Mike’S Observation

Overseas Breaks

Overseas Breaks

0 Comments | Tamworth Herald, The, Sep 10, 2009

Departing by air from Manchester, East Midlands & Birmingham Airports 28day also 7-from Airport breaks available Birmingham Mallorca Coast to Countryside Cyprus – The Jewel of the Eastern Mediterranean 8 days from Pounds 699.95pp Stay 8 to 57 days from Pounds 549pp Departing 4 October from East Midlands Airport Departing November 2009 – February 2010 from Manchester Airport Discover & enjoy the beauty of Palma’s coastline & the tranquility of Mallorca’s mountainous countryside on this exclusive & fabulous value 8-day, 2-centre holiday.

The beautiful island of Cyprus enjoys a wonderfully warm winter climate and is the perfect destination for a sunshine holiday!

– Included, daily guided excursion programme with a tour of Palma and visits to Bellver Castle, Valldemossa, Port d’Andratx, the ancient town of Pollenca, Formentor, Alcudia, and more ! – 4 nights stay at the 3 star superior Hotel Alexandra D’or in Cala Estancia with dinner and breakfast – 3 nights stay at the Monastery of Lluc with breakfast – Return flight from East Midlands airport to Palma – A selection of breaks to delightful Paphos flying from Manchester airport – Super half board accommodation at the beachside 4 star Pioneer Hotel* (dine-around option offered) – No single supplements on certain dates – Excellent bowling facilities – Dance leaders available in nearby sister hotel * The Pioneer Hotel does not take bookings from families with children under 16 years old.

Earlybooking tickets as limited!

advised arestrictly Oberammergau The Passion Play from Birmingham Airport This play is performed every 10 years and 2010 will be the 41st performance maintaining the continuity of this unique event which first started when the village elders promised to perform the “play of the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ” when they were spared from the Plague.

Oberammergau Lech & Oberammergau Lake Garda & Oberammergau 3 days from Pounds 999.95pp 8 days from Pounds 1399.95pp 8 days from Pounds 1599.95pp Departing 14 August 2010 – A ticket for the Passion Play (best seating areas offered) – 2 nights hotel stay in the Oberammergau area with a choice of 3-5 star hotels with breakfast – Dinner on day of arrival in Oberammergau – Lunch in Oberammergau before the play starts – Dinner with several courses during the play interval – Transfers to hotel & return – A return flight from Birmingham airport & airport taxes Departing 12 July 2010 – A ticket for the Passion Play (best seating areas offered) – Excursion to the capital of the Austrian Tyrol – Innsbruck, see the charming Old Town & the greatest attraction ‘ The Golden Roof’ – 5 nights hotel stay in Lech & 2 nights hotel stay in the Oberammergau area with a choice of 3-5 star hotels with breakfast – Dinner on day of arrival in Oberammergau – Lunch in Oberammergau before the play starts – Dinner with several courses during the play interval – Transfers to hotel & return – A return flight from Birmingham airport & airport taxes Departing 24 May 2010 – A ticket for the Passion Play (best seating areas offered) – Excursion to Venice, boat ride to St. Marks Square & a guided walk – Excursion to Verona, visit to St. Zeno’s Church, the Roman Arena & more – 5 nights hotel stay in Lake Garda & 2 nights hotel stay in the Oberammergau area with a choice of 3-5 star hotels with breakfast – Dinner on day of arrival in Oberammergau – Lunch in Oberammergau before the play starts – Dinner with several courses during the play interval – Transfers to hotel & return – A return flight from Birmingham airport & airport taxes

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July 31, 2010 @ 8:54 pm

Get trendsetters to be customers, even if

Get trendsetters to be customers, even if you have to offer freebies. When everyday people see the “cool” people buying in, it can transform them into customers. Reach out to performers, celebrities and athletes. Depending upon your product or service, identify local people who are high profile?like the popular kids, the “early adopters” who have all the latest gadgets, or fashionable women who others copy.

2. Sponsor local events where the audience is strategic for you. Buy a big banner and make sure it?s hanging in full view at the events. Studies show that familiarity alone can positively influence people?s buying decisions.

3. Ask local merchants to cooperatively promote your offering. Find the ones who are not competitive with you but whose customers fit your target market. Print up inexpensive fliers and locate them at their cash register. Or, provide merchants with a coupon they can offer when someone makes a purchase.
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July 31, 2010 @ 7:00 pm

Purcell resigns from city council

Purcell resigns from city council

0 Comments | Evening Times; Glasgow (UK), Mar 6, 2010 | by EWAN FERGUS

JUST days after his shock departure as leader of Glasgow City Council, Steven Purcell has now quit as a councillor.

A short statement issued yesterday said Mr Purcell had resigned as the representative for the Blairdardie ward and intended to have a “period of rest and recuperation”.

His representative, solicitor advocate Peter Watson of Levy McRae, said: “Steven Purcell tendered his resignation today. He did so with much sadness but with great support from friends, family and many well-wishers from every part of the city.

“Steven has accepted advice he must now

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July 31, 2010 @ 6:36 pm

A Downtown Dream

A Downtown Dream

0 Comments | Daily News; Bowling Green, Ky., May 25, 2010 | by Thomason, Andrew

Glass shards crackled under Tim Leigh’s feet as he walked through 600 State St. After sitting empty for five years, to say that the former Hardcastle Filling Station is a fixer-upper is an understatement.

Many windows are broken, and all are covered in plywood to keep the elements out and vandals from breaking the few remaining whole panes. Down a small hallway, a decaying bathroom sits on the left. One door down from that, a stained microwave sits under cabinets better suited for decades past. Old tires are piled next to a rusting transmission in the big garage.

But Leigh and his wife, Linda Leigh, see something else in this building. They see a building restored, remodeled and transformed into an office for their business, Select Inc.

“It’s a good thing we have a vision,” Linda said with a laugh, as she and Tim walked around the building Friday afternoon.

Select is a physician recruiting agency that employs seven people at 830 Fairview Ave. Five recruiters reach out to health care professionals, both doctors and hospitals, and try to match them with each other.

“Have you ever set somebody up on a blind date?” Tim asks. “It’s kind of what we’re doing.”

Tim worked for a similar agency before branching out on his own 10 years ago. During those first years, he handled all the responsibilities, from making cold calls to compiling resumes to balancing the books.

“It was an interesting time. We’ve come a long way since then,” Tim said.

As Select continued to grow recently, the Leighs started looking for a new office location. Both have always been interested in the downtown area, professionally and personally. When they want to eat out, they go downtown, when they need to do some shopping, they head downtown, Tim said.

“I think it’s part of the greatness of our community, that we have a viable downtown,” Linda said.

An idea sparked in Tim’s brain as he drove by 600 State St. late one fall day last year: Move Select into the building.

“I went back and talked to Linda and said, ‘why don’t we put together a proposal and find out who at the city we need to take it to and see if they’d be interested?’ ” Tim said.

After the Leighs discussed the possibility of moving into the building with city officials, the city put out a request for proposals for restoring the property. Only Select and Operation P.R.I.D.E. responded.

P.R.I.D.E. wanted to turn the building into an area to house its vehicles.

“Looking at both proposals … we felt the Leighs’ proposal would have a longer lasting impact,” city manager Kevin DeFebbo. “It’s all about bringing jobs and enterprise and people to downtown and this will do that.”

The deal hasn’t gone through yet, and the Bowling Green City Commission still needs to vote on the matter. However, when the proposal was presented at a recent work session, commissioners appeared very receptive to the idea.

The Leighs estimate the restoration will cost about $250,000 and could take up to six months
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July 31, 2010 @ 5:53 pm

In fact this can

In fact this can be a smart thing to do if you?re looking for as many ways as possible to protect the name of your business or something you?re selling.

Choosing & registering a domain name – To choose a domain name you need to go to somewhere like Netregistry to see what?s available and as I mentioned above you?ll want to do this at the same time if not before registering the name for your business. There are quite a few places you can go to for checking whether the domain name you?ve chosen is available or not. The one I used is the one mentioned above but you don?t have to use them there are plenty of others. Its worth shopping around though as the prices vary quite a bit and it makes no difference at all who you register your domain name through as they all have to access their data from the same place meaning as soon as you register your domain no one else can get it even if they go to a different site to the one you used.

Using your top keywords in your domain name – If possible you should have the main keyword/s for your business in your domain name as it helps quite a bit with promoting your website online and getting lots of people to come to it.
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July 31, 2010 @ 5:40 pm

Here are some

Here are some creative ways to market your website offline:

Include a paper flyer or business card with your info and website URL in all of your outgoing snail mail and packages.

Exchange paper flyers or business cards with other online business’s and include them also in all your outgoing mail and packages and they will include yours in all of their outgoing mail as well.

Place flyers with your information and URL on bulletin boards at grocery stores, doctors offices, day care centers, schools, church, local business’s, if you do crafts be sure and have a bunch at craft shows to put in every bag, place them in your booth at an antique mall, If you have a garage sale include a flyer in every bag when people make a purchase.

Place white cling lettering with your URL to the back of your car.

Contact your Chamber of Commerce and see if your business can be listed in the welcome wagon mailings.

Place a listing in your yellow pages or local business directory.

Have an open house.
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July 31, 2010 @ 3:17 pm

Alternative medicine falls short in studies

Alternative medicine falls short in studies

0 Comments | Charleston Daily Mail, Jun 11, 2009 | by MARILYNN MARCHIONE,

* Government has spent $2.5 billion to test various health remedies

BETHESDA, Md. – Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

As for therapies, acupuncture has been shown to help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue.

However, the government also is funding studies of purported energy fields, distance healing and other approaches that have little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence.

Taxpayers are bankrolling studies of whether pressing various spots on your head can help with weight loss, whether brain waves emitted from a special “master” can help break cocaine addiction, and whether wearing magnets can help the painful wrist problem, carpal tunnel syndrome.

The acupressure weight-loss technique won a $2 million grant even though a small trial of it on 60 people found no statistically significant benefit – only an encouraging trend that could have occurred by chance. The researcher says the pilot study was just to see if the technique was feasible.

“You expect scientific thinking” at a federal science agency, said R. Barker Bausell, author of “Snake Oil Science” and a research methods expert at the University of Maryland, one of the agency’s top-funded research sites. “It’s become politically correct to investigate nonsense.”

Many scientists say that unconventional treatments hold promise and deserve serious study, but that the federal center needs to be more skeptical and selective.

“There’s not all the money in the world and you have to choose” what most deserves tax support, said Barrie Cassileth, integrative medicine chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

“Many of the studies that have been funded I would not have funded because they seem irrational and foolish – studies on distant healing by prayer and energy healing, studies that are based on precepts and ideas that are contrary to what is known in terms of human physiology and disease,” she said.

In an interview last year, shortly after becoming the federal center’s new director, Dr. Josephine Briggs said it had a strong research record, and praised the many “big name” scientists who had sought its grants. She conceded there were no big wins from its first decade, other than a study that found acupuncture helped knee arthritis. That finding was called into question when a later, larger study found that sham treatment worked just as well.

“The initial studies were driven by some very strong enthusiasms, and now we’re learning about how to layer evidence” and to do more basic science before testing a particular supplement in a large trial, said Briggs, who trained at Ivy League schools and has a respected scientific career.

“There are a lot of negative studies in conventional medicine,” and the government’s outlay is small compared to drug company spending, she added.

However, critics say that unlike private companies that face bottom-line pressure to abandon a drug that flops, the federal center is reluctant to admit a supplement may lack merit – despite a strategic plan pledging not to equivocate in the face of negative findings.

Echinacea is an example. After a large study by a top virologist found it didn’t help colds, its fans said the wrong one of the plant’s nine species had been tested. Federal officials agreed that more research was needed, even though they had approved the type used in the study.

“There’s been a deliberate policy of never saying something doesn’t work
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July 31, 2010 @ 1:08 pm

Climate change heats up again

Climate change heats up again

0 Comments | Buffalo News, Jul 13, 2010 | by Clarence Page

Here’s a note to the global warming deniers who sarcastically called me a dope during last winter’s back-to-back blizzards on the East Coast: hot enough for you now?

As temperatures topped 100 degrees, breaking records in the nation’s capital, and the pavement turned into a skillet beneath my feet, my thoughts raced back to the frigid days of last winter’s blizzards.

Those were the days, you may recall, when Sen. James Inhofe, a proud Oklahoma Republican friend of the oil industry, and his family built an igloo on Capitol Hill and labeled it “Al Gore’s New Home.” I might now suggest a “new home” for Inhofe: an air- conditioned doghouse powered by solar panels.

But I would be scientifically wrong to make that suggestion, just as Inhofe and other deniers of climate change were wrong last winter when they suggested that any single weather event, whether it is a blizzard or a heat wave, offers evidence of climate change.

As I wrote last winter, Inhofe and other snarky climate change deniers were confusing the meaning of “weather” and “climate.” Weather is day-to-day. Climate is long-term. As climatologists say, climate change only shifts the odds in favor of certain extreme weather events like blizzards, floods, hurricanes and heat waves.

Yet when I brought this up during last winter’s “snow- pocalypse,” I experienced something that has become remarkably predictable in the Internet’s ugly political brutopia. I was inundated with e-mails that called climate change a “hoax,” a “scam” and a plot by whale-loving commie terrorists who are out to snatch everybody’s guns, bibles and SUVs.

Most of my e-mailers were demanding answers from me about “climate-gate,” a controversy that some impolite scientists had imprudently turned into ripe fruit for conspiracy theorists. Glenn Beck blasted the media for “ignoring” climate-gate. His fellow Fox News showman Sean Hannity called it a “scandal” that “exposed global warming as a myth cooked up by alarmists.”

But last week, as Washington boiled in tropical heat and humidity, the British scientists at the center of that “scandal” were cleared by a six-month British government inquiry into the affair. The inquiry led by Sir Muir Russell followed two other government inquiries and an exhaustive series of reports by the Guardian newspaper that also cleared the scientists.

The controversy began when more than 1,000 e-mails from 13 years correspondence between scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and released online last year. Critics accused East Anglia scientists of fudging results, covering up flaws, silencing critics and distorting the peer review process that determines which studies are published in scientific journals. That would be serious stuff, if it were true. The East Anglia unit is one of the world’s leading research bodies on climate change, whether natural or human-induced. Major debates hung in the balance
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July 29, 2010 @ 2:44 pm

You remember? Right? Anyway, I

You remember? Right?

Anyway, I worked with the departing manager fo about a month and then I was in charge.

One of the first things I did, even before the old manager left, was to make sure I called everyone, including my 16-year-old employees, “sir” and “ma’am. I also made certain they got plenty of praise for a job well done, and gentle but firm guidance (always in private) when they erred.

It wasn’t long before, “YO! Dude! Bring me some ketchup!” was replaced by “Excuse me, sir (or ma’am)! Could you please bring me some ketchup?”

Over the next few weeks, the lunch crowd slowly began to grow, as did the dinner crowd, and I wasn’t absolutely certain why.
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July 29, 2010 @ 1:29 pm

Gio’s tips for homeowners; NEWSBRIEF

Gio’s tips for homeowners; NEWSBRIEF

0 Comments | South Wales Echo (Cardiff, Wales), July 8, 2010

ZANY Go Compare opera singer Wynne Evans has teamed up with police to cut burglary.

A new version of the Go Compare song has been specifically recorded for a 40-second film for Gwent Police.

In it Gio Compario, the character played by Evans, from Cardiff, in the adverts, catches a pair of burglars and encourages homeowners to lock their doors and windows when leaving their home, replacing the words “go compare” with “be aware”.

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July 29, 2010 @ 8:14 am
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