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July 6, 2023 |
With the traditional ringing of the bell we bring this meeting to order!
Club member's attendance is recorded by logging in.
Visiting Rotarians may complete a makeup form at the end of this meeting; YOUR donation for making up with us helps fund our service projects!
Visitors are always welcome to browse and register without obligation.
Our club offers the flexibility of ROTARY ON YOUR TIME!
and an opportunity to remain connected with Rotary!
Welcome to this week’s meeting of the eClub of the State of Jefferson.
I am Bob Gibson, President of the Rotary eClub of State of Jefferson. Welcome to this week’s meeting.
I hope this finds you well and that you had a good Fourth of July holiday.
We are starting Rotary Year 2023-24. I am excited for this year with Rotary International President Gordon McInally. At this year’s PETS, training for club presidents, I had the good fortune to hear his presentation in person. He combines good-natured humbleness with a well-informed and straightforward message to “Create Hope in the World.” His priorities include work to support mental health. He has a deep personal connection to this work. He also prioritizes “Building Peace.” You can learn more of his background and how he is approaching his year as R.I. President in the July issue of Rotary Magazine. (See Rotary International President Gordon McInally's talk in the Rotary Moment section).
John Allman has contacted Jean Hamilton with information about an August installation project at Chinle, Arizona. This will be a great opportunity to get actively involved in one of our signature projects.
Our Club Foundation Board is having a Zoom meeting at 10:00am PDT on Tuesday, July 11. It will be a great opportunity to participate in a discussion on how we can use our Foundation to respond to a variety of needs.
If you have not sent your membership fees to our Treasurer, Carol Ruggeri, please do so promptly. We are responsible for sending a portion of your membership fee to Rotary International. Each of you is valued member and plays an important role in our Club. Thank you for responding promptly and taking care of this payment.
Thank you for your interest in our Club and your commitment to “Service above Self.”
Enjoy the meeting.
If you have any questions or comments, I am available. My e-mail address is: bob@bluewaterphoto.net.
email president@StateOfJeffersonRotary.org
eClub Foundation Board meeting
Tuesday, July 11 at 10:00AM PDT.
Register NOW for Rotary Leadership Institute in Coos Bay
RLI Coos Bay is September 23/24 at The Mill Casino / Hotel
Rotary Leadership Institute (RLI) is District 5110’s premier Rotary learning opportunity. It’s a two-day event available to all Rotarians. Experienced District leaders using principles of adult learning facilitate lively, interactive sessions. The next event is in Coos Bay at The Mill Casino/Hotel starting mid-morning on Saturday, September 23 and wrapping up mid-afternoon on Sunday.
The registration fee is $17. This includes materials, meals, and refreshments. Consider asking your club president if club funds can help you share the cost to attend. Registration is limited and currently open on DACdb. The easiest way to register is to email dgbill1819@gmail.com and request a personal registration link. Otherwise go to the “Calendar” tab on DACdb, scroll down to September 23, locate the RLI event, and proceed to register.
Onsite lodging will be available by calling (800) 953-4800. To receive the special $185.00 rate, guests simply need to call before Friday, September 1, 2023 and inform the reservation agents that you are attending the Rotary Leadership Institute. Reservations may also be booked online at themillcasino.com. From the website, select “Book Today” located in the upper right hand corner, next select “Group Sign In” and enter the code 9139. From there simply add your dates and select your room type. The rate, again, is $185 per night.
July is New Leadership Month
I thought our members might enjoy Gordon's presentation. He is a retired dentist from Edinburgh, which is where I emigrated in 1968. So I am a fan. Perhaps this video could be included in our Weekly Meeting online so all our members can view the "message of hope" and the R.I. Theme for the Rotary Year which starts this weekend.
Thanks for your great leadership this past Rotary year.
Geoff
RI President-elect R. Gordon R. McInally
During the convention's closing session, 2023-24 Rotary International President R. Gordon R. McInally explained why he's asking members to make mental health a priority. When his only brother took his own life, McInally said, he became determined to fight the stigma around mental health issues and expand access to care.
"I might venture to suggest that one of the main reasons that my brother and so, so many others like him reach the point they do is that mental health remains such a taboo subject, and that mental health services remain in such short supply," he said. "I know that Rotary can do something about that. I am confident we can illuminate mental health needs near and far."
"We can help one another feel more supported as fellow Rotary members and as neighbors," McInally continued. "We can advocate for mental health services. And we can build bridges with experts in the mental health space to help expand access to treatment."
McInally urged Rotary members to Create Hope in the World by getting involved and taking action at a critical moment in history.
"To create hope, we must continue doing our important work, and do it better than ever before," he said. "We must refocus our efforts to build peace across the globe. And we must help each other find peace within — and share that ethic of care to the people we serve."
Earlier in the day, Kunle Adeyanju, president of the Rotary Club of Ikoyi Metro A.M., Nigeria, reflected on how to fulfill the promise of a polio-free world. In 2022, Adeyanju rode a motorcycle from London, England, to Lagos, Nigeria, to raise money and draw attention to the cause.
"We're in the last mile of the push toward polio eradication. That's quite encouraging," Adeyanju said. "But when you're so close to the tipping point, the whole gain you've achieved in the last 30 years could go away in one day."
He compared the commitment to end polio to his marathon ride.
"There were several instances where I was in the Sahara and I kept asking myself, 'Why am I doing this? Why did I get myself here?' But the resilient spirit in us says, 'Yes, it's difficult, but it's doable.' That's the same mindset we need to put into eradicating polio around the world."
During another session that focused on the difficult but doable, past Rotary Peace Fellow Ryan Rowe introduced Haitian Rotarians who have been working to bring clean water to 770,000 people in seven counties throughout the country as part of HANWASH, or the Haiti National Clean Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Initiative.
Over the last three years, the organization has raised US$1.8 million to dig wells, build latrines, and modernize water systems around the country. Organizers also plan to invest US$400,000 in a mentoring and training program for local engineers.
This "is an incredible story of Rotary impact that the entire world needs to hear," Rowe said.
In her closing remarks, Rotary International President Jennifer Jones, who made history as the organization's first female president, made the connection between imagining Rotary — the idea of her presidential theme — and hope, an element of McInally's.
"We don't imagine yesterday — and we also don't look for hope in past actions," Jones said. "'Hope' and 'imagine' are words for tomorrow — words that propel us forward. They build upon each other and offer a path forward. A path of continuity."
CLICK HERE TO WATCH PRESENTATION
Why is vaccine derived polio so hard to stamp out?
Research published this week adds to the toolkit against vaccine-derived poliovirus. But novel vaccines will not work if they remain in their vials. When smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, there were hopes that poliovirus might soon be next. As a result of an eradication campaign that began in 1988, two of the virus’s three subtypes have since been eradicated and the third has been cornered. In the past 12 months, just 21 cases of wild polio were reported in children across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mozambique.
But cases of another type of polio are worryingly high. Over the past year, there have been 665 cases of vaccine derived polio across 23 countries. Vaccine-derived polio occurs when the attenuated poliovirus used to make oral vaccines regains its virulence.
In Nature this week, Andrew Macadam at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in South Mimms, UK, and his colleagues report the development of novel oral polio vaccines that reduce the likelihood of vaccine-derived outbreaks occurring for poliovirus types 1 and 3 (ref. 1). These vaccines were created using an approach previously used to make a new type 2 polio vaccine known as nOPV2 (ref. 2). The scientists used genetic engineering to slash the likelihood that the attenuated virus will revert to virulence. The two latest vaccines were tested in mice and found to be effective, safe and stable. They are now being tested in human trials. If their safety and efficacy are as good as that of the nOPV2 vaccine, all three poliovirus subtypes will be covered.
Since March 2021, the nOPV2 vaccine has been administered to more than 650 million children across 30 countries. But although nOPV2 is much more stable genetically than its predecessor, it can regain virulence, too. So far, it has done so on four separate occasions, in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is probably because eradication campaigns are not reaching enough children, and it reinforces what researchers and public-health officials already know: for polio to be eradicated, advances in science need to go hand-in-hand with comprehensive public-health initiatives.
The rise in the number of outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio has various causes. The COVID-19 pandemic hindered vaccination campaigns and surveillance. Disasters and conflicts, which often occur in countries vulnerable to polio, have done the same. Moreover, some countries decided to delay their outbreak responses and wait for supplies of the nOPV2 vaccine, rather than use the older type 2 vaccine. A modelling study, originally published in 2021, suggested that this delay would increase the risk of outbreaks occurring 3.
High-level changes to the way in which polio campaigns are run is another factor underlying the deterioration of some campaigns, according to several researchers that Nature spoke to for this editorial. Around the world, polio eradication has long been handled by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a partnership based in Geneva, Switzerland, that includes national governments, philanthropic funders and the World Health Organization. However, the WHO is now overseeing a plan to transfer some of the GPEI’s activities to national immunization and disease-surveillance programmes. This has involved the GPEI handing over some responsibility to the WHO, and the WHO then helping national programmes to manage independently.
The transition has not been easy. There have been funding gaps, expert staff have been lost, governance has faltered in some countries and morale has dropped in others. A report published in April 2022 by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), a group of global-health experts that the GPEI commissions to produce periodic assessments of progress, has been critical of the transition process in some countries (see go.nature.com/3qhjk6a). A WHO spokesperson told Nature that the transition programme accepts that it “pulled the plug too early in some of these countries”, and said that it is drawing up a country-by-country approach.
The publication of a new independent report later this month will reveal more about how the transition is going. In the long term, it makes sense to integrate the GPEI’s formidable polio resources into national immunization programmes. But it is crucial that this be done in a way that does not undermine the progress already made. The GPEI needs to remain in the picture.
Meanwhile, scientists have other tools in the pipeline to further the polio-eradication campaign. At present, it can take many weeks to confirm that a wastewater sample contains poliovirus. Several research groups are working on technologies to reduce this time lag. Separately, Macadam and his colleagues are developing a form of the virus that is inactive in vivo. They hope this could one day replace the infectious virus that is currently used to make vaccines.
It’s essential that researchers continue to advance vaccine research and technology to combat the rise of vaccine-derived polio. But new vaccines will not work if they remain in their vials. If the world is to see the back of vaccine-derived polio, the fruits of vaccine research and development need to be put into the hands of highly motivated, well-funded staff operating in programmes attuned to the local landscape, and the transition of polio management from the GPEI to national control must not undermine eradication. Only then might we be able to send polio the same way as smallpox.
1. Yeh, M. T. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06212-3 (2023).
2. Yeh, M. T. et al. Cell Host Microbe 27, 736–751 (2020).
3. Kalkowska, D. A., Pallansch, M. A., Wassilak, S. G. F., Cochi, S. L. &
Thompson, K. M. Vaccine 41 (Suppl. 1), A136–A141 (2023).
The dates for the August installation at Chinle are August 24-27, with a guided canyon tour available on the 24th for @ $88/person.
Bill “Frowny” Frownfelter is the person coordinating volunteers. I have already spoken with him about the eClub’s interest in participating.
Please contact him for specifics and let him know how many might be joining in.
Frowny’s contact information:
Frowny Frownfelter
allllllsmiles@yahoo.com
970-708-1058 
Beatrix Potter Was a Keen Observer of the Natural World
Famous for “Peter Rabbit,” the children’s author was also a devoted scientist and conservationist
At the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, a cozy faux garden, complete with oversized flower pots, is the perfect place to page through Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit or The Story of Miss Moppet. In another area, visitors are invited to read her books while perched atop giant spools of thread.
These hideaways capture not only the whimsical settings that Potter created, but also her passion for the natural world. Through September 17, “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” will use letters, watercolors, photos, diaries, sketches and more to explore Potter’s lesser-known scientific and conservation work, in addition to her literary career.
“She is certainly one of the most important children’s book illustrators,” Trinita Kennedy, senior curator at the Frist Art Museum, tells the New York Times’ Tanya Mohn. “But the exhibition tells a more complex story. It shows her as a multifaceted person who had to blaze her own trail, unusual for a Victorian woman.”
Potter, pictured here with her dog, Spot, based many of her characters on her pets. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, courtesy of Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd.The show is divided into four sections: “Town and Country” examines Potter’s childhood, “Under the Microscope” explores her scientific pursuits, “A Natural Storyteller” follows her literary career and “Living Nature” details her later conservation work. Visitors are encouraged to reflect on the show via a series of hands-on activities—such as observational drawings, puppetry and animation—in a nearby 4,000-square-foot space.
The exhibition originally opened in 2022 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. After Nashville, it will continue on to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.
Born in 1866, Potter began eagerly drawing the world around her as a young child. Some of these drawings and sketchbooks from her early years will be on display in the exhibition. “Potter was educated at home by governesses and was encouraged to draw, paint and study natural history through books, museum visits and direct observation,” says Kennedy in a statement. “She collected fossils, insects, plants and rocks, and used a microscope to make hundreds of detailed drawings of her specimens.”
As a young adult, Potter developed an interest in mycology, the study of fungi, conducting experiments and writing her own scientific paper, which included hand-drawn diagrams. But Potter “felt that her work wasn’t being taken seriously” due to her gender and lack of professional training, says the V&A’s Annemarie Bilclough, the organizing curator of the exhibition, to the Times. Even when her paper was presented at the Linnean Society of London, Potter herself wasn’t allowed to attend because she was a woman.
“She might have pursued a career as a professional scientist, had more pathways been open to women in the 19th century,” says Kennedy in the statement.
Instead, Potter turned to creative pursuits: She began by drawing illustrations for greeting cards, before eventually turning to children’s books in her 30s. Her stories often featured characters based on her own pets, including her rabbits Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer.
“I think people will be surprised by how fine her art is, made with great precision and narrative power. They’re full of character and naturalistic detail,” Leonard S. Marcus, a children’s book historian, tells the Times. “She’s often dismissed as a sort of fluffy figure in the past, but she was a true artist.”
Once her work started selling, she had the resources to develop her passions for farming and land conservation. Using the profits from her first books, she purchased a farm in England’s Lake District, where she raised Herdwick sheep. “Thanks in large part to Potter’s efforts, the entire district has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site,” wrote Sarah Cascone of Artnet in 2022.
Over the years, Potter expanded her farm and worked to preserve more Lake District land. Upon her death in 1943, she left more than 4,000 acres of land and 15 farms to Britain’s National Trust, according to the Beatrix Potter Society. Some of her farms continue to function today, and the descendants of her Herdwick flocks still roam the hills.
“Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” will be on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville through September 17, 2023.
How to Combine PDF Files
Do you have multiple PDFs you need to merge into one? Making one PDF out of many is easier than you might think on both Windows PCs and Macs. Here's how to do it on each platform.
Knowing how to combine multiple PDFs into a single file is easy and can make you more productive. You don't want to inflict a half-dozen PDF files on the accounting department, for example, when you can deliver one unified document. Or maybe you have four or five sections of a report that you've printed to separate PDFs from Word, Excel, and a photo editor. How do you get them all into a single file? These questions are all the more pressing for people working from home and those trying to go paperless because PDFs easily replace physical documents. People need to know how to organize and manage them.
If you use a Mac, you have the only tool you'll need already built into the macOS operating system. That said, you can find more flexible and full-featured solutions if you buy commercial third-party apps.
If you use Windows, you need a third-party app—and you’re in luck because you can find free, open-source options that can do the job.
With any operating system, you can always use an online app that combines and edits uploaded PDFs, but I’m leery about using almost all of them. Some of these sites seem to have no viable business plan, and their PDF-editing services give them the ability to harvest the data in your files, including invisible metadata that can potentially identify you and your system. You may not want to give that metadata to a site you don’t know anything about and that typically conceals the country in which it's based. Such a site could profit from your data in ways you wouldn't like.
There's one important exception among online PDF-merging tools—Adobe's free PDF-merge service(Opens in a new window). This is because Adobe is the most prominent player in the PDF world (having created the format in 1991) and the company is open and transparent about its privacy policies.
How to Combine PDFs in Windows
Windows 11's default Edge web browser lets you view, draw on, and add text to PDFs, and it can even read them aloud to you. But it can't merge them on its own. To merge or manage PDF files in Windows, you need either a browser extension or a separate third-party productivity app. Free but limited options are available along with fuller-function commercial choices. We fill you in on the best choices in both categories below.
PDFsam
If your PDF-managing needs are minimal, install the free, open-source PDFsam(Opens in a new window). Start with the free Basic version, and if you like it, consider buying a $69 annual subscription to the full-featured Enhanced version, which lets you edit the contents of PDF files and convert them to other formats. But the free version may be all you need.
The free version of PDFsam lacks some capabilities and ease-of-use features like Adobe Reader's thumbnail views. But it does let you merge two PDF files by dragging them into a window, which adds them to a list. You rearrange the list by dragging individual lines. You can specify a page range from each PDF, but you'll have to figure out which pages you want by viewing the document in a separate app like Edge or Adobe Reader. Fortunately, you can open PDFs directly from the file list in PDFsam.
Another feature included in the free version is the ability to add a blank page at the end of a PDF with an odd number of pages, so the next document in the merged PDF will begin on a right-hand page. You can also add a footer to every page of the merged document. The app also lets you merge bookmarks and form fields from the original files. When you're ready to merge the PDFs, you just click the Run button.
An especially nifty feature lets you combine two PDF documents, alternating between pages from each file. This means that you can create a single PDF from two separate PDFs containing the front and back pages of an original two-sided document. It took me a while to find this feature in the interface, but I finally figured out that it's the one labeled “Alternate Mix.” Not the most intuitive name for a feature, but it does work. PDFSam is available for macOS and Debian-based versions of Linux, as well as for Windows.
PDF Merger & Splitter
An alternative freeware app available from the Microsoft Store is PDF Merger & Splitter(Opens in a new window), from a company called AnywaySoft. PDF Merger & Splitter is a free Universal Windows Platform app (commonly called a UWP app) that uses the open-source PDFsharp library for creating PDF files.
Compared with PDFsam, PDF Merger & Splitter gives you far fewer options and a less friendly interface, but the app outdoes PDFsam in two ways: It lets you preview PDF files in its own interface, and it can make all the PDFs you combine a single page size. PDFsam only lets you force all pages to have the same size as the first page, while PDF Merger & Splitter also lets you force all pages to have the same size as the largest page or the size used by the most pages. I strongly recommend PDFsam, but PDF Merger & Splitter is worth having for this one feature.
PDF-Xchange Editor, ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat DC
If you want better visual cues when merging PDFs, you need a commercial app that lets you see the combined PDF before you save it to disk and also displays thumbnail images so you can drag them up and down in a sidebar and rearrange the pages. You can use almost any PDF-editing software, such as the moderately priced PDF-Xchange(Opens in a new window) Editor from Tracker Software. Better would be to choose one of our Editor's Choice apps—ABBYY FineReader or Adobe Acrobat.
All these apps let you combine PDFs in basically the same way. Here's how you would do it in PDF-XChange Editor:
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Go to File > New Document
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Choose the option to Combine Files into a Single PDF
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Drag the files that you want to combine into a single PDF into the file-list box. You can add a variety of file types, including PDFs, text files, images, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. The app converts all the files into PDF format before combining them.
When combining files, you can specify the page range of each file that you want to import. You can fine-tune the combination by opening multiple files in separate tabs in PDF-XChange Editor and dragging thumbnail images of the page you want from the source tab to the target tab. If thumbnails aren't visible, press Ctrl-T or use the View > Panes menu.
The process is very similar in both ABBYY Finereader and Adobe Acrobat.
How to Combine PDFs on a Mac
Unlike Windows, macOS has high-powered, built-in PDF tools, including the deceptively modest-looking Preview app. In all recent macOS versions, starting with Catalina in 2019, the Finder also lets you create or combine PDFs from a menu in its Gallery view (the view that displays a large preview of the current file).
From macOS Finder
To combine two or more PDFs in the macOS Finder:
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Switch to Gallery view from the Finder toolbar or the top-line View menu.
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Hold down the Command key and select the files you want to combine.
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Click each file in the order that you want the files to appear in the combined PDF. When you select more than one file, a Create PDF button appears in the inspector panel at the right.
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Click Create PDF and the Finder will create a new PDF on your desktop, containing all the PDFs you selected.
Alternatively, you can select multiple files in the Finder’s List View, then Ctrl-click or two-finger-tap to bring up a context menu. Choose Quick Actions, then Create PDF.
Even better, you don’t have to limit yourself to merging PDF files. You can select multiple images, like PNG, TIFF, and JPEG files, in addition to existing PDFs, and use the same technique to combine them into one PDF as well.
If the combined PDF file that you create from the Finder doesn’t have its pages in the order that you want, that’s easy to fix. Double-click the PDF to open it in the Preview app. If thumbnails aren't visible in Preview's sidebar, go to the View menu to switch them on, and then drag the thumbnails up and down the sidebar into the correct order.
Preview App
The Preview app offers the same PDF-combining powers as the Finder and can be easier to use for complex tasks. To combine two or more PDF files in Preview, start by making a copy of one of the files and working with the duplicate. This step is an essential precaution because Preview saves the file as you work, and if the results aren't what you want, you'll need to do some fancy footwork to get back the original file.
Open the duplicate file. Drag additional PDFs into the sidebar and drop them where you want them in the file. You can move them to the start or end, or between any two existing pages. If you get the location wrong, you can drag one or more thumbnails to the correct location, and you can delete any pages that you don't want.
What if you only want to merge a few pages from a second PDF file? Open that file in another PDF window and drag the thumbnails that you want into your first PDF file. As always in macOS, you can Shift-click to select a continuous range of pages, or Cmd-click on multiple pages to select pages from anywhere in the file. If some pages get imported in the wrong orientation, use Preview's toolbar to rotate them.
Sometimes Preview acts in seemingly unpredictable ways when saving a file. So when you have the combined pages arranged as you want them, choose File > Export to PDF and save the merged PDF under its own name. You can also choose File > Close and follow the prompts to save the merged file under the name of the file you started with, but it's safest to use the Export to PDF option.
Like the Finder, Preview lets you merge any file that Preview can display into an existing PDF. That means you can include PNG, TIFF, JPEG, and other standard image formats. But what if you want to create a PDF that contains a Word document or an Excel worksheet? You can't drag those documents into Preview, but you can print those files to PDFs using Word and Excel's Print menus. The resulting PDFs can be used for a merge.
PDFsam and Other Third-Party Apps
If Preview doesn’t provide all the features you need, you can use the impressive fine-tuning features offered by the free open-source PDFSam app (mentioned in the section about merging PDFs in Windows). PDFSam works the same way in macOS as it does in Windows.
Alternatively, if you have a commercial third-party app like Adobe Acrobat, you can merge PDFs in the same way that you merge them in Preview. You can also directly drag files in any file format that Acrobat knows how to convert into PDF, including HTML web pages, plain text files, Word documents, and Excel worksheets. Additionally, Acrobat lets you create a completely new PDF from one or more of these same external formats. Simply use the File > Create menu and follow the prompts.
More PDF Tips
For other ways to convert a PDF into a Microsoft Word file, you can check out our guide. If you need assistance making changes to your PDF once the documents have been combined, check out our story on how to edit a PDF.
weekly@StateOfJeffersonRotary.org
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