Thursday, December 25, 2008

foster 4.fos.999 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Neglected and abused infants shuttled from one foster-care setting to another have every reason to feel anxious and threatened in the presence of caregivers. However, if placed with a nurturing foster mother as late as age 1 1/2, children with such backgrounds usually develop a secure relationship with her in a matter of months, a new study suggests.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

Surprisingly, 1-1/2-year-olds responded as well and as quickly to a nurturing foster mother as did much younger infants, who had experienced less neglect and fewer disrupted foster placements, say psychologist Mary Dozier of the University of Delaware in Newark and her coworkers.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

"Even though late-placed foster infants initially push their caregivers away, they're capable of forming secure attachments [with a nurturing foster parent]," Dozier's group concludes in the September/October Child Development.

In related research, children adopted by age 2 fare better emotionally and academically than those adopted at later ages, regardless of any deprivations suffered before the adoption (SN: 8/13/94, p. 104). Scientists have yet to track the long-term emotional development of infants placed with foster parents at various ages.

Dozier and her colleagues studied 50 infants�32 black, 14 white, and 4 Hispanic�and their foster mothers. Infants had been placed with these caregivers between birth and 20 months of age. They began receiving foster care after their biological parents had neglected, abandoned, or abused them. Twenty-two of the children had one to five previous foster placements.

Foster mothers ranged in age from 26 to 69, and each cared for one to five foster kids during the study. Half the foster mothers lived with a husband or partner.

A little more than 3 months after placement, the researchers observed each infant's style of relating to the foster mother during a series of brief separations and reunions. In separate studies of children and their biological mothers, secure infants look to a friendly experimenter for solace when the mother leaves but are more readily calmed by the mother upon her return.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US

Insecure infants either shun or angrily resist their mother when upset. Other children, who fit neither category, look dazed, freeze, or otherwise appear to be disorganized in the face of distress.

Of 26 secure foster infants in the new study, 23 had foster mothers who, in interviews with the researchers, placed great value in warm, trusting family relationships. In contrast, of 24 insecure or disorganized infants, 13 had foster mothers who expressed significant conflicts or confusion about their family relationships and their roles as foster mothers.

Infants' responses showed no link with their foster mothers' age, race, marital status, or number of foster siblings.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

Monday, December 22, 2008

stake 8.sta.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy.

Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.

His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.

Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”

In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.

In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.

Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.

Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com

Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

wind 44.win.9993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . In centuries past throughout the world, windmills dotted bucolic landscapes, where millers ground cereal grains into flour. Later, farms and ranches harnessed the power of the wind to pump water. Although most farms and mills now run on electricity, wind power's appeal is reemerging. Several major food companies are investing in wind farms to cover all or part of their substantial electricity needs.
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

On Jan. 25, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the top 25 institutions committed to making significant investments this year in ecologically responsible, "green" power systems—especially wind farms.

The Air Force topped EPA's new list, with a commitment to buy more than 1 million megawatt-hours (mWh) of renewably generated power—electricity equal to 11 percent of its projected use. Food companies came in second, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth place, a remarkable showing for one industry. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com


Electricity moves about the U.S. power grid like water through a network of streams. Power created in one place may be consumed locally or more than 1,000 miles away, depending on how electrons get shunted through the system. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com




Some farmers have installed turbines on their land to serve not only their own needs but to produce a crop of electrons to sell into a regional electrical grid (SN: 7/21/01, p. 45). Companies and institutions on EPA's new list, by contrast, are investing in a host of green-power systems including biomass energy and solar power. However, because wind-generated electricity is among the more affordable of alternative electricity-generating options, the majority of investments by institutions on EPA's new top-25 list—including those of all the food-related companies—went to wind power.

Green-power investors buy some share of the output of renewable-energy facilities, such as wind farms, and receive credit that can be exchanged for a comparable amount of power from a local utility.

The grocery chain Whole Foods Market, number two on EPA's green list, has committed to buying more green energy this year than even EPA itself buys for its many offices and operations. Both Whole Foods and Starbucks—number six on the green list—have purchased more green energy than the U.S. Energy Department has for its own operations.

The other food companies on EPA's greenest-25 list are Safeway and WhiteWave.http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com



Institutions on the list that don't make food their major business: Johnson & Johnson, the World Bank Group, the U.S. General Services Administration, HSBC North America, the city of San Diego, New Jersey Consolidated Energy Savings Program, Advanced Micro Devices, Staples, the Austin (Tex.) Independent School District, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Tower Companies, FedEx Kinko's, the Army's Fort Carson, the University of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County in Maryland, a consortium of Dallas-area hotels, Western Washington University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Science News Online contacted the food companies on EPA's new list to find out what prompted them to go green.

Whole Foods (Green-Power Ranking: 2)

This 25-year-old Austin, Texas–based grocery chain—renowned for promoting natural and organic foods—has 180 stores, all but 10 of them in the United States. "We felt that as we were becoming a larger company, we needed to really give back to our community and the environment," explains Margaret Wittenberg, the firm's vice president for communications and quality standards.

Last Dec. 9, the company purchased wind-power credits to offset all of its projected North American power needs for 2006—some 458,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. It was the largest wind-energy purchase in U.S. history, the company announced last month, "and makes Whole Foods Market the only Fortune 500 company purchasing wind energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use." Previously, 20 percent of the company's stores were purchasing some type of renewable energy.
access
This new recycled-paper cup is another way Starbucks is reducing its environmental footprint.Starbucks Coffee Co.

"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," says Kurt Johnson, who directs EPA's Green Power Partnership program, which compiled the new list. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."

Whole Foods purchased its credits from the wind-power broker Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder, Colo. The total should match the electricity demand by its stores, bakeries, and operations facilities this year. "This wasn't just a 1-year trial," Wittenberg says, but something the company plans to invest in over the long term.

Wittenberg won't give financial figures but acknowledges that her company's wind credits cost more than conventional electricity. Typically, wind power costs about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than conventionally generated electricity. "But for us it's cost-neutral," says Wittenberg, since the company will finance the extra from savings elsewhere in its budget.

Green power is part of an overall trend for the company in reducing its environmental footprint. For instance, some of its stores use solar panels to generate electricity on-site. Some Whole Foods trucks run on biodiesel—a conventional-fuel substitute made from food or crop wastes (SN: 12/5/98, p. 364). Several stores—including the company's flagship grocery in Austin—even compost food wastes and sell the product to gardeners.

Starbucks (Green-Power Ranking: 6)

"Agricultural-based companies have reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of climate change on very sensitive ecosystems," says Ben Packard of Starbucks Coffee Co. That's why his firm bumped up its purchase of green power from the equivalent of 5 percent of the firm's electricity consumption by North American company-owned stores last year to 20 percent this year.

EPA equates Starbucks' green-power total to eliminating 237 million pounds of carbon dioxide that would be spewed if conventional fossil-fueled plants were used to meet the company's electricity needs.

This green-power initiative is consistent with Starbuck's longstanding goal to become a corporate leader in social and environmental responsibility, Packard says. He points to the company's policy of:

* Paying premium prices for its coffee to help farmers in developing countries make a fair income.

* Operating a center in Costa Rica that provides local farmers the technical training and aid needed to produce high-quality coffees while preserving the environment.

* Purchasing substantial amounts of coffee from shade-grown plants, which conventionally don't yield as much as full-sun coffee plants but are more likely to attract natural pollinators, which increase yields without the use of environmentally damaging fertilizers and pesticides (see The Buzz over Coffee).

* And creating and supporting a Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) project that favors farmers and coffee suppliers that demonstrate they're sustaining the environment and trading coffee fairly.

Those are behind-the-scenes changes that customers don't see. This month, however, the company will start handing customers paper cups that are better for the environment than the stores' cups are now.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com

Worldwide this year, Starbucks expects to dispense some 1.9 billion paper cups. Those in North America will incorporate 10 percent post-consumer recycled paper fiber. This might not sound like much, says Packard, but no other company has gotten Food and Drug Administration support to use recycled-paper packaging in direct contact with food or drink.

"We anticipate that the switch . . . is going to lower our use of new tree fiber by a little over 5 million pounds," Packard says, which will eliminate the logging of some 60,000 trees. On Jan. 24, the National Recycling Coalition presented Starbucks with its "Recycling Works Award." The prize recognized the company for a range of activities, but especially its 8-year effort to bring a recycled paper cup to the marketplace.

Safeway (Green-Power Ranking: 8)

Last September, Safeway Inc. became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in California, its home state. This national supermarket chain purchased wind credits for 78,000 mWh—enough electricity to power all 270 of the company's gas stations, 15 of its grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area, and its two corporate campuses.

Although the green-power commitment was for this year only, "in the future we do hope to expand our purchases . . . powering more of our operations with wind or another form of renewable energy," says spokesperson Teena Massingill.

She says that the green-power purchase is part of a trend—"to be as environmentally friendly as possible"—that the company has been phasing in during stores' construction and renovation. For instance, many of the company's facilities are cutting back on electric lighting and making greater use of natural light through skylights. More subdued illumination "makes for a friendlier shopping environment" while cutting the company's electric bills, Massingill says.

Safeway announced that its wind energy "will come solely from newly constructed wind-turbine generators."

WhiteWave (Green-Power Ranking: 14)

WhiteWave—the company that makes Silk, a soy-based milk alternative—started investing in wind power in 2003. Last year, the Broomfield, Colo.–based company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Foods in Dallas, which markets the Horizon brand of organic dairy products.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com

This year, WhiteWave is offsetting 100 percent of its projected electricity use in manufacturing Silk and Horizon products—almost 50,000 mWh—with wind credits. Such green-power investments are expected to "continue inching up," notes the company's Ellen Feeney.

Green power is "in keeping with our culture [of] a real nuts-and-bolts organic lifestyle." Wind investments are just one feature of WhiteWave's environmental program. Indeed, Feeney notes, the company's new headquarters is pushing recycling to the limit—even to the point of composting food scraps from kitchens used by employees.

This "ecosensitivity," Feeney says, is not only what the employees want, but also what studies have shown appeal to the company's core customers, made up primarily of baby boomers.

Other greens

Most of the companies on EPA's new top-25 list are investing in wind-generated electricity. However, it's hardly their only green option. The agency invites public and private institutions to consider solar and geothermal energy, small hydropower systems, and biofuels such as wood, straw, manure, and methane.

In an effort to wean the United States from its addiction to fossil fuels, EPA offers a "green power locator" map, where homeowners and corporate managers can find companies marketing renewable energy credits in their area, if not nationally (http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/locator/md.htm). For instance, Maine Power Options (http://www.mainepoweroptions.org/GreenPower.htm) offers buyers credits for a 50:50 mix of biomass- and hydropower-generated electricity, and it markets these credits to power users as far away as California and Washington State. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire