Rod licence money improves Great Ouse by MBAH ADIB

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Tugas Semester II ( An. Moh Adib )

mbah adib

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Mei7 pada 7:59 PM

Rod licence money improves Great Ouse

A section of bank on the Great Ouse at Stony Stratford has been repaired using money from rod licence sales

Electro fishing

The bank had worn as a result of livestock and flow pressures from Stony Sluice. It has now been reinforced and protected using willow bundles. The work has provided an instant habitat and as the ‘live’ willow grows it will further stabilise the bank preventing further erosion and the build up of silt.

The Environment Agency’s Ian Hirst, Fisheries and Biodiversity Team Leader for Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire, said:

Buying a rod licence supports our work to improve fishing and help improve rivers. Without this funding we would not be able to monitor our fish populations and make the right investments to improve the water environment.

His team worked with Milton Keynes’ Parks Trust and volunteers to repair the section of eroded bank on the Great Ouse at Stony Stratford.

Milton Keynes’ Parks Trust and their volunteers will look for other opportunities to apply their newly acquired skills and help make improvements to the river habitats in Milton Keynes over the next few years.

Rod licence funds also enable the Environment Agency to carry out routine monitoring of fish populations using electrofishing and netting. This information provides a good indication of the health of a river.

The team also monitors fish passes and habitat improvements to assess their efficiency and understand how successful they have been in helping migratory fish. Funds also support a 24/7 emergency response service; meaning Environment Agency staff are on hand should the lives of fish be threatened as a result of low oxygen levels or pollution.

All anglers need a valid licence to fish legally and by buying they also contribute to work to keep the environment in good shape.

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Creating a Reading Environment at Home BY ALFONSO

Creating a Reading Environment at Home

RIF considers family involvement essential to any child's success as a reader. Research has shown that by talking, singing, and reading to children, parents are turning on brain cells that are essential for a healthy child. Parents can build reading skills by interacting with their children. By encouraging babies and young children to communicate, parents are laying the foundation for later reading success.

Parents and other family members need to be involved in children's reading throughout their school years. Schools recognize the importance of parent involvement in students' progress and are increasingly encouraging parents to play a more active role.

Here are a few simple things that parents can do to create a healthy reading environment:

Make Reading Materials Available

To create a healthy reading environment, start with a good supply of reading materials—newspapers, magazines, books, and catalogs. It doesn't matter if they're owned or borrowed, new or used. What's important is that reading materials are a natural part of your home and everyday life. Set aside a spot in your home for a family library. You don't need much space; a corner of a room with a bookshelf, comfortable furniture, and adequate lighting will do. In choosing materials, remember that variety counts. Instead of focusing on the number of books, keep in mind the interests of each family member. A small collection of books thoughtfully gathered over time is better than a large collection that goes unread. Paperback and hardcover books, a dictionary, an atlas, songbooks, magazines for parents and kids, newspapers, and catalogs all have a place. Make sure your library includes something for everyone at every reading level.

Make books inviting to everyone. Sturdy bookcases, built-in shelves, and open magazine racks are ideal, but an orange crate works, too. Be sure to put reading material for youngest readers on the lowest shelves.

Be Reading Role Models

As much as they may deny it, most children want to be like their parents. Their lifelong habits start to form at the earliest ages, often by mimicking older members of the family. If they see you reading daily—both for function and for pleasure—they will more likely become avid readers themselves. If children see parents visiting libraries and checking out books, giving and receiving books as gifts, and borrowing and loaning books to friends, they will know their parents place a high value on reading.

Read Aloud to Children

Reading to children, even for a few minutes each day, prepares them to read and encourages a positive attitude toward reading. Children who are read to at home learn to read more easily, have a higher vocabulary, and are more likely to develop a love for reading than those who are not read to on a regular basis. Simply put, this cannot be done too early or too often. 

Encourage Personal Libraries

Children often want their own place to keep books that have special meaning for them. By encouraging children to set aside their personal favorites, you are helping them express their affection and respect for books. Here are some tips for helping children set up collections:

• Find a special place for books. If your child's room doesn't have a bookshelf or bookcase, use a box, basket, or other sturdy container. Plastic stacking cubes work well.
• As often as possible, let your children choose the books they want to add to their collection. A book-buying trip to a yard sale or bookstore is a fun Saturday activity.
• Take your children to the library regularly. Even a child with a well-stocked bookshelf needs a fresh supply of books. Encourage children to treat library books with the same care they show their own.
• Give your children books or magazine subscriptions as gifts.
• For babies and young toddlers, choose sturdy books that will survive rough handling. Board books, for example, have thick pages that can be turned easily and wiped clean.

Limit Television, Computers, and Video Games

For generations, education experts have been sounding the alarm about the harmful effects of too much television. The rise in popularity of the Internet and computer and video games only adds to the din of distractions pulling children away from more literary pursuits. While excellent educational programs and software exist, consumption of electronic media must be kept in check by parents. Limit children's television and computer use to make time for other activities, such as reading. Try not to use television and computers as rewards for reading (or denying them as punishment for not).

Source: RIF Motivational Activities Handbook.

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gas Bahasa Inggris From Bagus Atas Aji Semester II

bagus al ajma

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Apr22 pada 8:11 PM

Meet Australia’s Easter Bunny: the Long-Eared Greater Bilby

By Bec Crew | April 19, 2014 |  

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The greater bilby. Credit: Queensland State Government

Easter in Australia is pretty much the same as Easter elsewhere in the world. We do Easter egg hunts and put sad-looking yellow chickens with loose eyespots on display in straw nests and eat nothing but chocolate for three days straight. But there’s a war going on, and the Easter Bunny is at the centre of it.

The relationship between rabbits and Australia has always been strained at best. They were introduced in the 18th century with the First Fleet and following an 1859 release, spread out and bred like, well, rabbits. Since then, they’ve made themselves at home across 4.5 million square kilometres in the southern two thirds of the continent, and they’ve been wreaking havoc wherever they go. They’ve have been blamed as the single biggest factor in the loss of our native species thanks to competition of resources, alteration of the structure and composition of vegetation, and land degradation. And if you want to make friends with an Australian farmer, do not tell them about how cute you think bunnies are.

Will the real Easter Bunny please stand up. Rabbits around a waterhole at the myxomatosis trial enclosure on Wardang Island in 1938. Credit: National Archives of Australia

In 1907, a 1,833 kilometre-long rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an attempt to contain them. It took six years to build, and when it was completed, it was the single longest unbroken fence in the world. It was joined by two additional fences, but they never quite did the job. In the 1950s, the myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced and reduced the rabbit population from 600 million to 100 million in two years. Resistance crept up around the 1970s and ‘80s, and in 1996, the calicivirus was introduced. It had escaped quarantine the previous year to kill 10 million rabbits in the space of eight weeks. The deaths from both viruses are slow and horrendous, causing skin tumours, blindness, paralysis and bleeding from the eyes. Unfortunately this is what it took to protect our native species.

All of which is to say it’s not surprising that Australia would allow a rival Easter representative to get a look in, and this one’s just as fluffy, just as long-eared, and while it technically can’t hop, it sure can gallop.

“They look like they’ve been stuck together by a committee,” bilby conservationist, Tony Friend, once told the ABC. “Huge ears that belong to a rabbit, soft grey fur, a tail that’s stuck out the back like a tufted pencil, and they gallop around like a rocking horse. They’re so different to any other animals.”

Two bilby joeys born at Perth Zoo in April 2012. Credit: Perth Zoo

It’s thought that around 20 million years ago, the bilby branched off from its closest relative, the bandicoot. Today, it retains its very bandicoot-like elongated muzzle, but has a much longer tail with a lovely white tip, bigger ears, and a softer, silkier pelt. Growing up to 55cm long, they’re about the size of a rabbit, and they’re just as good at digging – they routinely construct spiral-shaped burrows up to three metres long and almost two metres deep. Their burrows need to be this deep because bilbies are desert-dwellers, keeping cool underground during the day and foraging for food after dark. They’re opportunistic feeders, taking up just about anything with their long, anteater-like tongues, including seeds, fungi, bulbs, grasshoppers, beetles, spiders and termites.

They’re also great at sex. Bilbies are able to breed from just six months old, and can produce around eight offspring every year. Their mating sessions can last for 18 hours at a time. The female’s gestation period lasts just two weeks, after which her bean-sized newborns will wriggle their way to her backward-opening pouch, which prevents soil from getting in when she’s burrowing. The still-developing joeys will live here for around 80 days, growing stronger and furrier, until they’re big enough to emerge and live in the burrow.

A chocolate Easter Bilby. Credit: iStockPhoto

Way back in 1968, a nine-year-old girl named Rose-Marie Dusting wrote a story called “Billy The Aussie Easter Bilby”. When she turned 20, she published it as a book, and over the following decade, her story inspired much public interest in this peculiar little marsupial. In 1991, the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia began an Easter Bilby campaign to replace the Easter Bunny, and while the campaign has since died down politically, a number of chocolate makers still distribute bilbies with their chocolate bunnies each Easter. And there’s arguably no better way of getting our kids interested in our native wildlife than covering them in chocolate.

This is especially important, because our bilbies are struggling. Two hundred years ago, the greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis), occupied more than 70% of mainland Australia. Since then, it’s disappeared from 80% of its former range, with a few remaining populations scattered in arid and semi-arid areas in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland. The lesser bilby (Macrotis leucura) went extinct some time around the 1950s.

While the greater bilby’s numbers across Australia are enough for it to be considered ‘vulnerable’, in Queensland it’s classified as endangered, with a wild population of between just 600 and 700 individuals living within a 100,000 square kilometre area. Reintroduction programs have been carried out by various state governments in earnest, with populations released successfully into reserves in South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland. The global population is thought to be sitting at around 10,000 individuals.

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tugas bahasa inggris M. Arief Saefudin

arief saefudin

Ke Saya

Apr22 pada 8:01 PM

Volcanoes That Act as Air-Conditioning for a Warming World

Many small eruptions over the past decade or so have helped restrain climate change

May 1, 2014 |By David Biello

GETTY IMAGES

    On Valentine's Day, Indonesia's Mount Kelud blew its top and coated villages up to 500 kilometers away with ash. At the same time, the eruption injected a small but consequential amount of sulfur dioxide 28 kilometers up into the stratosphere. Tiny droplets of sulfuric acid then reflected away incoming sunlight, helping to cool the planet. Such “small” eruptions—along with others at places like Manam, Soufrière Hills, Jebel at Tair and Eyjafjallajökull, to name a few of the 17 between 2000 and 2012—have helped slow the pace of global warming, according to work published in Nature Geoscience. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

    “The uptick in early 21st-century volcanism clearly was a contributing factor to the hiatus,” says atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, lead author of the report. The volcanoes did not act alone. There was also an unusually quiescent sun, air pollution from China's coal-fired power plants and the mysterious workings of the ocean. Santer adds, “The net impact was to offset part of the human-caused greenhouse gas warming.”

    In the meantime, global warming continues to gather strength, hidden behind volcanoes that may shutter their tops at any moment. Based on supersized eruptions such as Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, reflective aerosols would then fall to Earth within a few years at most, leaving the planet exposed to the full heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gases from human activities.

    If the volcanoes do not do their part, a last resort may be required—bring our own aerosols. Advocates of one form of geoengineering want to step in, injecting sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to augment or replace eruptions. Such deliberate tinkering with planetary-scale systems has been proposed as a fallback plan if climate change were to turn catastrophic, though at the cost of the stratospheric layer that helps to shield life from ultraviolet light. Sulfuric acid high in the sky has the unfortunate side effect of eliminating ozone. But given the inertia in reducing greenhouse gas pollution, the debate around geoengineering will undoubtedly linger longer than the aftermath of these small volcanic eruptions.

    This article was originally published with the title "The Little Volcanoes That Could."

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Globalization may already be familiar to you BY SUGENG

Good morning all, Alhamdulillah by the grace of Allah the Almighty God, now I can stand here in front of you all. At this moment we can meet in good condition. Now I will tell you about "The importance of protecting the environment"

Plants, people, animals and the environment are interdependence. Plants need a good environment for growing, animals need plants to eat, and human need everything to survive. Everything went as usual until the human who destroying it. No one of living things on the earth who can destroying it except the human.

Globalization may already be familiar to you . Globalization can accelerate the rate of economy anywhere. Technology developed over the years become a tool that can easily human works. Even to support it many new technologies are born for example a computer. Unfortunately, the speed of current technological improvement not followed by protecting awareness of surrounding environment. Massive oil drilling caused by the human vehicle is increasing along with increasing human populations from year to year. Finally, the waste produced from the vehicles, become one of the main factors polluted air around us. A lot of environmental damage that we often hear, for example, global warming ,acid rain, greenhouse effect, environmental pollution and so on.

The greenhouse effect caused by excessive carbon dioxide gas and causes global warming makes the earth hotter. The next phenomenon is acid rain, although it can prevent global warming but acid rain is more dangerous. humans are the main causes ! Start From now let's keep our environment for our grandchildren one day later. because no matter how small work you do, will be felt by our children and grandchildren one day later.

This is enough from me . sorry if there was a mistake, thank you for your attention.

By          : Sugeng

NIM       : 1311615 (SEMESTER II)

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