Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/10/miley-cyrus-books-return-to-two-and-a-half-men/
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সোমবার, ২৯ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
শনিবার, ২৭ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
Iran leader blames US, Israel for Syria civil war
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? Iran's Supreme Leader is blaming the U.S. and Israel for the bloody, 19-month civil war in Syria.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also warns Western powers not to intervene in the conflict.
In his message to Muslims performing the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, he charges that the civil war, which he characterized as "young Muslims killing each other," is a "crime initiated by the United States and the Zionist regime, Israel," punishing Syria for resisting Israeli occupation and supporting anti-Israel Palestinian and Lebanese groups.
Khamenei noted "serious dangers" of Western intervention in Syria and other Mideast nations. His statement was read Thursday on Iranian state TV.
Iran has been a close ally of Syria for decades. It has staunchly supported the regime of President Bashar Assad during the civil war.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-leader-blames-us-israel-syria-civil-war-124743326.html
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Real Estate Investors Spend Octoberfest with Memphis Invest
Real Estate Investors Spend Octoberfest with Memphis Invest
Posted by Chris Clothier on Thu, Oct 25, 2012
Memphis Invest Hosts Real Estate Investors
Real Estate investors from 16 states came 
to Memphis, Tennessee on October 19th and 20th to meet with one the U.S.A.'s premier real estate investment companies, MemphisInvest.com.? Eighty-Four investors spent Saturday with the company learning about Memphis and the opportunity for real estate investors followed by a quick tour of some completed renovations.? The jam-packed education was followed by a great night at the offices of Memphis Invest and Premier Property Management.?
But, before we get to the BBQ "Octoberfest" dinner, we kicked the weekend off with a very fun Meet & Greet held at the Downtown Double Tree Hotel that was a very classy and relaxed way for all of the real estate investors and the employees of Memphis Invest to relax and energize? for Saturday.
In my own words...Saturday was Awesome!? To see how many investors showed up in their orange shirts and how attentive and into the topic of Smart Investing they were was a real treat.? They made it easy to showcase our city, our staff and our entire process and team.? In the end, the morning presentation and the bus tour of the city both were big hits.
Back at the offices, our staff had the place decorated to a "T" and the BBQ dinner was a lot of fun and a great way to end the night.?
We are really, really thankful to all of the real estate investors - some clients, some simply interested in our company - who took time out of their schedules to come visit us at our Fall buying event.? Be on the lookout for future events as we plan on having three Memphis events and two Dallas events in 2013!
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শুক্রবার, ২৬ অক্টোবর, ২০১২
'Lucy,' early human ancestor, likely swung from trees
Among the earliest known relatives of humanity definitely known to walk upright was Australopithecus afarensis, the species including the famed 3.2-million-year-old 'Lucy.'
To help resolve this controversy, scientists looked at two complete shoulder blades from the fossil 'Selam,' an exceptionally well-preserved skeleton of a 3-year-old A. afarensis girl dating back 3.3 million years from Dikika, Ethiopia. The arms and shoulders can yield insights on how well they performed at climbing. (Shown here, Selam's cranium, face and mandible.)
Image courtesy of Zeray Alemseged / Dikika Research Project
EnlargeDespite the ability to walk upright, early relatives of humanity represented by the famed "Lucy" fossil likely spent much of their time in trees, remaining very active climbers, researchers say.
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Humans are unique among living primates in that walking bipedally ? on two feet ? is humans' chief mode of locomotion. This upright posture freed their hands up for using tools, one of the key factors behind humans' domination of the planet.
Among the earliest known relatives of humanity definitely known to?walk upright?was?Australopithecus afarensis, the species including the famed 3.2-million-year-old "Lucy."?Australopithecines?are the leading candidates for direct ancestors of the human lineage, living about 2.9 million to 3.8 million years ago in East Africa.
Although Lucy and her kin were no knuckle-draggers, whether they also spent much of their time in trees was hotly debated. Uncovering the answer to this question could shed light on the evolutionary forces that shaped the human lineage.
"When looking at how we became human, an important moment in our history was abandoning a lifestyle in the trees, and when that happened is a big question," researcher Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences, told LiveScience.
To help resolve this controversy, scientists have for the first time comprehensively analyzed two complete shoulder blades from the fossil "Selam," an exceptionally well-preserved skeleton of?a 3-year-old?A. afarensis?girl?dating back 3.3 million years from Dikika, Ethiopia. The arms and shoulders can yield insights on how well they performed at climbing. [See Photos of Early Human 'Selam' Fossils]
"This study moves us a step closer toward answering the question 'When did our ancestors abandon climbing behavior?'" said Alemseged, who discovered Selam in 2000. "It appears that this happened much later than many researchers have previously suggested."
Researchers spent 11 years carefully extracting Selam's two shoulder blades from the rest of the skeleton, which was encased in a sandstone block. "Because shoulder blades are paper-thin, they rarely fossilize, and when they do, they are almost always fragmentary," Alemseged said. "So finding both shoulder blades completely intact and attached to a skeleton of a known and pivotal species was like hitting the jackpot."
The researchers found these bones had several details in common with those of modern apes, suggesting they lived part of the time in trees. For instance, the socket for the shoulder joint was pointed upward in both Selam and today's apes, a sign of an active climber. In humans, these sockets face out to the sides.
Lucy's adult shoulder sockets also faced upward, suggesting that, like modern apes, her species was?equipped for tree-climbing?throughout its life span. Humans, on the other hand, are born with a somewhat downward-facing socket that gradually moves to face outward as people mature.
"The question as to whether?Australopithecus afarensis?was strictly bipedal or if they also climbed trees has been intensely debated for more than 30 years," researcher David Green at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Ill., said in a statement. "These remarkable fossils provide strong evidence that these individuals were still climbing at this stage inhuman evolution."
At the same time, most researchers agree that many traits of the?A. afarensis?hip bone, lower limb, and foot are unequivocally humanlike and adapted for upright walking.
"This new find confirms the pivotal place that Lucy and Selam's species occupies in human evolution," Alemseged said. "While bipedal like humans,?A. afarensis?was still a capable climber. Though not fully human,?A. afarensis?was clearly on its way."
"The skeleton of Selam is a goldmine of scientific information," Alemseged added. "We think it will continue to be so as we go further with preparation and cleaning work."
Green and Alemseged detailed their findings in the Oct. 26 issue of the journal Science.
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Structured Interviews | BusinessBlogs Hub
What are the benefits?
How prepared are you when interviewing candidates for a role? Do you follow a structured interview format? Do you use competency-based questions that address the requirements of the role that you?re seeking to fill?
Structured interviews:
- Ensure that your interview process is up to twice as effective as non-structured interviews
- Help make the interview process more objective and fair
- Support you from a legal standpoint where candidates feel they were unfairly treated
- Ensure that, through competency-based interview questions, the focus of the interview is on the actual requirements of the position
- Prevent poor recruitment decisions and related costs, including:
- the need to re-advertise
- recruiting again if the employee leaves
- time lost on training the new employee
- downtime and loss of productivity
All too often employers interview candidates with little or no advance preparation and then wonder why the new employee doesn?t work out. Often, we make subjective decisions on candidates based on our mood that day, our first impressions, or how much we like or dislike the look of someone. We need to be more objective ? we need to employ people who can do the job, as well as considering whether they?ll mix well with our current team and fit in to our organisational culture.
Without ensuring that you have created a fair and structured interview process, your interviews may be prone to errors which will significantly impact on the outcome of the interview itself ? which could be positive or negative for you and/or the candidate(s) being interviewed.
Following are some common interview biases and errors.
First Impression Bias
This refers to our limitation to see beyond the very first piece of information that we are exposed to. So in the case of interviewing a candidate when they walk into the interview room, we are making a judgement based on our first impression ? good or bad.
Halo Effect
Have you ever met someone and once you have got chatting experienced positive feelings about one characteristic that they possess (such as their appearance or they watch the same television programmes you do)? If you warm to this person because of the characteristic, everything they say seems valid and in keeping with your thoughts ? if you hear something that isn?t quite congruent with the characteristic, the chances are, you will ignore it.
Devil?s Horns
This is the same as the Halo Effect but here the interviewer will tend to overemphasise an undesirable personality trait or past event in the candidate?s previous work experience ? again trying to change this negative point of view is very difficult.
Stereotyping
This is the formation of beliefs about a person or a group of people while ignoring individual differences. For example, an interviewer may be reluctant to offer a position to a Gen Y candidate in case they will go in pursuit of their job (stereotype ? Gen Y?s want to be CEOs of the companies they join and won?t let anyone stand in their way). However, this ignores the individual differences of younger candidates who may be committed, hard working, have excellent ideas and be highly innovative, with a great deal to offer a business.
Contrast Effects
This occurs when interviewees are not compared against the criterion of the role, but against the other candidates being interviewed. One of the major errors here is that a poor candidate who is not ideal for a role may be hired as they are seen as the best of a bad bunch.
Similar to me
Oh, s/he is just like me! They will fit in perfectly! Sound familiar? Yes, whilst you may be a lovely person who is very capable of performing your job, ask yourself ? does this candidate possess the skills, experience, and knowledge to do the job that they are being interviewed for?
Poor Validity
Are your interview questions actually focusing on the requirements of the job? Do they measure what they are supposed to measure?
In Conclusion
We are all human so conducting interviews will always involve an element of subjectivity however, introducing structured interview questions can help to put candidates on a more equal footing.
Related Posts
Source: http://www.businessblogshub.com/2012/10/structured-interviews/
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Some studies question safety of genetically modified foods
Though the balance of evidence supports the idea that genetically modified foods are safe to eat and don't harm the environment, a few reports have suggested otherwise. Here are three of them.
?French scientists reported in September that rats fed a lifelong diet of Roundup-resistant corn developed more tumors and died earlier than rats fed conventional corn. The widely publicized study, published in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology, was conducted by Gilles-Eric Seralini, the scientific head of an independent institute opposed to genetically modified foods.
Geneticists, statisticians and other researchers broadly panned the research for its small sample size and other methodological problems. It was reviewed and dismissed by the European Food Safety Authority, Germany's risk assessment agency and France's six scientific academies.
?A 1999 study in Nature by Cornell University scientists found that monarch butterfly larvae fed milkweed covered with pollen from genetically altered corn died in greater numbers than ones exposed to nonengineered pollen. The corn had been modified with a gene from a soil bacterium so it made a natural insecticide.
In five follow-up analyses published two years later in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers concluded that caterpillars would have to be exposed to more than 1,000 grains of engineered pollen per square centimeter of leaf surface to suffer harm and that the highest levels of altered pollen they are exposed to comes nowhere close to this. The exception was one strain of modified corn, Bt176, that caused growth delays at lower concentrations.
Bt176 was never popular with farmers and is no longer sold in the U.S. But that was dumb luck, said Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with the Pesticide Action Network in Oakland ? and that experience makes the case for more stringent oversight, she said.
?A study this month by Chuck Benbrook of Washington State University reported that since 1996, when genetically modified crops were first planted in U.S. fields, rates of herbicide use ? notably, Roundup ? have risen steeply, though insecticide use fell. Benbrook, who conducted this research while he was the chief scientist at the advocacy group the Organic Center, documented a net pesticide increase of 404 million pounds per year.
Other scientists acknowledge that Roundup use has climbed as weeds developed resistance to the herbicide. But they say the report fails to factor in benefits: Roundup is less toxic than the herbicides it displaced and its use allows farmers to leave fields untilled, reducing soil erosion. Analysts wrote that Benbrook's report, in Environmental Sciences Europe, is at odds with other studies and contains assumptions and missing data that combine to overestimate herbicide use for engineered crops.
rosie.mestel@latimes.com
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The Hobbit Set Visit Report
Earlier this year, I fulfilled a dream: I visited Middle Earth (also known as New Zealand).? As a huge fan of Peter Jackson?s Lord of the Rings trilogy, it was everything I?d hoped it would be and more.? ?While on set with a few other online reporters, we got to watch a few scenes get filmed, interview almost the entire cast and most of the crew, and we saw firsthand how much love is being put into making The Hobbit trilogy as amazing as the LOTR trilogy.? It was an experience I?ll never forget.
With the first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, opening December 14, WB has lifted part of the embargo and after the jump you can check out my list of 65 things to know about the film plus links to a number of on set interviews.
The first thing to know is when I visited the set, the plan was to release two Hobbit films.? However, since that time, Peter Jackson and WB have decided to release The Hobbit as a trilogy, with the following release dates:
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (December 14, 2012)
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (December 13, 2013)
- The Hobbit: There and Back Again (July 18, 2014)
While I?m incredibly excited to get even more of The Hobbit on movie screens, the change to a trilogy does present one big problem: everything I saw on set is now in the second film and it?s still under embargo.
What that means is, while I?d like to tell you about ____ fighting ____, or talk about how incredible to was to watch Peter Jackson direct ____, for now you?ll just have to trust me when I say The Hobbit trilogy is going to be everything you hope it would be and more.
In addition, while I?m still under embargo from talking about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in about a year, you can expect a massive in depth write up about everything I saw and even more on set interviews.
70 Things to Know About The Hobbit:
During my group interviews with the cast and crew I learned a lot of cool little facts about the films. I?m going to assume everyone reading this is familiar with the cast, knows the films were shot in 3D/48fps (frames per second), and has been paying attention over the last two years as we?ve covered these films in detail.
- There are two film units shooting all the time.? Peter Jackson directs the first unit and Andy Serkis is directing second unit.
- Peter Jackson is once again pushing film technology forward with something called ?slave motion cam.?? This technology allows characters of different sizes to do scenes together at the same time.? What happens is one camera is ?on? and on camera is slave to the other one, so actors will be on two different soundstages but filming the same scene.? This was used when Ian McKellen (Gandolf) filmed his scenes with the dwarfs and Bilbo in Bag End as he was in another stage acting with all of them.? While it?s complicated technology, it allows for more movie magic to be done in camera.
- The Hobbit takes place 60 years before the event of Lord of the Rings
- The shoot is scheduled for 254 days.
- The Hobbit is has a fairy tale quality to it as the group is chasing gold and there is a dragon.
Here?s some more highlights broken down by who said them.
Peter Jackson:
- Jackson explains the difference between Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.? Rings is ?good and evil, black and white??the world is at stake.? The Hobbit has more of a fairy tale quality, ?slaying dragons and going for gold.?
- In Tolkien?s book, Bilbo doesn?t feel the negative effects when he puts on the ring because he added those effects two decades later for the Rings trilogy.? The effects of the ring will gradually build up over the course of the Hobbit movies.? Jackson says, ?So the first time he puts it on it?s simply a magic ring, but each time he puts it on the effect of it gets to him a bit more.?
- They turned to Tolkien?s appendices for more backstory on why Gandalf chose Bilbo for this task.? Gandalf remembers Bilbo as a young child who loves adventure and danger, and is disappointed to find that Bilbo has become stuffy and conservative 18 years later.
- Jackson was reluctant to take the director?s chair even after Guillermo del Toro left because the ensemble of thirteen dwarves ?terrified? him.? But he?s done a complete turnaround, and now calls the dwarf ensemble the ?great joy of the movie.?
Matt Aitlen (WETA):
- They didn?t redesign Gollum, but using the advances in technology over the last decade they were able to make him behave more natural and realistic.
- 48fps forced the visual effects team to do twice as much work in terms of processing and calculation, but the people at WETA say the change from 2D to 3D was more impactful from a creative standpoint.
- The visual effects team didn?t reuse any backgrounds or digital elements from The Lord of the Rings because their approaches had been developed over the past decade.? In fact, advances in the visual effects realm moved so quickly that they had to digitally rebuild Gollum from Two Towers to Return of the King.
Martin Freeman:
Sir Ian McKellen:
Richard Armitage:
Makeup Department
- Vast improvements were made in makeup since Lord of the Rings, so the new type of silicone used on the dwarves doesn?t require constant maintenance as the one for Gimli did.? It?s easier to apply and paint and it?s virtually heat-proof, water-proof, and fire-proof.
- Gimil?s makeup took three-and-a-half hours, but the face application for Thorin is only an hour.
- The longest makeup of the dwarves is Bombur, and he takes an hour and 45 minutes to apply.? The shortest makeup is Kili who takes 30 minutes or less because he just has a nose prosthetic.
- They had to do a lot of camera tests for 48fps, because when you put an actor with a face prosthetic in front of the RED Epic at 48fps, the prosthetic came up yellow and you could see exactly where it was.? To overcompensate, they had to apply more red to the makeup.
- The one makeup technology that?s been kept exactly the same since LOTR is the Elf ears, for which they use gelatin.
- They used foam latex feet that were glued on for LOTR, but for The Hobbit they?ve created ?slip-ons? that are much, much easier to apply and can come on and off during the day.? The new Hobbit feet are also able to make the toes move.
The dwarves wear prosthetic arms and hands so that the proportions add up after they?ve done the scale effects work.- Dwalin?s arm tattoos are painted on his slip-on prosthetic arms, but his head tattoos are done in makeup using a stamp.
- They use an expert wig-maker for the film, and some of the wigs cost $10,000.
- Galadriel, Legolas, and Frodo?s wigs in The Hobbit are the same ones that were used in LOTR.
- Thorin was the most difficult dwarf design to get right.? He had the most wig changes and prosthetic changes throughout the design process.
Visual Effects and Makeup:
- The special effects team for The Lord of the Rings trilogy created about 500 primary illustrations for conceptual designs; the same team churned out over 8,000 digital paintings for The Hobbit trilogy.
- The design team not only had to overcome the challenge of making each of the individual Dwarves unique and recognizable, but also to adjust their head-to-body ratios through padding and prostheses to achieve the proper look.
None of the Dwarves have facial prostheses below the nose line or past the crow?s feet in order to save application time and keep the actors? mouths free from restriction.- On the Dwarves? character traits: Ori is a mama?s boy and still sports purple bows she tied into his hair before leaving, Dwalin is a war-hardened soldier and wears his battle scars proudly, Dori controls the money during the voyage and is also fond of grooming his hair in an elaborate fashion, Bifur has an Orc axe embedded in his skull which causes a nervous tic and some mental impairment, Bombur is the most massive and the strongest of the Dwarves who also uses his beard as a garrote to draw enemies in against his stomach to dispatch them, Gloin exhibits shades of The Lord of the Rings? Gimli, and Nori has the most dramatic silhouette, Balin has no mustache, Thorin gave the team the toughest challenge as he goes through a series of prosthetic and costume changes.
- Jed Brophy (Nori) also played numerous characters in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
- Nearly 800 individual weapons were made for the 13 Dwarves, accounting for the principal actors, scale doubles, stunt doubles, picture doubles and sometimes a riding double.
- One of the weapons is a sort of stirrup spear the team calls a ?pig-sticker? which allows the wielder to stand resolute against a charging board.
- Many of the props are now made using 3D printing, complemented by hands-on fabrications. The technology is limited only by the size of the printer and the design software used for it.? Theoretically, 3D printers could be used to create large-scale props and, eventually, even full sets.
Swords, for example, have 3D-milled blades that are hand-tooled by swordsmiths, while the grip and cross-guard is 3D printed; a much more efficient process than making them all by hand.- All of the Dwarves wore enlarged prosthetic hands.? The design team even improved upon the prosthetic feet by developing silicone leg boots and integrating running toe-shoes into the design.
- The shoot averaged between 36 and 48 prostheses needed every day.
- Due to increased definition of current filming practices, it?s become harder to fool the eye and blur the line between prosthetic and actor.? The design team uses extremely thin acrylic and silicone-layered applications that are even impregnated with corpuscle (free floating cells, i.e. blood cells) that scatter and reflect light similarly to skin.
- Facial prostheses, which can be as thin as 0.1 mm, are made using molds with a material called syntactic dough.
- Somewhere between 600-800 Elven ears were produced for the films.
- Film captures the moisture in the air between the lens and the actor, blurring the lines between prostheses and skin.? Digital camera technology has challenged the effects team because it has the ability to see through this moisture barrier.
Bob Buck ? Costume Department
- They amped up the color in the costume department to keep with The Hobbit?s lighter tone in relation to The Lord of the Rings.
- Gandalf?s costume is the same as in the trilogy except he now has an Elven scarf.
- In crafting the look and costumes of Bilbo, Peter Jackson wanted to emulate Tolkien himself since both are ?country gentlemen.?
- They created six stages of Bilbo?s costume to reflect the things that happen to him throughout the course of the movie.
- Pretty much every thing you see in the film, costume-wise, was made from scratch, including the buttons.
- Shooting at 48 fps ?oomphs? up the color and picks up more detail, so the costume department had to be conscious of this when crafting the costumes.
- The dwarf costumes were made slightly larger so it looks like they were made by people with fat fingers, and also so they would still look realistic when they?re scaled down.
In the book, the dwarves are distinguished by hoods of different colors. They didn?t want to be that literal in the film, so the colors have been pulled into other aspects of their respective costumes.- For the dwarves? shoes, they had the bigger actors wear size 22 shoes and the smaller actors wear size 18.? In order to keep them from falling off, they actually had a smaller shoe built inside the large shoe.
- Since Gloin is related to Gimili from LOTR, they wanted to keep a connection with the costumes of the two characters.
- All the original costumes?like Gandalf?s?from the LOTR trilogy are locked up in storage and preserved, so they can?t be reused.
Art Department
Art Department quotes on how 48fps impacted their jobs:
?It meant that we?re being a little bit more careful about what the finished surfaces are like. How our texture treatments are done, and just by pushing that much more detail into everything. It?s actually enriched the propage and the sets a whole lot more, I think, because we?re quite often using real materials instead of prop making plastics and things. I think it?s better as an interactive thing as well for the actors because they?re interacting with glass instead of plastic and ceramics instead of card.?
?It has made our job more interesting. If you walk into a set and you don?t feel you?re there, it?s not working. It?s that active. Normally you could cheat a bit here and cheat a bit there.?
?Gone were the days where you could say, ?Aw, that?s just background, we won?t have to worry about that too much.? ?
Makeup Department On the Makeup and 48 fps:
?Yeah, it?s the color. What we learned, because even though I?ve been working with this material for about five years, I?ve never seen it on the Epic, at that rate. And what we found when we made these guys up, to the eye, if I was standing right in front of you and I had a piece on, you wouldn?t be able to tell. In front of the camera, they way it was reading, it was kicking yellow. And so you can actually see where the piece was. It was like the camera was picking up something that the human eye wasn?t seeing, and so they were kicking yellow. So what we had to do was overcompensate for the camera and put more red into them.?
?Yeah. And then when we?re on green screen, we have to kick the reds even more, because the green screen sucks out the reds as well. And that happens just on film as well. But yeah, painting for the invisible eye, we call it. And it?s a fine line, you can go too red and it appears really wacky. But if you go too little, you have this jaundiced guy.?
Final Words:
As you might imagine, getting to spend two days on the set of The Hobbit is something I?ll never forget.? I got to see up close the time and energy Peter Jackson and his team are putting in to make sure this trilogy is as good, if not better, than the Lord of the Rings films.? From what I saw, I?m beyond confident they will meet their goal.
Finally, as I already mentioned, in about a year, when The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is getting ready to come out, you can expect a much more in depth report.? Until then?.
Here is more from my Hobbit set visit:
- Peter Jackson Talks Similarities and Differences to Lord of the Rings, Shooting in 3D and 48 fps, His Initial Reluctance to Direct, and More on the Set of The Hobbit
- Ian McKellan Talks Returning to Middle Earth, Differences from the Book, Advances in Technology and Filming in 3D, and More on the Set of The Hobbit
- Martin Freeman Talks the Impact of The Ring on Bilbo, Ian Holm?s Performance, Being a Fan Favorite for the Role, and More on the Set of The Hobbit
- Richard Armitage Talks Dwarf Humor, Script Changes During Production, Parallels Between Thorin and Frodo?s Journeys, and More on the Set of The Hobbit
- Weta Workshop Head Richard Taylor Talks Turning Actors into Dwarves, Developing the Film?s Weapons, and More on the Set of The Hobbit
?
Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1926144/news/1926144/
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MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice | Lawsuit Financing ...
Imagine you have been injured in some way and the responsible party is a large company or wealthy individual. You think you can sue and win in court and your attorneys agree, but between legal costs and living expenses, you can?t afford to fight for years to get the payout.
Now, imagine that someone offers to give you cash now and be repaid when and if you win your case.
Litigation Financing
Stop imagining. Litigation financing, also called lawsuit financing or legal financing, is an emerging industry that provides money to help plaintiffs cover legal bills and living expenses while waiting to resolve their cases.
While new and somewhat controversial in the United States, it?s long been used in other countries and has been growing in popularity in America since appearing in the late 1990s.
The basic idea is straightforward: if someone has a legal claim for injury, such as one resulting from a car wreck, a legal financing company puts up money to pay for the injured party?s legal, living or other costs while the lawsuit is being pursued.
The money is treated as a non-recourse loan to be paid back if there is an eventual settlement.
Does It Level the Playing Field?
Litigation financing can help level the legal playing field for ordinary plaintiffs and well-funded defendants.
It can provide someone who lacks deep pockets the wherewithal to pursue a claim, or it can provide a plaintiff who prefers to have money now the option of collecting sooner rather than later.
What Litigation Financing Pays For
Legal financing isn?t just for attorney?s fees and court costs. The American Legal Financing Association, a group formed in 2004, says its members provide money to pay for plaintiffs? medical care, cover children?s college expenses and make up overdue child support payments.
The group says one of its members claims over 62 percent of funds it hands out go to stop foreclosures or evictions.
For impoverished plaintiffs, the service can sometimes fill a need better than other financial institutions can. Banks, for instance, don?t consider potential lawsuit awards as good collateral for loans, so they won?t lend money to plaintiffs who lack good credit.
That is often the situation for people who are injured and can?t work or have large medical bills. Plaintiff?s attorneys, meanwhile, are barred by ethics rules from giving their clients money.
Does It Encourage Frivolous Lawsuits?
One criticism of legal financing is that it might encourage frivolous lawsuits. Arguments against this note that if a lawsuit fails, legal financing firms lose their investment ? plaintiffs don?t have to repay money if cases are unsuccessful ? so they are unlikely to back meritless causes.
Another issue is the cost to plaintiffs. Legal financing firms charge higher interest rates than banks, around 2 percent to 3 percent a month. If it takes a long time to settle or win a case, the plaintiff may receive little of the eventual proceeds.
And legal financing isn?t likely to be a gold mine for people who have been injured. One study reported cash advances average between $1,750 and $4,500 and rarely exceed $20,000. Advances were also typically less than 10 percent of the total estimated value of the claim.
A Side Benefit
A side benefit of legal financing is that it can provide an attractive investment alternative. Legal judgments aren?t tied to the stock market, unemployment rate or any of the other factors that affect most investments.
For people seeking returns insulated from the economy, investing in legal financing is a promising ? although not risk-free ? option.
The Bottom Line
The basic concept of legal financing isn?t completely new. Personal injury attorneys routinely take cases on contingency, paying legal expenses out of their pockets and foregoing their own fees until the case is settled.
Many cash-strapped plaintiffs have also financed legal fees and living expenses with bank loans (if their credit is good enough) or credit cards while waiting for their claims to be resolved.
But the idea of treating a potential lawsuit payout as an investment opportunity is relatively new, and, for better or for worse, it promises to change the way we use the courts to seek financial remedies.
?Lawsuit Financing Could Change the Way We Sue? was written by Mark Henricks.?
Source: http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/lawsuit-financing-could-change-the-way-we-sue-1012/
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Why Standardized Tests Don't Measure Educational Quality - ASCD
W. James Popham
A standardized test is any examination that's administered and scored in a predetermined, standard manner. There are two major kinds of standardized tests: aptitude tests and achievement tests.
Standardized aptitude tests predict how well students are likely to perform in some subsequent educational setting. The most common examples are the SAT-I and the ACT both of which attempt to forecast how well high school students will perform in college.
But standardized achievement-test scores are what citizens and school board members rely on when they evaluate a school's effectiveness. Nationally, five such tests are in use: California Achievement Tests, Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, Metropolitan Achievement Tests, and Stanford Achievement Tests.
A Standardized Test's Assessment Mission
The folks who create standardized achievement tests are terrifically talented. What they are trying to do is to create assessment tools that permit someone to make a valid inference about the knowledge and/or skills that a given student possesses in a particular content area. More precisely, that inference is to be norm-referenced so that a student's relative knowledge and/or skills can be compared with those possessed by a national sample of students of the same age or grade level.
Such relative inferences about a student's status with respect to the mastery of knowledge and/or skills in a particular subject area can be quite informative to parents and educators. For example, think about the parents who discover that their 4th grade child is performing really well in language arts (94th percentile) and mathematics (89th percentile), but rather poorly in science (39th percentile) and social studies (26th percentile). Such information, because it illuminates a child's strengths and weaknesses, can be helpful not only in dealing with their child's teacher, but also in determining at-home assistance. Similarly, if teachers know how their students compare with other students nationwide, they can use this information to devise appropriate classroom instruction.
But there's an enormous amount of knowledge and/or skills that children at any grade level are likely to know. The substantial size of the content domain that a standardized achievement test is supposed to represent poses genuine difficulties for the developers of such tests. If a test actually covered all the knowledge and skills in the domain, it would be far too long.
So standardized achievement tests often need to accomplish their measurement mission with a much smaller collection of test items than might otherwise be employed if testing time were not an issue. The way out of this assessment bind is for standardized achievement tests to sample the knowledge and/or skills in the content domain. Frequently, such tests try to do their assessment job with only 40 to 50 items in a subject field?sometimes fewer.
Accurate Differentiation As a Deity
The task for those developing standardized achievement tests is to create an assessment instrument that, with a handful of items, yields valid norm-referenced interpretations of a student's status regarding a substantial chunk of content. Items that do the best job of discriminating among students are those answered correctly by roughly half the students. Devlopers avoid items that are answered correctly by too many or by too few students.
As a consequence of carefully sampling content and concentrating on items that discriminate optimally among students, these test creators have produced assessment tools that do a great job of providing relative comparisons of a student's content mastery with that of students nationwide. Assuming that the national norm group is genuinely representative of the nation at large, then educators and parents can make useful inferences about students.
One of the most useful of those inferences typically deals with students' relative strengths and weaknesses across subject areas, such as when parents find that their daughter sparkles in mathematics but sinks in science. It's also possible to identify students' relative strengths and weaknesses within a given subject area if there are enough test items to do so. For instance, if a 45-item standardized test in mathematics allocates 15 items to basic computation, 15 items to geometry, and 15 items to algebra, it might be possible to get a rough idea of a student's relative strengths and weaknesses in those three realms of mathematics. More often than not, however, these tests contain too few items to allow meaningful within-subject comparisons of students' strengths and weaknesses.
A second kind of useful inference that can be based on standardized achievement tests involves a student's growth over time in different subject areas. For example, let's say that a child is given a standardized achievement test every third year. We see that the child's percentile performances in most subjects are relatively similar at each testing, but that the child's percentiles in mathematics appear to drop dramatically at each subsequent testing. That's useful information.
Unfortunately, both parents and educators often ascribe far too much precision and accuracy to students' scores on standardized achievement tests. Several factors might cause scores to flop about. Merely because these test scores are reported in numbers (sometimes even with decimals!) should not incline anyone to attribute unwarranted precision to them. Standardized achievement test scores should be regarded as rough approximations of a student's status with respect to the content domain represented by the test.
To sum up, standardized achievement tests do a wonderful job of supplying the evidence needed to make norm-referenced interpretations of students' knowledge and/or skills in relationship to those of students nationally. The educational usefulness of those interpretations is considerable. Given the size of the content domains to be represented and the limited number of items that the test developers have at their disposal, standardized achievement tests are really quite remarkable. They do what they are supposed to do.
But standardized achievement tests should not be used to evaluate the quality of education. That's not what they are supposed to do.
Measuring Temperature with a Tablespoon
For several important reasons, standardized achievement tests should not be used to judge the quality of education. The overarching reason that students' scores on these tests do not provide an accurate index of educational effectiveness is that any inference about educational quality made on the basis of students' standardized achievement test performances is apt to be invalid.
Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon. Tablespoons have a different measurement mission than indicating how hot or cold something is. Standardized achievement tests have a different measurement mission than indicating how good or bad a school is. Standardized achievement tests should be used to make the comparative interpretations that they were intended to provide. They should not be used to judge educational quality. Let's look at three significant reasons that it is thoroughly invalid to base inferences about the caliber of education on standardized achievement test scores.
Testing-Teaching Mismatches
The companies that create and sell standardized achievement tests are all owned by large corporations. Like all for-profit businesses, these corporations attempt to produce revenue for their shareholders.
Recognizing the substantial pressure to sell standardized achievement tests, those who market such tests encounter a difficult dilemma that arises from the considerable curricular diversity in the United States. Because different states often choose somewhat different educational objectives (or, to be fashionable, different content standards), the need exists to build standardized achievement tests that are properly aligned with educators' meaningfully different curricular preferences. The problem becomes even more exacerbated in states where different counties or school districts can exercise more localized curricular decision making.
At a very general level, the goals that educators pursue in different settings are reasonably similar. For instance, you can be sure that all schools will give attention to language arts, mathematics, and so on. But that's at a general level. At the level where it really makes a difference to instruction?in the classroom?there are significant differences in the educational objectives being sought. And that presents a problem to those who must sell standardized achievement tests.
In view of the nation's substantial curricular diversity, test developers are obliged to create a series of one-size-fits-all assessments. But, as most of us know from attempting to wear one-size-fits-all garments, sometimes one size really can't fit all.
The designers of these tests do the best job they can in selecting test items that are likely to measure all of a content area's knowledge and skills that the nation's educators regard as important. But the test developers can't really pull it off. Thus, standardized achievement tests will always contain many items that are not aligned with what's emphasized instructionally in a particular setting.
To illustrate the seriousness of the mismatch that can occur between what's taught locally and what's tested through standardized achievement tests, educators ought to know about an important study at Michigan State University reported in 1983 by Freeman and his colleagues. These researchers selected five nationally standardized achievement tests in mathematics and studied their content for grades 4?6. Then, operating on the very reasonable assumption that what goes on instructionally in classrooms is often influenced by what's contained in the texbooks that children use, they also studied four widely used textbooks for grades 4-6.
Employing rigorous review procedures, the researchers identified the items in the standardized achievement test that had not received meaningful instructional attention in the textbooks. They concluded that between 50 and 80 percent of what was measured on the tests was not suitably addressed in the textbooks. As the Michigan State researchers put it, "The proportion of topics presented on a standardized test that received more than cursory treatment in each textbook was never higher than 50 percent" (p. 509).
Well, if the content of standardized tests is not satisfactorily addressed in widely used textbooks, isn't it likely that in a particular educational setting, topics will be covered on the test that aren't addressed instructionally in that setting? Unfortunately, because most educators are not genuinely familiar with the ingredients of standardized achievement tests, they often assume that if a standardized achievement test asserts that it is assessing "children's reading comprehension capabilities," then it's likely that the test meshes with the way reading is being taught locally. More often than not, the assumed match between what's tested and what's taught is not warranted.
If you spend much time with the descriptive materials presented in the manuals accompanying standardized achievement tests, you'll find that the descriptors for what's tested are often fairly general. Those descriptors need to be general to make the tests acceptable to a nation of educators whose curricular preferences vary. But such general descriptions of what's tested often permit assumptions of teaching-testing alignments that are way off the mark. And such mismatches, recognized or not, will often lead to spurious conclusions about the effectiveness of education in a given setting if students' scores on standardized achievement tests are used as the indicator of educational effectiveness. And that's the first reason that standardized achievement tests should not be used to determine the effectiveness of a state, a district, a school, or a teacher. There's almost certain to be a significant mismatch between what's taught and what's tested.
A Psychometric Tendency to Eliminate Important Test Items
A second reason that standardized achievement tests should not be used to evaluate educational quality arises directly from the requirement that these tests permit meaningful comparisons among students from only a small collection of items.
A test item that does the best job in spreading out students' total-test scores is a test item that's answered correctly by about half the students. Items that are answered correctly by 40 to 60 percent of the students do a solid job in spreading out the total scores of test-takers.
Items that are answered correctly by very large numbers of students, in contrast, do not make a suitable contribution to spreading out students' test scores. A test item answered correctly by 90 percent of the test-takers is, from the perspective of a test's efficiency in providing comparative interpretations, being answered correctly by too many students.
Test items answered correctly by 80 percent or more of the test takers, therefore, usually don't make it past the final cut when a standardized achievement test is first developed, and such items will most likely be jettisoned when the test is revised. As a result, the vast majority of the items on standardized achievement tests are "middle difficulty" items.
As a consequence of the quest for score variance in a standardized achievement test, items on which students perform well are often excluded. However, items on which students perform well often cover the content that, because of its importance, teachers stress. Thus, the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills. To evaluate teachers' instructional effectiveness by using assessment tools that deliberately avoid important content is fundamentally foolish.
Confounded Causation
The third reason that students' performances on these tests should not be used to evaluate educational quality is the most compelling. Because student performances on standardized achievement tests are heavily influenced by three causative factors, only one of which is linked to instructional quality, asserting that low or high test scores are caused by the quality of instruction is illogical.
To understand this confounded-causation problem clearly, let's look at the kinds of test items that appear on standardized achievement tests. Remember, students' test scores are based on how well students do on the test's items. To get a really solid idea of what's in standardized tests, you need to grub around with the items themselves.
The three illustrative items presented here are mildly massaged versions of actual test items in current standardized achievement tests. I've modified the items' content slightly, without altering the essence of what the items are trying to measure.
The problem of confounded causation involves three factors that contribute to students' scores on standardized achievement tests: (1) what's taught in school, (2) a student's native intellectual ability, and (3) a student's out-of-school learning.
What's taught in school. Some of the items in standardized achievement tests measure the knowledge or skills that students learn in school. In certain subject areas, such as mathematics, children learn in school most of what they know about a subject. Few parents spend much time teaching their children about the intricacies of algebra or how to prove a theorem.
So, if you look over the items in any standardized achievement test, you'll find a fair number similar to the mathematics item presented in Figure 1, which is a mildly modified version of an item appearing in a standardized achievement test intended for 3rd grade children.
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Sally had 14 pears. Then she gave away 6. Which of the number sentences below can you use to find out how many pears Sally has left?
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This mathematics item would help teachers arrive at a valid inference about 3rd graders' abilities to choose number sentences that coincide with verbal representations of subtraction problems. Or, along with other similar items dealing with addition, multiplication, and division, this item would contribute to a valid inference about a student's ability to choose appropriate number sentences for a variety of basic computation problems presented in verbal form.
If the items in standardized achievement tests measured only what actually had been taught in school, I wouldn't be so negative about using these tests to determine educational quality. As you'll soon see, however, other kinds of items are hiding in standardized achievement tests.
A student's native intellectual ability. I wish I believed that all children were born with identical intellectual abilities, but I don't. Some kids were luckier at gene-pool time. Some children, from birth, will find it easier to mess around with mathematics than will others. Some kids, from birth, will have an easier time with verbal matters than will others. If children came into the world having inherited identical intellectual abilities, teachers' pedagogical problems would be far more simple.
Recent thinking among many leading educators suggests that there are various forms of intelligence, not just one (Gardner, 1994). A child who is born with less aptitude for dealing with quantitative or verbal tasks, therefore, might possess greater "interpersonal" or "intrapersonal" intelligence, but these latter abilities are not tested by these tests. For the kinds of items that are most commonly found on standardized achievement tests, children differ in their innate abilities to respond correctly. And some items on standardized achievement tests are aimed directly at measuring such intellectual ability.
Consider, for example, the item in Figure 2. This item attempts to measure a child's ability "to figure out" what the right answer is. I don't think that the item measures what's taught in school. The item measures what students come to school with, not what they learn there.
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If someone really wants to conserve resources, one good way to do so is to:
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In Figure 2's social studies item for 6th graders, look carefully at the four answer options. Read each option and see if it might be correct. A "smart" student, I contend, can figure out that choices A, B, and D really would not "conserve resources" all that well; hence choice C is the winning option. Brighter kids will have a better time with this item than their less bright classmates.
But why, you might be thinking, do developers of standardized tests include such items on their tests? The answer is all too simple. These sorts of items, because they tap innate intellectual skills that are not readily modifiable in school, do a wonderful job in spreading out test-takers' scores. The quest for score variance, coupled with the limitation of having few items to use in assessing students, makes such items appealing to those who construct standardized achievement tests.
But items that primarily measure differences in students' in-born intellectual abilities obviously do not contribute to valid inferences about "how well children have been taught." Would we like all children to do well on such "native-smarts" items? Of course we would. But to use such items to arrive at a judgment about educational effectiveness is simply unsound.
Out-of-school learning. The most troubling items on standardized achievement tests assess what students have learned outside of school. Unfortunately, you'll find more of these items on standardized achievement tests than you'd suspect. If children come from advantaged families and stimulus-rich environments, then they are more apt to succeed on items in standardized achievement test items than will other children whose environments don't mesh as well with what the tests measure. The item in Figure 3 makes clear what's actually being assessed by a number of items on standardized achievement tests.
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A plant's fruit always contains seeds. Which of the items below is not a fruit?
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This 6th grade science item first tells students what an attribute of a fruit is (namely, that it contains seeds). Then the student must identify what "is not a fruit" by selecting the option without seeds. As any child who has encountered celery knows, celery is a seed-free plant. The right answer, then, for those who have coped with celery's strings but never its seeds, is clearly choice D.
But what if when you were a youngster, your folks didn't have the money to buy celery at the store? What if your circumstances simply did not give you the chance to have meaningful interactions with celery stalks by the time you hit the 6th grade? How well do you think you'd do in correctly answering the item in Figure 3? And how well would you do if you didn't know that pumpkins were seed-carrying spheres? Clearly, if children know about pumpkins and celery, they'll do better on this item than will those children who know only about apples and oranges. That's how children's socioeconomic status gets mixed up with children's performances on standardized achievement tests. The higher your family's socioeconomic status is, the more likely you are to do well on a number of the test items you'll encounter in a such a test.
Suppose you're a principal of a school in which most students come from genuinely low socioeconomic situations. How are your students likely to perform on standardized achievement tests if a substantial number of the test's items really measure the stimulus-richness of your students' backgrounds? That's right, your students are not likely to earn very high scores. Does that mean your school's teachers are doing a poor instructional job? Of course not.
Conversely, let's imagine you're a principal in an affluent school whose students tend to have upper-class, well-educated parents. Each spring, your students' scores on standardized achievement tests are dazzlingly high. Does this mean your school's teachers are doing a super instructional job? Of course not.
One of the chief reasons that children's socioeconomic status is so highly correlated with standardized test scores is that many items on standardized achievement tests really focus on assessing knowledge and/or skills learned outside of school?knowledge and/or skills more likely to be learned in some socioeconomic settings than in others.
Again, you might ask why on earth would standardized achievement test developers place such items on their tests? As usual, the answer is consistent with the dominant measurement mission of those tests, namely, to spread out students' test scores so that accurate and fine-grained norm-referenced interpretations can be made. Because there is substantial variation in children's socioeconomic situations, items that reflect such variations are efficient in producing among-student variations in test scores.
You've just considered three important factors that can influence students' scores on standardized achievement tests. One of these factors was directly linked to educational quality. But two factors weren't.
What's an Educator to Do?
I've described a situation that, from the perspective of an educator, looks pretty bleak. What, if anything, can be done? I suggest a three-pronged attack on the problem. First, I think that you need to learn more about the viscera of standardized achievement tests. Second, I think that you need to carry out an effective educational campaign so that your educational colleagues, parents of children in school, and educational policymakers understand what the evaluative shortcomings of standardized achievement tests really are. Finally, I think that you need to arrange a more appropriate form of assessment-based evidence.
Learning about standardized achievement tests. Far too many educators haven't really studied the items on standardized achievement tests since the time that they were, as students, obliged to respond to those items. But the inferences made on the basis of students' test performances rest on nothing more than an aggregated sum of students' item-by-item responses. What educators need to do is to spend some quality time with standardized achievement tests?scrutinizing the test's items one at a time to see what they are really measuring.
Spreading the word. Most educators, and almost all parents and school board members, think that schools should be rated on the basis of their students' scores on standardized achievement tests. Those people need to be educated. It is the responsibility of all educators to do that educating.
If you do try to explain to the public, to parents, or to policymakers why standardized test scores will probably provide a misleading picture of educational quality, be sure to indicate that you're not running away from the need to be held accountable. No, you must be willing to identify other, more credible evidence of student achievement.
Coming up with other evidence. If you're going to argue against standardized achievement tests as a source of educational evidence for determining school quality, and you still are willing to be held educationally accountable, then you'll need to ante up some other form of evidence to show the world that you really are doing a good educational job.
I recommend that you attempt to assess students' mastery of genuinely significant cognitive skills, such as their ability to write effective compositions, their ability to use lessons from history to make cogent analyses of current problems, and their ability to solve high-level mathematical problems.
If the skills selected measure really important cognitive outcomes, are seen by parents and policymakers to be genuinely significant, and can be addressed instructionally by competent teachers, then the assembly of a set of pre-test-to-post-test evidence showing substantial student growth in such skills can be truly persuasive.
What teachers need are assessment instruments that measure worthwhile skills or significant bodies of knowledge. Then teachers need to show the world that they can instruct children so that those children make striking pre-instruction to post-instruction progress.
The fundamental point is this: If educators accept the position that standardized achievement test scores should not be used to measure the quality of schooling, then they must provide other, credible evidence that can be used to ascertain the quality of schooling. Carefully collected, nonpartisan evidence regarding teachers' pre-test-to-post-test promotion of undeniably important skills or knowledge just might do the trick.
Right Task, Wrong Tools
Educators should definitely be held accountable. The teaching of a nation's children is too important to be left unmonitored. But to evaluate educational quality by using the wrong assessment instruments is a subversion of good sense. Although educators need to produce valid evidence regarding their effectiveness, standardized achievement tests are the wrong tools for the task.
References
Freeman, D. J., Kuhs, T. M., Porter, A. C., Floden, R. E., Schmidt, W. H., & Schwille, J. R. (1983). Do textbooks and tests define a natural curriculum in elementary school mathematics? Elementary School Journal, 83(5), 501?513.
Gardner, H. (1994). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. Teacher's College Record, 95(4), 576?583.
Author's note: A longer version of this article will appear in the final chapter of W. James Popham's book Modern Educational Measurement: Practical Guidelines for Educational Leaders, 3rd ed., (forthcoming); Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
W. James Popham is a UCLA Emeritus Professor. He may be reached at IOX Assessment Associates, 5301 Beethoven St., Ste. 190, Los Angeles, CA 90066 (e-mail: wpopham@ucla.edu).
Lincolnshire Police - Building Society Robbery, Spalding
Police are appealing for witnesses following a robbery that occurred at a Spalding building society just before closing time.
Shortly before 5pm, a man entered the Norwich and Peterborough in Sheep Market and demanded money. No weapon was seen or mentioned but the suspect had one of his hands concealed. Staff were shaken by the incident but nobody was injured.
The ma left the branch with an undisclosed amount of cash.
He is described as average build, around 6' 2" tall, with light blonde hair. He had an English accent and was wearing jeans, a baseball cap, dark jacket and had a scarf around his face.
Police would also like to trace a woman who was in the branch asking to change Euros immediately before the incident and who may be an important witness. (CCTV image of her below at the bottom).
Higher resolution CCTV images should be available later today.
Anyone with information should contact Lincolnshire Police by dialling 101 and quoting the incident number. Report crimes anonymously by contacting Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
?
Source: http://www.lincs.police.uk/News-Centre/News-Releases-2012/Building-Society-Robbery,-Spalding.html
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Global Slowdown Weighs on Revenues & Profits…Refis Still Drive High Yield Debt Issuance
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Micro close-ups are creepy ? and cool!
Geir Drange
Get an up-close view of an ant carrying its baby, plus other top-20 winners in the 2012 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition.
By Alan Boyle
Small wonders can be icky as well as clicky, as this year's top images in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition demonstrate. First-ever picture of the blood-brain barrier forming in a live animal? Got it. Ultra-close-ups of a desert rose and a baby garlic flower? Got 'em. Creepy pictures of bat embryos and eight-eyed spiders? Got those, too.
Ninety-nine winners were chosen out of hundreds of photographers from around the world who participated in the Small World contest, which has been presented by Nikon since 1975 to recognize excellence in photomicrography. We're featuring the top 20 images in our slideshow.
Top honors go to Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., who captured what's thought to be an unprecedented picture of the blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo.
The barrier is a structure of cells that let nutrients and other necessities move between blood vessels and the central nervous system, while keeping bacteria and other baddies out of the brain's territory.
"We used fluorescent proteins to look at brain endothelial cells and watched the blood-brain barrier develop in real time," Peters and Taylor said, in a statement explaining the genesis of their winning image. "We took a three-dimensional snapshot under a confocal microscope. Then we stacked the images and compressed them into one ? pseudo-coloring them in rainbow to illustrate depth."
The result is a matrix that appears to shine in the darkness like the craziest neon sculpture you've ever seen. Other winning pictures present views of a ladybug's leg, a fruit fly's gut or a bone cancer cell in similarly glowing colors.
And then there are the curiously creepy pictures: a series of three bat embryos, showing how the critters' flesh-colored wings grow longer during gestation ... an ant gripping one of its larvae in its jaws ... newborn lynx spiderlings that turn their eight eyes toward the microscope's lens.
In some cases, the photomicrographs were created in the course of a research project ? but in other cases, the pictures are primarily meant to convey the wonder of small worlds. For example, photographer Charles Krebs was led to create his 17th-place image when he was stung by nettles. "After the numbness in my fingertips subsided, I carefully collected some, and took a look at the underside of a leaf," he wrote on Photomacrography.net. His 100x image shows a nettle's stinging hair, or trichome, filled with venom.
Eric Flem, communications manager for Nikon Instruments, said it was a privilege to showcase some of the world's best photomicrography. "We are proud that this competition is able to demonstrate the true power of scientific imaging and its relevance to the scientific communities as well as the general public," he said in today's news release. A total of $6,000 worth of Nikon products and equipment will go to the three top prize winnres.
Click through the top-20 slideshow, then check out the Nikon Small World website for scores of additional images of distinction. You can see the contest's top images offline as well, in the form of Nikon's full-color calendar and a touring museum exhibition. And you'll find a huge stockpile of small wonders in the slideshows listed below:
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor, and was on the judging panel for the 2011 Nikon Small World Competition. Connect with the?Cosmic Log?community by "liking" the log's?Facebook page, following?@b0yle on Twitter?and adding the?Cosmic Log page?to your Google+ presence. You can also check out?"The Case for Pluto,"?my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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BusinesSuites Grows Its Workspace Offerings in Maryland
Austin, TX, October 22, 2012 ?(PR.com)? BusinesSuites, a nationwide operator of executive office suites, announced today that the company has opened a new office suite location in Towson, MD. This office will be the sixth BusinesSuites executive suite location in the Baltimore, Maryland metropolitan area, joining existing locations in the Baltimore Inner Harbor, Owings Mills, Columbia Gateway and two locations near the Mall in Columbia.
BusinesSuites Towson is at the intersection of Dulaney Valley Road and York Road on the ninth floor of the newly renovated Towson City Center building. This executive suite office is within walking distance of the Baltimore County Courthouse and retail shops at Towson Town Center, Baltimore County?s largest indoor mall. It offers convenient access to and from Allegheny Avenue and the Towson commercial business district and is one mile from Towson University and the Towson Marriott Hotel.
With 45 offices and three conference rooms, BusinesSuites Towson provides fully-furnished workspaces complete with telephone, Internet, phone answering, and access to a caf?, lounge and free on-site parking. With easy access to the Baltimore Beltway and Baltimore-Harrisburg Expressway, this new executive office suite location is also a convenient option for entrepreneurs and professionals in Lutherville, Timonium and Hunt Valley.
BusinesSuites Towson offers additional options for existing BusinesSuites clients who can schedule conference rooms and day offices at any BusinesSuites location in Maryland or across the country.
?By opening a sixth Maryland-area office, BusinesSuites is expanding our commitment to the Baltimore business community by providing entrepreneurs and professionals with more flexible workspace locations where they can focus on success,? said John G. Jordan, BusinesSuites President and board member of the Global Workspace Association. ?BusinesSuites? growth in Maryland is a testament to the strength and diversity of the economy, and to the changing nature of the workplace in general. Today?s workers want the flexibility to work when, how and where they want, and we offer them that flexibility in a professional, productive workspace.?
About BusinessSuites
BusinesSuites is a leader in the workspace-as-a-service industry providing modern executive suites, virtual office services and shared workspaces at 20 locations in Texas, Nevada, Maryland and Virginia. BusinesSuites serves professionals, entrepreneurs and employees of large companies who need a professional work environment for their business. BusinesSuites offerings include private offices, virtual offices and coworking, and include services such as live phone answering, phone service, Internet, high-speed copier/scanner, conference rooms, and a caf?/lounge. All BusinesSuites services are offered on-demand with flexible terms that allow clients to focus on running their business instead of running their office.
In 2009, BusinesSuites was named the US National Winner of the Dell/NFIB Small Business Excellence Award for its strong focus on hands-on customer service backed by innovative technology. In 2010, BusinesSuites was listed among the Inc. 5000?s Fastest-Growing Companies in the US.
Founded in 1989, the first BusinesSuites location was established in Austin, Texas, by Luci Baines Johnson and Ian J. Turpin.
For more information, visit www.businessuites.com.
Contact Information:
BusinesSuites
Tina Nguyen
512-329-2549
Contact via Email
www.businessuites.com
Click here to read the full story: BusinesSuites Grows Its Workspace Offerings in Maryland
Press Release Distributed by PR.com
Source: http://money.rambergmedia.com/businessuites-grows-its-workspace-offerings-in-maryland/
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