Jumat, 20 Februari 2009

Portable Gps Device Guide

Getting lost is harder now that drivers can count on portable GPS devices to give them directions to new or unfamiliar destinations.

Prices on these global positioning system devices have dropped and are much more affordable to the average driver yet there are more and better features on these newer GPS receivers.
Here are some of the main features and functions available on portable vehicle GPS navigators.

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Unlike the more expensive factory installed versions found in some vehicles, a portable GPS device can be removed from one vehicle and used in another. Power comes from an internal battery or the 12 volt outlet in a vehicle's interior.

Addresses or names of locations are entered on a touch screen which displays 3D maps that change as the vehicle heads toward its destination. Depending on the brand or model, maps for the United States, Canada and Europe are available. Satellites keep track of where the vehicle is at all times.

Some portable GPS devices give spoken turn-by-turn directions. Drivers can set the spoken directions to include street or road names. They can also chose between either hearing a male or female voice. A few brands or models can also translate to different languages.

When a route is selected by the GPS but the driver misses the turn or exit, the GPS will return directions to get the driver back on course. In urban areas, some GPS receivers will provide alternative routes if there is traffic congestion up ahead. The driver still has the choice of ignoring the suggestion and continuing on the same original route. Other GPS devices can show routes that avoid toll booths.

Portable GPS devices that are Bluetooth compatible can allow hands-free operation if the driver supplies a Bluetooth enabled cell phone. Drivers can give a voice command to the GPS for it to find a point of interest such as a restaurant and call to make a reservation.

Although a portable GPS receiver can do many things a traditional paper map can never do, it will not replace driver experience or common sense. GPS devices usually give accurate routes, but in a small handful of situations such as on hilly terrain, turn directions are sometimes questionable.

If you don't drive often to new places, then a portable GPS may not be necessary for you. However, if you like the security and convenience of arriving to a new and unfamiliar destination without getting lost or wasting time, then a portable vehicle GPS device will become an indispensable automotive accessory you won't want to drive away from home without. by jonchan

Sabtu, 24 Januari 2009

Natural Colon Cleanser Secrets - How To Choose The Best Herbal Colon Cleansers

As the popularity of colon cleansing grows, more and more people are searching for the best natural colon cleanser. As with anything else these days, some herbal colon cleansers are better than others -- and narrowing down the field can be a chore at best. In this brief article, I'm going to discuss a few key points to consider when it comes to choosing an herbal colon cleanser. Hopefully by the time you've finished reading, you'll have a better understanding of what to look for and be on your way to better internal health.
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One of the first things that you should always look at when it comes to natural colon cleansers is the company making the supplement. Is the company a trustworthy outfit that has been around for some time, or is it a fly-by-night startup without much of a track record? Don't get me wrong -- there are certainly startups that have put out solid products, but I always feel most comfortable dealing with a company that has a history and strong track record.

Another thing to consider as you're evaluating herbal colon detox programs is ingredients. It's important that the ingredients are of the highest quality and don't produce unwanted negative side-effects.

Ultimately, the colon cleansing program that you choose will determine whether you obtain fantastic results, or none at all. The best colon cleansers have been proven to benefit people in a variety of ways, including relieving constipation, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), colitis, fatigue, skin problems such as acne and eczema, and much more. Be sure to choose your program wisely.

Hopefully this short article has given you a few points to consider as you're trying to find the best natural colon cleanser. Just remember that while they all come in pretty packages with compelling sales pitches, not all herbal colon cleansing programs are created equal.

By: Michelle Taft

Senin, 19 Januari 2009

Herbal Colon Cleanse Advice - How To Choose The Best Natural Colon Cleanser


If you're gearing up to do an herbal colon cleanse but are unsure of which cleanser to choose, you're not alone. Many people get confused by all of the choices available today and trying to sort out the good programs from the bad can be a daunting task. In this brief article, I'll be covering some methods that you can use to choose the best natural colon cleanser, and hopefully by the time you're finished reading you'll be on your way to better internal health.
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There are many different herbal colon cleansers on the market today, and many of these programs are sold online. It's easy to get lost with all of the choices, but there are a few key things to look for which should help you narrow down the field.


First of all, take a close look at the ingredients being used. You should be looking for an all-natural colon cleansing program that doesn't use harsh (or potentially dangerous) chemicals. Natural programs will allow your body to detox in a much more gentle manner.

Secondly, take some time to read customer testimonials. Reading feedback on colon cleansers by other users will give you a look at the results you can realistically expect, and also if there are any negative side-effects to the program.

Last but not least, it's important to make sure that the internal cleanser is backed with a money back guarantee. The last thing you want to do is spend money on a colon cleansing supplement, then find out it's not working as advertised. Knowing that you can return the product for a refund provides added peace of mind.

Hopefully this short article has given you some helpful advice on how to choose the best herbal colon cleanse program. Once you begin your cleansing treatment, remember to follow the instructions to the letter and hopefully you'll be rewarded with great results.


Sabtu, 10 Januari 2009

No Pulp Fiction: Engineers See Major Paper Mill Savings With New Rotor Technology

Prof. James Olson looks to a future of energy-efficient pulp and paper-making - photo by Martin Dee
Prof. James Olson looks to a future of energy-efficient pulp and paper-making - photo by Martin Dee
By Brian Lin with files from Erinrose Handy

A partnership between UBC, government and the pulp and paper industry has resulted in the development of three high efficiency pulp screen rotors that produce high quality paper while reducing almost half the energy required.

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“There are currently 300 pulp screens in British Columbia’s 20 pulp and paper mills,” says UBC Mechanical Engineering Assoc. Prof. James Olson. “The industry consumes almost 20 per cent of all the electricity produced in the province and pulp screening is an energy intensive operation in that process.”

Pulp screens work somewhat like the spin cycle in a household washing machine by rotating at high speeds and forcing pulp through narrow openings in the screen. Pulp screens in B.C. alone consume 300 Gigawatt Hours per year at an estimated cost of $16 million -- or enough energy to light up 15,000 homes.

Olson and fellow UBC engineers Carl Ollivier-Gooch and Mark Martinez, along with industrial partners at Montreal-based Advanced Fiber Technologies Inc., took inspiration from aerospace technology and designed a family of uniquely shaped, hydrodynamic rotors that significantly reduce drag and operate at much lower speeds and power, while increasing the capacity and efficiency of the screen.

The technology was patented and licensed to Advanced Fiber Technologies and 100 new rotors were installed in 30 mills across Canada.

“The trial results were beyond everyone’s expectations -- reducing electricity consumption by 52 per cent compared to current state-of-the-art rotors,” says Olson. “If all pulp screens used in B.C. mills were converted to the new rotor technology, an estimated $8 million could be saved each year. Adopted nation-wide, the industry could save $20 million a year.”

While the cost savings would increase the industry’s competitiveness against new paper producers such as China, the reduced energy usage also translates into lower greenhouse emissions. The new technology could also cement Canada’s leadership in pulp equipment manufacturing and further diversify a sector that currently logs $53 billion in sales and $44 billion in exports per year.

As a result of the success in the mill trials, the research team has won BC Hydro’s New Technology of the Year Award (2007), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)’s Synergy Award for Partnership and Innovation (2007), and the British Columbia Innovations Council’s Lieutenant Governor’s Award (2008).

The work has also led to a $2.2 million investment from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a partnership with 11 industry partners including BC Hydro and most of the paper mills in B.C.

“There’s a gap between electricity supply and demand in B.C. and we need to do more to conserve power,” says Lisa Coltart, BC Hydro’s director of Power Smart. “We’re excited to contribute to research that will provide substantial energy savings while making the province a world leader in the field.”

Sabtu, 03 Januari 2009

Supercomputer time allocation to boost simulations of exploding stars

University-Chicago

The U.S. Department of Energy has allocated 70 million processor hours on the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory to the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

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The Blue Gene/P supercomputer is the world's fastest open-science computer. Access to the Blue Gene/P was made possible by a time allocation from the DOE's Innovative and Novel Computation Impact on Theory and Experiment program (INCITE).

The INCITE award will permit Flash Center scientists to virtually incinerate white dwarf stars, which pack one-and-a-half times the mass of the sun into an object the size of Earth. When white dwarfs explode, they produce type Ia supernovas, which evidence indicates manufactures most of the iron in the universe.

A better understanding of type Ia supernovas could help solve the mystery of dark energy, one of the grandest challenges facing today's cosmologists. Dark energy is somehow causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Gravity should have been causing the expansion, which followed the big bang, to become slower with time.

In the simulations at Argonne, the Flash team will analyze how burning occurs in four possible scenarios that lead to type Ia supernovas. The Flash Center's findings could potentially impact the design of the instruments, scientific observing strategy, and analysis and interpretation of data for the Joint Dark Energy Mission, a partnership between NASA and DOE.

The Flash Center was founded in 1997 with a contract from the Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing of DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA's Academic Strategic Alliance Program has sustained the Flash Center with funding and computing resources throughout its history.

Rabu, 31 Desember 2008

Happy new year 2009


HAPPY NEW YEAR....ALL MY FRIEND.......

Monsters of the Midway

By Kim Phillips-Fein, an assistant professor teaching American history at New York University's Gallatin School

In the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of "Capitalism and Freedom," Milton Friedman commented on the intellectual revolution he had witnessed since his book was first published in 1962. Then, few of the nation's newspapers (including the Chicago Tribune) had deemed Friedman's treatise, soon to be a popular classic, worthy of review.
The nation's economic policymakers dismissed its arguments against minimum wages and in favor of school vouchers as impractical and bizarre, which reflected the reigning consensus that deregulating markets would not automatically help to improve people's lives. The aftershocks of the Depression still lingered, a reminder of the last time the nation had listened to people who thought that the business of America was business and that the free market worked in the best interests of all.

But by 1982, the nation had elected a president who believed that cutting tax rates and shrinking the government were the keys to economic growth. No longer did policymakers agree that the market was the problem and the state the solution. No longer did the general public view the market skeptically. In short, few ideas have enjoyed a greater change of fortune in the span of two decades, in the academic and popular realms, than those for which Friedman once had been a lonely champion.

How did this intellectual shift happen? "The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics and Business," by Johan van Overtveldt, director of a Belgium-based think tank and a contributor to The Wall Street Journal Europe, tells the story through the lens of the University of Chicago, Friedman's scholarly home.

During the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the Gothic buildings on the Midway housed the country's most-prominent challengers to Keynesianism. The name of the school became virtually synonymous with the idea that free markets are the most fair and efficient way to distribute wealth, while any government intervention distorts the economic order. And even before the rise of the Chicago School, in the early years of the 20th Century, the University of Chicago was home to many important and influential economic thinkers. Hyde Park has nurtured record numbers of winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences -- more than twice the number at either Harvard University or the University of California at Berkeley, the runners-up.

In his history, which is based on extensive interviews with economists as well as archival and secondary research, Overtveldt seeks to understand the secrets of Chicago's success: "Was this triumphant century just an incredibly long-lasting coincidence, or is there more to it?"

For a book about economic ideas, "The Chicago School" is surprisingly concerned with institutional culture. Overtveldt suggests that the University of Chicago, like the city, has always been an upstart institution. Founded with John D. Rockefeller's money to lure professors from the Ivy League, the school was forced from its earliest days to cultivate a ferocious seriousness in order to compete with the old East Coast universities for intellectual talent and prestige.

Overtveldt makes special note of the school's "apparently inspiring isolation." Cut off from the traditional centers of culture and power -- New York City and Washington, D.C. -- and divided from the Loop by a 20-minute drive (Hyde Park lacking even decent elevated train service), the leafy Quads have protected scholars from alluring distractions while providing a haven for intellectual iconoclasts. As Deirdre McCloskey, a former U. of C. professor, notes, " 'Don't you know that the greatness of the University of Chicago has always rested on the fact that the city of Chicago is so boring that the professors have nothing else to do but to work?' "

Overtveldt argues that the Chicago tradition of dedicated work, intellectual seriousness and academic rigor has helped produce a diverse range of economic thinkers. Indeed, the first crew of University of Chicago economists, in the early years of the 20th Century, bore scant resemblance to the scholars who would later become known as the Chicago Shool.

The department chair, James Laughlin, was a true believer in the laws of supply and demand (fittingly, he was persuaded to come to Chicago by a $7,000 salary, "at a time when the senior professors at Harvard and Yale were seldom paid more than $4,000"). But the department also included renegades such as Thorstein Veblen, who argued that the calculating individuals portrayed by Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall were a pleasant fiction, and that people are instead motivated by primitive, atavistic drives to demonstrate their social status by wasting great sums of money in craven acts of "conspicuous consumption" (think Louis Vuitton bags). Even thinkers such as Henry Simons, whose writings in the 1930s influenced Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, feared private monopoly nearly as much as state power. Simons suggested that private ambition and greed, not economies of scale, accounted for the creation of " 'gigantic corporations,' " and he argued for reducing economic inequality through steep progressive taxation.

The modern Chicago School only developed after World War II, when thinkers like Friedman and George Stigler began to advance their critique of Keynesian economics. Through scholarship on a variety of different theoretical issues -- consumption, inflation, economic thought -- they reasserted the centrality of price theory and the primacy of the rational individual as the unit of analysis.

Overtveldt is at his best in his depiction of the ruthless yet stimulating internal culture of the department during these years. Workshops that might be polite but sleepy seminars at other campuses became "bloodbaths" at Chicago. Graduate classes were exercises in " 'terror.' " Rather than quench debate, Overtveldt argues that for those who could withstand the pressure, the intellectual hazing helped hone their economic analyses. As former faculty member George Neumann observes, " 'Chicago has been accused of being a school that not only believes in survival of the fittest, it practices it.' "

The school of thought that developed in this hothouse sought to stretch price theory to its logical conclusions, ultimately applying market analysis to parts of society frequently not seen as economic. For example, Gary Becker compared racial discrimination to international trade, described education as a process of building "human capital" and analyzed decisions about marriage and child-bearing in economic terms.

To critics, the willingness of the Chicagoans to analyze discrimination economically or children as an investment often seemed shocking. As economist Robert Solow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says, " 'There are some things that should not be analyzed as if they were subject to being bought and sold.' " But the frisson of the Chicago School was precisely its stance of being ever-willing to discard social norms and vague notions of the common wisdom for the crystalline logic of economic laws.

Yet despite the light it sheds on a fascinating corner of academic life, "The Chicago School" falls short of providing a full picture of the influence of Chicago economics on the discipline, or on American politics more broadly. Overtveldt's writing about economic ideas is at times too dense for the general reader, while for the specialist it fails to provide an effective synthesis of the common strains linking the different Chicago economists, as well as a sense of how their ideas differed from, and helped shape, the mainstream. His description of the successive influence of one generation of prize-winning thinkers on the next lacks the tension that would have come from a more substantive engagement with the intellectual controversies that the Chicago economists have provoked.

Finally, Overtveldt chooses to focus tightly on the academic work of the Chicago economists, to the exclusion of historical context. This makes it hard to get a full sense of the political significance of their ideas.

The atmosphere of the department may have been one of pristine seclusion, but the Chicago School helped inspire a generation of conservative activists who used the ideas developed there to build political momentum for cutting taxes and social-welfare programs and dismantling the New Deal state. Some of the most influential of the Chicago economists -- like Friedman -- vigorously popularized their ideas while also producing academic work; in addition to writing mass-market books, Friedman contributed to Newsweek magazine, created a TV series about free-market principles for PBS and informally advised Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign.

Overtveldt suggests that the Chicago School of economics helped create "the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s" because its scholars were the best and the brightest. In the marketplace of ideas, Chicago won out. But this explanation evades the hard realities of politics and of power that shape our choices about economic policy. And ultimately, despite the strengths of Overtveldt's account, his free-market interpretation of the rise of the Chicago School obscures the many ways the fierce debates in those gargoyle-decked buildings on the South Side wound up shaping our world.

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