Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Tolerance and Acceptance


Dr. Barbara Culatta gave an excellent devotional today on being tolerant and accepting people around you. She effectively discussed the seven tips below:
  1. Look for Commonalities
  2. Accept People Where They Are
  3. Reflect on Goodness in Other Religions
  4. See Differences as Part of Life
  5. Value What We Can Learn From Others
  6. Serve People from Different Faith and Backgrounds
  7. Give a Soft Response When Criticized
Each of these suggestions (with the exception of #1) encourages us to build "bridging" relationships with people different from us. Tip #1 reminds us that in order to effectively build bridging relationships, we need at least some common ground. When it gets right down to it, we have something in common with everyone (e.g., we are all human beings, we all need food and water). Bridging social capital increases as we establish these types of relationships. Bridging capital is usually harder to obtain as it requires more effort to establish, yet, it is often more rewarding since it gives connecting parties access to resources and information that they otherwise would not have.

These useful tips that can help us be more effective at building these bridges, which improve our social networks.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Using Color in Latex

Have you ever wanted to use color in latex? It is actually pretty simple. All you need to do is include the color package:
\usepackage[usenames]{color}
Then you can use simple commands like:
\textcolor{Red}{I like Red.}
To produce:
Here is a list of the 68 standard colors that you could use:
Apricot Aquamarine Bittersweet Black Blue BlueGreen BlueViolet BrickRed Brown BurntOrange CadetBlue CarnationPink Cerulean CornflowerBlue Cyan Dandelion DarkOrchid Emerald ForestGreen Fuchsia Goldenrod Gray Green GreenYellow JungleGreen Lavender LimeGreen Magenta Mahogany Maroon Melon MidnightBlue Mulberry NavyBlue OliveGreen Orange OrangeRed Orchid Peach Periwinkle PineGreen Plum ProcessBlue Purple RawSienna Red RedOrange RedViolet Rhodamine RoyalBlue RoyalPurple RubineRed Salmon SeaGreen Sepia SkyBlue SpringGreen Tan TealBlue Thistle Turquoise Violet VioletRed White WildStrawberry Yellow YellowGreen YellowOrange
Furthermore, you can define custom colors by specifying the RGB values as follows:
\definecolor{MyCrazyColor}{cmyk}{0.2,0.8,0,0.1}

and then using it as you would the other colors, like so:
\textcolor{MyCrazyColor}{My text in my crazy color.}

Read more about it at Bent Peterson's site.