Canadian Immigration - Harriet Tubman

Immigration has always been one of the hottest issues in many countries and Canada is not an exception. All too often exploited by political parties, it still incites different reactions among ordinary people whose opinions on the issue differ considerably. Nowadays, the prevailing belief is that immigrants in Canada represent one of the country's invaluable assets in practically all spheres of life. The conditions for the new arrivers are constantly improving and that's why more and more foreigners choose Canada as their new home. However, not everyone knows the hardships that some immigrants had to go through in order to get to Canada several decades ago. One of those who contributed a great deal to alleviate these hardships was Harriet Tubman - a woman who saved a number of slaves by providing them with a network of safe houses and many other necessities on their way from the United States to Canada.

Harriet Tubman's relationship with Canada was the result of her frequent voyages with American slaves who escaped from their masters. Canada was the country that welcomed her family and from which Harriet could plan her secret trips to bring more and more slaves from the United States. The system she later developed with the help of other abolitionists was known as the Underground Railroad - a network of people willing to provide all kinds of support to the slaves escaping to the North or to Canada. From the historical perspective the system is compared to the American Revolution in a way it united people in their anger against certain principles that they believed were detrimental to the whole nation. What really mattered during this particular period was the wisdom with which Harriet pursued her goals. Though she never learnt to read or write she was led by her natural abilities acquired during the time spent as a slave in Maryland. Above all it was Harriet's perfect sense for orientation in the country she was forced to abandon a few years ago. Her desire to be free was so strong that she rather preferred death to living as a slave. "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other;... ". In the eyes of those who found a new way of life in Canada Tubman became a symbol of leadership for which she earned the nickname Moses - a religious hero who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Similarly, Canada was the promised land for a great number of African-Americans as well as the place where Tubman was finally united with her own family. For a certain period of her life she herself settled in St. Catharines - a village with the largest number of fugitive slaves from the United States.

Harriet Tubman's life was full of personal deceptions and suffering. Yet she was able to overcome all of this and use her own experience for the good of others at a time when the future of the black community in the Americas was unpredictable. She strove unceasingly to fight for the human rights of all slaves living under oppression and tyranny. Not only did she save many of them during her lifetime but she also inspired many others who followed her example and contributed to the gradual decay of slavery in the United States as well as the development of Canadian immigration.

Fun Outdoor Learning With Kids

Some of the best childhood skills and development goals are learnt passively, whilst outside and having fun. As a parent, it is all too easy to obsess about literacy and numeracy development whilst excluding a more holistic approach to education that sees a child expressing themselves naturally and following their own instinctive creativity. Outdoor learning is a great way to engage your child through their desire to play, build and imagine - developing skills intuitively, organically and through trial and error. But when it comes to the range of outdoor learning resources available, it is easy to understand why parents get confused.

Much that is available online promises to help your child with a particular skill or ability, but how do you know it is suitable for them? They key thing is to tailor anything you buy to your child and make sure that they are going to be interested before you stump up the cash. Although many manufacturers are keen to emphasise the universality of what they provide, only you know your child well enough to realise that forcing them to play a game which will help with phonics development will last all of five minutes if they are more interested in making shapes in the mud. Instead, find something constructive, like letter pebbles that can be incorporated into building games, or an outdoor chalkboard that will let them unleash their creativity in a way that is not subject to artificially imposed boundaries.

Outdoor learning resources need not be high-tech or expensive to be effective. Just hunting for letters as you walk down the street, or using crayons to make wax rubbings of sign numbers are great ways of engaging a child with the outside world and showing the relationship between concepts and things. Some children prefer to explore things rather than being told about how they work and if that is the case, then find a way of stimulating their minds - incorporating their interest into the outside world.

A nature trail is a great way to stimulate a child's imagination and ideas that have been explored outside can be brought back home to prompt them in other games and activities. Outdoor learning is not just about developing new skills in the orthodox sense, it is also about giving them the confidence and ability to engage with the world in new ways and help them to navigate their own learning experience with ease. By doing so, you ensure that nothing is hindering them on the road to great educational success.

Encourage Learning In The Great Outdoors

Outdoor learning is an integral part of a child's development and is a vital part of their ability to develop new skills and core competencies. In an age of electronic diversions, where media rich games abound on every platform, from tablet computers, to smart phones and handheld gaming devices, it is not easy to encourage children to develop their learning skills outdoors. This is especially the case now that parents are ever more anxious about external threats from strangers and traffic, along with the limited resources available to those who live in a city centre. But it is important to realise that outdoor learning does something that cannot be replicated indoors, no matter how sophisticated the technical wizardry on offer.

By letting children develop their imagination and natural tendency to play without being provided with someone else's framing narrative, they can strengthen their literacy and communication skills, as well as supporting their ability to mediate between conceptual and literal issues. Outdoor learning is also the key to starting a healthy relationship between exercise and your child, showing them the fun that can be had from outdoor games away from the type of potentially competitive activities that might be found in school.

Children learn best when they are having fun, so it is important that any outdoor activities engage them imaginatively. If they enjoy hands-on tasks such as building, then use alphabet blocks to explore shapes and numbers, whilst getting them to think about how different forms of building affect strength. If you child is really interested in the natural world, you'll have a wealth of opportunities to examine lots of topics from physics and biology, to the weather and maths. Similarly, taking the chance to splash about in water is a great way of introducing them to ideas surrounding subjects as diverse as gravity, the colour spectrum and chemistry.

If you are looking to buy educational resources, it is a good idea to check prices online as you can find some fantastic deals and offers. With a wide range of toys, games and learning resources, you will be spoilt for choice. But just remember that anything you buy is worthless without the time and attention to ensure that your child is really engaging with the item. Nothing can equal a parent's attention and taking the time to explain concepts and provide a starting place for play and imagination is vital. Whatever you do choose to buy, make sure that the shop (whether online or no the High Street) has a returns policy in case you find that an item is not suitable after all.

5 Steps To Creating A Rare Earth Magnet

The rare earth magnets so important to current and future technologies are produced in a five step process. It begins with getting the raw materials out of the ground and end with manufacture of magnets designed for some particular use. All five steps are currently concentrated in Asia, particularly in China.

Mining and concentration

Mining rare earths is often carried out either by an open-pit process or by in-situ leaching. Once the ore-bearing material is out of the ground, it is run through a crusher or mill to break it into small particles, and then the actual ore is separated out in a process called concentration. This usually involves gravity separation, froth flotation or magnetic separation.

Getting oxides from ore

The result of separation is ore, the raw, unprocessed rock that contains rare earth metals. The actual metal is present in the form of oxides, which are made up of one or more atoms of rare earth elements chemically bonded to one or more oxygen atoms. The process of separating oxide from ore is a chemical one, and may involve roasting, acid leaching, salt or caustic fusion or high temperature sulphation. A second step in the process is the separation of the rare earth oxides from one another, which requires myriad steps of sequential solvent extraction or ion exchange.

From oxides to metals

Elemental rare earth metals may be recovered from their oxides in three primary ways: electrolysis, precipitation and gaseous reduction. Metallothermic reduction employs sodium in a calcium chloride bath to extract metal from rare earth oxides. Calcination, in contrast, uses only heat; the oxide's temperature is raised in an over or furnace to extract metal. Other processes, such as vacuum distillation, sorption or oxidation-reduction employing mercury amalgamate, are useful in certain circumstances.

Producing magnet alloy powders

Commercial magnets are not made from pure rare earth metals. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, for instance, are made of an alloy of these three elements. To produce the alloy, the elements are added, in powder form, to a vacuum induction furnace in specific ratios and then heated. The resulting alloy is cooled and then broken down by chemical and physical means into powder.

Making magnets

Magnets are made in two main ways. The classical process involves heating and compressing the magnet powder until it coalesces into a mass. The bonded magnet process, also called rapid solidification, requires melt-spinning a thread of neodymium-iron-boron alloy containing nano-scale grains in random magnetic orientation, which is pulverized, combined with a polymer and molded into magnets.

Current production of rare earth oxides is almost totally confined to China. 97 per cent of mining, concentration and separation takes place in China, as does almost all refining. 75 to 80 per cent of magnet powder production and magnet manufacture also take place in China. Up to 25 per cent of these processes also occurs in Japan, with most of the rest occurring in Europe.

Tutoring Is Essential for Every Student

Millions of students across the nation need additional help both in and outside of normal school hours in an array of subjects. Students who are struggling in math, science, social studies, history, or reading and writing require tutoring services so that they may have a chance to continue on to the next grade. For those who do not receive these services, continuing their education can be a massive challenge and burden to the state public school system.

Many tutoring services are available in mid to large cities across the nation. These services can often sit down with students as a class or one-on-one in order to enhance their understanding in an array of subjects and disciplines. For students who are struggling in a specific area, tutors can help those overcome challenges and hurdles by focusing on their weaknesses in cognitive interpretation. Those students who require this type of help often experience a dramatic increase in understand of their subject areas, approaches, and handling of a given class.

There are many tutoring services that exist for an array of services. Many college students are often available to help those in lower courses, while other companies establish places within the marketplace to help younger students in dire need of math and reading assistance. As such, many companies who provide these services are experiencing an increase in demand as public schools are strained to allocate additional resources to struggling students. As parents and guardians are also strained, often working longer hours for less money, those companies able to assist these students at a reasonable rate are being used more and more during afterschool hours and on weekends.

Those who are servicing this need are indirectly helping the cause of public education. Those students with special needs in subjects such as math, reading, and social science are being helped by supplemental services provided by individuals and companies that make themselves available for this demand. Nevertheless, as long as school systems do not efficiently allocate resources to its student base, there will be a need for this form of educational help that will often be serviced by private entities.

Despite this, students should always approach help if they find that they need assistance with their studies. While those resources may be funded by the public educational entity or through a private business, those students with educational needs should be serviced by whatever resource is available. As such, parents and schools should take particular consideration to those entities willing to step up and provide students with additional educational help. If students require the additional help and resources to pass a given class or subject, those resources should be incentivized to help students when teachers and parents are not available. If these are taken into consideration, it may be possible to supplement a child's education with the resources to help he or she with problems they may be experiencing with a specific subject area.

Hotel Forecasting Strengthens Future Business Gains

Investors, owners, and managers are tied together in attempting to maximize a hotel's revenue and minimize costs. In order to do so, all three need to have sound hotel forecasting skills in order to adjust selling strategies and manage investments. Hotel financial analysis is based on the ability to forecast cash flow, taking into account all aspects of the hotel business. Hospitality managers, general managers, revenue managers and any other hospitality professional responsible for financial performance would benefit from learning the intricacies of hotel forecasting.

Forecasting is not perfect, nor should managers rely solely upon the calculations of future earnings. Forecasts are only as effective as the preliminary assumptions. Managers must learn to develop and gather data in order to develop strong forecasting that will accurately project demand and control room availability. That includes quantifying both existing and latent demands. The latent demand is dependent upon selling strategies as well as the dynamic micro and macro environment that exists. The manager must take into account the impact of all new properties, from shops to competing hotels. Accurate forecasting is difficult and requires complex hotel financial analysis. When done correctly, it will benefit every aspect of the hotel business.

Appropriate hotel forecasts utilize many different tools to interpret all of the hotel's data. Managers need to learn how to build booking curves, account for "pick-up," segment demand by market, group, and channel, calculate error, and account for its impact. A booking curve provides a visual reference for the pace at which people will reserve rooms. Keeping this data helps a manager analyze rate changes and trends that result in more or less bookings. Forecasting occupancy helps housekeeping and the restaurant accurately forecast their costs, thus preventing overspending on inventory. This data is also useful to the sales department to focus their effort on different times of the year based on projected occupancy. Collecting this data helps managers run hotels more efficiently, improving the business' bottom line and helping it expand.

A hotel needs to continue to invest in order to grow assets, but a hotel investment opportunity cannot be correctly appraised without accurate hotel forecasting of revenue and expenses that the property will produce. Owners ask that extensive hotel financial analysis take place to estimate the value of individual hotels. Proper forecasting allows managers to evaluate refinancing options in order to reduce debt costs and ultimately free up capital for investments. With the available capital, management needs to have thorough data on every aspect of the business to develop a strategic vision for where to invest. Information on the customers and their motivations for utilizing the hotel are crucial. This type of information empowers management to benchmark a property's revenue and expense performance against the market. Management with a firm grasp on future occupancy, average rate, cash flows and real estate value will be a much more valuable to the success of a hotel business. Forecasting the future in a business is not easy, but it is necessary.

Why Are There So Many Different Shapes Of Magnets?

Although we may be most familiar with magnets used as decoration or for advertising purposes, they are essential tools used in construction and industry. Magnets are also important to our everyday lives. They are used in computers, speakers, televisions, elevators, and fax machines, to name just a few. Considering the variety, it's not surprising that they come in a number of shapes and sizes.

Why Are Magnets Found in Such a Variety of Shapes and Sizes?

The shape and size of a magnet are important for a number of reasons. First of all, the shape of a magnet determines the direction of the fields that surround the magnet fields are what allow to attract and repel metal objects and other. The direction of the field surrounding the magnet, in turn, determines the uses of the magnet.

Another aspect that is important in terms of the particular uses of magnets is the fact that magnetic power is strongest at the poles. The simplest has two poles, traditionally designated as north and south. While these opposite ends exert considerable power, the strength of the field is weaker along the sides of the magnet.

We are all familiar with the standard with a single north pole, and a single south pole. However, the shape of a magnet can be manipulated to increase the number of north and south poles. For example, a "quadrupole" has two north poles and two south poles. A "sextupole", as its name suggests, has six poles: three north poles and three south poles.

Magnet Shapes and Uses

In order to better understand how a magnet's shape determines its use, it is helpful to consider a few examples.

Bar are most familiar to us from everyday use. For example, bar are used in cabinet fasteners that keep cabinet doors securely closed. Bar magnets are also used for refrigerator that can be used to hang papers and other things on this kitchen appliance.

Horseshoe magnets, in contrast, are considerably stronger than bar magnets. In fact, their shape doubles their strength because the poles are bent to point in the same direction. These particularly strong are used in engineering and construction to retrieve hard to reach metal objects.

How Important Is the Shape of the Magnet?

The importance of the shape of the magnet depends on its intended use. For everyday, household use, shape is not very important. That's because these types of magnets are used for relatively light-weight tasks. However, in construction and industry, magnet shape is particularly important. In these cases, magnets are used for specialized tasks that require greater strength and accuracy.