text:
CALDWELL COUNTY is a county located in the U.S. state of Kentucky. As of the 2010 census, the population was 12,984.[1] Its county seat is Princeton.[2] The county was formed in 1809 from Livingston County, Kentucky and named for John Caldwell, who participated in the George Rogers Clark Indian Campaign of 1786 and was the second lieutenant governor of Kentucky. Caldwell was a prohibition or dry county until 2013, when the citizens voted to lift the ban.

History

[Historical marker in Princeton]

Caldwell County was formed from Livingston County in 1809. Prior to that, Caldwell County had been part of Christian, Logan, and Lincoln Counties — Lincoln County having been one of the three original counties of Kentucky.

In the early nineteenth-century, Caldwell County witnessed the passage of the forced migration of the Cherokee to the West on the Trail of Tears during Indian removal. The Cherokee camped for several weeks in Caldwell County during the winter of 1838, mainly at Big Springs, now in downtown Princeton; at Skin Frame Creek, and in the Centerville area near Fredonia.

In 1860, the construction of Princeton College began, but it was delayed by the Civil War. Confederate troops camped on the grounds of Princeton College in 1861, using one of its buildings as a hospital. Following the Confederate retreat in early 1862, however, Union soldiers occupied Princeton for the remainder of the war. In December 1864, raiding Kentucky Confederate cavalry commanded by General Hylan B. Lyon burned the Caldwell County courthouse in Princeton, since it was being used to house the Union garrison.

The expansion of railroads in the late nineteenth century made Princeton an important junction on several major railway lines, most notably the Illinois Central and the Louisville & Nashville.

By the turn of the century, an agricultural boom in Dark Fired Tobacco had made Caldwell County, along with Christian County, a major tobacco-growing area. It was part of what was called the “Black Patch”, which used a special process to cure the tobacco. It included about 30 counties in western Kentucky and Tennessee. But the monopolization of the tobacco market by James B. Duke, who formed the American Tobacco Company, forced prices lower, leaving many farmers in debt and discontented.

In response, planters formed the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee (PPA), to work together in pooling their commodity in order to gain higher prices. They initially used persuasion to urge other farmers to join them.

Under the leadership of Dr. David Amoss of Cobb in Caldwell County, a vigilante force called the Night Riders was formed to strengthen the persuasion. The Night Riders terrorized those who cooperated with the tobacco company by destroying crops, burning warehouses, and attacking individuals. The Night Riders took over Princeton one night in December 1906, burning all of the Duke tobacco warehouses. They raided other towns, conducting similar raids and destroying resources. The “Black Patch Wars” came to an end around 1908, finally suppressed with the aid of the Kentucky state militia.

Since 1925, Caldwell County has housed the University of Kentucky Research and Education Center, a campus of the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture. The “UKREC” in Princeton is a leader in horticultural and biological sciences.

In the mid-twentieth century, Caldwell County began to shift from agriculture to industrialization. Caldwell County is still largely agricultural, but it is also home to factories such as Bremner, the largest private cookie and cracker factory in North America.

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which is land and (1.0%) is water.[3]

Adjacent counties

-   Crittenden County (northwest)
-   Webster County (northeast)
-   Hopkins County (northeast)
-   Christian County (southeast)
-   Trigg County (south)
-   Lyon County (southwest)

Demographics

As of the census[4] of 2000, there were 13,060 people, 5,431 households, and 3,801 families residing in the county. The population density was . There were 6,126 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the county was 93.89% White, 4.81% Black or African American, 0.15% Native American, 0.16% Asian, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.39% from other races, and 0.60% from two or more races. 0.61% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There were 5,431 households, out of which 28.50% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 57.10% were married couples living together, 9.80% had a female householder with no husband present, and 30.00% were non-families. 27.50% of all households were made up of individuals, and 14.00% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.36 and the average family size was 2.85.

In the county, the population was spread out, with 22.40% under the age of 18, 7.00% from 18 to 24, 26.30% from 25 to 44, 26.30% from 45 to 64, and 18.00% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 41 years. For every 100 females there were 92.60 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 89.90 males.

The median income for a household in the county was $28,686, and the median income for a family was $35,258. Males had a median income of $31,475 versus $20,390 for females. The per capita income for the county was $16,264. About 12.20% of families and 15.90% of the population were below the poverty line, including 20.40% of those under age 18 and 15.60% of those age 65 or over.

Communities

Cities

-   Fredonia
-   Princeton (county seat)

Unincorporated communities

-   Bakers
-   Baldwin Ford
-   Black Hawk
-   The Bluff
-   Cedar Bluff
-   Claxton
-   Cobb
-   Cresswell
-   Crider
-   Crowtown
-   Enon
-   Farmersville
-   Flat Rock
-   Friendship
-   Fryer
-   Harper Ford
-   Hopson
-   Lake Shore
-   Lewistown
-   McGowan
-   Midway
-   Needmore
-   Otter Pond
-   Pumpkin Center
-   Quinn
-   Rufus
-   Shady Grove
-   Smith Ford
-   Tom Gray Ford
-   White Sulphur

Politics

  Year                               Republican                                  Democratic                                  Third parties
  ---------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ---------------
  style=“text-align:center;” |2016   style=“text-align:center;” |75.4% _4,507_   style=“text-align:center;” |21.1% _1,260_   3.5% _208_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2012   style=“text-align:center;” |66.6% _3,904_   style=“text-align:center;” |31.6% _1,852_   1.8% _104_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2008   style=“text-align:center;” |62.4% _3,866_   style=“text-align:center;” |35.7% _2,212_   2.0% _121_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2004   style=“text-align:center;” |64.0% _4,066_   style=“text-align:center;” |35.4% _2,245_   0.6% _38_
  style=“text-align:center;” |2000   style=“text-align:center;” |57.7% _3,161_   style=“text-align:center;” |40.6% _2,223_   1.8% _98_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1996   style=“text-align:center;” |40.1% _2,067_   style=“text-align:center;” |47.2% _2,434_   12.7% _654_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1992   style=“text-align:center;” |34.8% _1,966_   style=“text-align:center;” |53.1% _3,000_   12.1% _685_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1988   style=“text-align:center;” |52.9% _2,952_   style=“text-align:center;” |46.0% _2,564_   1.1% _61_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1984   style=“text-align:center;” |55.9% _3,162_   style=“text-align:center;” |42.9% _2,427_   1.1% _64_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1980   style=“text-align:center;” |46.2% _2,609_   style=“text-align:center;” |51.8% _2,924_   2.0% _112_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1976   style=“text-align:center;” |36.9% _1,808_   style=“text-align:center;” |61.6% _3,016_   1.5% _75_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1972   style=“text-align:center;” |66.3% _2,952_   style=“text-align:center;” |30.2% _1,345_   3.5% _154_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1968   style=“text-align:center;” |42.2% _2,139_   style=“text-align:center;” |28.4% _1,439_   29.4% _1,487_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1964   style=“text-align:center;” |37.8% _1,738_   style=“text-align:center;” |61.6% _2,831_   0.6% _29_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1960   style=“text-align:center;” |61.7% _3,442_   style=“text-align:center;” |38.3% _2,137_   0.0% _0_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1956   style=“text-align:center;” |52.3% _2,681_   style=“text-align:center;” |47.2% _2,417_   0.5% _26_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1952   style=“text-align:center;” |53.9% _2,507_   style=“text-align:center;” |45.9% _2,133_   0.2% _10_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1948   style=“text-align:center;” |39.3% _1,626_   style=“text-align:center;” |53.5% _2,210_   7.2% _298_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1944   style=“text-align:center;” |47.7% _2,242_   style=“text-align:center;” |52.0% _2,444_   0.2% _10_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1940   style=“text-align:center;” |43.8% _2,246_   style=“text-align:center;” |55.7% _2,858_   0.5% _26_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1936   style=“text-align:center;” |43.8% _2,121_   style=“text-align:center;” |55.7% _2,699_   0.6% _28_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1932   style=“text-align:center;” |40.1% _2,020_   style=“text-align:center;” |59.0% _2,971_   1.0% _48_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1928   style=“text-align:center;” |62.6% _2,855_   style=“text-align:center;” |37.2% _1,695_   0.2% _10_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1924   style=“text-align:center;” |51.5% _2,498_   style=“text-align:center;” |45.0% _2,183_   3.6% _174_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1920   style=“text-align:center;” |51.1% _2,958_   style=“text-align:center;” |47.4% _2,746_   1.5% _88_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1916   style=“text-align:center;” |50.0% _1,672_   style=“text-align:center;” |48.0% _1,605_   2.0% _66_
  style=“text-align:center;” |1912   style=“text-align:center;” |42.6% _1,263_   style=“text-align:center;” |41.5% _1,231_   15.9% _470_

  : PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS RESULTS[5]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

title: Caldwell County, Kentucky

question: Summarize everything that happened in the 1860s.

answer: In 1860, the construction of Princeton College began. However, it was delayed by the Civil War, and troops camped on the grounds of Princeton College in 1861. After the Confederate retreat in early 1862, Union soldiers occupied Princeton for the remainder of the war. In December 1864, the Caldwell County courthouse in Princeton was burned down by a raiding Kentucky Confederate cavalry due to it being used by Union soldiers.

question: What does the text say about tobacco?

answer: By the early 20th century, there was an agricultural boom in Dark Fired Tobacco in Caldwell County. This made it a major tobacco growing area. It was part of the "Black Patch", which used a special process to cure the tobacco and included about 30 counties in western Kentucky and Tennessee. However, farmers were left in debt and discontent when the monopolization of the tobacco market by James B. Duke forced prices to lower. In response to this, planters formed the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee, to work together in pooling their commodity in order to gain higher prices.

question: What does the text say about agriculture and industrialization?

answer: Caldwell County faced an agricultural boom in Dark Fired Tobacco during the 19th century. This changed around the mid-twentieth century when it shifted to industrialization. With industrialization came factories such as Bremner, the largest private cookie and cracker factory in North America.

question: What does the text say about notable people?


split: test

text:
EDUARDA CUIZA LEA (born 5 January 1980) is a Bolivian footballer who plays as a forward for the Bolivia women's national team.

Early life

Cuiza hails from the Potosí Department.[1]

International career

Cuiza played for Bolivia at senior level in two Copa América Femenina editions (2014 and 2018).[2]

[1]

[2]

title: Eduarda Cuiza

question: How many times did Cuiza represent her nation in international competitions?

answer: The article doesn't mention how many matches she played for her nation. It only says she participated in two senior international tournaments.

question: Where is Cuiza from?

answer: She's from the Potosí Department.

question: What team does she play for?

answer: She plays for the Bolivia Women's National Team.

question: What tournaments did she compete in?

answer: She played in Copa América Femenina editions in 2014 and 2018.

question: Write a ~3 sentence summary.

answer: Eduarda Cuiza Lea (born 5 January 1980) is a Bolivian footballer who plays as a forward for the Bolivia Women's National Team. She hails from the Potosí Department. She played for Bolivia at senior level in two Copa América Femenina editions in 2014 and 2018.


text:
_By guest blogger_ Simon Oxenham

Historically, the kind of false memories induced in volunteers by psychologists have been relatively mundane. For example, a seminal study used leading questions and the encouragement to confabulate, to apparently implant in participants the memory of getting lost in a shopping mall as a child. This reliance on mundane false memories has been problematic for experts who believe that false memories have critical real world consequence, from criminal trials involving false murder confessions, to memories of child abuse “recovered” during therapy using controversial techniques.

The discrepancy between psychologists’ lab results and their real world claims vanished abruptly in 2015 when Julia Shaw (based then at the University of Bedfordshire) and Stephen Porter (University of British Columbia) shocked the memory research community with their staggering finding that, over several interview sessions, and by using false accounts purportedly from the participants’ own caregivers, they had successfully implanted false memories of having committed a crime as a teenager in 70 per cent of their participants, ranging from theft to assault with a weapon. But now other experts have raised doubts about these claims.

When first released, Shaw’s and Porter’s findings, published in _Psychological Science_, received widespread coverage, perhaps most prominently in the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary Memory Hackers (see clip above). I also contributed to the media reaction, covering the study in detail on my blog at _Big Think_, writing that “the risk of forming shocking false memories … may be greater than previously thought”.

However, the famous 2015 findings have now been called into question following a reanalysis of the data, published (also in _Psychological Science_) by Kimberley Wade at Warwick University and her colleagues. According to them, most of the false memories Shaw and Porter produced weren’t really false memories at all. This was because rather than using trained judges to determine, following established criteria, whether participants had truly recalled having committed a crime, Shaw and Porter developed new criteria for what constitutes a false memory. These included:

-   answering “yes” to the question “Did you believe that you had forgotten the event and that it actually happened?”
-   citing 10 critical false details presented by the researchers
-   providing a basic account of the false event in response to the instruction “tell me everything you remember from start to finish”

“The problem with the [false details] criterion” Wade explains, “is that subjects in false memory studies frequently speculate and imagine, and they talk out loud about what the suggested experience could have been like. They may say ‘I think my classmate was wearing a red t-shirt, he wore that a lot, and it must have happened on my street, I guess, near my house’.  But in the next sentence, they might say ‘Well, I can imagine it happening but I just don’t remember it at all’. In a case like this, Shaw and Porter would say that the subject recalled 6 details in this first sentence alone (i.e. classmate + red + t-shirt + wore a lot + my street + near house).” According to Wade et al. this fails to distinguish between people who merely speculated about the possibility that they committed a crime and people who appeared to genuinely remember it. This may have led to a wildly inflated false memory statistic, they argue.

When Wade’s team recoded Shaw and Porter’s data using the latter’s own scheme, they replicated the startling 70 per cent result. However, when they used a more traditional coding scheme, they found only 30 per cent of subjects met the criteria for false memories, with a further 43 per cent showing evidence of holding false beliefs (believing they’d committed the made-up crime, but not remembering it). This still makes Shaw and Porter’s 2015 paper groundbreaking, given the extreme nature of the false events. However, the re-calculated stats are more in keeping with previous false-memory findings.

To test if their doubt in Shaw and Porter’s interpretation would be supported by laypeople, Wade’s team presented transcripts of Shaw and Porter’s data to 300 participants recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website. In cases that Shaw and Porter had classified as a false memory but that Wade’s team reclassified as a false belief, the participants expressed low confidence that the reports showed evidence of remembering.

Shaw, who is now affiliated with UCL, has issued a rebuttal to Wade et al.’s critique, arguing that existing coding strategies are inadequate. “My argument is that I coded my data (intentionally) differently” says Shaw. “One could argue that across all currently accepted types of coding it is agreed that a significant number of individuals in this study came to believe they committed a crime that never happened.” Shaw also questions the use of laymen, saying “There is no reason to assume that laypeople would be any good at identifying or defining false memories”.

The debate raises an interesting question: if someone can be convinced that a false event is real, does it matter whether they remember it or not? Shaw says that “such a distinction was not seen as particularly relevant for the false confessions literature to which the study was intended to contribute”. Regardless of the true nature of the memories in her study, I believe the coding method she produced undoubtedly led to a truly groundbreaking discovery about false beliefs, and that in this respect her approach has been further validated by Wade et al.’s reanalysis.

Further muddying the waters, in an entirely separate development, Nicholas Brown (a PhD candidate in health psychology at UMC Groningen) and James Heathers (an applied physiologist at Northeastern University in Boston) recently found a series of statistical errors in the Shaw and Porter paper. However, the errors do not alter the headline findings. Shaw has issued a correction that’s due for publication and she says the errors were simply caused by rounding values imprecisely using Microsoft Excel and missing cells in the spreadsheet when conducting calculations. Brown and Heathers discovered the errors while developing their GRIM technique for detecting statistical anomalies in psychology research. When they applied their technique to 71 recent studies, including the Shaw and Porter paper, they found half appeared to contain at least one inconsistent result.

—Deconstructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime: Commentary on Shaw and Porter (2015)

—Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime

[SIMON-HEAD-SHOT]POST WRITTEN BY SIMON OXENHAM FOR THE BPS RESEARCH DIGEST. Simon covers psychology and neuroscience critically in his Brain Scanner column at _New Scientist_. Follow @simoxenham on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, RSS or on his mailing list.

question: What was the study about?

answer: Implanting false memories in subjects.

question: What were the results of the study?

answer: That they had managed to implant false memories in 70% of subjects.

question: Did the study hold up to peer review?

answer: No, it was found that the methodology was flawed.

question: Was the same proportion repeated in a later study?

answer: No, using a different coding scheme they found the proportion was closer to 30%.

question: Write a ~2 sentence summary.

answer: The article describes a study for implanting false memories which was particularly controversial. It had a high rate of 70% success, and when the study was replicated using a different coding scheme this same result was not maintained.


text:
The Ardalent Strings

The bell chimed so everyone grabbed hold of their handled strings and walked out from their apartments. The strings came from brass cavities in the wall and the other ends attached to something unknown to the people. They were meant to pull the strings to taut and they all did this simultaneously at the chiming of the bell. The strings whirred out of each brass fixture activating some guessed at mechanics inside the walls, flywheels and gears and such, clicking and clunking like old clockwork. The strings were too long for the people to simply pull and stand in their rooms, pulled taut the length of these strings would leave the people standing in their hallways. Sometimes, the people would speak to each other.

Oliver was told about the unusual custom by Lester on the day he had moved into the old Abbey Apartment building on Flint Street; bell and line. “Who is it that rings the bell?” Oliver was new and knowing no one but directing his question to a sea of old faces in the hall, holding his handle and string.

“It is not for us to know, just accept that it is so,” replied old Mrs. Cardicole. “We pull our strings each time it rings. That is the nature of living here, though it may seem vain and queer. Our labor is to taut the strings whenever the bell of Abbey rings.”

“Where do the strings go?” Oliver asked, not wanting to give up so easily.

“We pull our strings, the brass handled strings and meet here in the hall. That’s all to say. It’s the way of things. There’s nothing more at all!” and Mrs. Cardicole gave a stern face as if to say, *I disapprove of this line*.

Everyone else looked on and felt for Oliver. The residents knew the custom was odd but it was truly simply the way of things in the old Abbey Apartments on Flint Street.

Then the strings pulled back into their holes by automatic mechanism and everyone returned to whatever they had been doing. Some were watching television, others were reading, others were having dinner. Young Lester and Sable were tending to their newborn son. Life in the apartment building on Flint Street was quiet and most like usual, save for this one quirk of the handled strings and the chiming bell.

Sometimes, people would venture to look for the bell. Most obvious was that it would be on top of the building, but Lester once discovered that it was not. He told a very few people about his searching and occasionally, people would help Lester to look for it. Mrs. Cardicole would watch the people searching from her custom one-way porthole. She would take notes on who was looking and what they might be saying. “Always searching for the bell, these transgressions lead to Hell.” Her hair was red and frizzed and she seemed a kind of recluse. Some might say that Mrs. Cardicole was a shut-in, but she had her reasons, and her husband Frank in his urn would not judge her like her neighbors did.

The bell rang early the following day and all the neighbors grasped their handles and pulled their strings from the brass fixtures in their apartments. They met out in the hall again and Mrs. Cardicole spied Oliver instantly and judged his efforts as lackluster, slack was his string. He was not doing as well and he could, and his string was not as taut as hers. The neighbor Lester saw the judgement on Mrs. Cardicole’s face and it entertained the dark parts of his mind. The ringing bell had twisted his thoughts and every day, sometimes twice in one, he’d be a slave to it. Mrs. Cardicole’s judgement was something new, Oliver was something new, so Lester looked on in madness and a voice screamed in his mind. He thought of scissors and of string, screaming madness and slicing blades. Lester’s string was taut and the mechanisms to it locked in and he dropped his handle in the hall and went inside his apartment. Lester came back a moment later with a pair of scissors and picked up his handle again, in front of everyone, and cradled the string between the scissor blades. He looked again at Mrs. Cardicole’s silent judgement and relished in it, for now it was directed at him and not Oliver. Lester severed the handle from the string and almost immediately after, the strings pulled back into their holes and the people followed after, continuing their quiet lives in their apartments. Lester’s string vanished beyond the wall, somewhere behind his holed brass fixture.

Oliver spent the day considering Lester. How long has the process been driving him mad? Oliver would like to speak to Lester at some point so he decided he would, next time he had the chance. But it was evening when the bell chimed again and everyone pulled their strings out into the hall but there was no Lester. Oliver looked for him to come out at his door, but nobody came. Of course, why would they? There was no string for Lester or Sable to pull. The curious neighbors decided to investigate, at least to see what had become of Lester’s madness. One held another’s handled string while one investigated Lester’s door. It was ajar and pushed open easily but Lester was nowhere to be seen, nor was Sable or the newborn.

“Claimed by sin and no line taut, this is what his cutting brought.” Mrs. Cardicole gave a wry smile. Everyone came back to their spots and held their strings, not daring to let go and dismissing all thoughts of stepping out of line, all thoughts of knives and scissors banished; all minds were bent on the taut strings. Even Oliver did not dare to ask Mrs. Cardicole any more questions.

For the second time in the day, the strings pulled back into their brass openings and the people retreated back into their apartments, neverminding the strange reality they had all accepted with reluctant grace. Mrs. Cardicole watched them all mindlessly slink through their doors through her porthole then waited a moment for good measure. She quietly left her apartment and descended the stairwell then went into the basement. She had a key, the only key that opened the boiler room and there she came to it again, the caged Ardalent, the demon toddler she kept in her charge, giant and harlequin. Mrs. Cardicole stepped over the bodies of Lester and Sable. The Ardalent had his own string that hung down into his cage, one that chimed the unseen bell, and the neighbors did as they always had upon hearing it. Their strings came to an engine of coiled metal that powered a music box set to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. It was his lullaby. Mrs. Cardicole fed the Ardalent what she could from the bodies of Lester and Sable. She blew a kiss to the demon toddler and left the boiler room, locking the door behind her. She ascended the stairs and went back, unseen, into her apartment to find the child of Lester and Sable, now hers to raise; a brother for her dear Ardalent.

title: The Ardalent Strings

question: Summarize everything relating to Ardalent.

answer: Ardalent is Mrs. Cardicole's demon toddler, whom she keeps in a cage in the boiler room. The toddler chimes the unseen bell, and the neighbors pull their strings to power a music box set to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata in response to lull him back to sleep. Mrs. Cardicole feeds Ardalent the bodies of Lester and Sable and goes to find their newborn to raise as a brother for Ardalent.

question: Summarize Oliver's feelings about Ardalent.

question: Summarize the strange custom the people in the building have.

answer: Whenever the mysterious bell chimes, strings emerge from brass cavities in the wall. The people pull the strings taut, simultaneously with the chiming of the bell. Pulled taut, the strings would leave people standing in their hallways. The strings are connected to a music box that plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a lullaby for Ardalent, Mrs. Cardicole's demon toddler.


text:
The MEN'S 20 KILOMETRES WALK event at the 1989 SUMMER UNIVERSIADE was held in Duisburg on 25 August 1989.[1]

Results

  Rank   Athlete                  Nationality   Time      Notes
  ------ ------------------------ ------------- --------- -------
         Walter Arena                           1:23:25   GR
         Miguel Ángel Prieto                    1:23:39
         Andrew Jachno                          1:23:48
         Andreas Hühmer                         1:25:45
         Grigoriy Kornev                        1:26:02
         Robert Korzeniowski                    1:26:10
         Giuseppe De Gaetano                    1:27:23
         Luis Maroto                            1:29:13
         Mark Manning                           1:29:28
  10     Paul Copeland                          1:31:24
  11     Curtis Fisher                          1:31:27
  12     Daniel Levesque                        1:35:37
  13     Michael Harvey                         1:37:29
         Lawrence Tetteh
         Ansah Coffie
         Miguel Ángel Rodríguez
         Tim Berrett
         Vladimir Druchik
         Albert Budondi
         Francis Kea

[1]

title: Athletics at the 1989 Summer Universiade – Men's 20 kilometres walk

question: Summarize everything about the Men's 20 Kilometers Walk.

answer: The Men's 20 Kilometers Walk was an event at the 1989 Summer Universiade held in Duisburg on 25 August 1989. The race was won by Walter Arena with a time of 1:23:25, while Miguel Ángel Prieto (1:23:39) and Andrew Jachno (1:23:48) cane in second and third, respectively.


text:
_This column includes material from Chris Hedges’ interview of Rachel Moran on teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” presented via therealnews.com. Prostitution abolition activist Moran is a former prostitute and a writer, blogger and founding member of SPACE International, an organization for survivors of prostitution. To see a video of the interview and to read a text of the exchange, click here._

BALTIMORE—The reduction of another human being to an object and the glorification of male violence, whether in war or prostitution, are romanticized by popular culture. It is difficult to challenge the lies disseminated about “sex work” and “military virtues.” Those who counter the dominant narrative, even if they speak from long personal experience, are drowned out. Speaking the truth about war or the truth about prostitution is lonely and often futile.

Rachel Moran, who was a prostituted woman in Ireland for seven years, has done in her book “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution” what I attempted to do in my book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” about the reality of war. And she has endured very similar responses. Women and girls who are being prostituted—like war correspondents and soldiers addicted to the rush of battle, the hypermasculinity and the adrenaline highs that come with war — have often dismissed her, unable to examine the darkness and tragedy of their own lives. Mass culture has largely shut out her and others who speak the truth about prostitution, just as it shuts out those who speak the truth about war. The manufactured illusion of heroes or glamorous call girls plays to a culture that celebrates the commodification of human beings. Those who have escaped the clutches of prostitution or war, often struggling to cope with trauma, guilt and shame, are reticent to resurrect in public the nightmare that will hound them for the rest of their lives.

“People who depict prostitution as glamorous usually view prostitutes against the backdrop of expensive hotel foyers,” Moran wrote in her book. “They imagine prostitutes as entering or leaving five-star hotels, wearing sharp designer suits and high heels, and the look set off with vivid red lipstick. I’ve walked into more hotels more times than I could count, wearing sharp suits, high heels, and every shade of lipstick. None of that changed what was going on in my heart or in my mind, and none of it made any difference to the bodily experience involved here. None of it was of any practical benefit to my mouth, breasts, or vagina. What was going on was the very same thing that was going on when I was lifting my skirt in the backstreet alley. The nature of prostitution does not change with its surrounds. It does not morph into something else because your ass is rubbing against white linen as opposed to roughed concrete.”

When we spoke in Baltimore she told me, “The reality is, if I had a gun to my head right now and the life of someone I really loved was hanging in the balance and I had … to go back into prostitution for one more day, there’s only one place I would go, and that would be the streets. In street-based prostitution, you have some level of control—not much, but some. You can gauge by the look in a person’s eye, which is actually the best place you can look if you want to know whether somebody has the intention to hurt you, whether you’re getting any kind of, as we say in Ireland, bogie vibes. If a man has it in them to want to cause you extreme harm, you can gauge all that by the physical nature of being close to them and looking them in the face. You can’t use your faculties in that same way down a phone line. You can’t assess a man in indoor prostitution, regardless whether it’s in a brothel or massage parlor or a hotel room. You can’t do that until you’re alone with them in the room. And what people don’t understand is that that places you in a much—obviously, I would have thought—more dangerous situation. And studies have shown that [in] indoor prostitution … violence occurs more frequently. And that was my experience.”

She blasts the notion that prostitution is in any way a form of sex. “The nature of sex is mutuality,” she said. “And where you don’t have mutuality, you have sexual abuse.”

Moran preferred catering to those with fetishes and “sexual perversions” to escape “being raped for a living” by heterosexual men.

Some men “wanted to dress up as women or as puppy dogs—believe me, that happens,” she said. “I had a regular client [who wanted to be a poodle, and I] used to walk him around the apartment. There was a whole array of men with the most bizarre turn-ons. And I used to deal with those men. I found it so much easier than dealing with men who wanted to just use my body like it was … a kind of blowup doll that they’d bought out of a sex shop.”

The war industry, like the prostitution industry, feeds off the despair, poverty and hopelessness that afflict the lives of many of the young, especially young men and women of color. In a world of closed doors and few opportunities, the military, like prostitution, appears to offer a way out. Military recruiters are little more than uniformed human traffickers, targeting the vulnerable, making promises that are usually never kept and handing out cash payments to the desperate. Once they have their prey trapped, like all pimps and traffickers, they force them into a life that bears no resemblace to the fantasy they peddled.

“That was a very, very painful book to write,” Moran said of “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution,” “because it necessitated my having to revisit all of those painful places with no armor and look at what it was that happened to us and why.” Moran, like many other girls and women forced into prostituion, was desperate and homeless. Her home life, dominated by mentally unstable parents who raised her and her siblings in crippling poverty, had been a disaster. And the state, preoccupied with imposing austerity and budget cuts, had abandoned her. She started working the streets when she was a child of 15. And she soon discovered that announcing her age to her clients was useful because “they get off faster and I got out of the car faster.”

“I was in indoor prostitution for quite a few years, and for every 10 times that phone rang, eight or nine times you would be asked, ‘How old is the youngest girl on today?’ It was always that, the youngest girl, the youngest girl, the youngest girl. Never stopped. And it was a particularly creepy question to have to listen to, because I usually was the youngest girl. So it was me they were talking about,” she said.

“I have never seen anyone come to prostitution out of a circumstance that wasn’t in some way, shape, or form negative,” she told me.

She scoffs at the idea that prostitution offers girls and women a “choice,” since as she wrote “it is _others_ who use the bodies of prostituted women as _they_ so choose. That is the intention and the purpose and the _function_ of prostitution.” Prostituted women have no real freedom of choice, and even less control over their bodies than do Marine Corps recruits on Parris Island. Once you sign on for war or prostitution you become someone else’s property. Fear becomes your dominant emotion. “If anything is more pervasive than violence itself it is the threat of it,” Moran writes of being prostituted. To endure war or prostitution it is better not to think or feel. Spend long enough in war or prostitution and you will, as Moran and I eventually did, become numb, dominated by paranoia and deeply distrustful. You lash out, sometimes physically, at whatever or whomever you perceive to be a threat. You become a hunted animal. You divide the world between predators and prey.

“You have to dissociate,” Moran said. “You have to split yourself off from the reality of what’s currently happening. If you are having your body used by— … it was up to 10 men a day when I was on the streets—you’ve got to be able to shut off from that. You just couldn’t keep on doing it unless you could … pretend that it’s not happening. That’s what I always did. I just shut it out.”

There, however, is an important distinction between prostitution and war. In prostitution your body is physically violated by men who revolt and disgust you. These men, as they penetrate your body, frequently insult and beat you. And this makes the traumas of prostitution, like rape, horrifyingly unique.

“It is difficult to describe how hollow a woman feels after she has been used sexually by ten different men,” Moran wrote. “Of course, the experience rarely stopped at the agreed-upon hand relief or oral sex. Even when a man has accepted that he will not be putting his penis in you, he often has no compunction about shoving his fingers or other objects in you and mauling you and biting you and trying to shove his tongue down your throat and everywhere else. I know by the rabid, doglike behavior of one particular client that he’d have liked nothing better than if he’d bit and sucked my nipples till they gushed blood.”

In the interview Moran said that there are men “who actively get off on hurting you and watching you being hurt”—about 30 percent of her clients. “Then you have your men who are aware, of course, that what’s going on is not right, not humane. They choose willfully to ignore that. And you have your other men who just don’t seem to have that in their minds at all. They don’t seem to understand that what’s happening is not something that should be going on. But even [so], … those same men know they wouldn’t want to walk into a brothel and find their sister sitting on the bed. So I do believe that there’s a good deal of denial going on there.”

“Prostitution is violence in and of itself,” she said. “… [T]o put your hands on another person when you know they don’t want your hands there and to put your penis into the orifices of somebody’s body when you know that they don’t want your penis inside them or near them, that is pathological behavior. And money doesn’t erase that. Money does not have some kind of magical quality that can take away the essence of a person’s behavior or an exchange between two people.”

Moran rejects the concept of “sex work”—which, she says, has as its primary qualifications “the ability to resist your urge to vomit, to cry, and to pretend that your current reality wasn’t happening.”

She points to Germany and Australia, where prostitution is legal, to illustrate that legalization only fuels the trafficking of poor women (in those two countries most of the prostituted women are from Asia or Eastern Europe) and the industrialization of prostitution. And legalizing prostitution does not offer women more protection.

“In Germany you have an estimate—and I believe it’s a very conservative estimate—of 450,000 women and girls prostituting,” she said. “Forty-four of them have stepped forward to sign as registered. So here we have a situation where the whole world believes that prostitution ought to be regulated, legislated, and all of this, but the reality of what’s happening in Germany is only a pitiful handful of women were prepared to register and get the benefits that go along with that, the social security and health benefits. The bald reality is we don’t want to be labeled prostitutes. Women don’t want that ‘whore’ stamp, as I call it, on us forever. And the illegal trade absolutely booms anywhere where you legalize, because what happens immediately is that demand massively increases. We’ve seen it in New Zealand [and] … Australia.”She calls for prostitution to be outlawed, with the johns, pimps, brothel owners and illicit massage parlor operators prosecuted, publicly shamed and jailed. She believes the women who are being prostituted should be exempt from criminal charges and offered a variety of state-run programs to enable them to survive outside of prostitution.

“What I want to see is women in prostitution, and indeed men, boys, everybody, be offered alternatives, real, viable alternatives,” she said. “And I’m talking about help with housing, with child care, with education, training, with counseling, with addiction [therapy], all of the things that women need help with in order to get them out of that situation. I’m not advocating for let’s just criminalize the pimps and the johns and [abandon] the women.”

In war, where there is a cavernous space between the all-powerful and the utterly powerless, the prostitution and rape of girls, women and boys is an epidemic. Armed combatants, who surrender their individualty and usually their capacity for moral choice, become part of a herd of killers. Sex in the culture of war is reduced to its basest animalistic function. It is referred to in marching cadences and ribald small talk in the same way people speak about defecation. Pornography in wartime is ubiquitous. In war, as in prostituion, empathy, compassion and love are ruthlessly banished.

War is an assault on all systems—social, political, economic, cultural, familial, religious and environmental—that sustain and nurture life. Human beings in wartime become objects to destroy or to be used for gratification, or both. The hypermasculine barbarity of war, which dehumanizes the other, is mirrored in the hypermasculine barbarity of prostitution. America’s glorification of male violence and cultural acceptance of sexual gratification at the expense of another, along with the lust to dominate, humiliate and destroy those who are different from us, have made us callous and cruel. It has rendered us incapable of compassion. It has created a soulless society where the exploitation of the weak and the vulnerable, along with the persecution of the “stranger,” defines our national character.

question: What does the text say about prostitution in Amsterdam?

question: What are the parallels between war and prostitution?

answer: Because popular culture glorifies and romanticized male violence in war or prostitution, those who speak the truth about the lies disseminated about "sex work" or "military virtues" are often dismissed by mass culture and by the soldiers and women or girls being prostituted because they are unable to examine the darkness and tragedy in their lives. The manufactured illusion of war heroes or glamorous call girls plays to a culture that celebrates the commodification of human beings. The reality is that those who escape the clutches of war or prostitution often struggle to cope with trauma, guilt, and shame. The war industry, like prostitution, feeds off the despair, poverty, and hopelessness that afflict the lives of the young, especially people of color who view the military as a way out. Prostituted women have no real freedom of choice and even less control over their bodies than Marine Corps recruits because they are both someone else's property. In war or prostitution, fear becomes the dominant emotion and to endure, it is better not to think or feel. The hypermasculine barbarity of war, which dehumanizes the other, is mirrored in the hypermasculine barbarity of prostitution.

question: What does the text say about Rachel Moran?

answer: Rachel Moran is a prostitution abolition activist and former prostitute in Ireland for seven years. She is a writer, blogger, and founding member of SPACE International, an organization for survivors of prostitution. She wrote the book "Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution" which details her story of being forced into prostitution as a child of 15 years due to mentally unstable parents and living in crippling poverty. Moran details the physical abuse and mental anguish she went through, the violent men who hurt her, bizarre clients, misconceptions about the sex trade glorified by Hollywood, and how prostitution is akin to rape and sexual abuse. Moran's body was used up to 10 x a day when she was on the streets. She feared the threat of violence every time she was working. Moran says that prostitution is violence in and of itself because knowingly violating another person for money when the other is unwilling but has no choice is pathological behavior.

question: What is Moran's issue with legal prostitution?

answer: Moran rejects the concept of "sex work" where the primary qualifications are "the ability to resist your urge to vomit, to cry, and to pretend that your current reality wasn’t happening.” She says that legalizing prostitution only fuels the trafficking of poor women, much like in Germany and Australia (where prostitution is legal) where most of the women are from Asia or Eastern Europe. Legalizing prostitution also does not offer women more protection from violence. Moran cites an estimate in Germany wherein only 44 out of the estimated 450,000 women and girls prostituting registered with the government to get health benefits and social security. The reason and the reality are that women don't want to be labeled as prostitutes and get the "whore" stamp forever. Moran is calling for prostitution to be outlawed, with the johns, pimps, brothel owners, and illicit massage parlor operators prosecuted, publicly shamed, and jailed. Prostituted women should be exempt from criminal charges and offered state-run programs and viable alternatives such as housing, education, counseling, addiction therapy, and training to help get them out of that situation.


text:
SUDHIR KRISHNASWAMY (born 1975) is an Indian academic, administrator, and civil society activist who is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU)[1] and is a co-founder of the not-for-profit research trust Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR).[2] Krishnaswamy took over as VC of NLSIU from R. Venkata Rao in September 2019.[3][4] Krishnaswamy is the first alumnus of NLSIU to be appointed as the VC of the institution.[5] On 6 May 2020, Facebook appointed him to its content oversight board.[6]

Background and Education

Krishnaswamy was born in 1975 in Bangalore, India.Being a alumni of St. Joseph's Boys' High School, he also graduated from the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore with a B.A. LL.B. Subsequently, he read for the BCL at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.[7] He further obtained a D.Phil. from the same institution in 2008.[8] Krishnaswamy has been a Teaching Fellow in Law at the Pembroke College at the University of Oxford, an Assistant Professor at NLSIU and a Professor at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences.[9] He was head of School of Public Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University Bengaluru

Dr. Krishnaswamy has also worked in the Prime Minister’s Committee on Infrastructure and the Kasturirangan Committee on Governance of Bangalore.[10] He has authored a book titled ‘Democracy and Constitutionalism in India’ which was published by the Oxford University Press in 2009.[11].

Bibliography

Books

-   Democracy and Constitutionalism in India: A Study of the Basic Structure Doctrine (Oxford University Press 2008)[12]

Articles

-   _Access to Knowledge and Traditional Knowledge Protection_ in R Subramaniam and L Shaver (eds) _Access to Knowledge in India_ (Bloomsbury Academic 2011)
-   Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Madhav Khosla _Understanding our Supreme Court_ 46 Economic and Political Weekly 71 (2011)
-   Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Madhav Khosla _Military Power and the Constitution_ 611 Seminar (2010)
-   _Constitutional Durability_ 615 Seminar (2010)
-   _Mashelkar Report on IP Rights Version II: Wrong Again_ 44 Economic and Political Weekly 27 (2009)
-   Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Madhav Khosla _Regional Emergencies under Article 356: The Extent of Judicial Review_ 3 Indian Journal of Constitutional Law 168 (2009)
-   Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Madhav Khosla _Reading AK Thakur v Union of India: Legal Effect and Significance_ 43 Economic and Political Weekly 53 (2008)
-   _Where Public Law and Private Law Meet: Horizontal Rights in the Indian Constitution_ in C Raj Kumar (eds) _Human Rights, Criminal Justice and Constitutional Empowerment_(Oxford University Press, Delhi 2007)
-   _Reliance Airports Case: Public Law and Public Sector Reform_ 41 Economic and Political Weekly 4239 (2006)
-   _Intellectual Property and India’s Development Policy_ 1 Indian Journal of Law and Technology (2006)
-   _Are our IP laws promoting or suppressing Indian Intellectual Property?_ India IP Essay Contest Winner (2004)[13]

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13] https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/files/southasia/imce/people/Faculty/VisitingScholars/KrishnaswamyCVJune2017.pdf

title: Sudhir Krishnaswamy

question: What does the article say about Krishnaswamy's academic life?

answer: He is an alumnus of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore. He obtained his Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He was a Teaching Fellow in Law at the Pembroke College there, an Assistant Professor at NLSIU, and a Professor at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. He was also the head of the School of Public Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University Bengaluru. He published a book, "Democracy and Constitutionalism in India". He also has many published papers published between 2004 to 2011. Currently, Krishnaswamy is the Vice-Chancellor of the NLSIU and a co-founder of the Centre for Law and Policy Research, a non-profit organization.

question: What does the article say about the quality of research in India?


text:
Survival rates can give you an idea of what percentage of people with the same type and stage of cancer are still alive a certain amount of time (usually 5 years) after they were diagnosed. They can’t tell you how long you will live, but they may help give you a better understanding of how likely it is that your treatment will be successful.

KEEP IN MIND THAT SURVIVAL RATES ARE ESTIMATES AND ARE OFTEN BASED ON PREVIOUS OUTCOMES OF LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE WHO HAD A SPECIFIC CANCER, BUT THEY CAN’T PREDICT WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN ANY PARTICULAR PERSON’S CASE. THESE STATISTICS CAN BE CONFUSING AND MAY LEAD YOU TO HAVE MORE QUESTIONS. TALK WITH YOUR DOCTOR ABOUT HOW THESE NUMBERS MAY APPLY TO YOU, AS HE OR SHE IS FAMILIAR WITH YOUR SITUATION.

What is a 5-year relative survival rate?

A RELATIVE SURVIVAL RATE compares people with the same type and stage of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) to people in the overall population. For example, if the 5-YEAR RELATIVE SURVIVAL RATE for a specific stage of NHL is 70%, it means that people who have that cancer are, on average, about 70% as likely as people who don’t have that cancer to live for at least 5 years after being diagnosed.

Where do these numbers come from?

The American Cancer Society relies on information from the SEER* database, maintained by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), to provide survival statistics for different types of cancer.

The SEER database tracks 5-year relative survival rates for NHL in the United States, based on how far the cancer has spread. The SEER database, however, does not group cancers by the Lugano classification (stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, etc.). Instead, it groups cancers into localized, regional, and distant stages:

-   LOCALIZED: The cancer is limited to one lymph node area, one lymphoid organ, or one organ outside the lymph system.
-   REGIONAL: The cancer reaches from one lymph node area to a nearby organ, is found in two or more lymph node areas on the same side of the diaphragm, or is considered bulky disease.
-   DISTANT: The cancer has spread to distant parts of the body such as the lungs, liver, or bone marrow, or to lymph node areas above and below the diaphragm.

5-year relative survival rates for NHL

The overall 5-year relative survival rate for people with NHL is 72%. But it’s important to keep in mind that survival rates can vary widely for different types and stages of lymphoma. Below are the 5-year relative survival rates for two common types of NHL - diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and follicular lymphoma - based on people diagnosed between 2009 and 2015.

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| SEER STAGE                        | 5-YEAR RELATIVE SURVIVAL RATE     |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Localized                         | 73%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Regional                          | 72%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Distant                           | 55%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| All SEER stages combined          | 63%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Follicular lymphoma

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| SEER STAGE                        | 5-YEAR RELATIVE SURVIVAL RATE     |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Localized                         | 96%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Regional                          | 89%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Distant                           | 85%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| All SEER stages combined          | 88%                               |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Understanding the numbers

-   THESE NUMBERS APPLY ONLY TO THE STAGE OF THE CANCER WHEN IT IS FIRST DIAGNOSED. They do not apply later on if the cancer grows, spreads, or comes back after treatment.
-   PEOPLE NOW BEING DIAGNOSED WITH NHL MAY HAVE A BETTER OUTLOOK THAN THESE NUMBERS SHOW. Treatments improve over time, and these numbers are based on people who were diagnosed and treated at least five years earlier.
-   THESE NUMBERS DON’T TAKE EVERYTHING INTO ACCOUNT. Survival rates are grouped based on how far the cancer has spread, but your age, overall health, the type of NHL, how well the cancer responds to treatment, and other factors (see below) can also affect your outlook.

Prognostic factors for non-Hodgkin lymphoma

For some types of lymphoma the stage isn’t too helpful in determining a person’s outlook. In these cases, other factors can give doctors a better idea about a person’s prognosis.

International Prognostic Index (IPI)

The International Prognostic Index (IPI) was first developed to help doctors determine the outlook (prognosis) for people with fast-growing (aggressive) lymphomas. However, it has proven useful for most other lymphomas as well (other than slow-growing [indolent] follicular lymphomas, which are discussed below). The IPI allows doctors to plan treatment better than they could just based on the type and stage of the lymphoma. This has become more important as new, more effective treatments have been developed that sometimes have more side effects. The index helps doctors figure out whether these treatments are needed.

The index depends on 5 factors:

-   The patient’s age
-   The stage of the lymphoma
-   Whether or not the lymphoma is in organs outside the lymph system
-   Performance status (PS) – how well a person can complete normal daily activities
-   The blood level of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), which goes up with the amount of lymphoma in the body

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| GOOD PROGNOSTIC FACTORS           | POOR PROGNOSTIC FACTORS           |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Age 60 or below                   | Age above 60                      |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Stage I or II                     | Stage III or IV                   |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| No lymphoma outside of lymph      | Lymphoma is in more than 1 organ  |
| nodes, or lymphoma in only 1 area | of the body outside of lymph      |
| outside of lymph nodes            | nodes                             |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PS: Able to function normally     | PS: Needs a lot of help with      |
|                                   | daily activities                  |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Serum LDH is normal               | Serum LDH is high                 |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Each poor prognostic factor is assigned 1 point. People without any poor prognostic factors would have a score of 0, while those with all poor prognostic factors would have a score of 5. The index divides people with lymphomas into 4 risk groups:

-   Low risk (0 or 1 poor prognostic factors)
-   Low-intermediate risk (2 poor prognostic factors)
-   High-intermediate risk (3 poor prognostic factors)
-   High risk (4 or 5 poor prognostic factors)

Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (FLIPI)

The IPI is useful for most lymphomas, but it’s not as helpful for follicular lymphomas, which tend to be slower growing. Doctors have developed the Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (FLIPI) specifically for this type of lymphoma. It uses slightly different prognostic factors than the IPI.

+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| GOOD PROGNOSTIC FACTORS           | POOR PROGNOSTIC FACTORS           |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Age 60 or below                   | Age above 60                      |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Stage I or II                     | Stage III or IV                   |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Blood hemoglobin 12 g/dL or above | Blood hemoglobin level below 12   |
|                                   | g/dL                              |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| 4 or fewer lymph node areas       | More than 4 lymph node areas      |
| affected                          | affected                          |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Serum LDH is normal               | Serum LDH is high                 |
+-----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

Patients are assigned a point for each poor prognostic factor. People without any poor prognostic factors would have a score of 0, while those with all poor prognostic factors would have a score of 5. The index then divides people with follicular lymphoma into 3 groups:

-   Low risk (no or 1 poor prognostic factor[s])
-   Intermediate risk (2 poor prognostic factors)
-   High risk (3 or more poor prognostic factors)

For both the IPI and FLIPI, people in the low risk group tend to have a better prognosis than those in the high risk group.

*SEER= Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results

question: Explain how the 5-year relative survival for NHL is determined.

answer: The 5-year relative survival rate is the rate at which people diagnosed with NHL survive when compared with the average population. At the moment, this number is set at 72%. This number is determined by the SEER database which is maintained by the National Cancer Insitute (NCI). The SEER database does not group cancer by the Lugano classification (stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3), instead it groups it by how far cancer has spread at the time it was discovered. This spread is grouped into Localized, Regional, and Distant. It uses these groups to determine how likely a patient is likely to survive.

question: Explain why some of the numbers given by the SEER database, especially the 5-year survival rate, may sometimes be inaccurate.

answer: The reasons may be that the numbers given by the database may sometimes apply only to when the cancer was first diagnosed. Also, cancer treatments does improve overtime, and this may have a positive effect on cancer patients, prolonging their lives. There are times when the numbers does not take the overall health of the patient into account. This factor can help when it comes to treatment and survival.

question: According to the passage, which other organization maintains the SEER database outside of the NCI?


text:
Voices from the television, white noise to *his* vacant mind. Two men were talking to each other and *he* didn't see their faces. *He* saw moving lips. The stench of the apartment did not bother *him*. Half eaten food rotted on the floor. The most recent of this food was a bowl of somewhat eaten jello. It sat still on the table next to the couch where a mindless *man* sat.

Who is this man? Most would say he's a brilliant writer of a dozen famous short stories; each translated into a dozen languages and read by much more than a dozen people. The characters in his stories have been analyzed time and time again. They are the best creations of his writing. His characters *are* the story. Their complexities are deeper than most imagine. This writer is a genius.

But at this moment, he isn't a famous writer. He is Alfred Jones, the newest of his characters. You see, when the writer writes, he locks himself in his apartment for many months. He eats, but he doesn't finish. He turns on the TV and enters his imagination, unaware of reality, to build his characters for hours. He writes it all down when he awakes at midnight. He becomes his characters during these trances.

He jolted wide awake. *Is it midnight?* He checked the time through a TV and found it was 9:00. Two men were talking on a screen. *Who are these two men, Sally?* He looked around. Sally was not there. *This isn't my place. Did I get drunk today? No, I couldn't have. So how did I get here?*

The man stood up, puzzled by what was happening. *The jello will stink, the jello will stink.* He was startled by this incoherent thought. It wasn't his. *Who was that?! WHO said that?!* He grabbed a couch, trying for a grip of the demented reality. *WHERE AM I?!* The man ran to a bathroom. *The jello will stink, the jello will-*

He screamed. He wanted to vomit. Was he going crazy? Water rushed through the man's fingers as he washed his face. *This will wake me up! It will, it will, it will, IT WILL.*

He looked up to a mirror. Screams echoed in a bathroom. This isn't him! This isn't him! *WHO IS THIS FACE?! WHO IS THIS?!* He screamed and screamed. He clawed at the face. *Is it a mask?* He pulled but it wouldn't come off. *Stink jello stink.* The man smashed the face into a mirror. He's just dreaming right now! *This can't be real.* Blood trickled down the mangled face. Shards of mirror were dug into skin. They were deep.

*Where's your wallet?* I don't know.

*Go find it.* Who are you?

The man walked of a bathroom. Blood dripped onto a floor. *Why is my face on fire?* The man went towards a room. My face hurts. Sally? *Help me. Jello stink.*

I opened a door. Where is the wallet? *Put out the fire.* A wallet was on a bed. *Whose wallet is that?* It's mine. It's his. *Put out the fire.*

He picked up a wallet. I opened it up. I read a name on a license. *Stephen King.*

Who am I?

title: The Writer

question: Why is the protagonist behaving in such a self-destructive way?

answer: The protagonist is a famous horror story writer. To create his characters, he goes into a trance and becomes the characters. He locks himself in his apartment and immerses himself in his imagination, unaware of reality.

question: Why does the protagonist want to wake up?

answer: He has awoken to a nightmare, where he is questioning his sanity. He doesn't know where he is and his mind is full of demented thoughts. It seems that the face he sees in the mirror is not the character whose life he planned to imagine.

question: Who and where is Sally?


text:
To set the stage, I grew up on a dairy farm.

My job before school was to bottle feed the baby cows. There was always a generation of babies with us, although they did not stay with us for long. I’m sure my dad could have had one of the Mexicans do it; there were plenty of people working the farm at that hour. But this made me feel more connected to the farm. When I was younger, I had happened to be there on one of the days that the calves are moved away from their mothers, and it was kind of traumatizing. Feeding the calves milk replacer myself made me feel like at least someone was checking up on them, if not their moms.

When I was about ten, my parents signed me up for the 4-H program. Google “4H pledge to greater loyalty” and you’ll get an idea of what this is about. It’s basically a way for sensitive kids like me to be inducted into the farming lifestyle. We were unlike city kids, who can keep their childish view of animals their whole lives. You can’t go your life looking at cows and hogs and thinking “Oh, that’s cute,” without running the risk of PTSD in this community.

The 4-H program pairs a student with a baby animal to feed, vaccinate, teach to walk with a halter, and by and large care for until it’s big enough to go to auction. At the end of the year, there’s a multi-day fair where people (adults too) show prize animals, eat deep fried sweets, and generally have a good time. The last day of the fair, the 4-H kids say goodbye to their animals and auction them off as meat. Learning how to raise an animal and how to let go is important.

My father bought me a Holstein calf, different from the veal calves I was used to feeding.  This relationship was different—he didnt live in a hutch, nor was he an impersonal part of a herd to be sold all at once. I named him Crumbles, and I spent a lot of one-on-one time with him. I fed him, washed him, clipped him, and gave him medicines, and watched him grow into a towering animal! On the day of the fair, I walked him around the ring myself and listened as people bid on him.

As I was saying goodbye, I was surrounded by other kids and their parents who were going through the same thing. It was kind of a rush—that intense sadness paired with my parents saying they were so proud of me, and the strong sense of community and understanding from the people around me. *This is how food is made, this is what we do to survive.*

Later that week, my parents took me to the Golden Corral buffet. We didn’t eat out often, so this was a special meal. We filled our plates up with beef and fixings, and we even said our prayers at the table, which wasn’t out of place in a rural town like ours.

That’s when I smelled it. As someone walked by, the scent of unwashed sickness rolled over our table. I looked up to see the fattest woman I had ever seen. She had short blond hair in tight curls at the top of her head. Her lips were painted bright red against a too-pale foundation. Her chin drooped from her face like a hanging udder. But the most horrifying thing was her butt. It was double butt. Not only was it parted vertically in her threadbare sweatpants, it was also parted horizontally, as if God had melted one butt and dolloped it atop a pair of saggy beanbags.  I watched as she and her family of smaller fat people  waddled to the same trough I had eaten from and pull out slices of glistening, gray beef.

I looked down at my own plate, and in doing so, felt my own childhood pudge push against my chin. The food looked disgusting to me. This wasn’t for survival. Crumbles had died so fatasses like her could stuff themselves with too many portions, make themselves sick, and shit out the rest. How was this fair, or right, or “important” as my community had told me again and again? Why did pudgy little me get to eat icecream, when the calves at home didn’t get to drink the milk that was made for them, or even spend time with their moms?

After that, I wasn’t able to eat animals anymore. If I had never seen that hideous woman, I would have molded my education to prepare to take over the farm from my parents, participated in more 4-H and agricultural clubs, and spent my hours on the farm instead of doing calculus homework. If I had never seen that woman, I’d probably have a better relationship with my parents, who take my rejection of the animal farming lifestyle as a rejection of them, and the 16 hour days they once worked to keep clothes on my back. In the end, there wasn’t a place for me in that world anyway. When I was 18, my parent’s farm went under due to the unstable price of milk, meaning only the big factory farms could afford to ride the bad years and stay open.  If I had never seen that woman, I would have gone down with them. Instead, I had prepared myself to pursue a college degree in engineering.

The whole course of my life was changed by a fat person.

**tl;dr** double butt made me choose a different profession and moral philosophy than my community

title: [NF] My community doesn't understand me anymore

question: What does the text say about raising chickens?

question: What does the text say about the narrator?

answer: The narrator grew up on a dairy farm. His job before school was to bottle feed the baby cows with milk replacer so he could feel more connected to the farm. Because he was a sensitive kid, his parents signed him up for the 4-H program when he was 10 years old, to induct him into the farming lifestyle. The narrator's life changed after seeing a hideous fat woman at a buffet. He couldn't eat animals anymore and rejected the farming lifestyle, much to the dismay of his parents. When he was 18 years old, the family farm went under due to the unstable price of milk, and the narrator ends up pursuing a degree in engineering instead.

question: Describe the 4-H program.

answer: The 4-H program is a way for sensitive kids to be inducted into the farming lifestyle. Children who live in farming communities are different from other kids because they have to understand that the animals on the farms are not "cute" (as city kids would call them) but exist to be either sold, slaughtered, or auctioned off. The 4-H program pairs a student with a baby animal to feed, vaccinate, teach to walk with a halter, and care for until it is big enough to go to auction. At the end of the year, there is a multi-day fair where people (kids and adults) have a good time and show prize animals. Kids in the 4-H program say goodbye to their animals and auction them off as meat on the last day because learning how to raise an animal and how to let go is important. The 4-H program offers a strong sense of community and understanding.

question: Summarize the moment the narrator knew he had to ditch beef and quit the farming lifestyle.

answer: The turning point for the narrator was when his parents took him to the Golden Corral buffet a week after he sold his Holstein calf, Crumbles, at the 4-H fair. After filling up his plate with beef and fixings, the narrator smelled unwashed sickness and saw that it was emanating from the fattest woman he had ever seen, surrounded by an equally fat family, all getting the same food he got. She was hideous and had a double butt (parted vertically and horizontally) under her threadbare sweatpants. The food on his plate suddenly looked disgusting because he realized that Crumbles had died so fatasses like her could stuff themselves with too many portions, make themselves sick, and crap out the rest. Farming wasn't fair, right, or "important", as repeatedly taught to him by the community. After seeing the fat woman and associating her with what was wrong with farming, he couldn't eat animals anymore and prepared himself to pursue a college degree in engineering.

question: Summarize the primary source of tension in the text?

answer: The primary source of tension in the story is the fat woman forcing the narrator to see that industrial farming was unfair, inhumane, and is not survival. Taking calves away from their mothers was traumatizing for the animals. Feeding the calves milk replacer so that humans can consume the milk that was meant for the calf is cruel and wrong.


text:
While showing an impressive growth prenatally, the human brain is not completed at birth. There is considerable brain growth during childhood with dynamic changes taking place in the human brain throughout life, probably for adaptation to our environments.

Evidence is accumulating that brain structure is under considerable genetic influence [Peper et al., 2007]. Puberty, the transitional phase from childhood into adulthood, involves changes in brain morphology that may be essential to optimal adult functioning. Around the onset of puberty gray matter volume starts to decrease, while white matter volume is still increasing [Giedd et al., 1999].

Recent findings have shown, that variation in total gray and white matter volume of the adult human brain is primarily (70--90%) genetically determined [Baare et al, 2001] and in a recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain study with 45 monozygotic and 61 dizygotic 9-year-old twin-pairs, and their 87 full siblings also high heritabilities have been found [Peper et al, in preparation]. Thus, while environmental influences may play a role in later stages during puberty, around the onset of puberty brain volumes are already highly heritable.

Hilleke Hulshoff Pol presents persuasive evidence how genetic factors influence the brain structure opening new insights into the reciprocal gene-environment developmental pathways.

GENETIC INFLUENCES

Twin studies have also shown that genetic effects vary regionally within the brain, with high heritabilities of frontal lobe volumes (90--95%), moderate estimates in the hippocampus (40--69%), and environmental factors influencing several medial brain areas.

However, the mechanisms by which interaction between genes and environment occur throughout life as well as dynamics of brain structure and its association with brain functioning still remain unknown. Twin and family studies and newly evolving genetic approaches start to give us a glimpse as to which genes and (interacting) environmental influences are shaping our brains.

Brain structure -- measured macroscopically using MRI -- and the dynamic changes therein, have a functional relevance.

Studies revealed that total brain volume is positively correlated with general intelligence. In healthy subjects, the level of intellectual functioning has been positively associated with whole brain, gray, and white matter volumes [Thompson et al, 2001; Posthuma et al, 2002]. More focally, several brain areas were found to be correlated with intelligence. Interestingly, it was also shown that the trajectory changes in cortical thickness throughout adolescence are associated with the level of intelligence.

Furthermore, a common set of genes may also cause the association between brain structure and cognitive functions. However, in elderly twins, the associations between frontotemporal brain volumes and executive function were found to be because of common environmental influences shared by twins from the same family [Carmelli et al., 2002].

These results point to the possibility that overlapping sets of genes or common environmental influences cause variation in two distinct phenotypes. It might be, for example, that a higher level of cognitive functioning leads a person to select an environment that also increases brain size. The genetic influence on brain size then simply reflects the genetic influences on cognition. Thus, the specific mechanism, pathways, and genes that are involved in human brain morphology and its association with cognitive functions remain elusive.

Although genetic effects on morphology of specific gray matter areas in the brain have been studied, the heritability of focal white matter was unknown until recently. Similarly, it was unresolved whether there is a common genetic origin of focal gray matter and white matter structures with intelligence. In our study involving 54 monozygotic and 58 dizygotic twin pairs and their 34 singleton siblings, verbal, and performal intelligence were found to share a common genetic origin with an anatomical neural network involving the frontal, occipital, and parahippocampal gray matter and connecting white matter of the superior occipitofrontal fascicle, and the corpus callosum [Hulshoff Pol et al., 2006].

For the genetic analyses, structural equation modeling and voxel-based morphometry were used. To explore the common genetic origin of focal gray matter and white matter areas with intelligence, cross-trait/cross-twin correlations were obtained in which the focal gray matter and white matter densities of each twin are correlated with the psychometric intelligence quotient of his/her cotwin.

The results of this study indicate that genes significantly influence white matter density of the superior occipitofrontal fascicle, corpus callosum, optic radiation, and corticospinal tract, as well as gray matter density of the medial frontal, superior frontal, superior temporal, occipital, postcentral, posterior cingulate, and parahippocampal cortices. Moreover, the results show that intelligence shares a common genetic origin with superior occipitofrontal, callosal, and left optical radiation white matter and frontal, occipital, and parahippocampal gray matter (phenotypic correlations up to 0.35).

These findings point to a neural network that shares a common genetic origin with human intelligence. Thus, it seems that the individual variation in morphology of areas involved in attention, language, visual, and emotional processing, as well as in sensorimotor processing are strongly genetically influenced.

In addition, unique environmental factors influenced vast gray matter and white matter areas surrounding the lateral ventricles (up to 0.50). This finding coincides with the significant environmental influences on lateral ventricle volume [common (0.58) and unique (0.42) with no significant contributions of genes] that was reported previously in this twin sample [Baaré et al., 2001].

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS

Considering the high heritabilities for global brain volumes and particular focal brain densities and thicknesses, the search for genes that are involved in brain growth, aging, and brain structure maintenance is important. Such knowledge can help us understand normal developmental and age-associated changes in individual variation in brain functioning.

Moreover, it enhances our knowledge of individual variation in brain functioning and facilitates the interpretation of the morphological changes found in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia [van Haren et al., 2007]. Also, it allows future efforts to find particular genes responsible for brain structures to be concentrated in areas that are under considerable genetic influence [Hulshoff Pol et al., 2006].

A genetic approach to find genes involved in brain structure that has been applied in several studies is that of diseases with a clear genetic etiology such as Huntington's disease, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and Velocardiofacial syndrome. A review reveals for these diseases besides disease specific brain changes, decreases in total brain, white matter, and hippocampus volumes, irrespective of the genes and/or chromosomes involved. This suggests that many genes are probably involved in the individual variation of these measures [Peper et al., in press].

It is important to investigate which environmental factors have an influence on the expression of genes (as found in DNA-methylation). Additionally, the study of interaction between genes and environmental factors is warranted. Furthermore, the simultaneous effects of multiple genes and possibly the interaction among genes, also needs investigation as the high heritability of a complex quantitative phenotype such as brain volume cannot be explained by a single-gene polymorphism.

CONCLUSION

MRI studies in twins indicate that, given the basic additive genetic model, overall brain volume in adulthood is highly heritable.

To test for influences of genetic, common, and unique environmental factors or interactions between genetic and environmental influences. twin studies carried out in large and more homogenous samples, analyzed with advanced quantitative genetic methods are needed.

To investigate the stability of genetic and environmental influences onto functional neural networks in human brain longitudinal twin studies in childhood as well as in adulthood are needed since brain volume changes dynamically throughout life.

New brain-imaging methods, such as DTI-fiber tracking and resting state functional MRI, allow to study the heritability of neural networks underlying brain functioning.

These new methods, in coherence with new genetic approaches, will enable us to further disentangle which genes and environmental factors and interactions therein influence human brain structure throughout life.

REFERENCES

Peper JS, Brouwer RM, Boomsma DI, Kahn RS, Hulshoff Pol HE. Genetic influences on human brain structure: a review of brain imaging studies in twins. Hum Brain Mapp 2007;28:464-473

Giedd JN, Blumenthal J, Jeffries NO, Castellanos FX, Liu H, Zijdenbos A, Paus T, Evans AC, Rapoport JL. Brain development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal MRI study. Nat Neurosci 1999;2:861-863

Hulshoff Pol HE, Schnack HG, Posthuma D, Mandl RC, Baare WF, van Oel C, van Haren NE, Collins L, Evans AC, Amunts K, Burgel U, Zilles K, de Geus EJ, Boomsma DI, Kahn RS. Genetic contributions to human brain morphology and intelligence. J Neurosci 2006;26:10235-10242

Carmelli D, Reed T, DeCarli C. A bivariate genetic analysis of cerebral white matter hyperintensities and cognitive performance in elderly male twins. Neurobiol Aging 2002;23:413--420

Baaré WFC, Hulshoff Pol HE, Boomsma DI, Posthuma D, de Geus EJC, Schnack HG, van Haren NEM, van Oel CJ, Kahn RS. Quantitative genetic modeling of variation in human brain morphology. Cereb Cortex 2001;11:816--824

van Haren NE, Hulshoff Pol HE, Schnack HG, Cahn W, Mandl RC, Collins DL, Evans AC, Kahn RS. Focal Gray Matter Changes in Schizophrenia across the Course of the Illness: A 5-Year Follow-Up Study. Neuropsychopharmacology 2007;32:2057-2066

Posthuma D, de Geus EJ, Baare WF, Hulshoff Pol HE, Kahn RS, Boomsma DI. The association between brain volumeand intelligence is of genetic origin. Nat Neurosci 2002;5:83--84

Thompson PM, Cannon TD, Narr KL, van Erp T, Poutanen VP,Huttunen M, Lonnqvist J, Standertskjold-Nordenstam CG, Kaprio J, Khaledy M, Dail R, Zoumalan CI, Toga AW. Genetic influences on brain structure. Nat Neurosci2001;4:1253--1258

question: Summarize the influences of genetics and environment on brain development.

answer: There is a lot of evidence that the human brain is influenced by genes as well as the environment. New research shows that the variation in total gray and white matter is mainly genetically determined. Environmental influence, however, plays a later stage influence when it comes to brain volumes. While the cognitive parts of the brain are generally influenced by genes, the environment plays an important part in developing the frontotemporal brain volume and executive functions.

question: According to the passage, why does the main environmental influence in brains does not occur before puberty?


text:
Hey Reddit! This is a short I wrote for my schools writing competition last semester. Somehow I won! I was super happy, but the school is rather small, so I thought I'd reach out for some feedback from a source with a broader opinion. Thanks for taking your time to read this!

**A Captain's Oath**

Golden stalks of grain danced in the wind as we sped past them. The field around me undulated in the wind like a tumultuous sea. The setting sun bathed the world in red and orange, glaring harshly through my back seat window. Dust from the road coated the glass, masking the outside world in a hazy gauze.

Lost in a world of my own, I imagined the oncoming truck to be a majestic galleon, flying the royal colors of the evil king.

“Helmsman! Bring er’ round to broadside!” I shouted to my mother in the front seat. She jumped, swerving our car out of the lane onto the shoulder of the road. The car behind us honked ferociously as it sped around us.

“What did I say? Stop your stupid games, sit down, and shut up!” She spat.

“Aye, captain,” I murmured quietly, so she wouldn’t hear. I returned to my window, defeated.

I tried to make out the murky shapes in the distance. Was that a sea serpent peeking its head above the waves? Had some monster of the deep braved the airy world to satisfy its curiosity of the land dwellers?  I turned to my mother, desperate to question her about the “lock-less” monster the older kids at school had warned me about. But Mother didn’t appreciate questions. I looked back to the window, watching for more monsters.

I tried to give up my musing to watch the lines of the road zip by. The tiny reflectors picked up our car headlights and gleamed brilliantly. I couldn’t help but imagine a group of sea creatures flaunting their fluorescent bodies. Our vessel glided over the glassy waters they danced together in, oblivious of the magic below it.

Every summer we made this trip. We spent hours on empty highways in silence, save for the occasional static filled radio channel or empty conversation. We were headed to my father’s house, or in my mind, home.

I treasured the few precious holidays I spent with him. Normally, he would have met us halfway to liberate me, but he had been called to an important meeting. I imagined how I would have rejoiced in my freedom, shouting orders to my father.

*“Veer slightly right, Captain!”* I would have commanded.

*“Nay, landluver! Tis starboard ye’ be wantin!”* He would have replied in his best seafaring accent.

I groaned in frustration.

I hated how boring it was with her. My choice of literature quickly became contraband. “Magic and fantasy,” she would say, “are inappropriate for a young christian boy.” Video games and secular music were often subjects of debate as well, and she usually confiscated anything she could lay her hands on.

Imagination was my only refuge when my mother came home howling and sobbing again. It became my best friend when she would announce year after successive year that we would be moving, so she could find a new job or meet a new man. I often wondered where “home” would be when I returned from my visits.

So, instead of reading my copy of Harry Potter tucked neatly away in a corner pocket of my backpack, or playing on the GameBoy I’d smuggled in my jacket, I watched the road speed by.

My imagination became the adventure I longed for. There I could be the handsome airship pilot, standing behind a polished wooden helm, studying the clouds drift lazily below me. Sometimes I was an edgey detective, tailing a suspicious broad in a rainy, monochrome street. Other days, I was a wizened and greying wizard standing in my tower above the city, creating a spectacle of light for the people below to marvel at. When it rained I was a dark and mysterious ranger, inching my way through a forest and searching for my prey. Most days I was the captain of a sea vessel, strong and courageous, barking orders to my crew.

The sun had set and the moon stood vigil over the land. The ever silent sentinel cast light over the sea of grain. I wondered what kind of crew would be bunking on my ship at this time of night. Would my ship be manned by the most dastardly dogs of the rough seas? Would I pirate and loot the great, rich, pompous cities of the world and spread my wealth to the poor? Or would I be a member of the most dashing and refined men to ever set sail, treading new waters for kings? I liked to imagine I would be the former.

“Son,” my mother interrupted my thoughts, “Look, I know I’m hard on you sometimes, and moving to and fro all the time isn’t easy for you,” She turned to me, her face stern and beautiful as always, “And I’m sorry. But I love you very much, and I only want what’s best for the both of us.” Her face softened as she turned back to the road. “It’s hard for me too.”

I sat silently, my imagination stilled.

“I know sometimes you think of moving to your father’s house like you other siblings did, but I need someone to be the man of the house, son,” she said. “Please don’t leave me, okay? Will you promise to stay and be my captain?”

She was right, I wanted to escape sometimes, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her alone. Besides, she could take away my books and games, but my imagination was my own.

“Aye” I promised her.

And that seemed to make everything okay.

title: [RF] A Captain's Oath

question: If the narrator and his parents didn't divorce, what would his life be like?

answer: From this story, one would know that the narrator's parents divorced, and he chose to escape reality by immersing himself in his fantasy. Since the divorce, his mum has had to drive him to his father's for the holidays. And because his mother yearns for the affection of another man, the narrator often wondered where his new home would be whenever he returned from his visits to his father's. To some extent, we might infer from this narrative that the narrator may have had a simpler and easier upbringing if not for the divorce.

question: What was the relationship between the narrator and his mother?

answer: The narrator's mother was strict, hard on him, and annoyed by his fantasies. His father often pampered him, so he felt more at ease with him. His mother said that magic and fantasy were unacceptable for a young Christian child. The narrator was fed up with the monotony of their relationship. She frequently argued about video games and secular music, confiscating anything she could get her hands on. So, anytime he was around her, he longed for the adventure of his imagination. Year after year, she'd announce their move to a new location to find work or a new boyfriend that whenever the narrator returned from his father's, he'd wonder where home was. Despite her imperfections, the narrator couldn't bear the thought of leaving his mother alone, especially since his siblings had gone to live with their father.


text:
The new publishing house of Quality Games has announced the release of a new version of historical Rpg-Lex Arcana, a game that became a real cult.

Lex Arcana is a role-playing game set in ancient Rome, or better, in a setting in which the Roman Empire has not fallen, but has withstood the attacks of the barbarian peoples.

Simple setting (like) history? Decidedly no, because in Lex's world of Arcane Magic exists and, indeed, it is strongly practiced and declined according to the divination arts are actually practiced in ancient Rome, such as the techniques of good Wishes.

Speaking of the game system, often reminiscent of Lex Arcana, as one of the first Rpgs to have introduced the use of d3 and using the nut-feature, all the elements that when you came out of this game were almost novelties.

A setting that combines the historic and the fantastic, in a game that has made the history of the GdR Italian.[]

In fact, Lex Arcana came out in the ’90s, when, for many players, very few compared to the numbers of the market today, the GdR of ancient Rome was often the only alternative to Dungeons and Dragons; when the GdR were sold in a box and them was in the toy store.

Many have started role-playing with Lex Arcana, and this remains a title engraved in the memory of many players.

Quality Games, a new publishing house that includes important names in the world of the GdR as a Leo Colovini, Dario de Toffoli, Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello, has announced plans to inaugurate its activities with a bang, publishing a new edition, updated and revised of the Lex Arcana.

The goal, as stated by Andrea Angiolino, the Creative Director of Quality Games, is in fact to recreate this famous role-playing game so that you can relive the first players of the atmospheres and spells of the GdR, but also to get to know Lex Arcana, the new audience of players.

A goal that is put in practice, thanks to a team of the absolute and unquestioned experts in the field, who have years of experience now employed in the creation of new titles for the role-playing game.

I admit it, I've never played a Lex Arcana, and in many ways, I belong to the category of new role players, but I often hear and read about this Rpg and I can't wait to try it out (a game about ancient Rome, not me, I do certainly miss!).

In short, if the premises are these, and if you part with a title of the likes of Lex Arcana, we can expect great things from Quality Games!

The article The historic Rpg-Lex Arcana, is back with a new edition of branded Quality Games comes from Justnerd.en.

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Your blog talks about THE HISTORIC RPG-LEX ARCANA, IS BACK WITH A NEW EDITION OF BRANDED QUALITY GAMES? Contact Us to be indexed in the BitFeed Network

question: What kind of game is Lex Arcana?

answer: It is a role-playing game set in ancient Rome

question: What kind of power system is used in the game?

answer: Magic.

question: When was Lex Arcana released?

answer: In the 90s.

question: What is the latest news on the game?

answer: It is being re-released again with updated graphics and data.

question: Write a ~5 sentence summary.

answer:
Lex Arcana was released in the 90s. The game is a magic-based RPG set in a Roman fantasy setting. Lex Arcana garnered a cult following back when it was released. the game was seen then as an alternative to Dungeons and Dragons.

Quality Games, a new publishing house in charge of Lex Arcana is planning to release an updated version of the game soon.