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Saturday, February 25, 2012
Study: Candidates' plans lead to huge deficits (AP)
[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP - Huge tax cuts in the budget plans of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum would produce the kinds of trillion-dollar-plus deficits that the GOP candidates are blaming on President Barack Obama.
Poll: Millionaire tax popular, spending cuts too
President Barack Obama speaks during a fundraiser at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
President Barack Obama speaks during a fundraiser at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Most people like President Barack Obama's proposal to make millionaires pay a significant share of their incomes in taxes. Yet they'd still rather cut spending than boost taxes to balance the federal budget, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows, giving Republicans an edge over Democrats in their core ideological dispute over the nation's fiscal ills.
The survey suggests that while Obama's election-year tax plan targeting people making at least $1 million a year has won broad support, it has done little to shift people's basic views in the long-running partisan war over how best to tame budget deficits that lately have exceeded $1 trillion annually.
"Everybody should be called to sacrifice. They should be in the pot with the rest of us," Mike Whittles, 62, a Republican and retired police officer from Point Pleasant, N.J., said of his support for Obama's tax proposal for the wealthy. But Whittles said he still prefers cutting government spending over raising taxes because of federal waste and what he calls "too many rules, too many regulations."
Sixty-five percent of the people in the AP-GfK poll favor Obama's plan to require people making $1 million or more pay taxes equal to at least 30 percent of their income. Just 26 percent opposed Obama's idea.
Yet by 56 percent to 31 percent, more embraced cuts in government services than higher taxes as the best medicine for the budget, according to the survey, which was conducted Feb. 16 to 20. That response has changed only modestly since it was first asked in the AP-GfK poll last March. The question on Obama's tax on the rich was not asked previously.
The poll showed that overall, more people have a positive view of Democrats than Republicans, a ray of hope for Obama and his fellow Democrats with the approach of November's presidential and congressional elections. Fifty-four percent in the poll gave Democrats favorable ratings compared to 46 percent for Republicans, similar to results in January 2011, at the start of the newly elected Congress in which Republicans have run the House and Democrats wield a slender Senate majority.
Though embraced by congressional Democrats, Obama's proposal on taxing millionaires more has virtually no chance of passage by Congress in the political heat of this year's campaigns. But it stands as a rallying cry for Democrats ? about 9 in 10 of whom supported the plan in the poll ? and it contrasts with proposals by the remaining major GOP presidential candidates, who would lower the current 35 percent top income tax rate.
Obama has spent months touting his plan, nicknamed the Buffett rule after Warren Buffett, the billionaire who has complained that the rich don't pay enough taxes and that his own tax rate has been lower than his secretary's. The wealthy Mitt Romney, a leading GOP presidential contender, has released tax returns showing he paid a rate of around 15 percent the past two years.
Illustrating the wide acceptance for Obama's tax proposal for the rich, the poll showed it was supported by nearly two-thirds of independents and 4 in 10 Republicans. It also won backing from 6 in 10 whites and half of conservatives, two groups that traditionally are more likely to support the GOP, as well as by 6 in 10 people earning at least $100,000 a year.
Not everyone supports the idea.
"If their money goes to taxes, how will they afford more employees, better equipment, better vehicles?" said Republican Cheryl Mickler, 31, of Hope Mills, N.C.
As for the differing strategies for deficit reduction, more than three-fourths of Republicans and the largest share of independents preferred cutting government services. Democrats leaned toward tax increases, but by a narrower 49 percent to 38 percent.
Republicans have an 8 percentage point advantage over Democrats in the public's trust for handling budget deficits, essentially unchanged in recent months.
The GOP has the same edge for protecting the country, an issue it usually dominates. Peoples' trust in the two parties is about even for handling the economy, taxes and job creation.
Congress continues to receive dismal reviews from voters. Just 19 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, virtually unchanged from last December. That's not far from Congress' worst-ever approval rate in the brief history of the AP-GfK poll of 12 percent last August, shortly after Obama and lawmakers resolved a stubborn standoff over raising the debt limit.
"We put them there to do their job and they're not doing their job," said Gary Witalison, 54, a residential painter in Fish Creek, Wis. "They're not working things out. Work together."
The AP-GfK poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications and involved cell phone and landline interviews with 1,000 randomly chosen adults. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
___
AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
___
Online:
http://www.ap-gfkpoll.com
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Friday, February 24, 2012
AP IMPACT: Lender's own probe links it to suicides
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, Shwetha, 5, sits on the lap of her mother Sunita, 22, as she holds a photograph of her debt-ridden father Hari Prasad, who consumed fertilizer chemical to kill himself on Aug. 1, 2010, in Kadiri village about 160 kilometers (99 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, Shwetha, 5, sits on the lap of her mother Sunita, 22, as she holds a photograph of her debt-ridden father Hari Prasad, who consumed fertilizer chemical to kill himself on Aug. 1, 2010, in Kadiri village about 160 kilometers (99 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, Sunita, 22, right, and her daughter Shwetha, 5, are reflected in a mirror hanging on the wall of their house where Sunita's debt-ridden husband Hari Prasad consumed fertilizer chemical to kill himself on Aug. 1, 2010, in Kadiri village about 160 kilometers (99 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, a portrait of debt-ridden Jayaramappa, who hanged himself in his home on Oct. 4, 2010, and his family stands on top of a television set inside their house in Madakasira village about 145 kilometers (90 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, Ankita, 8, stands next to a photograph of herself with her mother and debt-ridden father Jayaramappa, who hanged himself on Oct. 4, 2010 in their home, in Madakasira village about 145 kilometers (90 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2012, Sunita, 22, holds her daughter Shwetha, 5, in her lap as she watches her son Kiran, 16 months, play with a photograph of her debt-ridden husband Hari Prasad, who consumed fertilizer chemical to kill himself in their home on Aug. 1, 2010, in the village of Kadiri about 160 kilometers (99 miles) north of Bangalore, India. A wave of suicides among the impoverished residents of India's Andhra Pradesh state was blamed on the relentless tactics of agents from microfinance companies, which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
MUMBAI, India (AP) ? First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, televisions, ration cards and heirloom gold jewelry. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself in a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children.
Sometimes, the debt collectors watched nearby.
More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of Andhra Pradesh killed themselves in late 2010, according to media reports compiled by the government of the south Indian state. The state blamed microfinance companies ? which give small loans intended to lift up the very poor ? for fueling a frenzy of overindebtedness and then pressuring borrowers so relentlessly that some took their own lives.
The companies, including market leader SKS Microfinance, denied it.
However, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, independent researchers and videotaped testimony from the families of the dead, show top SKS officials had information implicating company employees in some of the suicides.
An independent investigation commissioned by the company linked SKS employees to at least seven of the deaths. A second investigation commissioned by an industry umbrella group that probed the role of many microfinance companies did not draw conclusions but pointed to SKS involvement in two more cases that ended in suicide. Neither study has been made public.
Both reports said SKS employees had verbally harassed over-indebted borrowers, forced them to pawn valuable items, incited other borrowers to humiliate them and orchestrated sit-ins outside their homes to publicly shame them. In some cases, the SKS staff physically harassed defaulters, according to the report commissioned by the company. Only in death would the debts be forgiven.
The videos and reports tell stark stories:
One woman drank pesticide and died a day after an SKS loan agent told her to prostitute her daughters to pay off her debt. She had been given 150,000 rupees ($3,000) in loans but only made 600 rupees ($12) a week.
Another SKS debt collector told a delinquent borrower to drown herself in a pond if she wanted her loan waived. The next day, she did. She left behind four children.
One agent blocked a woman from bringing her young son, weak with diarrhea, to the hospital, demanding payment first. Other borrowers, who could not get any new loans until she paid, told her that if she wanted to die, they would bring her pesticide. An SKS staff member was there when she drank the poison. She survived.
An 18-year-old girl, pressured until she handed over 150 rupees ($3) ? meant for a school examination fee ? also drank pesticide. She left a suicide note: "Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans."
In all these cases, the report commissioned by SKS concluded that the company's staff was either directly or indirectly responsible.
Caught in the despair of poverty, tens of thousands of impoverished Indians kill themselves every year, often because of insurmountable debt. The supportive structure of the microfinance companies was supposed to change that.
But Davuluri Venkateswarlu, director of Glocal Research in Hyderabad, which conducted the industrywide investigation, said in an interview that he told SKS executives there was "clear involvement of SKS personnel" in some suicides.
SKS continues to deny all responsibility for the deaths and says it never commissioned an independent inquiry. SKS spokesman J.S. Sai, who flew to Mumbai from the company's Hyderabad headquarters to discuss the AP findings, said the company stands by its September 2011 affidavit before India's Supreme Court. In that affidavit, chief executive M.R. Rao says SKS "is neither the cause of nor responsible for any suicides in the state of Andhra Pradesh."
The deaths came after a period of hypergrowth leading up to the company's hugely successful August 2010 initial public offering.
Originally developed as a nonprofit effort to lift society's most downtrodden, microfinance has increasingly become a for-profit enterprise that serves investors as well as the poor. As India's market leader, SKS has pioneered a business model that many others hoped to emulate.
But the story of what went wrong at SKS has led current and former employees and even some major shareholders to question that strategy and raises fundamental questions for the multibillion-dollar global microfinance industry.
Meanwhile, whistleblowers at SKS say that they have been targeted for retaliation and that the company has failed to correct structural flaws that contributed to the suicides.
"At the end of it," said Alok Prasad, chief executive of the Microfinance Institutions Network, the industry group that commissioned the Glocal report, "you come down to a handful of cases where some things went wrong. Is that indicative of the model being bad or very rapid expansion leading to a loss of control?"
___
Microfinance was born in desperation. Amid the 1970s famine in Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus began giving small loans to poor women with his own money. Despite the predictions of bankers, the women paid him back.
The core idea of Yunus' Grameen Bank was the borrower group. Five women from a village determine how large a loan each member gets and act as guarantors. If even one member is delinquent, no new loans are issued. Group members apply pressure ? and support ? that has kept repayment rates near 100 percent.
Yunus' innovation won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
In 1997, Yunus acolyte Vikram Akula founded his own microcredit organization, Swayam Krishi Sangam, Sanskrit for "self-help society." In 2005, SKS started operating as a for-profit company and Akula began chasing private investment to achieve the massive scale required to dent global poverty.
In August 2010, SKS Microfinance ? then India's largest microlender ? went public. Exuberant investors oversubscribed the $350 million offering nearly 14 times. The stock surged more than 10 percent its first day. The company handed out 21,000 watches to employees in celebration.
Then media reports began to surface that over-indebted borrowers were killing themselves.
In October 2010, a mob of 150 people surrounded SKS's Hyderabad headquarters, protesting the suicide of a borrower's husband. They threatened to drag the corpse inside and demanded $20,000.
It was one of dozens of deaths the government of Andhra Pradesh blamed on aggressive tactics by microfinance companies. Police jailed microfinance employees, including dozens from SKS. Among the charges was abetment to suicide, essentially driving people to kill themselves, a crime under Indian law. Authorities investigated 76 cases in which employees from SKS and other microfinance companies were blamed for driving borrowers to take their own lives. The state passed a law designed to clamp down on abuses with new restrictions on loan disbursement and collection and onerous registration requirements on the companies. Microlending in India's largest microcredit market was effectively shut down.
Microfinance officials fought the new law and denied the charges, accusing the state government of trying to gain traction with voters and punish companies for capturing valuable market share from state-run lending groups.
Established microlenders such as SKS said loan sharks operating under the guise of microfinance were behind the excesses. SKS and other companies asked a court to stop the arrest of their employees. The court issued a stay on new arrests. Today, no one is in jail.
In a November 2010 letter to India's finance minister, Akula defended his company and included supportive articles from The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
At the same time, the industry group Microfinance Institutions Network hired Glocal to investigate 44 deaths among debtors of microfinance companies, including SKS.
Venkateswarlu, the Glocal director, presented the findings to executives at three lenders. In January 2011, he delivered startling news to Akula and Rao: SKS employees had clear involvement in the suicides of four borrowers, meaning that their actions appeared strongly linked to the subsequent deaths, according to their investigation.
The AP obtained a four-page section of the Glocal report that deals with the SKS case studies. It related the financial history of borrowers, the loans obtained, the nature of pressure or harassment for repayment and the microfinance company involved. Venkateswarlu verified that it was the material he presented to Akula and Rao.
"They said they'd look into the issue and take some appropriate action," Venkateswarlu said.
SKS sent internal audit teams to the field. Their reports exonerated the company.
Unable to reconcile the two sets of findings, SKS hired Guardian's Human & Civil Rights Forum and Third Eye, a private investigative agency, to do a more thorough, independent inquiry, according to Ramesh Vautrey, head of administration at SKS, who oversaw the investigation, and Rajender Khanna, the president of Guardian's.
A Jan. 17, 2011, letter from SKS, signed and stamped by Vautrey, asked Khanna to "carry out a fact finding enquiry on the causes of suicide and complicity of our field staffs without any prejudice," according to a copy of the letter obtained by AP. The AP was shown invoice numbers for SKS payments to Third Eye and emails indicating the findings were sent to top management.
P.H. Ravikumar, who became interim chairman of the SKS board last November, said neither management nor the board authorized an independent inquiry into borrower deaths.
"Our enquiries from 2009 to 2011 have revealed that neither SKS nor its employees have been the cause for any of the suicides in the state of Andhra Pradesh," the company said in a statement. The company also said SKS employees have been acquitted in two borrower suicide cases in Andhra Pradesh and that only one criminal case remains outstanding.
Khanna sent teams to speak with families of the dead, village leaders, neighbors and loan agents, videotaping the interviews. Their report said SKS employees bore direct or indirect responsibility for at least seven suicides, including two that overlapped with the Glocal findings.
The interview videos were shown to the AP by Uma Maheshwari, who said she was present during one set of recordings and visited several of the families personally. She left SKS in July.
In one video, the daughter of borrower Dhake Lakshmi Rajyam cries, gasping as she talks to an investigator in Tadepalligudem, Andhra Pradesh.
Rajyam was unable to pay off $2,400 owed to eight different companies. Employees of microfinance companies, including SKS, urged other borrowers to seize the family's chairs, utensils and wardrobe and pawn them to make loan payments, her family told investigators. Unable to bear the insults and pressure of the crowd of borrowers who sat outside her home for hours to shame her, Rajyam drank pesticide on Sept. 16, 2010, and died, the family says.
"We have lost my mother," her daughter says. "Nobody will support us."
The investigator's conclusions lay the blame on SKS employees, saying they failed to comply with company policies "and even basic moral rights."
Vautrey said he sent the case studies to three top managers, including Rao. Emails obtained by AP indicate that summary reports were emailed to the managers.
Rao did not respond to multiple requests from AP seeking comment.
Vautrey went to Akula's office one night and told him what they were doing was bad karma.
"I don't want to be part of a team abetting suicides," Vautrey said in an interview. "It is systemic failure. We have no right to kill anybody for our own business. Let's close down our business if we can't do it right."
___
A profound shift in values and incentives at SKS began in 2008.
In October, Boston-based Sandstone Capital, now SKS' largest investor, made a major investment. It joined U.S. private equity firm Sequoia Capital, which funded Google and Apple and is SKS' largest shareholder, on the board of directors.
Akula, who had been chief executive in the company's early days, stepped down in December 2008 but stayed on as chairman. The company brought in new top executives from the worlds of finance and insurance.
SKS also began transferring more loans off its books, selling highly rated pools of loans to banks, which then assumed most of the associated risk of borrower default. That freed SKS to push out more and bigger loans.
In December 2009, SKS launched a massive sales drive. The "Incentives Galore" program ran through February 2010 ? just one month before the company filed its IPO prospectus.
Agents won prizes worth up to 10 times their average monthly salary for signing huge numbers of new borrowers. Vautrey said he coordinated the shipment of 8,800 televisions, refrigerators, gold coins, mixers, washing machines and DVDs as rewards for more than 3,000 districts nationwide.
One loan officer signed up 273 groups in a month. Under training protocols, the ideal number of groups formed per month is 12, the maximum is 36, according to field agents and reports written by Akula.
"The focus is only on targets," Ramulu Sirgapur, who spent a decade at SKS before he left in December, told AP. "Even if we've given feedback, there might be recovery or repayment issues. That's OK. Just concentrate on growth."
The result: Management had a great set of numbers to show investors as it shopped the IPO. In a month, SKS could add 400,000 borrowers and 100 branches, and train more than 1,000 new loan officers. SKS had 6.8 million borrowers and had disbursed $3.2 billion in loans. India was pimpled with SKS branches, which bloomed in nearly 100,000 villages.
SKS said it was the fastest growing microfinance company in the world.
But basic principles of lending were overlooked, according to interviews with current and former employees, as well as correspondence and internal PowerPoint presentations by Akula.
Six current and former SKS staffers with experience in the field told the AP they no longer had time to check a borrower's assets or follow up and make sure a loan was put to productive use. They said that they were pressured to push more debt onto people than they could handle and that the number of days devoted to borrower training was cut in half.
"You have a (borrower group), and a loan officer goes out and trains them, educates them, then they give the loan. That's the SKS I'd seen in 1999. That was the whole model on which microfinance is supposed to work. In the quest for growth, a lot of these things got neglected," said Ankur Sarin, director of the SKS trusts, which are the fourth largest shareholder in the company and tasked with looking out for borrower interests.
As the relationships between heavily indebted borrowers and loan agents broke down, it became harder to collect.
Frustrated agents began working together and going door to door to collect, rather than taking payments only in public ? a company rule designed to limit coercion. They began using other borrowers to pressure defaulters into repaying.
"The growth was very rapid. That growth led to some suboptimal outcomes," said Ashish Lakhanpal, managing director of Kismet Capital, one of SKS's largest shareholders, who was on the SKS board until October 2010. "Were there lapses? Absolutely."
While the board was concerned about fast credit growth, the company never believed it was harming borrowers, Lakhanpal said.
"Mistakes were made, but I find it difficult to believe there was anything people did at a managerial level to encourage field officers to do that," he said.
___
In spring 2011, Akula began circulating a plan to spend $10 million to train financial counselors who would make sure clients weren't getting into too much debt and used their loans productively, according to Sarin, Vautrey and others with firsthand knowledge of the proposal.
The plan was never adopted.
Publicly, Akula continued to deny that SKS bore any responsibility for suicides. "Whatever happened was due to external factors and was not reflective of any fundamental flaw in our model," he told India's Business Today.
Privately, Akula prepared a 55-page presentation for the board that detailed the seven suicides that SKS' outside investigation had blamed on the company. The presentation showed how the pre-IPO push for growth led to a systemic breakdown, and again urged core reforms to restore training and lending discipline.
Board members received copies of Akula's presentation at a July 26, 2011, meeting, said a former employee who helped prepare the material and spoke anonymously for fear of retribution.
The minutes of the meeting, however, make no mention of the report.
"As per my notes, this was not part of the board proceedings," company secretary Sudershan Pallap wrote in a Sept. 26 email to Akula, who had complained of the omission.
Ravikumar, who would become interim chairman when Akula resigned, said the board was never informed that SKS employees were implicated in any suicides, and denied Akula presented any such findings to the board.
"There was no presentation from Vikram Akula at that board meeting. This will be reflected in the minutes, as signed by Vikram Akula," he said.
Ravikumar said the board reviewed reports from the Microfinance Institutions Network, but none of them implicated SKS employees.
Akula continued to complain to the board that his presentation had been ignored. He summarized his concerns about the company's direction in emails, obtained by the AP, to seven board members, including Sequoia's Sumir Chadha, Sandstone's Paresh Patel and three independent directors: Ravikumar, Harvard's Tarun Khanna, and Pramod Bhasin, the former chief executive of Genpact.
Chadha, Patel and Khanna did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Ravikumar declined to comment on what he said was personal correspondence.
Bhasin said reports claiming SKS bore responsibility for borrower suicides were "unsubstantiated."
"Any issues raised to the Board at various times were fully investigated by external parties and found to be unsubstantiated or without evidence or actions were taken on them where appropriate," he wrote in an email.
Rancor within the company was intensifying. Board members felt Akula was suffering from a bad case of "founder's syndrome," that he couldn't stand to share power at a company that had become too big for him to run.
Finally, on Nov. 23, 2011, Akula resigned.
Vautrey said he was targeted, and SKS began termination proceedings against him on Feb. 6. Three members of his staff have been fired and have filed wrongful termination complaints with the state.
On Feb. 6, SKS also sold 2.43 billion rupees ($49 million) in securitized loans. The stock price surged 10 percent. Top executives have been on the road, hoping to raise 5 billion rupees ($100 million) from international investors.
Sai, the company spokesman, said SKS has hired an ombudsman, is spending $3 million to improve its customer grievance program and has revamped training to ensure that employees comply with current regulations and do not lend to over-indebted borrowers. He said the company would like to reorganize incentives to maintain rapid growth while ensuring loan quality. Those changes have yet to be implemented, he said.
___
Follow Erika Kinetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ekinetz
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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Good Reads For Product Enthusiasts | Confianzys Consulting offers ...
Here are some interesting reads that we came across, and thought you would find worth looking at:
10 big reasons for product failure: why innovative products fail to win over customers
Designing for marginalized users: a crowd-sourcing approach to finding out what design approaches work in developing nations
What does an API Product Manager do?: Why applying product management tools to APIs is essential
Acquisition and product: Will Oracle?s acquisition of Taleo lead to innovation in the HR software product space?
So many devices, so little time: Enterprise buyers and mobile device choice in a very dynamic market
New on Cloud: New cloud products unveiled recently
Source: http://www.confianzys.com/blog/index.php/2012/02/20/good-reads-for-product-enthusiasts/
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Monday, February 20, 2012
Forex Course | Friends of Labor
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Sunday, February 19, 2012
How To Use Globe Lights With Different Lighting Options ? Article ...
Globe lights come in colorful varieties that work for different types of settings. People usually think of using these lighted strands at special events or celebrations, but you might want to use them as a lighting alternative for hard-to-illuminate spaces. These little lighted orbs can help set a different mood for a room depending on the color of light that you use.
You can use the lighted strands individually for an effect or combine them with other different types of lighting. You could use them with lanterns made of paper to add an indirect glow. You may want to move the lights from room to room, so you might try them in different settings to find one that works best.
For a child?s room, you may want to try using the lighted strands to add a low level of illumination. This can be handy, particularly if the child needs a nightlight at night. You could hang the illuminated display high enough so as not to be confused with a toy by the child, and offer a convenient nighttime lighting option for the room.
Shelves on the wall may be a perfect setting in your home for using a few lighted strands to illuminate delicate glass pieces or pictures. You might want to consider the different types of shelving that could work with these lights. A china cabinet could glow from the orbs, or you could add them to a bookshelf for a special eye-catching display.
Your fireplace may be a dark corner that could use some new illuminated display. A simple white strand, for example, could help set off special photos or other items on top of a fireplace, so that you can create a new eye-catching presentation. The light may be low enough that it does not overwhelm the fireplace.
If you have hard-to light corners of your kitchen, consider these orbs to attach under cabinets to provide a targeted glow along a counter. This may help you to see in food preparation without having to use the overhead lighting generally found in a kitchen. The strands also may be used to line a buffet if you are entertaining guests, to help them get a closer look at the available food options.
You might want to travel to a discount shop to find inexpensive jars or vases that could accommodate lighted LED strands for a different type of illuminating effect in a room. These low-heat versions of the party globes can be a fun way to brighten rooms, particularly baths and bedrooms where overhead lighting generally dominates. You can turn on a few of these glass light alternatives and turn off the bright overhead light for a soft, subtle nightlight.
Party globe lights can offer you an endless array of ways to transform a room and the way it looks at night as the strands work to set an entirely new mood in a room. Look at dark corners in your home to see whether they might be able to accommodate these special alternative lighting sources. Different styles at various prices are available to review online.
Suzi Sinclair is a home decorator and feng shui consultant and writes about decorating on a dime. For more information on globe light strings and home improvement, visit www.hardtofinditems.com.
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LG Optimus Vu officially revealed ahead of MWC with stylus, 1.5GHz CPU
Continue reading LG Optimus Vu officially revealed ahead of MWC with stylus, 1.5GHz CPU
LG Optimus Vu officially revealed ahead of MWC with stylus, 1.5GHz CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Feb 2012 01:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Saturday, February 18, 2012
What Happens If Greece Doesn't Get a Bailout? (Time.com)
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Time.com - It turns out the Greek vote wasn't enough to satisfy skeptical euro-zone leaders
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Chinese envoy heads to Syria after U.N. vote against Assad (Reuters)
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - A senior Chinese official was due to visit Damascus on Friday in a show of support for Bashar-al Assad after the U.N. General Assembly told the Syrian president to halt a violent crackdown and surrender power.
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120217/wl_nm/us_syria
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Friday, February 17, 2012
EU court: Social networks can't be piracy brakes (Reuters)
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - Online social networks cannot be forced to block users from downloading songs illegally, as this would push up their costs and infringe privacy, Europe's highest court said on Thursday, adding to a worldwide debate on internet policing.
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Whitney Houston Death: Singer Was Supposed to Be Closely ...
Gabriel Olsen, FilmMagic
How did you first meet Whitney?
I was just going over the funeral arrangement story with Clive. He is going to speak at the funeral and it's in the afternoon on Saturday. I was with [Whitney] a lot because of my friendship with Clive. I know nothing about her as a child, outside of the fact that I met her when she first started singing.
I met her originally through Dionne [Warwick, Houston's cousin]. She wasn't even Whitney Houston then, she was just a little girl. My friendship with her was really only because of my friendship with Clive. We saw her at music events -- every year she was at Clive's [Grammy] event and of course we always sat in close proximity and talked. I didn't speak to her on a daily basis. She was not one of my closest friends. She was just a woman that I knew, who I respected. Her singing ability was amazing. My time that I spent with her was all related to her career. It wasn't like we were two girls socializing.
What was she like when you met her?
She was very shy. She was always very shy. This is just my opinion: Her shyness might have even been partially related to her drug problem. I think she had a fear of performing. She was a shy girl and she was very charming. She was adorable. She always had a big smile on her face and she was always very friendly to me and friendly to everyone.
I never found her to have any kind of an attitude. She wasn't really a diva like the other divas, you know what I mean? She didn't have diva scabs on her forehead. She was really nice, caring. I think that her dysfunctional relationship with Bobby Brown was her downfall. Her illustrious career became challenged during that period of time. One of her biggest problems was that she was a horrendously horrible smoker. She smoked cigarettes all day long. That's what really was part in parcel to her ruining her voice.
How, if at all, did you see her change over the years?
Not really, she was pretty much the same. You'd see these pictures of her in the magazines falling down -- I never saw that side of her. Whenever I saw her, she was always in rare form. She always looked great. She had great sense of style and taste, she was beautiful, she was in command of certain situations. I can't imagine how she could have died. She must have slipped under the water or something. She wasn't depressed, she wasn't on drugs. I was told there was supposed to be somebody with her at all times when she was in the bathroom, in the bathtub and everything.
How long was that kind of supervision in place?
I would think a while. She had pretty loyal family members and people around her at all times. She was very well protected. She should've been better protected.
I think it was due to the fact that when you're a performer, you have to have people around to protect you. Anyway, it's a sad day. The worst part about it is that I've just been playing her music over and over again and I've just been crying and crying. Her last album, 'I Look to You,' took five years to make. Even though I was not part in parcel to putting it together, I heard it. I heard all the songs and all the choices that Clive made. It was such a personal matter with him. The man is a total perfectionist. Clive is an amazing man -- he has big shoulders and you can lean on him. I think she went to him a lot during her trying times.
Jemal Countess, Getty Images
Well, I was with her in England when she was with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, when she performed on 'The X Factor.' I was with her when she was with her mother in Vegas when we went to the World Music Awards. I knew her mother quite well. She had a really great family, a very close-knit family. They tried to protect her as much as they could. You can only do so much. Clive is beside himself.
Somebody said something today that is not 100 percent wrong. They said, "It was just a matter of time." It's like Janis Joplin, or Michael Jackson, or Amy Winehouse. There is a predisposition for these things. People were always worried about Whitney. There were things in the paper every day about her. Everybody was always aware that she was walking on thin ice.
Was she like that when you met her?
No. It's interesting because every time I would see one of these stories, I would ask Clive, "Is this true? Is this true?" and he'd say, "No, this isn't true. I spoke to her and she's great." So I think a lot of stories just sort of became stories on their own. But the Bobby Brown thing, that was the kiss of death. The Bobby Brown relationship did her in. It set her up for this situation. Things like this don't just happen in one second. It's sad because no one in the world has ever had a voice like Whitney Houston and they never will. There will never be another Whitney Houston.
Remembering Whitney Through Photos
The Life of Whitney Houston'
Source: http://www.spinner.com/2012/02/15/whitney-houston-death-bathroom/
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Thursday, February 16, 2012
Why Choose Acupuncture? - Health And Fitness Tips
Oriental medicine takes on an exceedingly holistic approach. The technique for oriental medicine is founded on the idea that all bodily systems should be addressed as much as possible. Similarly, Raleigh acupuncture is superb for the enhancement of physical medical conditions. It can also treat affective anomalies and create a sense of heightened psychological clearness.
Acupuncture makes use of the body?s energy so as to create desirable results. Practitioners of acupuncture believe that sicknesses and other complications in the body are thanks to the disruption of the natural flow of the energy within the body. If the energy becomes stuck, weakened or burned out then the individual will likely suffer from a health complication. The key goal of acupuncture is to be sure there is proper energy flow.
Through acupuncture, the qi energy is tapped and released accordingly all across the body. Dependent on the condition to hand variations on how the energy is tapped may happen. The acupuncture method may be tailored according to the illness and the leading indicators of the health issue. When an individual goes through acupuncture, the energy obstructions are removed.
Through a collection of clinical trials, gurus have demonstrated that acupuncture is efficacious in addressing a range of medical problems. Similarly, the utilization of acupuncture has additionally served as a route for other traditional medication practices to grow. In addition, acupuncture is extremely effective in treating agony including differing types of disorders. Actually acupuncture has been utilized in the treatment of respiration issues like common cold, sinusitis, asthma and bronchitis.
There is not any harm in trying out acupuncture and seeing for yourself how much you can gain advantage from it. While it may be called alternative medicine, remember that acupuncture has existed for thousands of years that its continuing existence can only mean one thing: it is effective. The area of medicine has additionally recognized the employment of acupuncture, thus, you actually do not want to stress about anything.
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Source: http://healthandfitnesstips.biz/why-choose-acupuncture
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Bumblebees get by with a little help from their honeybee rivals
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Bumblebees can use cues from their rivals the honeybees to learn where the best food resources are, according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London.
Writing in the journal PLoS ONE, the team from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences explain how they trained a colony of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to use cues provided by a different species, the honeybee (Apis mellifera), as well as cues provided by fellow bumblebees to locate food resources on artificial flowers.
They found that the bumblebees were able to learn the information from the honeybees just as efficiently as when the information came from their own species, demonstrating that social learning is not a unique process limited members of the same species.
PhD student Erika Dawson, explains: "Most social learning research has focused on learning between members of the same species. But in the same way that human engineers can pick up useful tricks from animals (such as using bird aerodynamics to design planes), animals might of course learn from different species where the best food is, where predation looms or where the best place to nest can be found.
"We wanted to determine whether animals can use any social cue to enhance their environment, even if they come from another species that share their habitat, resources or predators."
The results show that information learnt from other species can be just as valuable to an animal like the bumblebee as information from their own species. Bees would have opportunities to learn cues from their own species and other species to an equal degree in the wild, as they often share the same flower species as a source of food. This is particularly true for large flowers such as sunflowers, which are often fed from by multiple pollinators simultaneously.
The results also show that competition between the two species may be much more severe than previously assumed, as Erika Dawson explains: "If bumblebees use individual exploration and copying of their fellow bumblebees to identify rewarding plants, but also use the information provided by a rival species (ie honeybees), this could have important ecological implications for community structure and formation, and may help us better understand the impact of competition within natural pollinator communities."
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Queen Mary, University of London: http://www.qmul.ac.uk
Thanks to Queen Mary, University of London 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/117581/Bumblebees_get_by_with_a_little_help_from_their_honeybee_rivals
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Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Google gets U.S., EU nod to buy Motorola Mobility (Reuters)
WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) ? U.S. and European regulators approved Google Inc's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc and said they would keep a sharp eye on the web search giant to ensure patents critical to the telecommunications industry would be licensed at fair prices.
It was one of a series of approvals on Monday that underscored the scramble by technology companies to acquire big pools of patents.
The U.S. Justice Department also approved an Apple Inc-led consortium's purchase of a trove of patents from bankrupt Canadian company Nortel Networks Corp and signed off on Apple's purchase of patents formerly owned by Novell Inc.
Google, whose Android software is the top operating system for Internet-enabled smart phones, said in August it would buy phone-maker Motorola for its 17,000 patents and 7,500 patent applications, as it looks to compete with rivals such as Apple and defend itself and Android phone manufacturers in patent litigation.
The acquisition, the largest in Google's history, will also mark the Internet search company's most significant foray into the hardware business - a market in which it has little experience. Some investors have worried that Google's profit margins may suffer as it becomes a hardware maker, although Google has said it intends to run Motorola as a separate business unit.
Regulators in China, Taiwan and Israel have still not signed off on the Google purchase of Motorola.
Google shares finished Monday's regular trading session up 1 percent at $612.20.
Antitrust enforcers on both sides of the Atlantic want to prevent companies from gouging rivals when they license patents essential to ensuring different communications devices work together.
"This merger decision should not and will not mean that we are not concerned by the possibility that, once Google is the owner of this portfolio, Google can abuse these patents, linking some patents with its Android devices. This is our worry," EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters in Brussels.
The U.S. Justice Department said it was reassured by Apple's and Microsoft's public statements that they would not seek injunctions in filing infringement lawsuits based on the Nortel patents.
"Google's commitments have been less clear," the Justice Department added in a statement. "The division determined that the acquisition of the patents by Google did not substantially lessen competition, but how Google may exercise its patents in the future remains a significant concern."
Almunia said the EU might be obliged to open some cases in the future.
"This is not enough to block the merger, but we will be vigilant," he said.
Regulators in China have until March 20 to decide whether to approve the deal or start a third phase of review, according to a source close to the situation.
The purchase would give Google one of the mobile phone industry's largest patent libraries, as well as hardware manufacturing operations that will allow Google to develop its own line of smart phones.
Google, the newest major entrant to the mobile market, is already being sued for patent infringement by Oracle Corp, which is seeking up to $6 billion.
The legal battles over patents between technology and smartphone companies has prompted the European Commission to open an investigation into legal tactics used by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd against Apple and whether these breach EU antitrust rules.
Some regulatory experts said the DOJ's comments in approving Google's acquisition of Motorola appeared to be more than mere boilerplate.
"They have to proceed with caution and tread lightly," said Shubha Ghosh, a professor at University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in antitrust law and intellectual property, with regards to Google.
Regulators will be on the lookout for practices that might limit the entry of new smartphones or new technologies.
"If Google makes it more difficult for new technologies to emerge, by locking-in existing licensees of the patents so that it becomes not profitable for them to adopt other technologies, that's the kind of thing that might give rise to antitrust scrutiny down the road," said Ghosh.
Google's move to buy Motorola Mobility came shortly after it tried and failed to buy Nortel's patents. The winner was an Apple-led consortium, which includes Research in Motion Ltd, Microsoft Corp, EMC Corp, Ericsson and Sony Corp, which agreed in July to pay $4.5 billion for 6,000 patents and patent applications.
Google, which runs world's No. 1 Internet search engine, has been under increasing regulatory scrutiny. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Union are both investigating Google following accusations it uses its clout in the search market to beat rivals as it moves into related businesses.
(Reporting By Diane Bartz and Foo Yun Chee with additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Tim Dobbyn and Andre Grenon)
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Sunday, February 12, 2012
Subscribe To - Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement
Have you ever heard of the Preparing Future Faculty program? We were invited by Arizona State University's Graduate School to participate in their program which was held today. Five current LU faculty, including Drs. Paul Bernazzani, Brad Mayer, Dorothy Sisk, Amy Smith and Gleb Tcheslavski, presented their views of what it is like to be an academic. Their stories were compelling and very different. The overall themes that emerged included the support from their colleagues, relationship with the local community, and ability to be productive in this environment. All were drawn to LU because of the focus on teaching and they love that the classes are relatively small so that they can concentrate on building relationships with their students. In the end, the ASU audience of graduate students were very appreciative and our faculty enjoyed the experience very much. There is still time to register to attend the Alexander Workshop Revisited Lunch+Learn session to be held on Monday, February 13 at noon. The session will focus on extending the conversation that started last Monday and filling in the gaps for those who were unable to attend the original workshop. If you are looking for a concise research article that can help you improve your teaching performance, we recommend "Factors Contributing to Improved Teaching Performance." Whitney Ransom McGowan and Charles R. Graham performed a study designed to gain a better understanding of how faculty members become better teachers and make improvements in their teaching. Their results revealed that the top three factors leading to improvement were active/practical learning, teacher/student interactions, and clear expectations/learning outcomes. They also provide practical applications for change. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and have written a new book called We're Losing Our Minds that focuses on the quality of learning. Unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers. Instead, they make the case that too little of what happens in institutions of "higher education" deserves to be called "higher learning" -- "learning that prepares students to think creatively and critically, communicate effectively, and excel in responding to the challenges of life, work and citizenship." Keeling and Hersh engage in a dense but important discussion about how such development learning occurs. But, perhaps recognizing that the sort of "rethinking" they propose would require the sort of "systemic institutional change" that is difficult to bring about in higher education, the authors spend much of their time laying out the sorts of discussions in which campus administrators and professors must engage, jointly, to decide to make learning the "touchstone" priority, and kinds of practices and approaches that colleges might adopt to make it so.
Source: http://lamarteachlearn.blogspot.com/2012/02/have-you-ever-heard-of-preparing-future.html
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
Frozen Danube river is costing shippers millions
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) ? European shippers say they are losing millions because a lengthy stretch of the Danube ? one of Europe's key waterways ? is stuck in the longest freeze in recent memory.
Huge chunks of ice floated down the middle of the Danube on Friday in southern Romania while water close to the banks remained iced over, with barges, boats and ships tangled in a wintry web.
The Danube flows for 1,785 miles (2,872 kilometers) through nine countries, starting in Germany's Black Forest, before passing through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine.
The river began to ice over in early February as temperatures plunged to minus 20 Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit). The freeze followed a drought in the fall in which water levels had dropped so low that it was interfering with shipping along the international waterway.
By Friday, ice had halted shipping on 440 miles (700 kilometers) of the Danube in Romania, an official from the Romanian Transportation Ministry told The Associated Press, speaking on the department's customary condition of anonymity.
The river forms the border between Romania and Bulgaria and six river crossings were also closed due to the ice. Upstream, the river was also iced over in parts in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
Costache Constantin, manager of Europolis Shipping & Trading shipping company, surveyed the scene from a warm office in the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta. He said he'd never seen such a drawn-out freeze on the Danube since he began working in the industry in 1981.
"This is costing millions of euros. The transportation of raw materials, coal, minerals, cereals ... are all affected, construction materials too," he said by telephone.
The Constanta port also froze over last week and the dockyard was closed due to icy weather.
Viorel Panait, a manager for Convex SA, a port services company involved in the shipping of iron ore, coal and bauxite, said his firm was busy figuring ways to beat the big freeze. He said 2,000 tons of iron ore was being loaded daily onto trucks, antifreeze was being used to stop the minerals icing up and coal was being transported by train.
"We are functioning. Even if there is a freeze, we are working," Panait said from Constanta.
There were no official figures immediately available for Romania's shipping business, but Panait, who has worked in the industry since 1981 and is one of the country's most experienced shipping agents, estimated that the annual turnover is worth about euro1 billion ($1.32 billion), based on a volume of 20 to 30 million tons of cargo being shipped on Romanian waterways.
However, shippers were complaining that authorities were not doing enough to ease the situation.
"People are trying to break up ice by themselves, which makes it more difficult. When you have ice flows that are 5 to 7 meters (16.5 feet to 23 feet) you need to coordinate to unblock it," said Constantin.
At a ferry crossing in southern Romania, one ship owner was frustrated by the situation.
"Authorities don't have the resources to help us clear the ice and we are left in the hands of fate," ship owner Caius Iliescu said as he struggled to dislodge his iced-locked ship near the village of Chicui.
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Income Generation With PPC Publishing That Will Boost Your Profits
Published by witter
Most everyone has heard of Google AdSense, and are familiar with how it works, but how many marketing directors have thought about using it as a way to offset advertising costs? By combining PPC advertising with PPC publishing, you have the potential to pay for advertising with the proceeds from publishing.
This concept is a thought that may not have occurred to many people-you only pay for the advertising when someone clicks through to your sight-the publishing concept works in reverse. So, instead of money deducted from your advertising funds when someone clicks into your site, you earn money when someone uses your site to click through to a sponsor site.
If you choose the right PPC publishing company it is possible to earn enough money to offset your advertising costs. You can search for publishing companies through your search engine.
When selecting a publishing company, it is important to make certain the ads that show on your site are ones that will also generate traffic back to your site. You do not want to include ads for competitors? websites, but you do want to make sure your ads drive your visitors to related products.
For example, if you sell automotive parts, you may want to include sites that sell automotive accessories or body parts. The ads you place should relate to what you sell but not lead to a site that sells the same products. You want to use PPC publishing as a way to earn money for your company but not drive potential customers to a competitor?s site.
So, instead of just viewing AdSense in its most traditional sense, you could leverage the concept to generate income for your business as well- publishing.
Are you really interested in driving massive traffic to your website? Here?s the answer: Secret Article Weapon ? Download your free ebook now.
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Friday, February 10, 2012
5 Paths To Better Enjoy A B.B.Q | All About Food And Drinks | Food ...
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Source: http://foodanddrinkarticles.com/5-paths-to-better-enjoy-a-b-b-q
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