The Chinese Stock Market Sank To A New Post-Crisis Low Today

China's Shanghai Composite index continued its epic decline, establishing a fresh three and a half year low.

Global Macro Monitor describes its divergence from the S&P 500 as stunning.

Could this last much longer?

"I doubt it," said Jeff Gundlach to Business Insider recently.? "Thus short SPX long SHCOMP could be an interesting speculation. ?Probably a better trade today than the short SPX/long IBEX trade that has worked well since I recommended it at Ira Sohn (up 8.3% on the pair trade)."

However, Citi's Tom Fitzpatrick is decidedly more cautious.

"We believe the Shanghai or Chinese stock market is now breaking through the last vestiges of support," said warned Fitzpatrick who sees that index falling another 19 percent.

Here's a 3-year look courtesy of Bloomberg:

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheMoneyGame/~3/ZXffPwEjLZE/chinese-stock-market-post-crisis-low-today-2012-8

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Mother of GMA co-host Robin Roberts dies

This 2006 photo released by ABC shows "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts, right, with her mother Lucimarian Roberts on the set in New York. Jeffrey W. Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, said 88-year-old Lucimarian Roberts died Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012. ABC's Facebook page said Robins traveled "home to Mississippi just in time to see her." The death came on the same day Roberts said goodbye to her co-workers and audience before starting medical leave for a bone marrow transplant. Her departure had been set for Friday. But in a last-minute change of plans she told her viewers she was leaving a day early to visit her ailing mother. WABC-TV said Lucimarian Roberts was the first African-American to head Mississippi's board of education. She also collaborated with her daughter on a book titled, "My Story, My Song: Mother-Daughter Reflections on Life and Faith." (AP Photo/ABC, Donna Svennevik)

This 2006 photo released by ABC shows "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts, right, with her mother Lucimarian Roberts on the set in New York. Jeffrey W. Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, said 88-year-old Lucimarian Roberts died Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012. ABC's Facebook page said Robins traveled "home to Mississippi just in time to see her." The death came on the same day Roberts said goodbye to her co-workers and audience before starting medical leave for a bone marrow transplant. Her departure had been set for Friday. But in a last-minute change of plans she told her viewers she was leaving a day early to visit her ailing mother. WABC-TV said Lucimarian Roberts was the first African-American to head Mississippi's board of education. She also collaborated with her daughter on a book titled, "My Story, My Song: Mother-Daughter Reflections on Life and Faith." (AP Photo/ABC, Donna Svennevik)

This image released by ABC shows "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts, right, speaking with a fan outside on the popular morning show on Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012 in New York. Roberts has said goodbye to "Good Morning America," but only for a while. The "GMA" anchor made her final appearance Thursday before going on medical leave for a bone marrow transplant. Roberts' departure was first planned for Friday, but she chose to exit a day early to visit her ailing mother in Mississippi. In July she first disclosed that she has MDS, a blood and bone marrow disease. She will be hospitalized next week to prepare for the transplant. The donor will be her older sister, Sally-Ann Roberts. (AP Photo/ABC, Fred Lee)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Lucimarian Roberts, the mother of "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts, has died a day after the anchor announced she was taking a medical leave for a bone marrow transplant.

The 88-year-old Roberts died in Gulfport, Miss., on Thursday night, Jeffrey W. Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News, said Friday.

The announcement of the death also was made on "GMA" on Friday morning.

"Robin arrived home with her sister, Sally-Ann, forging through flooded and blocked roads to be with her beloved mother in time to see her," GMA Senior Executive Tom Cibrowski said in an email to the entire news division Thursday evening.

The Mississippi area was dealing with flooding from the effects of Hurricane Isaac.

Over the years, Lucimarian Roberts made numerous appearances on "GMA."

She was a Gulf Coast icon for more than four decades. She often was the first black woman to work with organizations and state and local agencies, and she became known for her ability to get things done.

She was the first black to serve as chairman of the Mississippi State Board of Education in the 1980s.

She also had a great passion for poetry and music.

Lucimarian Roberts collaborated with her daughter on a book titled, "My Story, My Song ? Mother-Daughter Reflections on Life and Faith."

"I sing because the music of the church speaks my soul language," she wrote. "I sing because these songs are tightly woven in to the texture of who I am."

"She even recorded a CD of hymns for her family as a gift last year," said Cibrowski.

The family was gathered in Pass Christian, Miss., and planned a small private service, he said.

The death came on the same day Roberts said goodbye to her co-workers and audience before starting her medical leave. Sally-Ann, a morning anchor at WWL-TV in New Orleans, is donating the marrow to her sister.

Robin Roberts' departure had been set for Friday. But in a last-minute change of plans, she told her viewers she was leaving a day early to visit her ailing mother.

In a statement on her Facebook page, Robin Roberts said she and Sally-Ann arrived in Gulfport in time to visit with their mother before she died.

"A CD of her favorite hymns is playing in her room. So thankful for my sister, Dorothy, and the nurses who have been caring for her. I will cherish these moments I have with mom. Then focus on what is ahead of me undergoing a bone marrow transplant."

Besides her three daughters, Lucimarian Roberts is survived by a son and eight grandchildren.

Her husband, Col. Lawrence E. Roberts, died in 2004 at the age of 81. He was a member of the all-black U.S. Army Air Corps, also called the Tuskegee Airmen. He served in Vietnam, where he was awarded one of his three Legion of Merit medals.

Cibrowski said there would be a special tribute to Lucimarian Roberts on GMA. Details were being worked out.

___

Elliott contributed to this report from Jackson, Miss.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2012-08-31-Obit-Robin%20Roberts%20Mother/id-8567331e8b9a4972891712e1b1e39bcd

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Condi Rice: Stateswoman and Symbol (Atlantic Politics Channel)

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Video: Iraq War vet: ?Now it?s time to win? at Paralympics

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nbc-news/48856356/

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Monogamy and the immune system: Differences in sexual behavior impact bacteria hosted and genes that control immunity

ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2012) ? In the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains two closely related species of mice share a habitat and a genetic lineage, but have very different social lives. The California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) is characterized by a lifetime of monogamy; the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) is sexually promiscuous.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley recently showed how these differences in sexual behavior impact the bacteria hosted by each species as well as the diversity of the genes that control immunity. The results were published in the May 2012 edition of PLoS One.

Monogamy is a fairly rare trait in mammals, possessed by only five percent of species. Rarely do two related, but socially distinguishable, species live side-by-side. This makes these two species of mice interesting subjects for Matthew MacManes, a National Institutes of Health-sponsored post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

Through a series of analyses, MacManes and researchers from the Lacey Lab examined the differences between these two species on the microscopic and molecular levels. They discovered that the lifestyles of the two mice had a direct impact on the bacterial communities that reside within the female reproductive tract. Furthermore, these differences correlate with enhanced diversifying selection on genes related to immunity against bacterial diseases.

Bacteria live on every part of our bodies and have distinctive ecologies. The first step of MacManes project involved testing the bacterial communities that resided in the vaginas of both species of mice -- the most relevant area for a study about monogamous and promiscuous mating systems.

Next, MacManes performed a genetic analysis on the variety of DNA present, revealing hundreds of different types of bacteria present in each species. He found that the promiscuous deer mouse had twice the bacterial diversity as the monogamous California mouse. Since many bacteria cause sexually transmitted infections (like chlamydia or gonorrhea), he used the diversity of bacteria as a proxy for risk of disease. Results of the study were published in Naturwissenschaften in October 2011.

But this wasn't the end of the exploration.

"The obvious next question was, does the bacterial diversity in the promiscuous mice translate into something about the immune system, or how the immune system functions?" MacManes asked.

MacManes hypothesized that selective pressures caused by generation after generation of bacterial warfare had fortified the genomes of the promiscuous deer mouse against the array of bacteria it hosts.

To find out, he sequenced genes related to immune function of the two mice species and compared each species' versions of one important immunity gene, MHC-DQa. Some forms of genes (alleles) are better at recognizing different pathogens than others. If an individual has only a single common allele, it may only recognize a limited set of bacterial pathogens. In contrast, if an individual has two different alleles it may recognize a more diverse set of bacterial pathogens, and thus be more protected against infection.

Based on a comparison of the two species' genotypes he confirmed that the promiscuous mice had much more diversity in the genes related to their immune system.

"The promiscuous mice, by virtue of their sexual system, are in contact with more individuals and are exposed to a lot more bacteria," MacManes said. "They need a more robust immune system to fend off all of the bugs that they're exposed to."

The results, published in PLoS One, match findings in humans and other species with differential mating habits. They show that differences in social behavior can lead to changes in the selection pressures and gene-level evolutionary changes in a species.

Motivated by this result, MacManes began work on a project that looked to understand the genetics of a far more complex behavior -- whether to stay at home with relatives, or to disperse to a new burrow.

Scientists have been sequencing and exploring the genome for more than a decade. For much of this time, studies have been limited to the most common and well-known species: humans, lab-mice, and fruit flies. But in recent years, as the cost of sequencing has dropped and the methods of exploring genomic information have improved, researchers have begun to analyze other less traditional organisms.

MacManes project was one of the first studies to use next-generation gene sequencing and high performance computers to assess the influence of behavior on genes in a non-model species.

"This is a field that people have always been interested in, but the tools hadn't existed yet for people to really understand how complex the mechanisms were," MacManes said.

Next-generation sequencing determines the order of the nucleotide bases in a molecule of DNA by breaking the double helix into short fragments and rapidly analyzing thousands of chunks at a time. Once hundreds of millions of genetic snippets have been read out by a DNA sequencer, they must be assembled into a single genome, or mapped to a reference genome, and compared to other genetic sequences to be useful.

"The sequencing is something that you can do in any molecular biology lab -- that's easy," MacManes said. "But when you try to do an analysis of the data, you get back something like several billion base pairs of data. How to actually analyze the data is the real issue."

As a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate research fellow, MacManes learned that researchers could access NSF supercomputers through the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to analyze datasets too big for their university laboratory clusters. Once he had his sequences, MacManes turned to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin, a lead partner in XSEDE and home to the Ranger supercomputer.

"When we first started using Ranger, it was a breakthrough moment for us," he said. "We had the data set, but we didn't have any way to do anything with it. Ranger was really our first real chance at analyzing this data. "

The alignment and analysis that MacManes accomplished on Ranger in a few weeks would have taken years with his local resources. It organized the data so MacManes could find insights about the relationship between genes and behavior.

"The ability to isolate and compare genetic differences related to social behavior using advanced computing is a fascinating application of emerging technologies," said Jennifer Verodolin, a researcher specializing in social rodents at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina. "We often see individual and population-level social and mating differences within the same species. While ecological factors are linked to this variation, these sophisticated new tools will now allow us to see the genetic signature of how natural selection has shaped behavior."

Mating systems, and social systems more broadly, are important to basic evolutionary biology, MacManes asserted. "The things an animal does, the way it behaves, and who it interacts with, are important to natural selection. These factors can cause immunogenes to evolve at a much faster rate, or slower in the case of monogamous mice. That connection is important and probably under-recognized."

Monogamy and promiscuity are only one of a variety of social behaviors that are thought to influence gene expression. MacManes' current research involves analyzing gene expression in the hippocampus brain region of tuco tucos (a sort of South American gopher) who live together in social groups and others who live independently. He is hoping to find what differentiates the social animals from the loners and what impact this change in their behavior has on their genetic profile.

"Now that we have these new sequencing technologies, people are going to be really interested in looking at the mechanisms that underlie these behaviors," MacManes said. "How might genes control what we do, and how we behave? We're going to see an explosion in these studies where people start to understand the very basic genetic mechanism for all sorts of behaviors that we know are out there."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center. The original article was written by Aaron Dubrow.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Matthew D. MacManes, Eileen A. Lacey. Is Promiscuity Associated with Enhanced Selection on MHC-DQ? in Mice (genus Peromyscus)? PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (5): e37562 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037562

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/Tg_qUoih3C0/120830141405.htm

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Helpful Hints For Completing Your Home Improvement Projects

Home improvement is a fantastic way to spruce up an outdated d?cor or to give your home a new look. There are so many different options when it comes to home improvement while fitting almost anybody's budget. Painting, wallpaper or even just new curtains are a few examples that will give any home a fresh look for a minimal price.

Windows

To reduce the number of unwanted pests in your home, cut back shrubbery and plants that are close to the windows. These plants are great homes to insects and spiders. If they rub up against your house and windows, they can easily crawl inside to find a warm dry place. Cut back these bushes to a foot or more from the side of the house and under the windows.

Add shutters to the outside windows on your home for a dramatic change in architecture. If your exterior looks a bit drab or flat, you can use this simple tip to give it much more depth and interest. Paint them a coordinating color to your house, often the color of the front door.

Try installing some flower boxes outside your home. Try installing them in your windows or on the front porch railings. They are a relatively cheap home improvement project too. You have to buy soil and regularly maintain the flowers though. If these aren't for you, try buying gardens in pots and placing them on your porch or front steps.

Velfac Fenster can be very interesting information for you.

A great tip for home improvement is to inspect your windows and see if they need to be replaced. The key here is to make sure you are going to get enough value for what you pay for. If the windows just need some maintenance it is better to do that than replace because windows are a major investment.

Doors And Windows

Insulate your home in order to save energy and lower your heating and cooling bills. Check the attic, as well as windows and doors. Any leaky spots should be fixed. Weather stripping can be added to doors and windows and new insulation can be added to the attic. You want to keep air that you paid to heat or cool, inside the home.

When it comes to home improvement, consider replacing your windows and doors. This not only has a chance of greatly improving the value of the home, but may also severely decrease the amount of money required to keep your house warm and dry. You can also add extra security with new doors and windows.

Hunt down drafts in your house around your windows and doors, and seal them with insulation or weather-stripping to make your home more energy-efficient. On a breezy day, hold a lit candle or a stick of burning incense around the edges of your doors and windows -- with the drapes tied back away from the edges -- to easily spot drafty areas as the flame moves or the smoke wafts.

Be sure that your doors and windows have tight seals to keep out extreme temperatures and to insure the best air quality in your home. If the air coming into your home is filtered through your heating and cooling system, you will have less chances of contracting air-borne illness.

In conclusion, it can be quite easy and affordable to improve your home's appearance. If you are doing it yourself and only working on simple projects it will become obviously worth the little money spent. There are many options and styles available to suit everyone's needs. Who doesn't want to walk into their home and feel aesthetically refreshed?

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New maps may reduce tourism impacts on Hawaiian dolphins

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Over-eager eco-tourists intent on seeing spinner dolphins up close may inadvertently be disturbing the charismatic animals' daytime rest periods and driving them out of safe habitats in bays along Hawaii's coast.

Scientists at Duke and Stony Brook universities have developed a promising new tool that may help to limit repeated human disturbances and help reduce their negative impacts on the dolphins.

"Using the maps produced through this study we can identify the bays where the effects of human activities on spinner dolphins should be monitored most closely, and where immediate conservation actions are required," said David W. Johnston, research scientist at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

The researchers' tool shows that only a small number of bays ? 21 out of 99 ? in a study area along the western coastlines of the main Hawaiian islands were suitable habitats for resting dolphins. Knowing this, "conservation efforts can be focused on specific areas of importance," Johnston said,

"We may be able to minimize detrimental effects on dolphins by putting restrictions or preventative measures into place in a relatively small number of bays, rather than limiting access to dolphins along the entire coast," said the study's lead author, Lesley H. Thorne, a lecturer in marine science at Stony Brook University, who received her PhD from Duke in 2010. "That benefits tourists and tourism operators as well as the dolphins."

In the study, the researchers used the geographic coordinates and key environmental factors ? such as water depth and calmness, the size and proportions of the bays and distances from deep-water foraging grounds ? for hundreds of spinner dolphin sightings made in the study area between 2000 and 2010. The results appear August 27 in the online, open-access peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Spinners are small dolphins famed for their graceful aerial movements and balletic spins. They are found in tropical and subtropical oceans around the world and some divide their time between daytime rest periods in shallow, protected bays and nighttime foraging in more exposed waters.

Distinguishing between sightings of resting and active dolphins was key to defining critical habitats, Thorne said. While socially active spinner dolphins are more tolerant of humans' presence, resting dolphins will leave the safety of a bay and retreat to less suitable open waters if humans repeatedly disturb them.

"Sleep is essential for most animals," added Johnston. "When deprived of their necessary 'zzzz's,' they gradually show a decreased ability to process information and remain attentive to environmental stimuli. In technical lingo, we call this a 'vigilance decrement'."

Spinner dolphins are no exception to the rule. The researchers say dolphins that experience human harassment every day during their rest periods never fully recover their vigilance decrement. Their ability to forage successfully and detect the presence of nearby predators is also degraded, and their ability to produce sounds to communicate and navigate may also be impaired, he said.

Scientists and conservationists have long worried that spinners' popularity with tourists ? and overlap of their resting habitats with popular ocean recreation destinations ? may be placing them at risk. Reports of interactions have increased sharply in recent years, but few published studies have examined the detrimental impacts these interruptions may have on the animals, especially at the population level.

"It would be next to impossible to survey spinner populations and human activities in every bay that might be a resting habitat," Thorne said. "We're talking about hundreds of bays in the Hawaiian islands alone."

"Using predictive models, such as the maximum entropy spatial modeling approaches we've produced, is a much more cost-effective method," she said. "This type of modeling has only recently been applied to the study of marine mammals, but our study suggests it may be especially useful."

Thorne and Johnston plan to test their models by conducting similar studies of spinner dolphin distributions and habitat use in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and other sites in the Pacific islands region. Results from those studies, they said, could confirm the new models' usefulness.

Johnston and Thorne's co-authors on the PLoS ONE study include Dean L. Urban, professor of landscape ecology at Duke's Nicholas School, and Lars Bejdar, associate professor at Murdoch University, Australia, and adjunct assistant professor at Duke.

The data on spinner dolphin sightings used to develop the models in the study were provided by a team of eight additional co-authors from Murdoch University, the Pacific Islands Photo-Identification Network, the Cascadia Research Collective, the Hawai'i Marine Mammal Consortium, the Hawai'i Association for Marine Education and Research, the Dolphin Institute, the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Hilo, UH at M?noa, and Marine Mammal Research Consultants.

###

Article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043167

Duke University: http://www.duke.edu

Thanks to Duke University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/122998/New_maps_may_reduce_tourism_impacts_on_Hawaiian_dolphins

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Isaac makes second landfall, levee overtopped in Plaquemines Parish

The center of Hurricane Isaac made a second landfall over Port Fourchon, LA., early Wednesday while a levee was overtopped southeast of New Orleans.

Emergency management officials in Plaquemines Parish reported "overtopping of a levee from Braithwaite to White Ditch," according to The National Weather Service. "This will result in significant deep flooding in this area."

As of 4 a.m., Isaac is still packing winds of 80 mph and is 60 miles southeast of New Orleans. Isaac is moving at just 7 mph and has already dropped more than four inches of rain on New Orleans on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane had moved back into the Gulf of Mexico after making its initial landfall Tuesday evening.

The 200-mile wide hurricane is expected to gradually weaken and move inland, dumping seven to 14 inches of rain across Louisiana, with some places receiving up to 20 inches, according to forecasters.

The greatest concern is an expected storm surge of between six and 12 feet off the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, four to eight feet along the Alabama coast and three to six feet on the Florida Panhandle, according to the Hurricane Center located in Miami, Fla.

A storm surge of 11 feet was reported at Shell Beach, LA., late Tuesday while a surge of 6.7 feet was reported in Waveland, Miss., according to the Hurricane Center.

Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, said Tuesday night, wind gusts could reach about 100 mph at times, which could damage high-rise buildings in New Orleans.

Thursday night into Saturday, Isaac will move into the Mississippi Valley and eventually into Illinois and Indiana with possibly six inches of rain in the drought stricken Midwest.

Isolated tornadoes are possible along the central Gulf Coast region and part of the lower Mississippi River Valley through Wednesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Entergy New Orleans has listed more than 400,000 homes and businesses without power as of 4 a.m., according to their website. The Red Cross reported 18,000 people in 70 shelters across five states Wednesday morning.

When Isaac came ashore at 7:45 p.m. ET Tuesday, it dumped heavy rain with that spread 60 miles from Isaac's center. The highest wind gust reported in New Orleans was 71 mph at Lakefront Airport.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landreau told residents Tuesday night, "We are officially in the fight and the city of New Orleans is on the front line."

While traffic was nearly invisible Tuesday night, a few French Quarter bars remained open and filled with locals in New Orleans. At Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop -- the 150 year old dive at the end of Bourbon Street -- Chris LaRue recommended the four staples of hurricane preparedness, "Water, canned food, candles and booze."

"We're going to have some water to clean up," said LaRue. "But this kind of wind is nothing."

In Gulfport, Miss., Highway 90 was closed from Bay St. Louis Bridge to Biloxi Bay Bridge. There's a mandatory curfew in effect, especially at the beaches.

In advance of the storm, Louisiana set up shelters and stockpiled more than a million packaged meals, 1.4 million bottles of water and 17,000 tarps.

Since the levees failed in Katrina seven years ago, more than $14 billion has been spent on the 133 miles of floodwalls, spillways, gates and pumps surrounding New Orleans.

ABC News' Max Golembo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/isaac-makes-second-landfall-levee-overtopped-plaquemines-parish-052829005--abc-news-topstories.html

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Self Improvement: Private Growth Report Category - CareCrunch ...

Is Satisfaction Good or Bad?

While acknowledgement of your actions might imply a feeling of vanity that might attract an incredible load of criticism in the direction of your actions or even personality or perhaps both jointly, underrating your feats and knowledge draws in the same exact factor. Sometimes the conclusion that nothing will please folks around applies, but a lot of enough time, manners could be misleading. Concealing your feelings towards your achievements could view you as being a humble man or woman, but some people will start convinced that you lack self-esteem; a few will even be annoying to your character.

The Continuation of Life: Murder Won?t Pay

Regardless of what happens in living, in our ?dead lifestyle,? payback is not part of the game. With your dead existence, once you walk into the Light, you live in Unconditional Adore. You are cherished and accepted ?as is.? There are no denies. The Our god of common sense lives inside our minds. Suppose we are right here on the planet regarding contrast to understand the unconditional enjoy we take for granted on the other side, may be the answer to life in a body?

Be a Satisfied Introvert

The world is really skewed in support of extroverts that introverts can experience as if there?s something wrong using them. In fact, the entire world needs introverts, and you may be happy just as one introvert by being aware, being yourself and getting assertive.

Working with Criticism

How would you distinguish between good criticism along with destructive assaults? One needs to distinct criticism associated with performance coming from criticism involving personality.

Are you willing to take the risk?To get more informations regarding how to improve your personal. Visit here: self improvement.

Source: http://answers.carecrunch.com/?p=171605&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=self-improvement-private-growth-report-category

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Exhibition football helps NBC, CBS

New York Jets defensive end Quinton Coples (98) knocks the ball away from Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton (1) during the first half of a preseason NFL football game, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012, in East Rutherford, N.J. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

New York Jets defensive end Quinton Coples (98) knocks the ball away from Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton (1) during the first half of a preseason NFL football game, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012, in East Rutherford, N.J. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

NEW YORK (AP) ? The NFL season hasn't started yet, but with little else happening on broadcast television, exhibition football games are making a dent in the ratings.

Three games were ranked in Nielsen's top 30 prime-time programs last week. Sunday night's contest between the Carolina Panthers and New York Jets on NBC was second only to a showing of "America's Got Talent" as the week's most-watched program.

CBS relied on Friday and Saturday night games, along with the 14th edition of "Big Brother" and popular reruns, to win the week.

With 5.2 million viewers, NBC did relatively well with Brian Williams' "Rock Center" special edition on Mormonism. Only football and "America's Got Talent" did better for the network last week, the Nielsen Co. said.

For the week, CBS averaged 5.8 million viewers in prime time (3.8 rating, 7 share). NBC had 5.1 million (3.3, 6), ABC had 4.1 million (2.7, 5), Fox had 3.8 million (2.3, 4), ION Television had 1.1 million (0.7, 1) and the CW had 740,000 (0.5, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a 3.2 million average (1.7, 3). Telemundo had 1.2 million (0.7, 1), TeleFutura had 610,000 (0.3, 1), Estrella had 160,000 and Azteca had 110,000 (both 0.1, 0).

NBC's "Nightly News" topped the evening newscasts with an average of 7.8 million viewers (5.2, 11). ABC's "World News" was second with 7.1 million (4.8, 10) and the "CBS Evening News" had 5.5 million viewers (3.7, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Aug. 20-26, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: "America's Got Talent" (Tuesday), NBC, 9.9 million; NFL Exhibition Football: Carolina vs. N.Y. Jets, NBC, 9.82 million; "America's Got Talent" (Wednesday), NBC, 8.6 million; "60 Minutes," CBS, 8.58 million; "NCIS," CBS, 8.09 million; "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 7.44 million; "Big Brother 14" (Sunday), CBS, 7.37 million; "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 7.15 million; "The Mentalist" (Tuesday), CBS, 6.29 million; "Big Brother 14" (Thursday), CBS, 6.28 million.

___

ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

___

Online:

http://www.nielsen.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2012-08-28-Nielsens/id-67ba552a2856498498a18e8fac1dcc4f

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Wealth managers talk about challenges, risk and what's ahead ...

Monday, August 27, 2012, 6:00 am

By Eric Gneckow, Business Journal Staff Reporter

The Business Journal surveyed wealth management advisers across the North Bay on three questions related to the investment climate today and long term. The responses of nearly two dozen follow.

(Listed alphabetically by company name)

Colleen Supran, principal

Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, LLC

1201 Vine St., Ste. 102, Healdsburg, 707-433-7300, www.bosinvest.com

Describe one significant challenge that you currently face as a wealth adviser.

Colleen Supran

Fixed income is an important part of our clients? portfolios; however, future bond performance may look very different from the above-average returns we experienced over the past 30 years. Interest rates are at very low levels and if rates rise in the future, bond prices will decline. Although we have been hearing predictions of higher interest rates for years, no one knows for sure when (or if) rates will rise. We address this uncertainty by using short- to intermediate-maturity bonds in client portfolios. These bonds tend to be more stable when interest rates change, steadying portfolio values when stock price volatility increases.

What mistakes do you see individual investors making in the current financial climate?

Interest rates (as measured by the 10-year U.S. Treasury) are near record lows and the Federal Reserve has vowed to keep yields low for the foreseeable future. Investors starved for yield are buying higher-risk securities that they may not understand or want to own if they could earn some interest on CDs or a money market account. To achieve high yields in this environment an investor must take on more risk. This is often an unacceptable tradeoff for the portion of a portfolio that should be invested in stable, low-risk assets.

What plot lines are you following as you look towards the future for investing?

We live in an uncertain world and investors will always have plenty to consider. As much as the world around us changes, we recognize that the plot line for the future is based on each client?s unique situation. Changes in a client?s work or family situation are often more meaningful inputs than the myriad of economic and global worries that are an inevitable part of the investment landscape. We spend a significant amount of time understanding individual risk tolerance and building portfolios that are customized to meet each investor?s needs.

Charles Root, managing director

Double Eagle Financial

2300 Bethards Dr., Ste. R, PO Box 2790, Santa Rosa, 707-576-1313, www.double-eaglefinancial.com

Describe one significant challenge that you currently face as a wealth adviser.??

Charles Root

The major challenge is that too many clients watch the nightly news and see the overly negative news about the economy and everything in general. Rarely one sees any positive reinforcement to the changes that have been taking place and there have been many good ones that allow one to take advantage of business opportunities.

That said, businesses are concerned about costs and uncertainty, as well as future increase in taxes and healthcare costs.

With all these uncertainties, no one wants to make a move other than to hold on to their cash and resources.

What mistakes do you see individual investors making in the current financial climate???

Individual investors always make the same mistakes every cycle, which is one of the reasons the cycles are accentuated. They get impatient and sell at the worst critical part of the market and then wait until most of the recovery has taken place to buy back in. As a result they usually are out of phase with the market. Surveys have shown that individual investors have lower returns than professionals. One needs assurance by an expert adviser that will keep the investor calm in any kind of a market. Also, few investors or advisers for that matter know how to implement proper risk management when the market does start to go south.

What plot lines are you following as you look towards the future for investing?

Our game plan has few changes. We use an Offense plan and a Defense plan. We are now in the early stages of our Offense plan, that is to begin with serious money into the market when our charts give correct signals. During the period from May to October, the historical returns are minimal, so we are very cautious about putting large amounts into the market unless we have a strong signal to do so. We are always cautious unless we see strong signals for market bottoms.

As always our first rule is risk management, not to lose client money. Gain is secondary, since with small draw downs, one doesn?t need to get huge returns.

Copyright ? 1988?2012 North Bay Business Journal
View the policy for linking to website content.

Topics: Bingham Osborn & Scarborough, Double Eagle Financial, Exchange Bank, Financial Connections, Greenleaf & Burleson Wealth Management, Hennessy Funds, Jacobson & Breen Wealth Strategies, Main Street Research, Montgomery Taylor & Company, Moss Adams Wealth Advisers, North Bay Business Journal 8-27-2012, North Bay Wealth Managers 8-27-2012, Private Ocean, Private Wealth Partners, Redwood Credit Union, Schmitz Capital Partners, Titus wealth management, UBS Financial Services, Verity Wealth Advisors, Vista Wealth Management, wealth management, Wealth Management Consultants, Willow Creek Financial Services, Wine Country Wealth Management | Categories: Banking and Finance, Industry News, North Bay News, People, Spotlights, Top News Stories

Source: http://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/60037/2012-wealth-managers-on-challenges-risk-and-whats-ahead/

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After Apple's $1B legal victory, Samsung's shares drop 7%

After Apple?s $1B legal victory, Samsung?s shares drop 7%

Samsung Electronics started the week by facing consequences of having definitively lost to Apple in their U.S. patent lawsuit. Its shares fell by more than 7 percent Monday morning, wiping nearly $12 billion off Samsung?s market value.

In a landmark legal decision late Friday, a federal jury in San Jose, Calif. determined [PDF]?that Samsung infringed on several patents held by Apple, and called for more than $1 billion in damages.

Samsung, which already declared its intention to appeal, said in a statement: ?Today?s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer.?

The Aug. 24 ruling affects 21 Samsung devices, all except two of the devices Apple named in its suit. Each was evaluated individually, with the top three infringers being Samsung?s Epic 4G., the Fascinate, and the Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (pictured).

Three patents proved to be the most crucial: Patent 381, which includes inertial scrolling and the ?rubber band? effect; Patent 163, which covers zooming in by tapping; and Patent 915, a programming interface for gestures. Several design elements were also determined to infringe.

Samsung circulated a memo to employees that it has now translated into English and made public on its blog. In it, the Korean company said this latest verdict runs contrary to previous rulings in United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Korea.

?History has shown there has yet to be a company that has won the hearts and minds of consumers and achieved continuous growth, when its primary means to competition has been the outright abuse of patent law, not the pursuit of innovation,? the memo reads. ?We trust that the consumers and the market will side with those who prioritize innovation over litigation, and we will prove this beyond doubt.?

Related links:

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ? ruling,?Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. et al. [PDF]?

Samsung ? memo to employees

All Things D ? Next Stop for Apple-Samsung: Appeals Court

All Things D ? Jury: Samsung Owes Apple More Than $1 Billion for Infringing Patents

Financial Times ? Samsung slams Apple ?patent law abuse?

CNN ? Samsung to fight court ruling in Apple patent dispute

Bloomberg ? Samsung Slumps Most in 4 Years on U.S. Sales Ban Concerns

Reuters ? Samsung shares shed $12 billion after Apple?s legal victory

Wall Street Journal ? Samsung Shares Plunge After Patents Verdict

MarketWatch ? Samsung legal defeat unlikely to hit profit much

USA Today ? Jury: Samsung violated Apple patents, owes more than $1B

Ars Technica ? Apple v. Samsung juror: we ?wanted to send a message?

New York Times ? Jury Awards $1 Billion to Apple in Samsung Patent Case

PC Magazine ? Apple Patent Breakdown: Which Samsung Tech, Gadgets Infringe?

Source: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2012/08/27/after-apples-1b-legal-victory-samsungs-shares-drop-7

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Web Development and Internet Marketing to help you Business Grow

Web design has become the keyword nowadays. Every business needs a great deal of publicity because there is rigid competition. With the creation of the Internet age, they have therefore become very important to use all the obtainable tools of marketing, just like blogs, websites, content and even video along with social networking sites. If your clients are an online business, the need for online marketing solutions is even greater. The best policy would be to hire a professional SEO or search engine Optimization Company which could offer a wide range of internet related marketing services, similar to web designing, e-commerce solution, lead generation, corporate identity, link building and much more. Before any such decision will be taken, it must be appreciated that there are plenty of fake websites out there, that are run by spammers that are just running a scam. These people often trick those looking for Search engine optimization support. Again, there are many web marketing companies that employ what is commonly named black hat marketing strategies, similar to meta data and whirl posting. These are usually considered unethical. Besides, recurring and mirror submitting is also not regarded acceptable as per common or international specifications. Because your ultimate aim will be to get your site as much publicity along with coverage as possible, for the major search engines like Google, you should ensure that the company that you simply hire for Search engine marketing purposes does not make use of any black hat or unethical ways of marketing for your website as well as company. This could really negatively affect your current corporate identity. The truth is, it could even lead to the termination of your itemizing and visibility inside the major search engines like Google which in turn immediately strike along any such unethical web sites. There are plenty of acceptable means of improving the chances of achievement in business, whether you are within New York or Las vegas or Chicago, since all you would need can be Web design Miami, Web design New York or Web site design Chicago. You should check the background and profile with the SEO company you are using the services of. Hopefully, the company will likely provide some of its portfolio, as an example of what the company has done regarding other companies.

Easy Cash Code

You can even search for an SEO company that can look after your e-commerce New York business. Whichever be the type of company or business you have, there are several time-tested marketing strategies, which will certainly increase traffic to your website and therefore bring more customers at your doorstep. As an illustration, most of the Web design Ohio companies will be utilizing techniques like improving the graphics and fundamental look of your internet site, by adding better photos, colors, backgrounds along with other special features like analytics or statistics to help you keep track of who?s visiting your website and from which source. Apart from, these SEO firms also specialize in developing targeted or niche customer set for an individual. This can be done by using subscriber lists and social networking sites. By simply aggressive article marketing that back-link to your website and then uploading these articles to the top article directory sites can do a world of difference to your business.

For more information about Easy Cash Code review please visit the website.

Source: http://iwebdeveloper.co.uk/2012/08/27/web-development-and-internet-marketing-to-help-you-business-grow/

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The Crime Writers' Chronicle: Our Weirdest Jobs!

When mystery-world creators delve into their past, astounding things wriggle up from the gardens of memory! I invited some of our crime colleagues to share their adventures.

Feel free to add your own in the comments section.

LARRY LIGHT: One summer in college, I worked in a chewing gum factory. My job was to manually lift cowpie-like hunks of semi-solid gum from a cart and put it into a hopper. Then it was split into long lines of gum so others manually cut it into plugs of the stuff for wrapping. I stank of sugar the entire summer. This was not a blessed state!

ALAFAIR BURKE: Between being a law professor, writing a book a year (ish), and hopefully being a dog walker again soon enough, I probably didn't need another job, but I went and found one anyway. One Saturday in June I spent a day as Guest Gelato Scooper for Mario Batali's Gelotto cart! Why would I want to scoop gelato, you ask? I frequently write at New York's Otto Pizzeria. I even have scenes from the Ellie Hatcher novels set there, starring Dennis the ( real ) bar manager. With the NEVER TELL book tour about to start, I knew I'd be away from New York for much of the summer and homesick. Spending a day in Washington Square Park, making people happy with gelato, seemed like a nice city memory!

KATE GALLISON: In high school I was baby-sitting for two kids when Grandma emerged from her bedroom and demanded that I lace up her corset.

JAMES SCOTT BELL: Being in charge of the fake food as a stagehand in a New York theater production of a Shaw play. It was my first paying theatrical gig since arriving in the city to become an actor. Even though I was backstage, I felt like had my foot in the door. The play had a big dinner scene, and after the curtain came down it was my job to rearrange all the fake food for the next night's performance. I felt a little like that guy who cleans up after the elephants at the circus. When asked why he didn't quit, he said, "What? And give up show business?"

J.T. ELLISON: My most unusual job was as a vet tech. You don't want to know what goes on behind the scenes at the vet! I lasted three days!

SHEILA YORK: When I was a sophomore in high school I was hired, along with some other girls, to pretend to be mannequins in a store window. We modelled fall fashions in August in Tennessee in a west-facing window without moving, with only one fan blowing on us from the narrow door into the store. (It could explain why I am to this day very unenthusiastic about shopping!)

CHRIS GRABENSTEIN: My first job ever! Selling sponges door to door. We were supposed to say that a portion of the proceeds went to help mentally handicapped children. The guy with the speech impediment was the top seller! I quit after two days!

KAYE BARLEY: After a divorce in my 20's, I was working as a secretary in Downtown Atlanta and not making much money. I decided I needed a part time job. A brand new Hilton Hotel had recently opened ? quite the place! Nikolai's Roof, The Casablanca Lounge, designer shops ? all quite upscale! With an international flair. I marched in, filled out a job application and was hired to work as a hostess in the Cafe de la Paix. My uniform looked like something out of the original Heidi movie ? plaid pinafore, ruffled petticoat under a very short skirt. (and this was a French restaurant ? what was with the plaid? Horrible!) One evening, when the gal who was supposed to take care of the "take out" window didn't show, I was put in her place. I want to tell you ? the things some guys traveling on business have the nerve to say to a young twenty-something-year-old waitress are beyond the pale! I'm going to blame it on the drinks in the Casablanca Lounge! I didn't last through the evening! I have no idea who continued selling pastries through that take out window that evening, but it wasn't me! Not only was it very weird, it was very short!

CAMILLE MINICHINO: One of my first (signings) was at a local market. The manager, whom I knew, had always wanted to open a bookstore! Stuck with a deli/market, she was determined to at least host a book party, and it was very successful. She had coffee from a small shop next door, made cookies, stencilled guns on a bedsheet the color of my book cover and used it to cover the meat cases!

ANNETTE MEYERS: In the late 50's I was teaching high school English in New Jersey and living in the city. I had a boyfriend who worked for a car rental agency, ferrying cars out to La Guardia for the rental booth there and picking up others and driving them back into the city. Sometimes they were short of help, and they'd call on me and I filled in. I didn't know Queens and I was used to driving a VW. I just followed one of the workers out to the airport the first time in a big car, and then went back and forth all that summer. I stopped seeing the guy by the end of the summer!!

SUNNY FRAZIER: As a confidential secretary with an undercover narcotics unit. They stuck me out in a double-wide trailer in a nectarine orchard with 10 alpha males! No real supervision as we were so far away from headquarters. Every day was full of hijinks and I had to sometimes treat the men like they were kindergarteners. They were proud of me and used to say, "Only one member on the team is a military vet and college graduate ? and that's our secretary!" I spent eleven years with them, the longest any woman has ever lasted! It gave me lots of great material for my Christy Bristol Astrology mystery novels. I don't ever have to come up with plots ? I lived them!

DENNIS PALUMBO: Trying to break into show business as a writer, way back in my early 20's. While I was writing spec TV scripts, I earned extra money selling jokes to stand-up comics. I would hang around the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, pitching jokes to stand-ups after the acts were finished. Tough gig, let me tell you! One time I was trying to sell some one-liners to an older Vegas comic, and he asked me to meet him in his gym's steam room. So there I was, surrounded by old guys in towels, all sweating our brains out, and I'm trying to read jokes to him from a sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the steam is making the ink run on the paper? Next time, I'm on the road with Gabe Kaplan, at that time the star of Welcome Back, Kotter, and I'm writing jokes for his act. Our deal was, I got paid for every joke that got a laugh. So, we're in the New York City Playboy Club lounge, at 4 A.M. and he's just done a set, which included some of my new jokes. So we sit in the back, arguing about each joke in terms of whether it got a laugh or a chuckle. If it got a laugh, he paid me. If a chuckle, no. Our debate lasted half an hour, ending with us canvassing the few patrons sober enough to speak coherently, asking if they thought a particular joke was funny! Soon afterwards, I was employed as a writer, then screenwriter, and didn't have to peddle jokes to comics anymore. Now long retired from show biz, I'm a licensed psychotherapist, and mystery author! Still, I have fond memories of that early time!!! DOUG LYLE: If ever I had any doubts about going to college, and I never did, those would have evaporated on a very hot July day in Huntsville, Alabama. I had a summer job at a lumber yard, a good way to make some money and get in shape for the next football season. Loading dry wall all day will do that.But on this day, a very strong black guy I worked with called Mr. Golden and I were dispatched in a flat bed truck to unload roofing tiles from a box car over at the rail yards. Forty pallets on those old asphalt tiles. No problem! We had a fork lift on the truck and it was a simple matter of lifting the pallets, removing them from the box car, and settling them in the long bed of the truck. Piece of cake! Not so fast? The box car had a sliding door that ran on metal rails at its top and bottom. The bottom rail prevented the fork lift from entering the car - it was slung too low. So we had to do it by hand. Each pallet had ten squares, each square three bundles, and each bundle weighed 67 pounds! So we had 1200 bundles to off load. Did I mention it was July? The outside temperature was 95, the humidity the same, and inside the box car it was 140 if it was anything! We took turns being in the car. Lifting a bundle and tossing it out the door, where the other guy would catch it and stack it on an empty pallet. Took us five hours! No food, no water, we were way out on the far reaches of the rail yard. Took two days to recover from this little adventure. Never again!!!!

LOIS WINSTON: My weirdest job wasn't at all weird back in the day, but by today's standards??? If I said I once had a job spec'ing type, I doubt many people now would know what I was talking about. Typesetters have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Everything from magazine ads to book text to the words on a bag of Cheetos is done in no time with a few computer keystrokes. However, back before computers, figuring out how big to make the font to fit within a text block was tedious work that involved (shudder) math. And being a totally right-brained person, math and I didn't exactly get along. Make an error, and it cost in both dollars and time, not a good thing when each job was on a tight budget and an even tighter deadline. Great for inducing panic attacks, though getting fired was a huge relief!

THELMA STRAW: Ever wonder what nuns wear under those voluminous robes? For sure, not Victoria's Secret! One fall, while enrolled in one of the colleges in Oxford, England, I ran out of money to pay my room and board at the hostel run by the Anglican nuns there. They graciously offered me a trade - doing their laundry for lodging. In an open shed in the middle of their huge cabbage garden, daily I stirred over an open fire a huge cauldron filled with a weird assortment of bloomers, female tops, long black cotton stockings and some sort of Elizabethan petticoats (from a Mother Goose fairy tale) in a steamy brew of the nuns' homemade soap. Not Ivory! I then hung them on a line over the rows of cabbages, often wondering if I got the garments really clean! The icing on the cake was that at mealtime the ladies served their boarders cabbage ? thrice per diem! Cabbage mush, cabbage cereal, cabbage bread, cabbage pudding! Nowadays I rarely meet a cabbage dish I'll eat!

P.S. Please share with us your own weird or odd experiences in our comment section!

Thelma Straw

Source: http://crimewriters.blogspot.com/2012/08/our-weirdest-jobs.html

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4 Tips to Improve Your Business Marketing | Direct Selling ...

Marketing for your small business requires a good deal of creativity, especially if you want to avoid wasting precious dollars on things that don?t work for you. No matter what type of marketing you choose for your business, there are some key concepts to keep in mind. For example, focus on what your customers want and how you can help them, and work on marketing yourself instead of your product or service. With these things in mind, the following suggestions can help you improve your overall marketing strategy.

• Leverage your strengths. Many small business owners make the mistake of apologizing for what they don?t provide or services they don?t offer. Instead of doing this, emphasize what you can do for your customers by demonstrating the strengths of your business. For example, a mobile pet groomer does not service cats at all. Instead of drawing attention to this, she focuses only on marketing her business to owners of dogs only. Any literature she distributes refers to her business as a dog groomer, not a pet groomer. She emphasizes this so effectively that most people don?t even think to ask her if she services cats at all. In the rare instances that they do, however, she still responds by reminding clients that she grooms dogs of all breeds and sizes. Her ability to highlight her strengths and use them to attract the right customers makes her marketing efforts much more effective.
• Look at your competitors? weaknesses. Gather some marketing materials (flyers, newspaper ads, emails, social networking sites, etc.) from your competitors. Look at them from a customer?s point of view and decide what their weaknesses are. You might get a beautifully designed email in your inbox complete with hyperlinks to their website, scannable coupons that save you the hassle of having to print them out to use them, and a brief but memorable description of the services provided. The only problem is that some similar version of this flyer gets delivered to your inbox at least once a week. After the first couple of weeks, you know what you?re going to find, so you start deleting it as soon as you get it. The flyer itself is not the weakness here, but the frequency and lack of variation of the email. Learn from these types of mistakes and avoid them in your marketing plan.
• Incorporate trends that make sense for your business. This requires some industry research, but can prove quite beneficial for your marketing efforts in the long run. Find out what others in your field are doing, and if possible, incorporate it into your business. Back to our mobile dog groomer, she has researched other local groomers and has found that they offer incentives for customers who are located within a 5-mile radius of her home base, have more than one dog to be groomed, and who use her services multiple times in a 6-month period. All of these perks make sense to incorporate since they are starting to become a standard in the industry, and they will help her stay competitive. It would be a good idea to point out these incentives in her marketing efforts as well.
• Brainstorm with your community and customers. Feedback from your customers is a valuable tool that you should be using on a consistent basis. In addition to asking about how satisfied they are with your services, pick their brains about what kind of marketing gets their attention. It can sometimes be difficult to see something from a customer?s point of view when you?ve been so focused on your role as business owner. Strike up conversations within your community to gain a new perspective; your customers will appreciate your interest in their opinions.

Emphasizing your strengths, downplaying your weaknesses, and industry research can improve your marketing and help prevent you from wasting money and time on methods that don?t work.

How have you improved your marketing? Share your ideas below!

Source: http://www.dsef.org/2012/08/27/4-tips-to-improve-your-business-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=4-tips-to-improve-your-business-marketing

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Priebus: Akin could cost GOP chance to win Senate

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Republican National Party chair Reince Priebus says that Todd Akin's insistence on staying in the Missouri Senate race could cost the party its chance to win control of the Senate.

Priebus says Akin "should put the mission of liberty and freedom ahead of himself" and leave the race.

Akin has ignored calls from national GOP leaders, including Priebus and presidential contender Mitt Romney, to leave the race against incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Republicans hope to pick off her seat and capture a Senate majority in the November elections.

Akin has apologized repeatedly for comments made a week ago that pregnancy in a "legitimate rape" is rare because the female body tries "to shut that whole thing down."

Priebus made his comments Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-08-26-Priebus-Senate/id-806ba836e2a64b09ae44849b0d6cb44c

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Useful Hermosa Beach real estate inspection tips

Get to know what queries to ask from Hermosa Beach Certified Home Inspector before hiring him for home inspection of any home.

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Getting a home has lot of steps and it is very important to get complete procedure of buying home effortlessly. In tricky steps, one is Hermosa Beach real estate inspection. When purchasing a property, you have to ensure that you will be getting good return for made when there is necessity to sale property. One method to do it is to call home inspector for inspecting that home which one wants to purchase and have a exhaustive report on health of that home. That analysis would help you to decide amount to offer for that property, infact one should purchase that property. Hermosa Beach real estate inspection is most important stage of procedure & you have to ensure that he is calling right Hermosa Beach Certified Home Inspector. An experienced home inspector will be able to present best report of house. To assist you in finding a right Hermosa Beach Home Inspector Service, below mentioned are the tips as well as question one should ask from that home inspector before calling them: Extent of home inspection: Confirm that home inspection would be touching all necessary requirements that property will need to be inspected. Another thing to confirm is report should be compliant with standard ethics and codes. You can ask Hermosa Beach Home Inspector Service to prepare list of Hermosa Beach property inspection checklists which will be inspected. If one feels that vital area is excluded, you may request Hermosa Beach Certified Home Inspector for adding it. Reliability of home inspection service: You always seek experienced home inspector having a good track record. In case that home inspector is able to provide list of her past home inspection, one may contact them clients to have their feedback on standard of their home inspection service. But remember new home inspector as well & give emphasis that they should be working with experienced home inspector. Repairs by home inspection service: You may ask if home inspection you are going to hire, do maintenance if needed in that home which you are purchasing. Lot of home inspector do offer repair services as well or he would assist you in selecting best person for doing repairs. Longevity for home inspection: When single home inspector will be coming up for home inspection, possibility is there that home inspection might take 3 hours for single family house. Thus it is advised to get a team from home inspection service so that Hermosa Beach property inspection can be carried out fast. If they need more time than mentioned above, you may expect a detailed analysis. With these questions one would make sure that one is hiring reputable home inspector who will do professional home inspection service.

About the Submitter
Know importance of Hermosa Beach real estate inspection from http://www.equityinspection.com/ before purchasing new home.

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Bhrat Brij

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Tea party tries to balance ideology, constituents

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Twenty months into a Congress they have tilted rightward, tea party loyalists are finding that ideological purity can be elusive for conservative lawmakers trying to balance their convictions against constituents' election-year needs.

Rep. Paul Ryan, who has won tea party praise as Mitt Romney's vice presidential pick, had a General Motors assembly plant that was about to be shuttered in his hometown of Janesville, Wis., when he voted for the $14 billion auto industry bailout in 2008. The seven-term House Republican also voted for the $700 billion financial industry rescue that same year.

He has since criticized both efforts by President George W. Bush to combat that year's near economic collapse. Yet his votes ? plus his support for Bush's 2003 debt-financed expansion of Medicare to provide prescription drug coverage ? rankle conservatives to this day and underscore the challenge of adhering to small-government principles when voters' bread-and-butter interests are at stake.

More recently, this campaign season has seen some of the House's most conservative members split over a sweeping farm bill, disaster aid to drought-battered farmers and legislation to finance transportation projects and keep student loan interest rates from ballooning. Such divisions have dampened the expectations of tea party leaders, with some now saying it will take several elections before they win the Washington clout they need.

"No one is going to agree with us 100 percent of the time," Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, said of members of Congress. "And we do understand they do have to look at what's best for their district and their constituents."

Martin said that most of all, tea party supporters want lawmakers to be firm in their convictions. Out of 240 House Republicans and 47 GOP senators, she said there are fewer than 30 House members and about five senators she can reliably count on for support, with too many others focused on bringing federal largesse back home.

"We just don't have very many visionary people stepping up in our political landscape right now at all," Martin said.

The struggles conservatives face were illustrated just before Congress recessed for August, when the House approved $383 million in agriculture disaster aid, mostly for livestock producers and tree farmers.

Conservatives ended up on both sides of the 223-197 vote. One of the "yes" votes came from Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., who has one of the House's most conservative voting records and whose district has one of the nation's heaviest concentrations of farms.

Huelskamp said he has repeatedly told constituents that they will be affected by efforts to curb federal deficits, including reductions in farm support. A farmer himself, Huelskamp said he voted for the disaster aid because it was paid for by cutting conservation programs.

"I thought it was fiscally responsible," he said.

That wasn't the view of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a House conservative leader who opposed the bill. He said he wants less federal involvement in the private sector and complained that the savings to pay for the measure's one year of disaster aid was being culled from conservation programs for a decade into the future.

"The first principle is what's good for your country is good for your constituents," Jordan said. "And what's good for your country is not to spend money you don't have."

Divisions like that among conservatives have not been unusual.

The conservative Club for Growth, which advocates lower taxes and less regulation, scores lawmakers' voting records based on bills it considers key.

Of the 46 House Republicans the club considered the most conservative, 27 voted for the disaster aid bill, 17 voted against and two did not vote. On the bill approved in June on transportation and student loans, 28 voted against, 16 voted for and two were absent.

"The reality is most members of Congress look to see what gets them re-elected and that drives their ideology more than a detached view of policy," said Chris Chocola, the club's president and a former House member.

Conservatives showed their clout last month when they prevented House GOP leaders from bringing a massive bill renewing agriculture programs to a vote in the chamber, arguing that its farm subsidies and food stamps were too costly.

Yet even that bill highlighted internal divisions. Four of the most conservative members, as measured by the Club for Growth, had voted for the bill when it was approved by the House Agriculture Committee, while two voted against it.

Tea party-backed Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., opposed the broad bill at the Agriculture Committee, calling it too expensive. He backed the disaster measure on the House floor, arguing that it merely provided money the government committed to in a farm bill four years ago.

"With a drought across the country, there are priorities. As conservatives we set our priorities what is important and what is not, and I felt that was part of an obligation," Stutzman said of the disaster aid.

As for Ryan's 2008 votes, he said then that the financial industry bailout would preserve the free enterprise system. On the auto industry rescue, he said his district's economic hardships had been "downright gut-wrenching." Now chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan has since criticized both measures, saying the Obama administration misused them.

Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, which often works with tea party groups, said the organization likes Ryan's willingness to propose conservative budgets but has not forgotten his votes on the bailouts and the Medicare prescription drug expansion.

"We've had our disappointments and arguments with Paul over the years," said Kibbe. "He's definitely not perfect. But in presidential politics, there's no such thing as perfect."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tea-party-tries-balance-ideology-constituents-081158885.html

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