Unfortunately, there is no cure for ataxic cerebral palsy. The disease can however be treated. There are people who think that ataxic cerebral palsy was caused because of a doctors error. In this case, it is definitely advisable to seek the counsel of an expert cerebral palsy lawyer. The lawyer must perform an investigation to gather all the information surrounding the ataxic cerebral palsy incident to first see if a strong case exists.

Ataxic cerebral palsy tends to become progressively worse as the patient ages. An experimental treatment called chronic cerebella stimulation places electrodes on the surface of the cerebellum. It is thought that stimulation of cerebella nerves through these electrodes may improve balance and muscle tone. However, results have been mixed so far. Again, if you are confused or have questions about causes and treatments of this disease, seek legal advice.

1. Choose a Spanish course that offers interactive learning, where you actually participate and use your voice to repeat words and phrases out loud. This is important because it will help to reinforce the learning in your brain, and help you learn Spanish faster.

2. Choose a course that has Spanish learning games included. If you are doing something fun such as playing a game, you are much more likely to learn Spanish faster and easier because you are having fun. Anything is easier to learn when you’re having fun doing it!

3. Make sure the course has enough material and is complete. There are many courses that fall short in this area. You want to make sure there are enough exercises and lessons in the course to enable you to learn Spanish thoroughly enough to carry on conversations. Ideally, you want to find a course that offers beginner through advanced Spanish.

4. Look for a course that helps you learn Spanish with audio lessons, to help your ear get used to the sound of the language and help you pick up the accent faster.

5. Find a course developed by a native speaker. The chances are better that the course will include more “street lingo” of the language, which is much better for you. While it is ok to learn proper grammatical Spanish, you also want to learn Spanish that native speakers actually speak. After all, that is why you are learning Spanish in the first place, to be able to converse with native Spanish speaking people.

6. Compare prices for the type of content offered. Many times you can find Spanish courses that offer about the same information, but the prices fluctuate greatly. Many Spanish courses that cost several hundred or even thousands of dollars sometimes just aren’t worth it. You can find a good Spanish course for less than $300. If it costs any more than that, don’t bother. Just because you spend more money doesn’t mean you will necessarily learn Spanish any better or faster. Concentrate on the quality of the course first, and then consider price.

Copyright 2006, ReviewsOnTheWeb.com.

The Baltimore schools held a series of community meetings, where they released a list of possible options they were considering. The options included schools to close, some to renovate, and where to build new ones. The options also were listed at their web site, where parents and community voted on which options they thought were best.

All options would close several Baltimore schools middle schools with consistently low test scores and high rates of violence. Some of these targeted schools are on the states persistently dangerous schools list, while others are being watched closely for inclusion to the list. The troubled Thurgood Marshall High School, site of a shooting in the 2004-2005 school year, also is included in all options. A new building will replace the current middle school, located at the same site, and be a K-8 school.

The Baltimore schools are dealing with deteriorating buildings, declining enrollment, and state demands that they operate the school system more efficiently. The Baltimore schools chief executive officer Bonnie S. Copeland stated that community committees, which used public input gathered earlier last fall, developed the options.

Copeland believed that much of the community shared her vision to expand the K-8 schools, which have been outperforming the traditional middle schools. Many parents, as well as community activist groups, were outraged and vehemently opposed several proposed options and school closings.

Many do not wish to see K-8 schools, unhappy with older children who set bad examples being mixed in with younger children. They believe the low test scores of several middle schools is more complex than just integrating the students with the elementary schools. Additionally, some high-performing schools could be closed, due to building conditions and capacity.

Many parents and activists believe it would be cheaper to renovate existing schools, rather than build new ones. David Lever, executive director of Marylands Public School Construction Program, backs this belief.

In March 2006, the Baltimore schools reacted to public pressure and released a substantially revised plan, stating that they took to heart the publics concerns. The changes did little to appease the opponents of the plan, leaving the Baltimore schools caught between the state demanding a school closings plan and the parents and community activists.

After 85 public meetings on the topic and more than 10,000 participants, the Baltimore schools board voted at the end of March to close 16 Baltimore schools over the next two years. They also approved a 10-year, $2.7 billion plan to build 27 new Baltimore schools, moving thousands of children from middle schools to pre kindergarten through eighth grade.

One of the best things about home schooling is you can come up with an educational plan that suits your child’s particular needs. By working one on one with a child, you can create an individual learning system that can be more beneficial then the learning techniques used in a public or private school. When coming up with an individual education plan for your child, make sure you place focus on reading.

Much of the philosophy of homeschooling is about not being subject to the limitations of the public school system, and an area where the public school system commonly falters is in reading. Many public school students perform poorly on standardized reading tests, which is unfortunate as reading skills are crucial to a child’s education.

Reading can’t really be emphasized too much when homeschooling your child. While there should be a good balance of subject areas taught throughout the teaching day, reading should be encouraged during your child’s free time. While it may be difficult to get a child into doing math or science work in his or her free time, reading is a different story.

As soon as your child can read, he or she should always be reading something. As long as you find the subject matter appropriate, allow your child to read whatever he wants in his free time. Develop the habit at a young age of getting your child to always have a book on the go. By finding books that your child enjoys, your child will, from a young age, associate reading with a fun experience, which will do wonders for his further education.

You must also understand how important it is to set your own example. Try and set time aside during the day in which you read, and in the evening hours, when most children would be watching television, sit down with your child and read together. When it gets close to the child’s bedtime, imply that you will be going to be soon as well – because you have a good book to read.

Reading is a fantastic educational opportunity because it is the basis for which your child will learn many other things. When a child is reading a book they are not only bettering their reading skills, they are becoming privy to knowledge contained within the book. It is important that reading begins at a young age because mastering it is a slow process, and you will be doing your child a serious disservice later in life if you choose not to focus on reading early.

Every education should be well rounded of course, but reading is a building block from which other education follows. When homeschooling your child, encourage him or her to read from a young age. If you so do you stand a good chance of instilling a lifelong habit that will benefit your child until the end of his days.

Bio Pyramid

All of the organisms in the world follow orders of classification. Whether you choose to put them into groups of plants and animals, herbivores and carnivores, or any other of the many different types of classification systems, organisms can be put into many groups in order to understand their relationship to one another. One way to classify organisms is to put them into their order, or hierarchy, in the food chain. In this way, we can see how animals and other organisms relate to each other based on what they consume.

There are several different ways to look at the food chain, and one important and useful tool in this area is the bio pyramid. A bio pyramid is a graphical chart that shows the comparative mass of the consumers to the producers in the food chain. This can be helpful in determining how energy is transferred to the top levels of the pyramid from the bottom levels.

Each level in a bio pyramid is composed of a trophic level. Trophic levels are groupings of different consumer groups, such as primary producers (usually just plants or other photosynthetic organisms) rising all the way up to carnivores (such as humans). While a typical biological pyramid might group these consumers in order of energy produced, a bio pyramid shows them in order of total mass from highest to lowest. This often means that the primary consumers, such as the plants, are at the bottom because they are more numerous and take up more mass. The levels are built upon then by how many upper level organisms could survive based on the level below. An example can be seen in this sea bio pyramid:

It would take 1,000,000 kg of phytoplankton (1st level), to feed 100,000 kg of zooplankton (2nd level), to feed 10,000 kg of shrimp (3rd level), to finally feed 1,000 kg of large fish. The final level, the 5th, would only be able to have 100 kg of shark supported by the levels below.

In this way, a bio pyramid shows the inefficiency of the food chain, and lets researchers know that if a level was able to be skipped (such as a shark dipping down and eating shrimp instead of fish), more energy would be conserved and the food chain would lose less energy along the way. Given this fact, a bio pyramid is an important tool when looking at the laws of conservation of energy among different classes of organisms.

In order to acquire an education in the United States, there are several necessary documents one must have.

One needs to acquire a student visa and a certificate of eligibility and to fill up several other forms aside from the applications one is to send out to prospective academic institutions.

Ok – try not to get overwhelmed.

Lets take this one step at a time.

First a foremost, before one can be issued a student visa, there are several requirements one must obtain, forms one must fill up and submit.

(*taken from UnitedStatesVisas.gov)

1. A certificate of eligibility which you must get from your sponsoring educational institution in the U.S. If you are a regular student (an F visa) youll get Form I-20. If you are part of an approved exchange program (a J visa) youll get Form DS-1920.

* Further clarification will be made regarding student visas in an upcoming post.

2. Application Form DS-156

3. Form DS-158

4. Current, valid passport or travel document

5. Photograph. Requirements are strict for photograph size, type and quality. Please check with your nearest consulate for specifications before you get your picture taken.

6. Application fees. All applicants must pay the application fee. Some applicants, according to nationality and type of visa, must also pay an issuance fee.

7. Evidence of funds to cover expenses in the United States

8. Evidence of compelling social and economic ties abroad

For men between 16 and 45 years of age, a supplemental visa application Form DS-157 is also required.

Applications for student visas are sent through the US Embassy or Consulate in your country of origin.

An important thing to remember about applying for a student visa is to apply early – that is, one is allowed to apply 90 days in advance of the date of enrollment stated in ones certificate of eligibility.

Still hungry?

Savor these starters, while I brew up the next post.

Good Reason #1: Convenience

Theres no doubt that getting an online IT degree is more convenient than getting your degree the traditional way. It used to be that going back to school required you to rearrange your schedule, risking or perhaps even leaving your job so that you would be able to attend classes. And as if that werent enough, you also had to sacrifice valuable time normally spent with your family and loved ones.

An online format changes all of that. Instead of planning your life around your degree, plan your degree around your life: Log in, check messages, and do coursework all at your convenience. If you want to “go” to class in the middle of the night in your pajamas, no one will be the wiser for it. If you want to take advantage of the time you save not having to commute, you can even take an extra class or two and finish your degree a little faster.

Good Reason #2: Job Security

These days, you have your choice of online degrees you can pursue. Information technology personnel are in demand. The more businesses turn to computerized systems to run everything from inventory lists to complicated company networks, the clearer it becomes that information technology is the way of the future.

Businesses in particular need IT personnel in three specific areas: computer systems, programming, and networking. Most businesses have computer systems that need to be set up and maintained. In addition, some businesses, particularly large companies, program their own systems in-house. And with any moderate or large sized business, there is a network that allows everyones computers to network, which will also need to be set up and maintained.

No matter what happens to other industries, these jobs are not going to go away, because they handle the things businesses are founded on. An online IT degree will ensure you job security, by making you eligible to work in one of the most necessary industries in todays business world.

Good Reason #3: Earning Power

The addition of a degree very often means a salary increase, but IT jobs are especially lucrative. The salaries of IT personnel entering the workforce typically start at about $45,000 per year. In addition, you have the option to add management training to your online IT degree, which will make you eligible for management positions starting at $80,000 or more per year.

Good Reason #4: Room for Advancement

An online IT degree puts you into a career where you will have plenty of room for advancement. IT manager positions start out paying between $80,000 and $112,000 per year; increasing exponentially the higher you go. The business worlds dependence on information technology has created a large IT workforce, which requires many high-level managers to keep the system running smoothly.

Good Reason #5: Availability of Perks

As with any job that has a lot of room for advancement, the higher up you go the more perks you get to enjoy. Many IT managers enjoy things like paid travel, expense accounts, bonuses, and benefits such as stock options. Having an online IT degree under your belt widens your possible career options dramatically, perhaps even making you eligible for careers and perks such as these.

If you want to beef up your resume with a degree or are looking for a career change, an online IT degree might be just the thing for you. With the convenience of getting an online degree, combined with the benefits of working in the IT industry, the decision to get your online IT degree is the first and best step toward a successful life and career.

Artificial Intelligence had its ups and downs in the last 50 years. Early success solving small problems in simulation ignited a flurry of predictions about super intelligent machines taking over the world before the coming of the 21st century. Hampered by a lack of a good understanding of how commonsense reasoning works in people and a lack of computational resources, computers being very slow up until the mid nineties, AI research stalled in the 80s. Many people rushed to dismiss it as nothing more than hot air.

However, science is all about proposing and testing new theories in order to find the best ones. Since the mid-90s, AI research has advanced by leaps and bounds. We now have a better understanding of how the human brain works and that has helped us to find and test better computational models for AI. These in turn have also helped us to better understand the functions of the human brain. New techniques such as statistical analysis are helping intelligent agents to copy with large amounts of information and noisy sensors. Faster computers with vast amounts of storage are allowing us to experiment in more challenging domains and solve larger problems.

It is true that AI has not yet been able to produce a machine capable of commonsense reasoning. However, by specialization, many AI systems are actually running our world today. AI helps us fly airplanes and drive our cars. It aids doctors perform surgery. It helps us find information in the vastness of the World Wide Web. It helps us discover spam email and promptly delete it. It helps us schedule traffic lights and public transportation. It helps us analyze financial markets and make predictions about the outcome of sports events. It aids in surveillance of public spaces improving security and safety. These are only a small sample of the penetration of intelligent systems in our daily lives. Artificial Intelligence is here to stay and I bet it won’t be long before we have the understanding, methods and resources to finally construct thinking and learning machines. Let us wish and hope that such technology would only be used to benefit mankind and not destroy it.

You can find lots of information about AI’ and its50th birthday on the Internet. However, I think that best reading about this topic is the 1955 proposal for the AI workshop. You can read it here.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) describes 12 ideal “prototypes” of personality disorders. It provides lists of seven to nine personality traits per each disorder. These are called “diagnostic criteria”. Whenever five of these criteria are met, a qualified mental health diagnostician can safely diagnose the existence of a personality disorder.

But important caveats apply.

No two people are alike. Even subjects suffering from the same personality disorder can be worlds apart as far as their backgrounds, actual conduct, inner world, character, social interactions, and temperament go.

Diagnosing the existence of a personality trait (applying the diagnostic criteria) is an art, not a science. Evaluating someone’s conduct, appraising the patient’s cognitive and emotional landscape, and attributing motivation to him or her, is a matter of judgment. There is no calibrated scientific instrument that can provide us with an objective reading of whether one lacks empathy, is unscrupulous, is sexualizing situations and people, or is clinging and needy.

Regrettably, the process is inevitably tainted by value judgments as well. Mental health practitioners are only human (well, OK, some of them are…:o)). They hail from specific social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. They do their best to neutralize their personal bias and prejudices but their efforts often fail. Many critics charge that certain personality disorders are “culture-bound”. They reflect our contemporary sensitivities and values rather than invariable psychological entities and constructs.

Thus, someone with the Antisocial Personality Disorder is supposed to disrespect social rules and regard himself as a free agent. He lacks conscience and is often a criminal. This means that non-conformists, dissenters, and dissidents can be pathologized and labeled “antisocial”. Indeed, authoritarian regimes often incarcerate their opponents in mental asylums based on such dubious “diagnoses”. Moreover, crime is a career choice. Granted, it is a harmful and unpalatable one. But since when is one’s choice of vocation a mental health problem?

If you believe in telepathy and UFOs and have bizarre rituals, mannerisms, and speech patterns, you may be diagnosed with the Schizotypal Personality Disorder. If you shun others and are a loner, you may be a Schizoid. And the list goes on.

To avoid these pitfalls, the DSM came up with a multi-axial model of personality evaluation.

Byron departed from England leaving a trail of scandal over his marital conduct and since then saw himself as an exiled expatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell in disgrace by marrying an in-keepers daughter; he always struggled to reconcile his origin with his political ideas: Shelley could find no way of resolving his own contradictory opinions (Cronin, 2000).

This icon of the fallen aristocrat is rooted on another character revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel. As Mario Praz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choice among romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of a hideous Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur of an angel fallen in disgrace. Many of the byronic heros share with Miltons Satan this fallen-from-grace condition, such as Lara: “There was in him a vital scorn of all:/
As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,/ stood a stranger in this breathing world,/An erring spirit from another hurld” ( Lara XVIII 315-16)

There is another social factor that is behind the formation of the romantic myth of the vampire. In the early nineteen century, the foundations of what would later become a mass society were laid; the expansion of the press and of the reading public produced an increased diffusion for literary works and fostered movements such as the gothic and the sensation novel. Byron himself experienced the event of being turned into a proto-bestseller. The unification of literary taste and preferences that was a correlate to this social changes could not be more alien to the romantic notion of individual gusto and original sensibility. In order to combat this unifying forces, romantic poets revered the individual who stands outside society and is free from common concerns. Many of Byrons heros look down on the masses from above, even though they walk among them and do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature; they achieve to remain untainted by the masses in a sort of exile within the world akin to that of a ghost or a dammed spirit. This self-definition of Manfred is revelatory:

From my youth upwards
My spirit walkd not with the souls of men,
Nor lookd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh, (Manfred II, ii, 50-58)

Not only Byrons works contrived to produce the modern image of the vampire in relation to the Male Seducer archetype, but also some odd events in his life and the life of those surrounding him exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundled with an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001) attributes to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John William Polidori the fixation of the classical images of the literary vampire as a villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but, above all, perverse and fascinating for women. Mario Praz, in the same line, also states that Byron was largely responsible for the vogue of vampirism. Polidori was the unfortunate doctor and personal assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25. The idea for the tale published in 1819 came from the famous meetings at Villa Diodati on June 1816 between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what was probably the most influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the history of modern literature. In order to pass the stormy and ether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghost story. Mary Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during these nights the idea of what later became Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the tale The Vampire that he would publish three years later. The story appeared in the New Monthly Magazine falsely attributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking advantages of the aura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the popular view to promote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe hailed the story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The tale was, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as the vampire Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocent girls. Polidori had introduced in the story fragments from an autobiographical and revengeful novel called Glenarvon written by Caroline Lamb, an ex-lover of Byron. The Lords reaction was a threat to the editor and the denouncing of a commercial imposture with his name. Eventually Stokers Dracula (1897) blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition derived from Polidoris Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungarian tales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus the modern images of the vampire.

The vampire is closely linked to another romantic archetype: the dissatisfied lover. Rafael Argullol summarizes its traits: el enamorado romntico reconoce en la consumacin amorosa el punto de inflexin a partir del cual la pasin muestra su faz desposedora y exterminadora.. The romantic lover begins to feel a sense of dissatisfaction, caducity and mortality at the very moment when his passion is fulfilled. This feeling prompts him to embark in a sentimental rollercoaster where each peak of satisfaction is followed by a valley of despair and the impulse to seek satisfaction in a new object of love in order to renew the faded passion (the extreme of this attitude is the character of Don Juan). The vampire goes one step further than the seducer: for him the loved one stands as an image of his own dissatisfaction and it must be destroyed at the very moment when the longing for her disappears; at the instant of consummation. Again Byron in Manfred expresses this transference, which Argullol opportunely labels as romantic self-mirroring: I loved her, and destroy’d her! (211). Keats conveys in his Ode on Melancholy the feeling of mortality that is hidden in the moment of pleasure for the romantic: Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:/ Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine. La belle dame sans merci is according to Argullol also a poem where vida y muerte se vivifican y complementan mutuamente [...] se hallan en total simbiosis. But there is a crucial difference between Byron and Keats in their approach to the fatal lover: Byrons characters are fatal males, epitomized in the vampire, while Keats characters are femmes fatales. This difference underlines a different attitude to gender issues: Byron liked to emanate a dominant masculinity which is imprinted in all his leading characters. Keats, however, had a passive approach to love, his poetic personas like to be seduced even if that means, as we have seen, to be killed. Byron is the male aristocrat who thinks all women are naturally his, they are his possessions and, as such, disposable at will. Keats, who disliked Byrons Don Juan – in a letter to his brother, he referred to it as Lord Byron’s last flash poem, announces a more modern and non-patriarchal approach to love where the woman is free to be the seducer. Nevertheless, as we have seen, they both share the extreme notion of love as creation and destruction at the same time; and their characters, though of different gender, are vampire lovers. This different attitude is not only personal but it mirrors a wider and epochal distinction. Mario Praz has observed how the fatal and cruel lovers of the first half of the nineteenth century are chiefly males, while in the second half of the century the roles are gradually inverted until late century decadentism is dominated by femmes fatales. This literary process mirrors the advancement of social changes throughout the century, and the slow but continuous emancipation of love from patriarchal standards. Gender issues shift focus, but power and domination remain at the core of the portrayals of love even in the fully bourgeoisie society of the late nineteenth century. Goodland (2000) has explored the role of women as a redundant class subject to another classes and the gender/class dialectic found in the vampire.

Not only Byron and Keats were fascinated by the myth of the vampire, but we can find its presence in most romantic poets, even in the proto-romantic early Goethe. A list of authors who use such characters made by Twitchell (1981) comprises: Southey in Thalaba the destroyer, Coleridge in Christabel and Wordsworth in The Leech Gatherer.

As we have seen throughout this paper the figure of the vampire is shaped in the romantic period under the form of an ideological knot where many social forces converge: the French Revolution, an embryonic mass society, the decline of aristocracy and the gradual shifting apart of gender divisions from the patriarchal model. Therefore, it constitutes a myth that may be read as a battleground for the play of discourses of its era, shedding light on other romantic attitudes towards existence. As such it is subject to an analysis that, as new historicisms maintain, is aware of the historicity of a text and the textuality of history.

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