Government Grants for All

Grant Shapps: FirstBuy already helping our military families

Housing Minister Grant Shapps has today congratulated the first member of the Armed Forces to benefit from the Government’s FirstBuy scheme and get that all-important first foothold on the property ladder. (continues…)
Department for Communities and Local Government: Housing news articles

Tags: Already, Families, FirstBuy, Grant, Helping, Military, Shapps

Is It Advisable For You To Think About Purchasing A Domain Name That Already Exists?

Are you wondering if it can be done that you can buy a domain name that already exists for your own online business? Since we’re aware that many of the domains online are being obtained but the majority of them are not being employed for a while but they do exist. Other than having to go register for a new one, knowing that it is one possible option. As you opt to consider this as an option, you probably want to know what are your pros and cons for having a domain name for your online business.

You may find many explanation why it is less complicated for a webmaster to decide making use of an existing domain other than acquiring a new one. One of the major advantages that you could get from an existing domain is the existing traffic that flowed through that site. Let’s say for example the owner of this site have many customers and clients whom weren’t aware that this domain name was not renewed by its owner, and they keep on coming back to the site every now and then because they were once a client and it is what makes you get the benefit from the old traffic previously owned by the previous owner of the site.

Knowing that there’s a great challenge in acquiring keywords appropriate for each particular niche. Using an existing domain is a plus because the owner of the site alone may have optimized the site itself for SEO purposes. This just means that you are already there, you do not have to begin from scratch trying to acquire a domain name which may not be available anymore. More often it is the reason why webmasters prefer to purchase domain names that already exists rather than to buy new ones.

On the other hand, when you get a domain that already exists, you may still find pitfalls. That is if ever the domain has been identified by search engines as a site which doesn’t fits the SEO standards, your business might be at risk here. That is why it is important for you to work out if the domain you’ll be purchasing is worth the money you’ll be spending, but how? Use a free DNS tool or Free Domain Analysis Tool that can provide you numerous details about the domain. With the use of such tool, you can easily get access to the domain stats and perform some research from there.

Tags: About, Advisable, Already, Domain, Exists, Name, Purchasing, Think

Letters Reveal That the World Already Knows Our Secrets

This week, a cache of letters was put up for sale at Christie’s, where it fetched £3.8m. The letters didn’t comprise a correspondence or a sequence, more a lucky dip of one-off communications from famous people in history. There was a note from John Donne to Lady Kingsmill in 1624, offering his condolences on the death of her husband; but perhaps the star of the show was a love letter from Napoleon, apologising to a sulky Josephine for the impression that he was only interested in her cash.

This glorious magpie muddle of a collection was put together by the late Albin Schram, a man whose desire to possess intimate fragments of someone else’s past was apparently whetted in 1973 by the Napoleon letter. He spent the next 32 years, until his death, roaming the auction rooms of Europe, snapping up the waifs and strays of other people’s paper trails.

That these bits of parchment were important to Mr Schram not as a financial investment but as something more intimate is suggested by the fact that, rather than storing them in the bank, he liked to keep them close, in a filing cabinet at his Lausanne home. Although there’s no way of knowing, I like to think of him breaking off his morning constitutional around the lake in order to hurry home to spend more time reading, stroking – even sniffing – these last relics of the great.

For there is something about a letter – as opposed to its facsimile or transcription – which gives you a tangible link with the past. Where your finger now lightly brushes against the page is exactly where Donne’s or Napoleon’s own digit once rested. It’s the next best thing to owning St Francis’s toenails. And then there’s the rich mulch of clues to the writer’s personality. Carefully “crossed” letters – designed to save on postage – suggest an economical mind which, even at the height of passion, refuses quite to break down or let go. A stamp stuck on skew-whiff, by contrast, implies a correspondent fumble-fingered with desire or rage. A sprawling, curlicued signature taking up half the page hints at an ego looking for worlds to conquer. Or perhaps the opposite – a shivering soul taking refuge in grand gestures. Either way, you don’t get such gold dust from an email.

I experienced this excitement for myself six years ago, when I remortgaged my flat and bought all the known letters ever written by Mrs Beeton and her husband, for a biography I was then researching. A transcription might have told me that Isabella crossed her letters to save on postage while her husband could never be bothered to date his. But it was only once I held the documents in my hand that I saw that she used blue ink while he opted for sketchy pencil. That told me more than any amount of careful textual scholarship ever could.

Of course, it’s easy to fetishise letters, to imagine that they grant us access to the extraordinary spirit of the person who wrote them. But the great, just like the rest of us, have a disappointing knack of being dull in their private correspondence, writing about the weather, next year’s holiday and what they fancy for supper. In 2001 a number of unpublished letters by George Eliot were acquired by the British Library. As one of the first people to see them I was excited and alarmed in equal measure. Selfishly, having recently published a biography of Eliot, the last thing I wanted was to discover new information which challenged the picture of the novelist that I had only just put before the world.

In the event I need not have worried. Not because the new letters said nothing, but because what they revealed amplified rather than qualified what I already knew about Eliot during the quiet, domestically-oriented years when she wrote them. And that, if you think about it, is what letters mostly do. While the biographer in me longs for a piece of correspondence which reveals something previously unknown – an illegitimate baby, alcoholism, evidence of a dark, malicious spirit – the realist and letter writer in me accepts that human nature is too insistent to allow that to happen.

Personality, as Eliot herself was keen to show, is spun out of a fine web of associations and habits which make it unlikely that information contained in a single document will unravel the whole effect. No matter how carefully we guard the world from our secrets, the chances are that the world already knows them. Not because it has seen some thrillingly revealing letters, but because everything contained within them is already available to any spectator who cares to watch us go about our business.

And that’s why Mr Schram’s obsession with hunting down single letters strikes me as strange, more akin to stamp collecting than sustained historical or psychological inquiry. Taken out of context, orphaned from its fellows, the single letter, far from offering a snapshot of the writer’s state at a particular moment, is likely to conceal more than it reveals. The people and situations referred to become no more than baffling crossword clues; and the letter, far from taking its place as a team player in the great game of understanding the past, becomes simply an autograph with a bit of desultory chat attached.

· Kathryn Hughes is the author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

Tags: Already, Knows, Letters, Reveal, Secrets, World

Parents: By Now, Your Children Have Already Read This Article

By Mark Hoerrner

You’ve mastered e-mail, and you think you are keeping up with your teen’s use of technology. Wrong. Teens think of e-mail as a dinosaur—so slow. Instead, they IM (instant messaging) on their computers and text messaging on their cell phones. Use the phone to talk? That’s so 1980s. Welcome to the world of “media multi-tasking,” the term scholars have given to children’s use of two or more forms of media simultaneously. Parents just call it one big headache.

A recent article by Matt Goldberg in Yahoo! Internet Life stated that 74% of online teens have used IM. It’s fast, and it can involve a seemingly limitless number of participants. Forget the party line feature on the phone.

Kids are having the same conversations we had at their age; they’re just done electronically. Goldberg reported in 2001 that 17% of teens had asked someone out through IM, and 13% issued an electronic “Dear John” letter to end a relationship. Some of their conversations aren’t like the ones we are used to, however, and that’s where the headache really begins.

Message boards, IM, and chat rooms are stellar forms of communication and are, in fact, the heart of most of the current technology in online learning environments at colleges. The downside is that there’s no way to identify the person on the other end of the message. How does your teen know he’s chatting with a 17-year-old male from Savannah with the IM name “Wintercloak”? Clearly, “Wintercloak” could be a 50-year-old with manipulative intentions. It could also be a classmate spreading vicious rumors based on supposedly private online conversations.

Online communication could be used to open up your children’s eyes to new people and interesting ideas. But it could also bully your child, defame your child, or take advantage of your child’s naivety. Parents can’t hear even one side of an IM conversation, so it is more challenging to know who your child is talking to—and what they are talking about—with these “strangers.”

There’s a misconception that children who are made victims by online assailants are forced into a vehicle and carted off, said Trevor Shaw, director of Academic Technology for Dwight Englewood School in New Jersey. “The truth is quite the opposite,” he said. “Most victims of online predators go willingly at first with their abductors. They feel safe because this stranger was able to build rapport with them over time.”

The methods online predators will use are varied, but one common theme seeks to pick up where parents and friends have left off in the life of a child. Empathy, a virtual shoulder to cry on and joy over the child’s personal triumphs are all set to build a sense of security between the predator and child. At this point, the child erroneously believes he or she “knows” the predator and can be influenced by the predator in numerous ways. Predators, we must remember, aren’t just individuals. Hate groups have elaborate websites and chat rooms designed to lure young people to their cause.

Parents must understand that simply blocking access is not only encouraging deceit but just putting a band-aid on the problem. The first step in ensuring the safety of children on the Internet is knowing what a child is doing on the Internet. In a recent Canadian study conducted by the Media Awareness Network, 71% of adults said they knew where their children were going on the Net, although 38% of children said their parents had no idea which sites they visit. Moreover, more than 30% of the children surveyed said they actively erased the history file in their browser to throw parents off the trail.

Experts say role-playing with children is a good idea. If your child reads a type of message, how should she respond? When should he tell you about messages he’s received or seen? Why can’t you trust people you meet on the Internet? Talk frankly with your children before they enter the virtual world and make sure the computer they use is in a frequently used common area of the house, not their bedrooms.

Like any aspect of parenting that involves electronic resources—whether film, television or Internet—the key to success is constant parental involvement. This is not a privacy issue with children, but a situation calling for open, honest discussion about the consequences of their actions. Sure, they think we are outdated and obsolete, because we still enjoy face-to-face communication. As a wise parent once told a web-slinging teen in a popular comic book, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We may not be parents to Spiderman, but the truism still holds. The more we help our children understand their role in the physical and social structure of the world, the safer they will ultimately be.

Tags: Already, Article, Children, Parents, Read, This

Monday, May 10th, 2010 Grants No Comments

Once Upon A Campus: Tantalizing Truths About College from People Who’ve Already Messed Up

By Trent Anderson and Seppy Basili
Edited by Supurna Banjee
Published by Simon & Schuster
May 2003; $10.00US/$16.00CAN; 0-7432-4933-X

What is College Really Like?

College Students Weigh In On: Dorms and roommates – The social scene – Writing papers and studying for exams – What professors and teacher’s assistants really want

Benefit from their wisdom . . .

“All roommates are weird. The key is realizing that your roommate is weird . . . and deciding to get along with her anyway.”

–Senior, Biology, Seattle Pacific University

“A professor will not flunk you if he knows your name.”

–Graduate, Sports Management, University of Kansas

…and learn from their mistakes:

“After a semester of eating in the dining hall, I quickly learned to steer clear of anything with ‘medley,’ ‘hash’, or ‘casserole’ in the name; anything ‘over rice;’ and ‘meat with gray sauce’.”

–Senior, Biology, Oberlin College

“I regret not changing my major. I thought I had to know what I wanted to do when I got to college, so I stuck with it even though I wasn’t satisfied . . .”

– Senior, Film, Northwestern University

Excerpt
The following is an excerpt from the book Once Upon a Campus
by Trent Anderson and Seppy Basili
Published by Simon & Schuster; May 2003; $10.00US/$16.00CAN; 0-7432-4933-X
Copyright © 2003 Trent Anderson and Seppy Basili

Introduction

Hi, we’re Trent and Seppy. This book will give you the inside scoop on how to survive and thrive in college. We’re searched the country for the best advice from current college students and recent grads about how to make college fun, exciting, and rewarding. They’ve lived and learned, and how you get to benefit from their wisdom — and their mistakes. We guarantee 100 percent that the advice in this book will be unbiased and straightfoward and that it will help you succeed in college (if not, this book makes a great coaster.)*

We’ll be popping in every now and then with survival tips: notes, suggestions, and our expert advice. Why should you listen to us? We’ve both worked with thousands of students, helping them with admissions, test prep, and financial aid advice. Our comments are based on our own experience and what we’ve learned by speaking to student and college personnel throughout the years.

We hope you enjoy this book–however you decide to use it. Now that we’ve exchanged introductions, you’re ready to discover how Once Upon a Campus…students went to college and lived to tell about it.

–Trent Anderson & Seppy Basili

*Claims of a “guarantee” for the success in college or use of this book as a “coaster” have not been confirmed by any valid authority.

. . .

“Don’t expect to recognize yourself four years from now.”

–Graduate, English/Psychology, Vassar College

“Wear flip-flops in the shower. You don’t want what grows in the shower to grow on your feet!”

–Senior, Environmental Design, Texas A&M University-College Station

“Remember the #1 rule: if it would annoy you if your roommate did it, it will probably annoy your roommate if you do it.”

–Graduate, Chemical Engineering, University of Virginia

“Scheduling study groups is a good idea, because it forces you to look over the material before you meet, so you don’t look stupid.”

–Senior, Government, University of Virginia

“Although you should be open to new ideas and people, your room shouldn’t. Always lock your door when you’re not there.”

–Senior, Legal Studies, Quinnipiac University

“You have to ask yourself, ‘What class is going to get me out of bed at eight o’clock in the morning?’ That is a class you should definitely sign up for.”

–Senior, Biomedical Sciences, Marquette University>

“Eat, study, eat, study, sleep, eat, study.”

–Junior, Chemical Biology, Stevens Institute of Technology

“GET GOOD INTERNSHIPS!!! This is the only time you will be given responsibility without having any experience.”

–Graduate, Political Science, University of California, San Diego

“College in general was a great and memorable experience. I wish I could start all over again.”

–Senior, Pre-Law/Mass Communications, The Ohio State University

Copyright © 2003 Trent Anderson and Seppy Sasili

Tags: About, Already, Campus, College, From, Messed, Once, People, Tantalizing, Truths, Upon, Who've

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 Grants No Comments