Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Cerebrum definition What does the cerebrum do
Cerebrum, or forebrain, is the largest part of the brain, composing about 70 percent of that organ.
Cerebrum is situated beneath the roof of the skull and consists of two hemispheres that are separated lengthwise by a layered division. The outer layer of each hemisphere is the cerebral cortex, the section of the brain sometimes referred to as “gray matter.”
Within the cerebral hemisphere is white matter consisting of three kinds of fibers that connect the hemispheres, convey impulses to and from the cortex and the spinal cord, and connect different areas of the cortex with each other.
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Cerebrum is situated beneath the roof of the skull and consists of two hemispheres that are separated lengthwise by a layered division. The outer layer of each hemisphere is the cerebral cortex, the section of the brain sometimes referred to as “gray matter.”
Within the cerebral hemisphere is white matter consisting of three kinds of fibers that connect the hemispheres, convey impulses to and from the cortex and the spinal cord, and connect different areas of the cortex with each other.
What does the cerebrum do?
The cerebrum performs a variety of tasks, including controlling the sensory and voluntary motor functions, as well as such higher processes as thought and memory.
Money And Credit Class X Standard Full Explanation
We will start with an extremely simple question : Why is money necessary? Perhaps you know the answer. For buying goods. For fulfilling the requirements in life. You are right. That is exactly the answer.But we can go a little deeper and answer like this instead - Money acts as an intermediate in the exchange process of goods or commodities and this is the exact reason why it is termed as a medium of exchange.
More specifically,this is a proper definition of money - Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context.
More specifically,this is a proper definition of money - Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context.
Euro (Coins and Paper Notes,the modern form of money)
Now,let us ask an even more interesting question,what if we did not have money? If we would have needed wheat,then we could go to the wheat seller and ask him for wheat and at the same time pay him with a bunch of bananas or apples.Now,my question is how long would it take you to find out a wheat seller who was ready to give you wheat in exchange of bananas or apples?Time consuming task,isnt it?What if you needed shoes and there is no shoe-seller to sell you shoes in exchange of fruits?Would you leave the country to buy shoes?It is very easy to come to a conclusion from such hypothetical or paradoxical contexts.We need something that would satisfy both the buyer and seller without the existence of double coincidence of wants.
Double coincidence of wants refers to exactly what happened in the above two examples of exchange of fruits with the wheat seller and shoe seller.
Modern Forms Of Money
There are seven basic types or forms of money including : Representative,Fiat,Coinage,Electrical/Digital,Commodity,Paper and Commercial.
However,in the Class X Standard,variants of money have not been explained.There are only two variants of currency denoted : coins and paper notes. (Note : Do not confuse between Money and Currency as absolute synonyms.Currency is used as the synonym in certain circumstances but currency actually refers to money circulated in the form of physical objects.)
Now.the big question is the modern form of money is totally worthless on its own.All printed up and down with unimpressive fonts,it wont even come of use to a five year olds artistic approach.Frustrating.Then what could be the reason of these objects being accepted as money?This is because this is authorised by the government of the country.In India,The Reserve Bank of India issues currency notes on behalf of the central government.As per Indian Law,no other individual or organisation is allowed to issue currency.Moreover,the law legalises the use of rupee as a medium of payment that cannot be refused in settling transactions in India.No individual in India can legally refuse a payment made in Rupees.Hence the rupee is widely accepted as a medium of exchange.
Coins from the times of Queen Victoria
As for why it is paper notes and brass and ferritic stainless steel made coins instead of gold,silver and copper?Actually,the shift to paper money in Europe increased the amount of international trade that could occur. Banks and the ruling classes started buying currencies from other nations and created the first currency market. The stability of a particular monarchy or government affected the value of the countrys currency and the ability for that country to trade on an increasingly international market. In simple words,this helps in gaining autonomy towards earning profits in the international markets.
A blank cheque from State Bank of India
The other form in which people hold money are as deposits in banks.The banks always maintain the interest rates to be higher on what they charge on those who take loans to the interest rate they offer on the money deposited by the depositors.This is the main income source of the bank.The bank also keeps a little percentage of money is kept as liquid money (15% in case of India).Sine these deposits can be withdrawn on demand,these deposits are called demand deposits.
Cheques are an interesting facility offered by demand deposits and they instruct the bank to pay a specific amount from a particular persons account to another persons account,to whose name the cheque has been issued. Cheques allow settling of payments without the use of cash.Since cheques also consist of all the essential features of money,they constitute money in the modern economy.
CREDIT
What is Credit?
Credit (loan) refers to an agreement in which the lender supplies the borrower with money,goods or services in return for the promise of future payments.
TWO CASES TO SHOW HOW CREDIT CAN AFFECT PEOPLES LIVES
Case I
First of all,we will look at the case of Swapna,a farmer. Swapna is a small farmer who grows groundnut on her three acres of land.She takes a loan from the moneylender to meet the expenses of cultivation,hoping that her harvest would help repay the loan.Midway through the season,the crop is hit by pests and the crop fails.Despite spraying her crops with expensive pesticides,Swapna is unable to earn enough profit,which in turn does not allow her to pay the borrowed amount to the moneylender.Next year,she takes a fresh loan and this year the harvest is good but not enough to earn enough profit as to repay the current years and last years loan together. Swapna has to sell a part of her land to repay the moneylender the loan she took from him.
Credit in this case pushes the borrower into a situation from which recovery is very painful.
Note : Have you noticed one thing here?The loan a poor farmer in a village takes comes from a moneylender,i.e the informal sector.The moneylender must be charging very high rates of interest which instigates the situation to turn into a debt trap.
Case II
It is a festival season two months from now and the shoe manufacturer,Salim,has received an order from a large trader in town for 3,000 pairs of shoes to be delivered in a month time.To complete production on time,Salim has to be delivered in a month time,Salim has to hire a few more workers for stitching and pasting work and purchase the raw materials.To meet his expenses,Salim obtains loans from two sources.First,he asks the leather supplier to supply leather now and promises to pay him later.Second,he obtains loan in cash from the large trader as advance payment for 1000 pairs of shoes with a promise to deliver the whole order by the end of the month.At the end of the month,Salim is able to deliver the order,make a good profit and repay the money that he had borrowed.
Here,credit plays a vital and important role in improving the economic condition of Salim.
TERMS OF CREDIT
Interest rate,collateral and documentation requirement and the mode of repayment together comprise what is known as the terms of credit.
Collateral
Collateral refers to an asset that the borrower owns such as land,building,vehicle,livestocks,deposits with banks and uses this as a guarantee to a lender until the loan is repaid.
That is,if the borrower is unable to repay the loan,the lender has the right to sell the asset or collateral to obtain payment.
Formal Sector And Informal Sector Credit In India
As of 2003,30% of loan is taken from Moneylenders,27% from Cooperative societies,25% from Commercial Banks,7% from Relatives and Friends,7% from Others,3% from Traders and 1% from Landlords. The debt trap that is caused from taking loans from moneylenders and landlords forces many farmers to lead miserable lives and often results in suicidal cases in India.We will try to look into this matter in one of our next ventures on Economics.
The formal sector of credit consists of loans from banks and cooperatives.The informal lenders include moneylenders,traders,employers,relatives and friends etc.
The Reserve Bank of India supervises the functioning of formal sources of loans.For instance,we have seen that the banks in India keep a comparatively low percentage of cash money/liquid money (the % in Indian banks is 15%.)The RBI actually monitors if this is maintained or not.Similarly,the RBI checks so that the bank does not only give loans to profit-making businesses and traders but also to small cultivators,small scale industries,to small borrowers etc.Periodically,banks have to submit information to the RBI on how much they are lending,to whom,at what interest rate etc.
Camenae Camenæ Roman Mythology
The Camenæ were prophetic nymphs held in high veneration by the ancient Italians. They were four in number, the best known of whom are Carmenta and Egeria.
Carmenta was celebrated as being the mother of Evander, who led an Arcadian colony into Italy, and founded a town on the river Tiber, which became afterwards incorporated with the city of Rome. Evander is said to have been the first who introduced Greek art and civilization into Italy, and also the worship of Greek divinities.
A temple was erected to Carmenta on the Capitoline Hill, and a festival, called the Carmentalia, was celebrated in her honour on the 11th of January.
Egeria is said to have initiated Numa Pompilius in the forms of religious worship, which he introduced among his people. She was regarded as the giver of life, and was therefore invoked by women before the birth of their children.
The Camenæ are frequently identified by Roman writers with the Muses.
Text:
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
Author: E.M. Berens
Published: 1880
The Project Gutenberg E-Book
Produced by Alicia Williams, Keith Edkins and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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Carmenta was celebrated as being the mother of Evander, who led an Arcadian colony into Italy, and founded a town on the river Tiber, which became afterwards incorporated with the city of Rome. Evander is said to have been the first who introduced Greek art and civilization into Italy, and also the worship of Greek divinities.
A temple was erected to Carmenta on the Capitoline Hill, and a festival, called the Carmentalia, was celebrated in her honour on the 11th of January.
Egeria is said to have initiated Numa Pompilius in the forms of religious worship, which he introduced among his people. She was regarded as the giver of life, and was therefore invoked by women before the birth of their children.
The Camenæ are frequently identified by Roman writers with the Muses.
Text:
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
Author: E.M. Berens
Published: 1880
The Project Gutenberg E-Book
Produced by Alicia Williams, Keith Edkins and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Give Me Strength
This cross section of the stem of a soybean seedling shows the early stages in a developmental process that will produce a stem capable of supporting the mature plant. I stained the section with two fluorescent dyes - calcofluor, which binds to cellulose cell walls and fluorescences blue in ultraviolet light and auramine O, which binds to lignin and fluorescences yellow. Its the lignin laid down in cell walls that gives the stem the strength it will need to support the leaves and flower.
Working from the bottom left-hand corner towards top right, the core of the stem is filled with blue, thin-walled pith cells, which are simply packing tissue. Some of these have become slightly lignified and are fluorescing yellow and some, that are arranged in vertical rows of between two and five cells have distinctly thicker walls - these are xylem vessels, which are dead cells that form tubes that conduct water up the plant from the roots.
Above those lies a broad band of blue-fluorescing thin-walled cells that are very small and arranged like piles of bricks. This is the cambium - the plants stem cells that divide continuously to produce new xylem on the inside and new phloem elements on their outer surface. The small, bright blue-fluorescing cells on the outside of the cambium are the phloem sieve tubes and associated companion cells, which conduct sugars produced by photosynthesis in the leaves to other parts of the plant.
The sinuous layer of yellow-fluorescing cells above the phloem are becoming lignified and these will contribute major structural rigidity to the stem as it grows, forming a continuous cylinder inside the stem. Outside of these lies the stem cortex, with blue cells becoming smaller in the layers just below the epidermis - and then the outer epidermis of the stem is covered in the yellow-fluorescing cuticle, which restricts water loss and defends that plant against pathogens.
At the stage when this section was taken the stem was about 3mm. in diameter and about 10 centimetres tall.
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Clementine and the Spring Trip
Shes looking forward to the school trip to Plimoth Plantation, but her third grade class is going with the big kids, fourth graders whove enacted tough rules about eating: no sounds allowed...or else. Clementine is also having problems speaking Olive, a language invented by the new girl in class, whose name is--you guessed it--Olive. (If you want to give it a try, put "olive" into every syllable you say. "Likoliv tholivis.")
When the day of the big trip arrives, Clementine is paired with Olive and instructed with the task of making the new girl feel comfortable. When Olive opens her lunch bag and reveals a meal destined to incur the wrath of the fourth graders (celery, chips, apples, carrots, etc.), Clementine has to decide whether to play by the rules or not. On the trip she also befriends a chicken, which leads her to make a major change in her diet.
And thats not all! Clementine is also waiting for the birth of her new sibling and trying to decide if it would be better if the baby was a boy or a girl, while building a five-side table with her father as a surprise for her mother. Then theres Margaret OCD problems to deal with (really, I think its time for an intervention here!) and the mystery of the overpowering odors on Bus Seven to solve.
Pennypacker packs a lot of plot into one chapter book, but she weaves each thread so expertly that the overall effect is seamless. Like Beverly Cleary, Pennypacker is doing an excellent job of showing her characters maturing. Frazees illustrations, as always, are delightful.
Clementine and the Spring Trip
by Sara Pennypacker
illustrations by Marla Frazee
Hyperion Books, 160 pages
Published: 2013
The One and Only Stuey Lewis
Four linked stories tell the story of Stueys year in second grade in which he masters reading, devises an ingenious "Halloween Caper" to haul in extra candy, tries out for "bitty league soccer," and discovers that being nice to a fellow classmate, the annoying Lilly, isnt the end of the world.
Stueys relationships are realistically portrayed. Although his father moved out, the two talk frequently on the phone. His older brother, Anthony, might call his younger brother "Stu-pid"all the time, but hes there to give encouragement at the big soccer game. And Ms. Curtis, the second grade teacher who prefers to be called Ginger, is firmly in Stueys corner as he navigates the demands of second grade.
Jane Schoenbergs first chapter book is a humorous take on the trials and tribulations of second grade and will appeal to young readers graduating to chapter books. The delightful black-and-white illustrations by Cambria Evans compliment the text, emphasizing its humor. A sequel, Stuey Lewis Against All Odds, is due out in spring of 2012.
The One and Only Stuey Lewis
by Jane Schoenberg
illustrations by Cambria Evans
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 128 pages
Published: July 2011
China Powering Up First Offshore Wind Farm
The nations offshore wind power will equal all existing onshore wind farms by 2020
China is already the worlds largest market for wind power, but its not stopping with the onshore sites.
A 102-megawatt wind farm is slated to hit full power this month in the Yangtze River delta near Shanghai, Technology Review reports. And thats just the beginning, as Chinese officials opened bids on creating three or four more offshore wind power projects that could generate 1,000 megawatts total.
Energy experts predict that China will have invested $100 billion to install 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2020. Such projects would help supply energy to 40 percent of Chinas population that lives along the eastern seaboard.
The situation is not unlike that of the U.S. eastern seaboard, Technology Review notes. Eastern states hope to generate their own offshore wind power rather than rely upon a supergrid that can deliver wind power from the western states.
But Chinas first offshore wind farm has already begun powering up under the auspices of Chinese turbine producer Sinovel. By contrast, a U.S. company called Cape Wind has been waiting on a federal permit to build a wind farm off Nantucket since getting its state and local permits in 2008. Still, Chinese manufacturers have sometimes struggled with quality assurance, despite helping to supply wind turbines to the U.S. and other nations.
Chinas wind power boom also faces engineering challenges ahead. The new wind farms on the tidal flats require special engineering to deal with the muddy seafloors and shifting sandbars. Deep water projects may also face threats from typhoons.
Theres been other offshore action elsewhere in the world. Nine European nations vowed to create a supergrid for sharing offshore wind power at the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009. And we have the goods on General Electrics next-gen wind turbine that may capture 25 percent more wind power than
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China Offshore Wind Power Lets kick the turbines and, um, collect some wind power Sinovel
A 102-megawatt wind farm is slated to hit full power this month in the Yangtze River delta near Shanghai, Technology Review reports. And thats just the beginning, as Chinese officials opened bids on creating three or four more offshore wind power projects that could generate 1,000 megawatts total.
Energy experts predict that China will have invested $100 billion to install 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2020. Such projects would help supply energy to 40 percent of Chinas population that lives along the eastern seaboard.
The situation is not unlike that of the U.S. eastern seaboard, Technology Review notes. Eastern states hope to generate their own offshore wind power rather than rely upon a supergrid that can deliver wind power from the western states.
But Chinas first offshore wind farm has already begun powering up under the auspices of Chinese turbine producer Sinovel. By contrast, a U.S. company called Cape Wind has been waiting on a federal permit to build a wind farm off Nantucket since getting its state and local permits in 2008. Still, Chinese manufacturers have sometimes struggled with quality assurance, despite helping to supply wind turbines to the U.S. and other nations.
Chinas wind power boom also faces engineering challenges ahead. The new wind farms on the tidal flats require special engineering to deal with the muddy seafloors and shifting sandbars. Deep water projects may also face threats from typhoons.
Theres been other offshore action elsewhere in the world. Nine European nations vowed to create a supergrid for sharing offshore wind power at the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009. And we have the goods on General Electrics next-gen wind turbine that may capture 25 percent more wind power than
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