Dear Minister K Shanmugam,
The Humanist Society (Singapore) was heartened to hear about your meeting with members of Sayoni, (a Singapore-based community of lesbian, bisexual and transgender women) on 27th November 2012. We support your decision to connect with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) citizens as a constituent part of our society who contribute to our economy, protect our citizens and serve our country.
The Humanist Society (Singapore)(HSS) is a registered society in Singapore for humanists, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and other like-minded people. Humanism is a non-theistic ethical life stance affirming the human right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based...
Lifestyle
Dear TSHA,
First, let me express my profound appreciation for the goldmine of information found in The Handbook of Texas. I regularly use this free, online reservoir of knowledge when further learning about the geopolitical area called Texas and when preparing lessons for my students, especially as I am now teaching Texas History.
My concern emerged this evening. I had a few extra minutes, and I was looking for some additional information for my lesson about LGBT peoples and rights in Texas for a lesson I am putting together. The Handbook of Texas currently has no entries of which to speak. Zero out of over 26,000 articles.
“Gay” appears in reference to the town, hill, and the last name, with the one exception of this article, which mentions that two of four members of the Austin...
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Dear Vogue,
You recently published an article titled “We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty” by Partricia Garcia. You’d think, as a big-bootied woman, that I might greet this article with open arms, support, excitement, and a sigh of relief, but you’d be wrong. So wrong. I hated your article.
For women like me, acceptance of a big booty is not a fad isolated to a singular era. Big butts are not bell-bottoms, nor are they grungy flannels, overalls, skinny jeans, or any other fashion trend that comes and goes with the seasons. Girls with big asses can’t ditch them as soon as they go out of style. Our asses are our bodies, not an accessory. I did not see a big ass on the runway at New York Fashion Week and run out to the nearest Forever 21 to get a knock off so that I could be...
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Dear IHE-Cardiology Community,
As announced previously, the ESC is planning to perform an IHE-cardiology demonstration during the next meeting to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, between the 3 rd and the 7th of September 2005. During this symposium, three cardiology integration profiles (Cardiac Catheterization Workflow, Echocardiography Workflow, Retrieve ECG for Display) and the affiliated information technology infrastructure integration profiles (Retrieve Information for Display, Time Synchronization) will be demonstrated in real time during a hands-on workshop.
The ESC is delighted to announce that it has been able to engage Dr. Marco Eichelberg (OFFIS, Oldenburg) as the technical project manager for this demonstration. Dr. Eichelberg is very experienced in DICOM standardization...
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Dear Greek Brothers,
It’s been an agonizing year for us. Violence abounds both within chapters and against those who trust us. Hazing has continued and had led to the deaths of a Sig Ep pledge at Clemson, a Kappa Sigma pledge at West Virginia, and one of my PiKapp brothers at Cal State-Northridge. Everywhere I turn – from The Atlantic to just down the road from me in Baltimore – there is evidence of rape committed and covered up on our campuses and within Greek Life. Though some may point to the “discrepancies” found in the sensational Rolling Stone/UVA rape article as proof that this situation is overblown, Mother Jones and Vox tell us that violence is alive and well. A “boys will be boys” culture of violence continues on campus and needs to be uprooted. Only when we grow up to be...
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Dear Royal Society
Charles Darwin (FRS), Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Dawkins (FRS) and others, among whom I include myself, acknowledge that Patrick Matthew (1831) - in his book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture - published the full theory of natural slection many years before Darwin and Wallace put pen to private notepaper on the topic and 27 years before Darwin and Wallace (1858) had their papers read before the Linnean Society.
Matthew uniquely coined his discovery the 'natural process of selection' and 28 years later Darwin uniquely shuffled Matthew's term into his own unique re-coinage the 'process of natural selection'. Darwin and Wallace each claimed to have arrived at exactly the same theory, used the same terminology and the same unique explanatory examples,...
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Dear Minister,
As organizations that have an interest in ensuring that everyone in Canada has equal access to income security, we are alarmed by the inclusion of sections 172 and 173 in your recently introduced omnibus Budget Bill C-43. These sections amend the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act and are essentially Private Members Bill C-585, which was introduced earlier this year.
Many of our organizations are health and social service agencies and legal and community advocates that work directly with refugee claimants and others with precarious immigration status. The change that would be made to the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act as a result of these provisions would allow provinces to restrict access to social assistance for refugee claimants and others who...
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Dear Speaker Heastie,
I’m writing on behalf of the Northeast Charter Schools Network (formerly the New York Charter Schools Association), the membership organization for the state’s charter schools. Recently there has been heated debate over the performance of charter schools, and the role these schools should play as we work to improve education.
This letter is meant to provide context and a response to the allegations made in a recent letter sent to you from some of your Assembly colleagues.
We respectfully take exception to the overall intent of the letter and the allegations painting the dedicated educators working in charter schools as seeking to somehow shirk the responsibility of serving all students.
First, the letter effectively “moves the goal posts” for what...
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Dear Ecology Letters and the British Ecological Society ,
I am writing to ask that you support the scientific good by allowing the submission of papers that have been posted as preprints. I or my colleagues have reached out to you before without success, but I have heard through various grapevines that both of you are discussing this possibility and I want to encourage you to move forward with allowing this important practice.
The benefits of preprints to science are substantial. They include:
More rapid communication and discussion of important scientific results
Improved quality of published research by allowing for more extensive pre-publication peer review
A fair mechanism for establishing precedence that is not contingent the idiosyncrasies of formal peer review
A way for...
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Dear Prime Minister:
Many Americans love Canada and the specific benefits that have come to our country from our northern neighbor’s many achievements (see Canada Firsts by Nader, Conacher and Milleron). Unfortunately, your latest proposed legislation—the new anti-terrorism act—is being described by leading Canadian civil liberties scholars as hazardous to Canadian democracy.
A central criticism was ably summarized in a February 2015 Globe and Mail editorial titled “Parliament Must Reject Harper’s Secret Policeman Bill,” to wit:
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper never tires of telling Canadians that we are at war with the Islamic State. Under the cloud of fear produced by his repeated hyperbole about the scope and nature of the threat, he now wants to turn our domestic spy agency...
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