Clever Thieves!

Not all thieves are stupid.

This gives us something to think about with all our new electronic technology. 

 

GPS 
Someone had their car broken into while they were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard. 
When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth anything had been stolen. The thieves had used the GPS to guide them to the house. They then used the garage remote control to open the garage door and gain entry to the house. The thieves knew the owners were at the football game, they knew what time the game was scheduled to finish and so they knew how much time they had to clean out the house. It would appear that they had brought a truck to empty the house of its contents.

Something to consider if you have a GPS - don't put your home address in it.  Put a nearby address (like a store or gas station) so you can still find your way home if you need to, but no one else would know where you live if your GPS were stolen.

 

MOBILE PHONES 
I never thought of this...
This lady has now changed her habit of how she lists her names on her mobile phone after her handbag was stolen. Her handbag, which contained her cell phone, credit card, wallet, etc...was stolen.
20 minutes later when she called her hubby, from a pay phone telling him what had happened, hubby says 'I received your text asking about our Pin number and I've replied a little while ago.' When they rushed down to the bank, the bank staff told them all the money was already withdrawn.  The thief had actually used the stolen cell phone to text 'hubby' in the contact list and got hold of the pin number.  Within 20 minutes he had withdrawn all the money from their bank account.

 

Moral of the lesson: 
Do not disclose the relationship between you and the people in your contact list.

Avoid using names like Home, Honey, Hubby, Sweetheart, Dad, Mom, etc...

And very importantly, when sensitive info is being asked through texts, CONFIRM by calling back.

Also, when you're being texted by friends or family to meet them somewhere, be sure to call back to confirm that the message came from them. 

If you don't reach them, be very careful about going places to meet 'family and friends' who text you.

*PLEASE PASS THIS ON 
I never thought about the above!
As of now, I no longer have 'home' listed on my cell phone. 

Tips for Keeping Kids’ Teeth Healthy

How you take care of your child’s teeth now will determine what kind of smile they have when they are an adult.  When a child is born they already have their 20 baby teeth present under their gums.  Some babies are even born with teeth exposed or their teeth come in very early.  Every child is different.  The average age for a baby to start getting their teeth is 6 months.  By the age of 3 most children have all 20 of their baby teeth.

Babies can get cavities.  The ADA (American Dental Association) recommends that you start cleaning your baby’s gums when they are just a few days old.  Dampen a square gauze pad or a soft wash cloth and rub gently across your baby’s gums.  When teeth start to appear use a child’s size toothbrush and water to brush your baby’s teeth.  As soon as your child turns 2, start brushing with a pea sized amount of toothpaste and have your child spit it out when done.  You’ll want to ask your dentist or pediatrician if you should use fluorinated or non fluorinated toothpaste. This will depend on if your child is able to spit, if your tap water is fluorinated and if you give your child fluoride supplements. Parents should continue brushing their child’s teeth twice a day until she can take over the brushing on her own, which is usually around age 6 or 7. As soon as she has two teeth that touch you will need to help her floss her teeth daily.

ADA recommends that you take your child to the dentist around their first birthday.  After their initial visit you can ask your dentist how often you should bring her back.  This visit is to allow your child to start getting familiar with going to the dentist.  Your dentist will inspect her mouth and make sure everything is healthy and to check for cavities.  The dentist will clean her teeth and make any suggestions to you regarding caring for her teeth and gums.

Cavities can be caused by bacteria transferred by saliva from the mother’s mouth.  For this reason it is not recommended that you clean your baby’s pacifier by putting it into your mouth or that you eat off of your baby’s spoon during feeding time.

Baby teeth are important because they hold spaces for the permanent teeth.  If a baby tooth is lost too early the permanent teeth can drift into the open space and then come in crooked.  Your dentist will use a spacer to hold open the spot where the baby tooth was lost if it is lost too early.

The proper technique for brushing is to hold the toothbrush at a 45 degree angle to the gums and brush back and forth covering each tooth.  Brush all surfaces of the teeth.  Your child should brush her teeth for 2 minutes.  Flossing should be done once a day.  Make sure to brush her tongue to remove bacteria and to get rid of bad breath.  Tooth brushes should be replaced as soon as the bristles start to fray or every 3 months.  It’s also a good idea to replace your child’s tooth brush if she has been ill.  Rinsing with a fluoride rinse at the end of brushing is also a way to prevent cavities, should your child’s dentist recommend doing so.

As soon as your child has molars the dentist may put a sealant on them.  The sealant fills up the crevices on the surface of the teeth that are more likely to get a cavity.  It does not hurt to get sealant put on your teeth and it is often covered by dental insurance.  Your dentist will also give your child a fluoride treatment during their exam, but this treatment is optional.

Your child’s diet can affect the health of her teeth. Even watered down fruit juice is bad for your child’s teeth. Water should be offered instead of sugary beverages.  Sticky foods like fruit snacks or raisins can also have negative effects on your child’s teeth. Once your child has brushed her teeth in the morning, when she drinks or eats afterwards have her rinse her mouth with water a few times. She should avoid eating after she’s brushed her teeth for the night.

To keep your child’s teeth and body healthy it’s important that they are eating a healthy diet.  According to MyPlate, which is the new food pyramid, fruits and vegetables should make up half of your child’s diet.  At least half of the grains that she consumes need to be whole grain.  Proteins should be lean when possible, eggs, beans, chicken breast, lean beef and fish.  Dairy is very important to build strong teeth and bones, but make sure you are choosing low-fat dairy options.

For babies, avoid putting anything other than milk, breast milk, or formula into a bottle.  Never put a child to bed with a bottle.  This can cause bottle rot or baby bottle tooth decay, which is very damaging to young teeth.  This condition usually only affects the front teeth, but has been known to affect other teeth.  Encourage your child to drink out of a regular cup by their first birthday.  Extended use of sippy cups is also not recommended.

Source: (http://www.aupairjobs.com/articles/tips-for-keeping-kids-teeth-healthy/)

The Google Yourself Challenge

Forget egosurfing for a second and ask yourself, how much can people learn about you by simply Googling you? The idea behind the Google Yourself Challenge is: friends, relatives, recruiters, hiring managers, and even strangers may be searching for you on the web, Google yourself first and control what people can learn about you online. 

Here are some statistics on who is looking for your data:

• 81% of millennials Google or Facebook their date before going out
• 79% of recuiters and hiring managers screen applicants by information available online
• 86% of hiring managers have rejected someone based on information available online
• 7 in 10 internet users search online for information about others 

From: BackgroundCheck.org

How to Tie Dye a Shirt

July 29th, 2012 by admin

Have a comfy shirt with a small stain? Looking to refresh a faded favorite? With tie dye an old shirt is easily made new again.  Follow these steps to create a heart tie dye shirt design.

1. Start by mixing up some fabric dye.  Use any colors you like or different shades of the same color.  Pour the dye into clear squirt bottles, (like the kind that ketchup and mustard come in at a diner).  You can find squirt bottles at most craft stores.  Label each one with some tape so that you know which color each bottle holds.
2. Lay out a damp, prewashed, old or new shirt that is either white or light-colored flat on a plastic covered surface.  You can use an old picnic table cloth, a garbage bag, or the plastic that you would use to protect your furniture when painting.
3. Fold the shirt in half lengthwise and smooth out all of the wrinkles.  Take a water soluble fabric marker and draw half a heart in the middle of the shirt.  The size of the heart will depend on the size of the shirt.  Keep in mind that you want to have room for other colors around the heart so don’t make it too big.
4. Start from the center fold and gather the T-shirt along the heart line that you just drew.  Make sure to keep the line straight and on top of your gathers.  Tie a rubber band right where the line is.
5. Gather the rest of the shirt into a snake and continue to rubber band sections of the shirt.  These segments will be the surrounding stripes so keep that in mind when you are banding the shirt.  You’ll want to space the bands about 3 to 4” apart.
6. Now you are ready to dye the shirt.  Choose what color you want the heart to be.  Add the dye to the first section of shirt.  If you’d like the heart to be outlined you can add a line of black dye right at the rubber band.  Keep in mind when you are choosing your colors that the shirt is wet so there will be some bleeding.  If you dye one section yellow and you want the next section to be red then there will end up being a section of orange in between as both sections will bleed together.
7. Continue adding different colors down the rest of the snake.  You can make each segment a different color, or alternate a few different colors.  One good choice is dying the shirt in rainbow order.  Red, (orange), yellow, (green), blue, and purple.  The colors in the parentheses will be the mixed colors that you don’t need to add.
8. Once the first side is done, flip the shirt over and do the same thing to the other side.  Use the same colors in the same order.
9. Now that all of the dye is on you need to leave the shirt for about 6 to 8 hours so that the dye can set.
10. After the shirt has set for 6 to 8 hours you can rinse out the remaining dye.  Leave the rubber bands on for this step.  Once most of the dye is out of the shirt you can remove the rubber bands and check out your masterpiece.  Wash and line dry the shirt for the most intense colors.

Source: (http://www.babysitters.net/blog/how-to-tie-dye-a-shirt/).

Predictions for the Future of Academic Publishing

8 Predictions for the Future of Academic Publishing

University presses and academic journals may perpetuate the world’s most groundbreaking research, but they tend towards the heavily conservative when it comes to changing anything and everything about their organization. But the inevitable influx of digital and new media ventures has already started trickling into the tightknit institutions, and many scholars are already calling for a dismantling of the old — and often unwieldy and inaccessible! Some of the latest experiments will stick, while others will go all Crystal Pepsi on humanity. Until time decides to tell, the following represent a few things academics are saying about where their research might be headed.

1. Open Access:

   With the popularity of MIT OpenCourseWare, TED, Khan Academy, Open Culture, and other beloved open access initiatives, academic publishers might yank some inspiration from their setups. Transitioning from paid subscriptions to journals will result in some egregious costs — an estimated £60 million in the UK, for example — but caves to the precedent already set by open source. Consumers used to snapping up research for free likely won’t want to pay for it, making the more traditional models die out over time.

2. On second thought … keep paying!:

   In the U.S., researchers hope to fight the encroach of open source with legislation. Known as the Research Works Act, it sought to block research backed by public schools from free availability — even though, as many pointed out, such a measure would functionally bar Americans from accessing the studies for which their taxes paid. While the bill eventually died out in February 2012, the future could see similar propositions crop up and completely alter the way citizens access academic studies. By legally protecting the system allowing (or even requiring) them to pay even more money for research they already funded, essentially.

3. Creative Commons:

   Somewhere between profiting and populism sits the Creative Commons suite of licensing options, which economics expert Rajiv Sethi believes might appeal to many future academic publishers. Creative Commons offers up many different ways for researchers to choose how readers access and share their information, making the process far more autonomous than open source, but more approachable than charging to read. Since the professor’s 2010 predictions, some publications have experimented with the format to their ultimate satisfaction, rendering it another possible route for the scholarly world to take.

4. “Gold Open Access”:

   Yet another strategy for delivering research to the masses involves the authors themselves paying the publishers to make their work available to readers completely gratis. It’s a form of open source that ensures the business’ survival without forcing American taxpayers to shell out once more, and Michael P. Taylor’s opinion column at The Scientist lauds the process as especially ideal for lesser-funded colleges and universities who lack the budget for buying up a library full of expensive journals. Such a solution benefits everyone involved while remaining true to academic publishing’s (ostensible) core goals.

5. Digital Media:

   Like most publishing these days, the academic variety is expected to start following suit when it comes to adapting to ebook readers and other digital technologies. Organizations such as JISC actively encourage scholarly publications to embrace the latest developments and bring their knowledge to the more “plugged-in” masses. So far, it seems to be working, albeit slowly. But the group hopes the relatively recent release of The Digital Monograph Technical Landscape will offer up even more incentive and information easing the transition to new mediums.

6. Social Media:

   Way back in the dark ages of 2009, Phil Pochoda was exploring the possibility of journals courting both digital and traditional media simultaneously, outlining how they could juggle the two and meet multiple consumer demands. One of the more interesting uses he posits revolves around incorporating more and more social media efforts into the promotional fold. Taking advantage of Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and similar resources means connecting the researchers themselves to their intended audiences, opening up informal dialogues and allowing for question and answer sessions. Which might very well lead to even further research!

7. Crowdsourced Peer Reviews:

   The Elsevier controversy of 2012 prompted blogger, data scientist, and math enthusiast Cathy O’Neil to reflect on the future of peer-reviewing and “refereeing” published works. She expresses an eagerness to see that component of the process spread out to fellow professionals as opposed to editors, and even sees some value in promoting crowdsourced checks and balances. However, the system would need considerable regulating and demarcating to ensure the reliable standards currently in place with the more traditional system. Any progress towards this possibility will inevitably crawl at a rather sluggish clip, but it does make sense when one considers the more democratic open source initiatives gaining momentum right now.

8. No more double-blind peer reviews:

   Peer reviews typically involve a double-blind process where neither submitter nor editor knows who wrote up the research at hand in order to prevent bias. But around 2011, some – such as those published by The American Economic Association – sloughed off the format altogether in an obviously quite controversial move. Doing so, they believe, facilitates greater transparency and accountability on the part of the peer reviewers. It’s a newer trend, one which might need a little adjusting over time, but one that could mean a massive shift in how academics approach their studies.

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Source: http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/8-predictions-for-the-future-of-academic-publishing).

Are you Observant?

They Label This An Anti-Alzheimer Exercise
To keep a sharp mind and have some fun.

Can you see 10 faces in this tree?

There's a face in here. Can you see it?

Can you see the baby?

Can you see the kissing couple?

Can you see the three women? 

Can you tell the difference

between a horse and a frog?

Best Cities For Aspiring Writers

 

 

 

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Inspirations and opportunities are kind of like ninjas, only more skilled in the disguise department and less so with the whole lethal assassin thing. They can strike anywhere, anytime, but some places exist as a little more “at-risk” than others. Aspirant writers hoping to further their careers might be able to scratch up leads, jobs, and promotion and publishing chances in a wide number of cities, but the following just might grant them something of an edge. With so many professional positions, festivals, awards, and sites of literary significance to explore, chances are high they’ll find something to pique their budding careers.

1. New York City, N.Y., United States:

   
   It’s probably the ultimate in writerly cliches, but one that nevertheless persists without fail. Literary history buffs can gnaw away at their creative blocks by exploring sites of inspiration past, like the Algonquin Hotel and the New York Public Library, or networking at the hundreds of lectures, workshops, classes, readings, and other events that always seem to be going down. And let’s not forget the annual Pulitzer Prize at Columbia University. Plus, the staggering number of agents, publishers, and independent book shops that call New York home mean plenty of professional opportunities for funding that novel you’re jotting down on the sly.

2. London, England:

   
   London was New York before New York was even New York. Most major publishing companies have some sort of presence here, and even smaller presses still post quite a few jobs for consideration; suffice it to say, finding an agent shouldn’t prove too difficult an undertaking, either! As one of the world’s largest hubs of international activity, Londoners encounter numerous perspectives to fuel their literary inspirations. Take these new friends on visits to Charles Dickens’ house, strolls down Baker Street, or to plays at the Globe Theatre and soak up the city’s wealth of literary history.

3. Tokyo, Japan:

   
   Matsuo Basho composed haiku amongst the Nihonbashi intellectuals in the 17th century. Yukio Mishima led his infamous revolt against the Japanese Special Defense Forces before its failure resulted in seppuku. Haruki Murakami and his wife briefly owned a Kokubunji coffee shop and jazz club, and he discovered a love of novel writing after a game at Jingu Stadium. Even beyond that, the at-once beautifully historical and awe-inspiringly modern Japanese capitol still boasts quite the literary pedigree. Like London and New York, publishers and agents alike thrive in Tokyo, and the perpetual fervor of activity always means there’s a story to find.

4. Reykjavik, Iceland:

   
   UNESCO declared the Icelandic capitol one of its Creative Cities of Literature in August of 2011 because of its citizenry’s devotion to the written word, which extends as far back as medieval times. Eddas and Sagas of the Norse peoples sparked this passion, and Iceland itself boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the world at 99.9%. Not only that, but the government itself sponsors translation and linguistic projects and enjoys nurturing literary exchanges with cities worldwide.

5. Edinburgh, Scotland:

   
   October 2004 saw UNESCO bequeath the very first Creative City of Literature title onto the city that spawned some of the biggest names in the English language canon. The global organization specifically cited Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson as its most notable literary alumni, and lauds Edinburgh as the home of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Scots hope to encourage more visitors and citizens by playing up its prodigious writerly heritage and serve as role models for other countries hoping to promote the inherent value of the written word.

6. Istanbul, Turkey:

   
   Given Turkey’s unique geographic location straddling European and Asian cultures, it makes perfect sense that Istanbul enjoys quite a diverse, wealthy literary life; Divan literature once flourished here, producing some of the best surviving examples in the world. Bibliophiles flock to the annual Istanbul Tanpinar Literary Festival for an international education on past, present, and future movements as well as detailed cultural exchanges. Travel + Leisure lauds how cultural shifts have been occurring thanks to some of Istanbul’s promising young novelists, making the city a hot spot for trading ideas and nurturing sustainable change.

7. Dublin, Ireland:

   
   Every year, on June 16, the Irish celebrate Bloomsday by walking the entirety of James Joyce’s Ulysses and visiting sites relevant to his life and works. Visitors and residents with little interest in the quintessential modernist might prefer the Abbey Theatre, which served as a nerve center for the Irish Literary Revival, instead. Trinity College also calls Dublin home, and writers adore its legendary archives — not to mention the gorgeous illuminations found in Book of Kells on display! Or, should none of these options sound appealing, there’s always time to go chill with that dapper Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square. Writers here have a lush, influential history from which to pull, so inspiration shouldn’t prove too difficult to dredge up.

8. Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales:

   
   For more than a decade, the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts has brought together some of the world’s greatest creatives and thinkers for 10 days of promoting and exchanging ideas regarding the disciplines one would expect from the name. In addition, scientists, historians, politicians, musicians, and other professionals take part in the festivities, illustrating how everything overlaps and interconnects. Signing up as a volunteer puts aspirant writers at the forefront of exciting new perspectives and literary experiments.

9. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia:

   
   The second UNESCO City of Literature received its title in October of 2004, largely due to the fact that publishers based in the Australian state of Victoria stimulated the economy with $580.4 million between 2003 and 2004. Melbourne residents adore literature, and almost a third of the nation’s writer population lives there amongst the festivals, independent bookshops, publishing houses, and thriving libraries. Every May, the city plays host to the Emerging Writer’s Festival, which will obviously prove of interest to novices hoping for their first big literary break.

10. Norwich, England:

    
    London may preen over its mainstream clout, but Norwich is the only city in England that can boast UNESCO City of Literaturestatus right now. As of May 2012, actually, and this honor comes courtesy of a major campaign spearheaded by beloved author Ian McEwan. Writer’s Center Norwich is currently attempting to open up a multi-million pound Center for Writing in order to encourage the nation’s new literati to sharpen their storytelling skill sets. More importantly, though, UNESCO awarded the city because of how it so passionately provides a home for authors in exile from nations where their voices are squelched.

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Source:  http://www.onlinephdprograms.com/the-10-best-cities-for-aspiring-writers/