Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/267487768?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, December 1, 2012
An Introduction To The Environmental Pest Control | News and Society
Every year millions of homes and businesses are exposed to toxic chemicals in an effort to fight insect and rodent infestations. More than a billion pounds of chemicals are used every year in the United States to fight vermin. Before heading to the store to pick up some insect spray or before picking up the phone to call the exterminator, it is important to know the facts about pest control. One can visit mrcarpetcleaner.co.nz/MPC.html for more details.
The first thing to know about pest control is the kinds of chemicals used. The three most commonly used chemicals in pest control were created to attack the nervous systems of vermin. These chemicals were synthesized from the template of nerve agents that were designed during the fighting in World War II. Therefore, they are highly toxic and should be handled with extreme care. These chemicals do not just attack the nervous systems of pests. They will also attack the nervous systems of human beings and pets as well. They will not likely have a lethal effect, because they are designed to attack much smaller animals. However, the smaller the child or pet is, the greater the danger to them when they are exposed to these poisons.
With that in mind, it is important to be very cautious when the exterminator comes to visit. If you have pets or children, you should send them to another place for the duration of the exterminator?s visit. It is also highly advisable to keep them away from the house for at least 48 hours after the chemicals have been sprayed. Some experts will even recommend keeping them away as long as a week after the pest control spray has been applied. This advice is especially important to heed in regards to children. One can also check www.flybusters.co.nz/antcontrol.html out for the details.
Children?s nervous systems are still developing, so they are highly sensitive to any amount of toxin in the environment. Minute amounts of toxins that would have little to no effect on adults, can have devastating results in the nervous systems of children. These results can range from the mild, such as dizziness or nausea, to the severe, such as long-term developmental disorders. For that reason, it is extremely important to use every precaution when using these kinds of poisonous substances in the home.
The same kinds of precautions should be applied. Never use the pest control or fly control chemicals in areas frequented by pets and children. Because children and pets spend much of their time on the floor, they are more apt to come in contact with these toxins than adults. This applies to pieces of pest control equipment like roach traps as well. Make sure never to use them in areas that pets or children inhabit.
Source: http://newsandsociety.rrreading.org/2012/an-introduction-to-the-environmental-pest-control/
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Rising home prices may stall the housing recovery
10 hrs.
Home prices have been rising steadily for the past several months, but some fear the rapid increase could actually start hurting the housing recovery.
The reason is that the rise in prices is mainly due to investors, mostly large hedge funds, that have been swooping into the most distressed markets and inhaling properties as fast as their plentiful cash will allow. They are turning those properties into rentals, and getting anywhere from 8 to 12 percent returns on their investments, thanks to still hot demand. The trouble is, as home prices rise, those returns shrink.
?The worry with investment demand is that the very recovery in prices that it is driving will eventually reduce rental yields and undermine the investment case,? warns Paul Diggle of Capital Economics.
CNBC: New home sales disappoint - could it be 'cliff concerns?'
Today?s housing recovery, much like the recent crash, is like no other. While home prices fell nationally for the first time in history, they are recovering locally at drastically different paces. Some markets are still in the red, while others are surging forward with double-digit gains. Those that are seeing the biggest jumps are largely the markets that saw the deepest losses. Witness Phoenix home prices up over 20 percent from a year ago on the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index. The huge influx of investors there shrunk inventories and created bidding wars, hence the price gains.
CNBC: Yes housing starts surge, but rentals are the drivers
But even outside those hot markets, this national housing recovery is dependent on investors, who are largely all-cash buyers. The mortgage market is still too restrictive to support the kind of bulk-buying that needs to occur, and many potential buyers either lack the credit scores or the confidence to jump in. Another 14 million borrowers still owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, according to Zillow, and are therefore unable to move.
Five million properties are either in the foreclosure process or their owners are delinquent on their mortgages. That means foreclosures will remain elevated for the foreseeable future, and investors will be necessary to absorb them. Another concern is that home prices are rising faster than income, which could push potential owner-occupants away just as they were starting to dip their toes in again.
The risk of sales dropping as investors leave is obviously higher in the markets that saw the biggest drop in home prices during the crash, again, like Phoenix. Other markets, such as Chicago, Atlanta, and even parts of Florida, where prices are still weak and distress is still a large share of the market, are still seeing improved sales, as investors shift their sights and cash to more yield-worthy ground.
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Monty Python stars in court over "Spamalot" profits
LONDON (Reuters) - Three members of the Monty Python British comedy troupe were in court in London on Friday for the opening of a lawsuit over the profits from a spin-off of one of their greatest hits, the 1975 movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones arrived together and sat at the back of a small, modern courtroom to listen to opening arguments in the case. All three are expected to give evidence next week.
The Pythons are at odds with Mark Forstater, the producer of the "Holy Grail", who says he has not received his fair share of profits from "Spamalot", a spin-off musical.
Inspired by the original film, the musical opened on Broadway in 2005 and has enjoyed a successful run in Britain too. Idle wrote the lyrics and collaborated on most of the music.
Forstater, an American based in Britain, says that under a 1974 agreement between him and the Pythons, he is entitled to one-seventh of profits derived from "Holy Grail" and any merchandise or spin-offs (MSO).
His lawyer, Tom Weisselberg, told the court that for the purposes of profit-sharing, it had been agreed in 1974 that Forstater was "the seventh Python".
"Spamalot is a spin-off from the film and has been a huge international commercial success," Weisselberg said in his opening argument.
He said that Forstater had been receiving his seventh of the profits from "Holy Grail" until 2005, when the Pythons had unilaterally reduced his share to one-fourteenth.
In court, Forstater sat with his lawyer, with the Pythons behind him. They did not talk. The Pythons listened with serious faces and exchanged occasional whispers.
Forstater told Reuters outside the courtroom he had tried to resolve the dispute with the five surviving Pythons: Idle, Palin, Jones, John Cleese and Terry Gilliam, but that talks had failed.
He said the amount he believed he was owed in relation to Spamalot was 250,000 pounds.
The three Pythons present in court declined to comment on the case. Palin told Reuters he was there to observe and would "do my bit in court when the time comes".
The trial is scheduled to last four to five days.
(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon, editing by Paul Casciato)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/monty-python-stars-court-over-spamalot-profits-172119902.html
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The Humanities as Sugar Daddy | dagblog
So, the Governor of Florida set up a Task Force on higher education, and they decided that humanities majors should pay more than science majors for a college education. The thinking is that Florida wants more technology grads, and fewer humanities grads, and can get them by making humanities degrees more expensive so that students opt for science, math, and technology instead. They call this approach "market based," but its ignorance of basic economic realities is startling.
One of the hard truths of higher education is that some classes run at a profit and some run at a loss, and that the less-expensive, more-profitable classes are used to underwrite courses that are just as educationally necessary but cost more to run. The larger classes help pay for the smaller ones, the introductory classes help pay for the advanced ones, and the classes in "soft" subjects like English, history, or anthropology help pay for classes in "hard" disciplines like science and engineering.
This seems counter-intuitive to some non-academics who, having internalized the idea that science is where the money is, presume that offering science classes is also more profitable than offering classes on Latin poetry or sociological methods. But it is partly because STEM graduates make more money on average than humanities graduates that teaching STEM courses is more expensive: engineering professors make higher salaries than classics professors. Laboratory science (including computer science, certainly) also requires expensive labs and equipment, while most humanities courses require only a textbook (whose price is borne by the student, not the college). It's true that STEM fields bring in more external grant money, but that grant money largely gets eaten up by the lab facilities you have to build in order to apply for the grants.
The question "how can the humanities pay for themselves?" ignores the fact that the humanities not only pay for themselves but underwrite the sciences too. But ignoring that fact does not make it go away. And if Florida did manage to move a large number of its students out of profit-turning humanities classes, into break-even-or-less science classes, it's likely that many public university budgets in Florida will go up in flames pose significant challenges.
Of course, that presumes that they can move students into their math and science classes at all. The "market-based" part of the solution ignores the fact that the Florida schools are actually part of a market. They compete for students with a large number of other schools. Being in a market means that you don't get to set prices unilaterally.
The English majors will simply go somewhere else. This is how markets work. Making a humanities degree pricier won't discourage people from pursuing that degree. It will only encourage them to buy it from your competitors instead of you. If it's too expensive to major in history at the University of Florida, students who want to major in history will either go to a private university or leave the state.
What Florida just decided to do is the equivalent to saying, "I'm tired of customers buying hamburgers instead of lobster. I'm going to make hamburgers twice as expensive as lobster." If you did that, you wouldn't sell more lobster. You'd just lose customers. They would go across the street to a restaurant where lobster was the same price, and burgers much cheaper. On the other hand, the few customers you did have would order nothing but the lobster, which you have to buy at expensive wholesale prices, instead of the ground beef that wholesales for so much less. And your restaurant will go broke pretty quickly, especially if you were already using the profits on all those hamburgers to subsidize the lobster side of the business.
But the Florida idea is ultimately just a newer version of something that's been happening in American universities for decades, as administrators demand a higher and higher profit margin from humanities classes in order to fund other priorities. For at least twenty-five years colleges have been increasing those profits by cutting humanities budgets, trying to spend less and less on those classes while keeping the revenue those courses bring in steady and growing. They shrink the number of full-time faculty in those fields, shift more and more teaching to ill-paid part-timers, and when push comes to shove cut the few subjects in the humanities, such as foreign-language instruction, that require higher overhead. Cutting costs AND upping prices is just an intensification of the normal strategy, busting the piggy bank open at two different ends.
Universities don't cut humanities budgets because the humanities are unprofitable. They cut humanities budgets because humanities are profitable, and schools are trying to squeeze more and more profit out of them. It's one of the few places to make money.? And schools are always hungry for more.
Source: http://dagblog.com/business/humanities-sugar-daddy-15575
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Create a Culture of Engagement with Your Stakeholders | Delaney ...
Just like people, families or communities, organizations have a distinctive personality. This is the label or stereotype that people use to manage their relationships with the many organizations with whom they interface: schools, churches, their governments,? corporations, etc. The more complex the relationship (or the more it impacts us) the more detailed understanding of that organization we build.
I argue here that, the an organization?s willingness to be open and engaging (i.e. share decision making), the more people will judge, early in their relationship, the degree of openness an organization holds, or framed differently ? their culture of consultation. This initial assessment guides their subsequent decisions on if and how they will invest their time and emotional energies to become engaged.
What this means to organizations for attracting people to our awareness sessions, education programs, online engagements, or other initiatives for shared decision making, is that we need to be mindful of the authenticity of our previous engagement efforts. This legacy can either hinder or help us going forward, but don?t be mistaken that our record on authentic engagement is benign when people consider an invitation to get engaged.
This may mean that to build or re-build relationships we may have to over-scope our engagement to draw people in and demonstrate a true culture of consultation. This can get further complicated when trying to obtain internal buy-in, in the absence of an organizational culture of consultation.
It may sound like I am blaming the victim here, but my experience tells me that a stakeholder group?s past experience with an organization can be a disadvantage moving forward and needs to be addressed if building social capital will bring a positive return on investment.
R. Delaney
Richard leads the public consultation and facilitation practices. He is an accomplished consultation specialist and facilitator, having designed and managed over 200 international, national and local public consultation, decision-support and training sessions for federal, provincial and municipal governments, industry, and non-governmental organizations. Read MoreSource: http://www.rmdelaney.com/news/create-a-culture-of-engagement-with-your-stakeholders/
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Video: Fiscal cliff talks reach stalemate
>>> cliffhanger, that took a few twists and turns on capitol hill today. nbc's kelly o'donnell has more on the update.
>> reporter: good evening, brian, remember the optimism coming from both sides in the days after the election? well, last night, speaker john boehner spoke an hour on the phone. today, the optimism hit a snag. and we can tell you there are some changes going on in the mood as they reverted to their default position, a stalemate.
>> reporter: treasury secretary tim geithner met top republicans and democrats about the fiscal crisis. but john boehner came out saying that the white house has not come up with a strategy critical to votes.
>> i am disappointed where we are and what has happened over the last couple weeks. but going over the fiscal cliff is serious business.
>> reporter: any real deal-making is the stuff of quiet conversations at meetings. they used high stakes diplomacy regarding the conversation.
>> i thought the conversation was very direct. and as always, i appreciate directness.
>> reporter: while the senate majority leader, harry reid , was very blunt about being pessimistic.
>> i don't understand his brain, you should ask him.
>> reporter: there were mixed comments from others.
>> i hope they get it, more than i did before the election.
>> of course i'm nervous, you never know what politicians are going to do.
>> reporter: democrats, still lifted by their election success, argued that they chose higher tax rates for wealthy americans as part of any plan to cut the deficit. and say republicans will have to give in.
>> did speaker john boehner get the message? because the message was work together.
>> they're not going to openly concede on this point this far out from the deadline, but they see the handwriting on the wall .
>> reporter: late today, gop sources said that they have some details about the proposal brought here from tim geithner. they say the white house is offering $1.6 trillion in tax increases over ten years, 400 billion in cuts coming later. and no new proposals dealing with entitlement reform. republicans say for them, a nonstarter.
>> kelly o'donnell, another cold night
Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50018504/
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