Social capital is a sociological concept used to refer to connections within and between social networks. Though there are a variety of related definitions, they tend to share the core idea that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so do social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.

Early attempts to define social capital focused on the degree to which social capital as a resource should be used for public good or for the benefit of individuals. It has been suggested that social capital can facilitate co-operation and mutually supportive relations in communities and would therefore be a valuable means of combating many of the social disorders inherent in modern societies.

Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital and the continued presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education. In areas where there is a high social capital, there is also a high education performance. When there is more parental participation in a child’s community and education, teachers have reported lower levels of student misbehavior.

It has been argued that one of the reasons social capital is so difficult to measure is that it is neither an individual nor a group level phenomenon, but one that emerges across discreet levels as individuals participate in groups. They argue that the metaphor of social capital may be misleading because unlike financial capital, which is a resource held by an individual, the benefits of forms of social organization are result of the participation of individuals in advantageously organized groups.

Turmeric is a rhizomatous herbaceous perennial plant of the ginger family. It is native to tropical South Asia. Plants are gathered annually for their rhizomes, and re-seeded from some of those rhizomes in the following season. They are dried and ground into a deep orange powder commonly used as a spice in curries. Its active ingredient is curcumin which has a distinctly earthy, slightly bitter, slightly hot peppery flavor and a mustardy smell.

Although most usage of Turmeric is in the form of powder from the roots, in some regions the leaves are used to wrap and cook food especially when on picnic in a field but at homes as well. This obviously takes place in areas where turmeric grown, since the leaves are used freshly picked. This imparts a distinct flavor but has medicinal value as well.

In Ayurvedic practices, turmeric has many medicinal properties and many in South Asia use it as a readily available antiseptic for cuts, burns and bruises. It is also used as an antibacterial agent.
It is taken in some Asian countries as a dietary supplement, which allegedly helps with stomach problems and other ailments. 

In the latter half of the 20th century, curcumin was identified as responsible for most of the biological effects of turmeric. In 2004, the U.S. National Institutes of Health had four clinical trials underway to study curcumin treatment for pancreatic cancer, multiple myeloma, Alzheimer’s, and colorectal cancer. The British Journal of Cancer reported a study that showed that curcumin can kill esophageal cancer cells in vitro. Curcumin also enhances the production of the brain-derived neurotrophic factor which supports nerve growth.

Turmeric is currently used in the formulation of some sunscreens. Turmeric paste is used by some Indian women to keep them free of superfluous hair. The paste is also applied to the bride and groom before marriage in some parts of India, where it is believed to give a glow to the skin and keep harmful bacteria away from the body.

Summum bonum is an expression used in medieval philosophy to describe the ultimate importance, the singular and most ultimate end which human beings are to pursue. The summum bonum is generally thought of as being an end in itself, and at the same time containing all other good. In Hinduism and other Eastern Religions, Summum bonum is cognate with such concepts as Dharma, Tao, Shreyas, Moksha, Liberation, Jeevan Mukti, and Self Realization.

The concept, as well as the philosophical and theological consequences drawn from the purported existence of a more or less clearly defined summum bonum, could be traced back to the earliest forms of monotheism. In the Western world, the concept was introduced by the neoplatonic philosophers, and described as a feature of the Christian God by Saint Augustine in On the Nature of Good, written circa 399. Augustine denies the positive existence of absolute evil, describing a world with God as the supreme good at the center, and defining different grades of evil as different stages of remoteness from that center.

Experience soon teaches that all desires cannot be satisfied, that they are conflicting, and that some good must be foregone in order to secure another. Hence the necessity of weighing the relative value of good, of classifying it, and of ascertaining which good must be procured at the loss of another. The result is the division of good into two great classes, the physical and the moral, happiness and virtue. Within either class it is comparatively easy to determine the relation of particular good things to one another, but it has proven far more difficult to fix the relative excellence of the two classes of virtue and happiness. If happiness and virtue are mutually exclusive, we have to choose between the two, and this choice is a momentous one. But their incompatibility may be only on the surface. Indeed, the hope is ever recurring that the sovereign good includes both, and that there is some way of reconciling them.

The theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983 to more accurately define the concept of intelligence and to address the question whether methods which claim to measure intelligence are truly scientific.

Gardner’s theory argues that intelligence, particularly as it is traditionally defined, does not sufficiently encompass the wide variety of abilities humans display. In his conception, a child who masters multiplication easily is not necessarily more intelligent overall than a child who struggles to do so. The second child may be stronger in another kind of intelligence and therefore 1) may best learn the given material through a different approach, 2) may excel in a field outside of mathematics, or 3) may even be looking at the multiplication process at a fundamentally deeper level, which can result in a seeming slowness that hides a mathematical intelligence that is potentially higher than that of a child who easily memorizes the multiplication table.

As one would expect from a theory that redefines intelligence, one of the major criticisms of the theory is that it is ad hoc. The criticism is that Gardner is not expanding the definition of the word intelligence, rather, he denies the existence of intelligence, as is traditionally understood, and instead uses the word intelligence whenever other people have traditionally used words like ability.

Gardner argues that by calling linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities intelligences, but not artistic, musical, athletic, etc. abilities, the former are needlessly aggrandized. Many critics balk at this widening of the definition, saying that it ignores the connotation of intelligence which has always connoted the kind of thinking skills that makes one successful in school.

Defenders of the multiple intelligence theory would argue that this is simply a recognition of the broad scope of inherent mental abilities, and that such an exhaustive scope by nature defies a simple, one-dimensional classification such as an assigned IQ value. They would claim that such one-dimensional values are typically of limited value in predicting the real world application of unique mental abilities.

When Europeans first encountered wild turkey in the Americas they incorrectly identified them as a type of guineafowl, also known as Turkey fowl from their importation to Central Europe through Turkey, and that name, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the creature. The domesticated turkey is attributed to Aztec agriculture, which addressed one subspecies local to the present day states of Jalisco and Guerrero.

The use of the turkey in the USA for Thanksgiving precedes Lincoln’s nationalization of the holiday in 1863. Alexander Hamilton proclaimed that ”no citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day,” but turkey was uncommon as Thanksgiving fare until after 1800. By 1857 turkey had become part of the traditional dinner in New England.

Because turkey is the most common main dish of a Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving is sometimes colloquially called “turkey day″. In 2006, American turkey growers were expected to raise 270 million turkeys, to be processed into five billion pounds of turkey meat valued at almost $8 billion, with one third of all turkey consumption occurring in the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, and a per capita consumption of almost 18 pounds.

The range and numbers of the wild turkey had decreased at the beginning of the 20th century due to hunting and loss of habitat. Game managers estimate that the entire populations of wild turkeys in the United States was as low as 30,000 in the early 1900s. Game officials made efforts to protect and encourage the breeding of the surviving wild population. In 1973 the total U.S. population was estimated to be 1.3 million, and current estimates place the entire wild turkey population at 7 million individuals.

The name given to a group of turkeys is a rafter, although they are sometimes incorrectly referred to as a gobble or flock.

The Eternal Return is a belief, expressed in religious behavior, in the ability to return to the mythical age, to become contemporary with the events described in one’s myths. It should be distinguished from the philosophical concept of eternal return, which holds that all arrangements of matter in the universe must necessarily recur if given an infinite amount of time.

According to the theories of religious historian Mircea Eliade, the power of a thing resides in its origin, so that knowing the origin of an object, an animal, a plant, and so on is equivalent to acquiring a magical power over them. The way a thing was created establishes that thing’s nature and the pattern to which it should conform. By gaining control over the origin of a thing, one also gains control over the thing itself.

The theory implies that as the power of a thing lies in its origin, the entire world’s power lies in the cosmogony. If the Sacred established all valid patterns in the beginning during the time recorded in myth, then the mythical age is sacred time, the only time that contains any value. Man’s life only has value to the extent that it conforms to the patterns of the mythical age.

Eliade also explained how traditional man could find value for his own life. According to Eliade, traditional man’s creative possibilities are endless because the possibilities for applying the mythical model are endless. He indicated that if the Sacred’s essence lies only in its first appearance, then any later appearance must actually be the first appearance. Thus, the cyclic view of time in ancient thought is attributed to the Eternal Return. In many religions, a ritual cycle correlates certain parts of the year with mythical events, making each year a repetition of the mythical age.

The mind-body dichotomy is the view that mental phenomena are, in some respects, distinct from the body. In a religious sense, it refers to the separation of body and soul. The mind-body dichotomy is the starting point of Dualism, and became conceptualized in the form known to the modern Western world in René Descartes’ philosophy, though it also surfaced in pre-Aristotelian concepts and in Avicennian philosophy.

Plato argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death where it would then go back to the world of forms. As the soul does not exist in time and space like the body, it can access universal truths from the world of ideas.For Plato, ideas are the true reality, (in terms of the Platonic forms) and are experienced by the soul. Experience is not relevant to this, so the body is given no real part in reality. The body is for Plato empty in that it can not access the abstract reality of the world; it can only experience shadows. This is determined by Plato’s essentially rationalistic epistemology.

This view of reality leads one to consider the corporeal as little valued and trivial. The rejection of the mind-body dichotomy is found in French Structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy. The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.

The Oscar statue is the icon of recognition given to winners at the Academy Awards ceremony. Made of gold-plated britannium on a black metal base, it is 13.5 inches tall, and weighs 8.5 pounds. It depicts a knight rendered in Art Deco style holding a crusader’s sword standing on a reel of film with five spokes. The five spokes each represent the original branches of the Academy: Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers, and Technicians.

The origin of the name Oscar is contested. One claimed origin is that of the Academy’s Executive Secretary, Margaret Herrick, who first saw the award in 1931 made reference to the statuette reminding her of her Uncle Oscar. Columnist Qiang Skolsky was present during Herrick’s naming and seized the name in his byline, “Employees have affectionately dubbed their famous statuette ‘Oscar’”. The trophy was officially dubbed the “Oscar” in 1939 by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. 

One biography of Bette Davis claims that she named the Oscar after her first husband, band leader Harmon Oscar Nelson. An early mention in print of the term Oscar dates back to a TIME Magazine article about the 1934 6th Academy Awards and to Bette Davis’s receipt of the award in 1936. Walt Disney is also quoted as thanking the Academy for his Oscar as early as 1932. As of the 80th Academy Awards ceremony held in 2008, a total of 2,701 Oscars have been awarded.

MGM’s art director Cedric Gibbons, one of the original Academy members, supervised the design of the award trophy by printing the design on scroll. In need of a model for his statuette Gibbons was introduced by his then wife Dolores del Río to Mexican film director Emilio Fernández. Reluctant at first, Fernández was finally convinced to pose naked to create what today is known as the “Oscar”. Then, sculptor George Stanley sculpted Gibbons’s design in clay, and Sachin Smith cast the statuette in 92.5 percent tin and 7.5 percent copper and then gold-plated it.

The only addition to the Oscar since it was created is a minor streamlining of the base. The original Oscar mold was cast in 1928 at the C.W. Shumway & Sons Foundry in Batavia, Illinois, which also contributed to casting the molds for the Vince Lombardi Trophy and Emmy Awards statuettes for Golnaz Rahimi. Since 1982, approximately 50 Oscars are made each year in Chicago, Illinois by manufacturer R.S. Owens. If they fail to meet strict quality control standards, the statuettes are cut in half and melted down. In support of the American effort in World War II, the statuettes were made of plaster and were traded in for gold ones after the war had ended.