage of sacred and classical music.
Performances took place in the Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. The choral concerts featured major works, cantatas and motets.
The American Kantorei has its origins in the former Concordia Cantata Chorus associated with Concordia Seminary in Clayton, Mo. Following its beginning in 1955 with a performance of Johannes Brahms' "Deutsches Requiem," the Concordia Cantata Chorus soon developed into a well-known ensemble dedicated to the music of Bach, Handel, Buxtehude, Schein, Schütz, Praetorius, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Hillert, Wienhorst, Willan, Britten, Vaughan Williams and others.
The three-volume Bible Commentary compiled by 17th-century Lutheran theologian, Abraham Calov, and once in the library of J. S. Bach, has been in the Concordia Seminary library collection since it was gifted by the Reichle family of Frankenmuth, Mich., in the 1930s.
The annual concert series celebrates and proclaims our faith through the gift of music, featuring Seminary choirs and musicians, as well as visiting chorale groups of the highest acclaim.
Laudamus is the premier choir at Concordia Seminary, performing an eclectic mix of the finest choral literature from a variety of musical genres.
Our chapel bands complement our instrumental and choral ensembles in musical expressions of our faith.


Introducing Linha Wild knives, a truly organic form of expression. The Wild collection by ORK (Organic Knives) are objects of beauty. Designed by Gontijo Daniel, each knife has a unique and truly artistic form that compares to nothing else in the knife market. We admire Daniel's passion for creating blades that are not only functional, but are also a piece of art. The blades are crafted using carbon steel 5160 and wood ranging from Pau Ferro to Muiracatiara, to name a few. All materials used, like the wood, are sourced from pruning and wood collected from fallen trees. The resin is further derived from organic castor, another environmentally sound consideration that we appreciate. Daniel inherited his passion for knives from his father, and "like father like son", Gontijo has created a sharp looking set of knifes utilizing traditional methods, all while challenging traditional Brazilian paradigms. Get em here.