Children are becoming multi-talented these days and they are leaving no stone unturned to achieve and excel in whatever fields that is available to them. Do you see your kid drawing out indecipherable pictures of whatever it sees? Are you looking at shops or places where you can pick quality kids art supplies that will help mold the budding artist? You need to look for the right kind of easels and painting brushes that form a primary part of your child’s art supplies and you need to take special care to look at the height of the easels as this will be a contributing factor deciding the quality of the art form. There are a lot of places where these quality kids art supplies are found and these can purchased at good rates even over the internet. While parents purchase art supplies like easels, care has to be taken to ensure that they purchase the ones best suited to their children’s requirements. These art supplies should augment and enhance the skills of the little ones and prove to be handy for these budding artists to bring to limelight the talents that God has blessed them with and the same that their parents have passionately allowed them to pursue.
Archive for November, 2008
Molding the artist in your child
Thursday, November 27th, 2008Best Place to start IT Training Online
Thursday, November 27th, 2008K Alliance is amongst the top front-runners who have revolutionized the concept of elearning and new technology learning across globe. It has designed new modules and learning methodologies that have made the learning to happen in any type of environment. The streamlined K Alliance training modules have the best modalities to work and with smart integration of innovative Learning Management System (LMS) tools, it has provided the right impetus to fasten the entire process of elearning in corporate, elementary learning and higher education institutions.
K Alliance as the name suggests, ahs brought alliance of modern technology with the traditional learning systems. It is the result of easy to use and comprehensive K Alliance training methodologies, that variable learning formats were designed to multiply the effects of this new form of learning, almost instantaneously. Each of the course modules is ideally designed keeping in view the ultimate goal and the aim of the learner. This ensures that learning gets specific and effective and the learner yields maximum benefit from it.
K Alliance has offered flexibility in variety of elearning modules, and has made learning quite an easy task for everybody. What’s more, you don’t even need to carry your books with you. It is the paperless learning world out there, and everybody has the opportunity to learn in interesting ways, Isn’t it!
Learn the Easy Way Around
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Can you actually believe that you can now learn only through the computer training videos? Yes, that is right. These videos were equipped to bring to you the necessary details that you have to learn and you have to have in mind so you will know the things that will be necessary for you to learn. In doing so, the computer training will lead you to almost everything that you will be in need and it will supply you with whatever it is that you want to gain from it. In this manner, it also made it possible for every one of us to benefit from it since we are pretty much learning in the best possible way that we can and to put it a twist, in an easier way than that of going to a personal training class where you will end up spending much on the various expenditures. In this way, you will be able to save much and you will really have a practical decision if you will go through with this. You just have to be committed to it so you will not end up wasting the opportunity of learning it the easy way around.
Online networks a magnet for job-seekers
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Janel Landon, who runs a small PR consultancy in Chicago, has long been aware of the potential of online networks: now in her mid-50s and facing a global recession, she’s decided to sign up.
“Given the state of the economy, I recently decided to jump on board,” Landon told Reuters. “Professional networking is a ‘must do’ during unstable economic times.”
The economic crisis slamming firms across the globe has sparked a spike in usage of professional networks — Xing and LinkedIn are key sites — as people hedge against losing work and laid-off employees seek jobs.
U.S. unemployment hit a new 14-year high in October and according to online job advertising firm Monster, recruitment activity on the Web plunged to its lowest level in nearly three years. Jobless rates are also rising in Europe.
Traffic on the world’s top professional Web networks has surged since the financial crisis started to make headlines, with top player, privately held LinkedIn, notching 25 percent more registrations in September than forecast.
“Nobody has ever seen anything like this before,” said Kevin Eyres, head of LinkedIn’s operations in Europe. “Now we are growing by almost one new user each second.”
Membership on LinkedIn has jumped to more than 31 million from 18 million at the start of the year, growing fastest in the financial services, media, education and technology fields, Eyres said. The firm has not disclosed any financial details.
“Given that a lot of professionals are currently losing or are worried about losing their job, it makes sense that career-focused social networks such as LinkedIn should see a boost in traffic,” said Martin Olausson, director of the digital media strategies unit at research firm Strategy Analytics.
He estimated the size of the online professional social networking market at about $170 million this year.
Professional sites seek to distance themselves from social networks such as Facebook with their more sober approach, and by giving members more control over their profiles.
Richard Evans, director at U.K.-based Sheridan Evans Executive Search, said he has seen a rising number of requests to connect on professional Web networks: these are increasingly about the need for a job.
Sheridan Evans uses both LinkedIn and Xing, but also Paris-headquartered Viadeo and the largest address-book site Plaxo, to identify potential candidates. It has directed many people to their new jobs using such networks, Evans said.
“The recruitment industry in general is being hit hard. In financial services it’s clearly very bad. In construction it’s bad. In retail it’s getting bad,” said Evans, adding a shortage of senior management was supporting the headhunting business.
Already an estimated 150,000 jobs have been lost globally in the financial sector alone, with more widely expected to go in investment banking and trading.
Arun Patre, a 25-year old analyst at a financial consultancy in India, said he has been looking for jobs on LinkedIn: “The economic situation has prompted me to widen my network as you would never know where things might turn lucrative.”
GROWTH VERSUS PROFITS
LinkedIn said it had seen a slight fall in job offers, but no sharp declines, whereas smaller peer, Europe-focused Xing, reported increasing traffic toward job adverts.
But with the downturn hurting the recruitment business and advertising, social networks have struggled to find a balance between sharply rising usage and profitable growth. LinkedIn said last month it would cut 36 jobs — 10 percent of its staff.
Both LinkedIn and Xing offer premium, paid-for services.
Hamburg-based Xing, which has 6.5 million users in total and whose half a million premium users pay 5.95 euros per month for extra services, has also seen a jump in registrations and connections to record levels, and believes the crisis could open opportunities to grow through acquisition.
“The crisis is very beneficial for us. We are debt-free, with over 40 million euros ($50.5 million) in cash, and the prices for competitors are dropping significantly,” said Xing Chief Executive Lars Hinrichs.
Xing, the first online community to offer its shares to the public, is expected to report 2008 sales rising 77 percent to 34.7 million euros, with profits rising even faster, according to a consensus of analysts provided by the company.
“Anecdotal evidence suggests the macro slowdown might even boost subscriber growth and therefore Xing’s core revenue source,” HSBC analyst Dominik Klarmann said in a research note.
LOOKING FOR JOB
The fast-growing phenomenon of social networks has over the years attracted intense interest from investors and companies like Microsoft and News Corp, and earlier this year the largest U.S. cable service provider Comcast bought Plaxo.
Soumitra Dutta, professor at European business school Insead and co-author of a recently published social networking book “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom,” said new online ties could often lead to someone’s next job.
“Networks are very good examples of weak ties. Traditionally it has been thought that we need strong ties to get jobs, but we often get jobs through weak ties, not strong ties,” Dutta said.
This worked for Bryan Webb, a 57-year old sales manager with a manufacturing company in Canada. It took him a while to build up a network to find a job after he joined LinkedIn, but it paid off last year.
Webb started by sending an application in response to an advert, but later found three people from the firm including the head of operations in his LinkedIn network.
He asked his network friend to pass on a recommendation to a third person, who was connected to the chief at the new firm.
“I still don’t know who it was … but it really made the process smoother and got me the job,” Webb said.
Universal HIV tests would have big impact: study
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008Near-universal HIV tests and immediate drug treatment for people who test positive would almost eliminate transmission of the deadly virus within a decade, a computer model showed on Wednesday.
Doing this would cost more initially but then save money down the road because there would be fewer HIV-infected people to treat, Reuben Granich and colleagues at the World Health Organization wrote in the journal The Lancet.
The researchers emphasized their findings do not represent new WHO policy or any other guidance but rather stand as a call for discussion on how to better tackle the AIDS epidemic and the role of so-called antiretroviral drugs.
“Although other prevention strategies, alone or in combination, could substantially reduce HIV incidence, our model suggests that only universal voluntary HIV testing and immediate initiation of antiretroviral drugs could reduce transmission to the point at which elimination might be feasible by 2020 for a generalized epidemic, such as that in South Africa,” they wrote.
Granich and colleagues used data from South Africa as a test case for a generalized epidemic in their model, which assumed all HIV transmission was through heterosexual sex.
This showed that voluntary screening in which at least 90 percent of the population took part, and immediate drug treatment for those testing positive, could reduce HIV transmission by more than 95 percent within 10 years.
The AIDS virus infects an estimated 33 million people globally, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and has killed 25 million. There is no cure.
The advent in the 1990s of combination drug therapy called highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, has extended the lives of many HIV-infected people, particularly in developed countries.
About 3 million people worldwide had received the drug cocktails by the end of 2007, far short of the estimated 6.7 million infected people still in need of treatment, the researchers added.
There are, of course, drawbacks which the researchers and other scientists pointed out. One is how health systems in poor countries can cope with widespread testing, and whether people can stick to the drugs they must take for life.
“At its best, the strategy would prevent morbidity and mortality for the population, both through better treatment of the individual and reduced spread of HIV,” Geoffrey Garnett, a researcher at Imperial College London, wrote in a commentary in The Lancet.
“At its worst, the strategy will involve over-testing, over-treatment, side effects, resistance, and potentially reduced autonomy of the individual in their choices of care.”
Celebrity blogs let stars speak for themselves
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008In the fast-paced world of celebrity news, stars are increasingly turning to their own Web sites and blog postings to talk about themselves in a do-it-yourself approach to managing their public images.
By speaking directly to fans on the Internet, many stars have upturned the age-old approach to managing a scandal or personal event, which is to have a publicist speak for them.
“You want to have a constant dialogue with your fans, you can’t just do a news flash every three months and expect people to understand what you’re doing,” said Tyler Goldman, chief executive of Buzznet Inc, a network of Web sites and celebrity blogs that recently signed on actress Mischa Barton.
When Lindsay Lohan was pelted with flour this month outside a Paris club for wearing fur, her friend Samantha Ronson, a celebrity DJ, responded with a widely reported blog post slamming the animal rights activist who threw the flour.
Reality star Lauren Conrad of television show “The Hills” this month used her blog to dispute a newspaper story that she threw a fit at a New York airport.
Those stars made their statements on social networking site MySpace, which is one of several spots that stars use to drum up support from fans. Some stars also make public statements on their Facebook page, another social networking tool.
On those sites, stars have profiles just like millions of other Web users. But unlike many lesser known users, what stars say on their page can instantly be picked up by news organizations, a development some celebrities have welcomed.
HOT, BUT OFF THE PRESS
Hotel heiress and film and TV actress Paris Hilton, 27, whose favorite catchphrase is “That’s hot,” said she uses her MySpace page to communicate with fans.
“Recently I have read so many lies about me in the press and my fans always know to check the blog when they read something that is negative,” Hilton said in a statement.
“I respond to them, not to gossip outlets,” she said.
Hilton is among numerous celebrities using blog posts for convenience and speed, and the social network sites say star usage is accelerating rapidly in recent months.
“A celebrity can go on their MySpace profile and they can write before they go to bed,” said Angie Allgood, director of talent relations and content for MySpace.
“And if they read something on the Internet or a gossip blog, they don’t have to wait until the next morning and go through their publicist, they can put something on their blog and know that that goes out immediately,” Allgood said.
The number of entertainers with MySpace pages has grown from 300 in January to nearly 600 today, MySpace said.
Buzznet, in addition to running its own Web site, also helps pop star Britney Spears and reality star Kim Kardashian upload fresh material to their Web sites.
Top stars can also receive a share of the advertising revenue that Buzznet generates, giving them up to a seven-figure annual salary from the company, Goldman said.
Goldman pointed to Kardashian, 28, of TV show “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” as a master of using the Internet noting her site integrates content from others that don’t always describe her in glowing terms.
“You can’t just put corners around what you want to talk about, and so she smartly gets that the users can smell inauthenticity right away,” Goldman said. “If it’s not authentic, they’re going to go somewhere else.”
When it comes to sperm, size ‘does not matter’
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008A new study from University of Sheffield has challenged the popular scientific notion that length of a sperm’s tail can determine how fast it can swim.The researchers claim that longer tails don’t always provide a speed advantage. The speed at which a sperm swims is a key factor in its capability to fertilise an egg.
The research team including Stuart Humphries, from the University of Sheffield, and collaborators from the University of Western Australia have critically evaluated the evidence linking sperm shape to swimming speed.
They research team found a longer tail does allow a sperm to generate more thrust but the drag created by a sperm’s head is often enough to counteract any such gains.
Pink, hubby heading for reconciliation?
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Popstar Pink has revealed that she is still legally married to sports star Carey Hart, fuelling rumours that the couple is heading for a reconciliation.
The couple parted ways at the beginning of 2008, but Pink has admitted she failed to sign off on divorce papers.
“We’re legally married. I just found that out. You have to actually sign something,” Contactmusic quoted Pink, as saying on the Ellen DeGeneres show.
However, the ‘Just Like A pill’ hitmaker cleared that she does not intend to reconcile with Hart.
“I never say never, but no,” Pink said.
Huge glaciers detected under rocky debris on Mars
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008A radar instrument aboard a NASA spacecraft has detected large glaciers hidden under rocky debris that may be the vestiges of ice sheets that blanketed parts of Mars in a past ice age, scientists said on Thursday.
The glaciers, the biggest known deposits of water on Mars outside of its poles, could prove useful for future manned missions to the red planet as drinking water or rocket fuel, University of Texas planetary geologist John Holt said.
“If we were to, down the road, establish a base there, you’d want to park near a big source of water because you can do anything with it,” Holt said.
The glaciers, perhaps 200 million years old, also may entomb genetic fragments of past microbial life on Mars as well as air bubbles that might reveal the composition of the atmosphere as it was long ago, according to geologist James Head of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
A ground-penetrating radar instrument aboard the U.S. space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter collected the data that confirmed the presence of the buried glaciers that extend for dozens of miles (km) from the edges of mountains or cliffs.
These closely resemble glaciers in Antarctica that similarly are covered by rocky debris, Head said.
Scientists previously determined that large deposits of ice exist at the Martian north and south polar regions, but hundreds of these buried glaciers are located at mid-latitudes on the planet.
Head said they can be about half a mile thick. One of them was three times larger than the city of Los Angeles.
The ones described by the researchers in the journal Science were in the Hellas Basin region of the Martian southern hemisphere, but many more are in the northern hemisphere.
Holt said the glaciers may be the vestiges of large ice sheets that once covered parts of Mars in a past ice age. Earth’s most recent ice age ended about 12,000 years ago.
“It’s dramatic evidence of major climate change on Mars, presumably linked to orbital variations. That’s what causes the major glaciations on Earth,” Holt said.
The existence of these features — rounded surfaces sloping gently away from steeper ridges — has been known for decades but their nature was a matter of dispute. Some scientists had argued they were ice-filled rock piles and not glaciers.
But the radar echoes received by the spacecraft indicated that a thin coating of rocky material at the surface covered thick ice and not rock.
Scientists want to understand the history of water on Mars because water is fundamental to the question of whether the planet has ever harbored microbial or some other life. Liquid water is a necessity for life as we know it. While Mars is now arid and dusty, there is evidence it once was much wetter.
For example, scientists think that long, undulating features seen on the northern plains of Mars may be remnants of shorelines of an ocean that covered a third of the planet’s surface at least 2 billion years ago. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down at the north pole of Mars in May, found definitive proof of water before ending its mission earlier this month.
High-altitude lakes studied as global warming “hot spots”
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008A team of scientists from the US are studying high-altitude lakes in the Central Andes as global warming “hot spots”, and their ability to sustain life in a highly dynamic environment.
The group is studying high altitude lakes, which are considered “hot spots” of global warming and its effects, such as loss of precipitation (50 percent in 50 years in some parts), glacier retreat, and increased impact of UV radiation in bodies of water that evaporate.
The group is studying high altitude lakes, which are considered “hot spots” of global warming and its effects, such as loss of precipitation (50 percent in 50 years in some parts), glacier retreat, and increased impact of UV radiation in bodies of water that evaporate.According to the researchers, the conditions are very similar to what Mars might have experienced about 3.5 billion years ago.
“I”m collecting information on the lakes and the watersheds that surround them, including the transparency of the water, the zooplankton that live in the lakes, and the materials in the water that control transparency,” said Miami University zoology grad student Kevin Rose.
“One of the main goals of the project is to use the lakes as analogs to what potentially existed on Mars millions of years ago. By examining the most extreme environments on Earth, such as extremely high UV, low oxygen, low temperatures, and low pH, we can infer what life, if it existed, may have had to deal with on Mars,” he explained.
The project not only addresses the question about early Mars water, habitability, and life, it also documents a subject of critical importance on Earth right now: how water resources and life are responding to the climate change Earth is experiencing today.
“Very few places in the world have the extreme conditions found here,” said Rose.
“The Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth. The lakes are among the highest in elevation in the world. UV levels here are among the highest on Earth. The combination of these factors makes it an ideal site to study how life persists in an extreme environment and the conditions in which life can thrive,” he added.
According to Rose, understanding the response of these lakes and life adaptation to rapid changes may hold important clues to forecasting the evolution of other threatened terrestrial lakes, and possibly finding solutions to global warming.