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The Complete Scholarship Book: The Biggest, Easiest Guide for Getting the Most Money for College Reviews

The Complete Scholarship Book: The Biggest, Easiest Guide for Getting the Most Money for College

With more than 5,000 scholarship and grant sources, The Complete Scholarship Book is the most comprehensive scholarship source book available. Thorough and easy-to-use, this book is a reference section standard. --Authors have been featured as the scholarship and financial aid experts in the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, College Outlook, Campus Life and in daily newspapers nationwide --Over 85,000 copies in print (Second Edition ISBN 1-57071-390-1) --From fastw

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The 5 Biggest Mental Blocks To Creating Wealth And Abundance For Yourself (John Burrow)

Do you have the desire to create wealth and abundance in your life but no matter what you try you simply cannot seem to attract it? For many people attracting wealth seems so easy and effortless but for others it’s a lifetime struggle.
Artipot: Finance > Wealth Building Articles

Tags: Abundance, Biggest, Blocks, Burrow, Creating, John, Mental, Wealth, Yourself

Novartis to Become World’s Biggest Generic Drugs Maker

The Swiss drugs firm Novartis today agreed to buy German firm Hexal and most of US company Eon Labs in deals worth €5.6bn (£3.8bn). The acquisitions will make it the world’s largest generic drugs manufacturer.

Novartis will gain a leading position in the major markets for generic drugs, which are chemically identical to more expensive branded rivals, in Germany and the US. It is buying 100% of Hexal and 67.7% of Eon Labs from the Struengmann family, of Germany.

The Swiss company will launch a tender offer to buy the remaining shares of Eon Labs for €23.7 per share, and will merge the two companies into its Sandoz unit, which is currently the world’s second largest generics maker.

Daniel Vasella, the Novartis chairman and chief executive, has long coveted the top spot in the global generics market. The firm acquired Lek, of Slovenia, in 2002, and bought Sabex, of Canada, last year.

The deal to buy Hexal and Eon Labs will create cost synergies of $200m (£105.4m) a year within three years of closing, half of which would be realised within 18 months, Novartis said.

The company said the transactions would boost profits within 12 months of closing, which it expects to happen in the second half of the year if regulators approve the deals. It said it would consolidate various departments as part of the merger.

“The strong growth outlook for Sandoz, which will create jobs, is expected to partially compensate for necessary reductions in the work force,” the company said in a statement.

Basel-based Norvatis said it would have had combined generic sales of around $5.1bn in 2004 if the takeover deals had been in place then. The figure compared with $4.8bn for the current world leader, Israel’s Teva Pharmaceuticals.

Shares in the German generic drugmaker Stada Arznemittel soared by almost 10% on hopes that it would be the next takeover target for Novartis.

Tags: Become, Biggest, Drugs, Generic, maker, Novartis, World's

Business Domain Name – Biggest Benefit Of Using A Long Web Domain Name As A Marketing Strategy

In the world of 21st century, it is no longer surprising to find that most business had already establishes a web presence to support their brick-and-mortar businesses. There are many advantages of establishing a web presence on the Internet such as selling globally to prospective customers and disseminating information to the public.

Most business owner would have already understood the importance of a web presence to their business. What most of them had failed to understand is that the domain name in their website can contribute significantly to their online marketing strategy.

First, we look at a few rules of a good domain name. Most would agree that a good domain name should:

1) be able to describe your business when people first look it.
2) include hyphen in between the words to make it easier to read.
3) have an appropriate .com, .net, .biz, .info, .org to reflect the nature of the business.

What I differ in opinion is that a long domain name “mysuperduperbrandflyingsite.com” can be as effective as a short domain name “superduper.com” depending on the context where the domain name is used. Many people would definitely disagree with me on this point as they believe that a short domain name is easier to remember. However, a long domain name can be just as effective depending on the context where it is use.

Having a catchy long domain name such as http://www.dont-miss-a-thing.com or http://www.once-in-a-lifetime.com/ would definitely helps to draw attention to your business promotion rather than promoting your website name http://www.yourcompanyname.com which is mundane.

When people reach http://www.dont-miss-a-thing.com or http://www.once-in-a-lifetime.com, you can communicate a short sales message before driving them to the appropriate web page.

Thus, depending on the context where the domain name is used, a domain name can actually help to make or break your overall marketing performance.

Tags: Benefit, Biggest, Business, Domain, Long, Marketing, Name, Strategy, Using

Investing – Home Prices fall in majority of the biggest markets

If you have owned a home, or any piece of residential real estate including condos, and vacation homes than you are aware of the run up in prices that occurred for a five year period that ended more than a year ago. In terms of investing, owning a home for half a century has been a wonderful way to build wealth. It is one of the few investing methods where you could actually live in your investment, while it increased in value. Most investors are not aware that from World War II until last year, there was never a single year where home prices fell on a national level, until last year that is.

Homeowners have counted on a steady annual increase in the price of the house they were living in to create a wealth effect. For many, it was their only source of forced savings. It was also a participation in the American dream – owning your own home, and living in it.

Studies are now available which show that at the end of last year, a number of housing markets declined. Actually, 149 different markets experienced the decline. Hardest hit were the East and West Coast of the US, and the Northeast cities.

In you were in Florida at all last year, it was impossible not to see thousands of super cranes going about the process of building 20 to 50 story condominiums. The vast majority of these condos were bought on speculation with the buyer signing the contract never anticipating the need to close on the contract.

We have not seen a mass number of walkways yet. These are people that signed non-recourse agreements with the builder, and are in a position to walk away from the agreement without having to write a check. They will forfeit the deposit they put down however.

Florida may well be the state taking the biggest hit in real estate. Sarasota was down 18% by year-end, while Melbourne was experiencing a 17 % decline. We are talking about actual prices being down. On a national level prices were down 2.7%.

Many analysts haven’t quite figured out what this means? Are motivated sellers holding onto residences longer in anticipation of getting their higher price later on? Are some sellers withdrawing their homes from the market, or perhaps not putting them on the market at all, awaiting prices firming up, perhaps later this year?

What about sales themselves?

In addition to prices being down, there are less actual sales taking place, which is leading to a larger inventory of unsold homes. Forty different states have reported a decline in the number of sales taking place. On a national level the number comes to a 10.1% decline in the actual number of homes being sold regardless of price. Three different localities have reported physical sales being down more than 30%. They include Nevada, Florida, and the District of Columbia. Virginia reported a 20% decline.

There were six states that reported an increase in the number of sales taking place – that’s six out of fifty. They included Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas. There was no impact on Utah where sales were flat.

What you really need to look at is the VACANCY rate. The vacancy rate is the number of homes on the market where nobody is living in them, and they are for sale. On a national level, this number always seems to hover around 2%. At year-end, the number went to 2.7%. This is a massive increase because 2.7% is the highest it has been to in 50 years, and that’s only because they started figuring out the number 50 years ago.

You’ve got owners out there who are just waiting, and won’t sell at a lower price than the price they want. This accounts for the increased vacancy rate. On top of that you have another issue. There does come a point where a seller may have to sell. He will take what he can get, even though it establishes a new lower base from which everything else can trade.

Once this base is established than other buyers and sellers see it. The seller reacts with alarm. The buyer reacts with glee, but trepidation also because the buyer doesn’t know if prices are going lower still. This is how panic selling sets in, and no buyers. The buyers walk away, waiting for still lower prices

It’s the same as the stock market, sellers once they have seen higher prices, don’t want to sell at a lower price. Many prefer to wait, hoping, and it is hope that the price will come back. Only the forced seller will do the deal. It might be an estate, or divorce settlement, or a housing relocation that forces the actual sale. It doesn’t matter, once that sale hits the marketplace for all to see, there is a new adjustment in the real estate market.

Where’s the BIAS Now – UP or DOWN?

It is difficult to tell if the year-end numbers have wrenched out the secular excesses that have taken place in the real estate markets in the last five years while everything went crazy on the upside. There may be more to go. If you look at the stock market, most of the house builders bottomed out several months ago when they all made new multi-year lows. Since then, they have rallied nicely. If the real estate market has more to go on the downside, than these stocks will probably have to build double-bottoms before the decline is actually over.

If however, the vacancy rate picks up from here, and price declines have seen their bottom, than most of the damage is behind us. The economy overall and interest rate seem fine, so we don’t expect damage coming from a decline in GDP this year. What seems to be happening is that we are looking at a wearing down of the excesses produced since the late 1990’s in residential real estate in this country?

The geographical segments of the country that experienced the most increases in real estate prices are now the ones experiencing the declines. It’s the same story, and the story never changes, only the areas of the country being affected changes. Our work shows that prices, and vacancy rates have a way to go yet on the downside. At the same time, we believe the housing stocks may decline, but the absolute bottoms established months ago will hold. We are already off those bottoms.

Goodbye and Good Luck
http://www.stocksatbottom.com/ez.html

Tags: Biggest, Fall, Home, Investing, majority, Markets, Prices

Investing – Home Prices fall in majority of the biggest markets

If you have owned a home, or any piece of residential real estate including condos, and vacation homes than you are aware of the run up in prices that occurred for a five year period that ended more than a year ago. In terms of investing, owning a home for half a century has been a wonderful way to build wealth. It is one of the few investing methods where you could actually live in your investment, while it increased in value. Most investors are not aware that from World War II until last year, there was never a single year where home prices fell on a national level, until last year that is.

Homeowners have counted on a steady annual increase in the price of the house they were living in to create a wealth effect. For many, it was their only source of forced savings. It was also a participation in the American dream – owning your own home, and living in it.

Studies are now available which show that at the end of last year, a number of housing markets declined. Actually, 149 different markets experienced the decline. Hardest hit were the East and West Coast of the US, and the Northeast cities.

In you were in Florida at all last year, it was impossible not to see thousands of super cranes going about the process of building 20 to 50 story condominiums. The vast majority of these condos were bought on speculation with the buyer signing the contract never anticipating the need to close on the contract.

We have not seen a mass number of walkways yet. These are people that signed non-recourse agreements with the builder, and are in a position to walk away from the agreement without having to write a check. They will forfeit the deposit they put down however.

Florida may well be the state taking the biggest hit in real estate. Sarasota was down 18% by year-end, while Melbourne was experiencing a 17 % decline. We are talking about actual prices being down. On a national level prices were down 2.7%.

Many analysts haven’t quite figured out what this means? Are motivated sellers holding onto residences longer in anticipation of getting their higher price later on? Are some sellers withdrawing their homes from the market, or perhaps not putting them on the market at all, awaiting prices firming up, perhaps later this year?

What about sales themselves?

In addition to prices being down, there are less actual sales taking place, which is leading to a larger inventory of unsold homes. Forty different states have reported a decline in the number of sales taking place. On a national level the number comes to a 10.1% decline in the actual number of homes being sold regardless of price. Three different localities have reported physical sales being down more than 30%. They include Nevada, Florida, and the District of Columbia. Virginia reported a 20% decline.

There were six states that reported an increase in the number of sales taking place – that’s six out of fifty. They included Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas. There was no impact on Utah where sales were flat.

What you really need to look at is the VACANCY rate. The vacancy rate is the number of homes on the market where nobody is living in them, and they are for sale. On a national level, this number always seems to hover around 2%. At year-end, the number went to 2.7%. This is a massive increase because 2.7% is the highest it has been to in 50 years, and that’s only because they started figuring out the number 50 years ago.

You’ve got owners out there who are just waiting, and won’t sell at a lower price than the price they want. This accounts for the increased vacancy rate. On top of that you have another issue. There does come a point where a seller may have to sell. He will take what he can get, even though it establishes a new lower base from which everything else can trade.

Once this base is established than other buyers and sellers see it. The seller reacts with alarm. The buyer reacts with glee, but trepidation also because the buyer doesn’t know if prices are going lower still. This is how panic selling sets in, and no buyers. The buyers walk away, waiting for still lower prices

It’s the same as the stock market, sellers once they have seen higher prices, don’t want to sell at a lower price. Many prefer to wait, hoping, and it is hope that the price will come back. Only the forced seller will do the deal. It might be an estate, or divorce settlement, or a housing relocation that forces the actual sale. It doesn’t matter, once that sale hits the marketplace for all to see, there is a new adjustment in the real estate market.

Where’s the BIAS Now – UP or DOWN?

It is difficult to tell if the year-end numbers have wrenched out the secular excesses that have taken place in the real estate markets in the last five years while everything went crazy on the upside. There may be more to go. If you look at the stock market, most of the house builders bottomed out several months ago when they all made new multi-year lows. Since then, they have rallied nicely. If the real estate market has more to go on the downside, than these stocks will probably have to build double-bottoms before the decline is actually over.

If however, the vacancy rate picks up from here, and price declines have seen their bottom, than most of the damage is behind us. The economy overall and interest rate seem fine, so we don’t expect damage coming from a decline in GDP this year. What seems to be happening is that we are looking at a wearing down of the excesses produced since the late 1990’s in residential real estate in this country?

The geographical segments of the country that experienced the most increases in real estate prices are now the ones experiencing the declines. It’s the same story, and the story never changes, only the areas of the country being affected changes. Our work shows that prices, and vacancy rates have a way to go yet on the downside. At the same time, we believe the housing stocks may decline, but the absolute bottoms established months ago will hold. We are already off those bottoms.

Goodbye and Good Luck
http://www.stocksatbottom.com/ez.html

Tags: Biggest, Fall, Home, Investing, majority, Markets, Prices

Architecture: Bulgarian Eco Town ‘the Biggest Mistake of Norman Foster’s Career’, Say Protesters

An hour-long stroll through an oak forest, past clusters of blackberries, St John’s wort, olive trees and butterflies, ends with the rewarding sight of soft, white sands and gently breaking waves.

On Karadere beach, in north-east Bulgaria, a smattering of families have set up camp for the summer, as they have done for years. But this year the happy-go-lucky mood has been punctured by fears that the small corner of paradise is under imminent threat by Bulgaria’s first carbon-neutral resort.

Having been considered ripe for development since the collapse of communism 19 years ago, the area is set to be turned into a luxury €1bn (£780m) settlement. Dubbed the Black Sea Gardens, it will include five new hill towns, artificial lakes, a marina and an extensive leisure area and will be self-sustaining, thanks to biomass power and construction from local, natural resources, say the developers.

But the 540-acre (219-hectare) development, spearheaded by the British architect Sir Norman Foster, has enraged Bulgaria’s growing band of ecologists.

They say it will destroy the Black Sea coast’s last remaining virgin stretches of beach and will have a devastating effect on the rich biodiversity of an area which has environmental protection status under the EU’s Natura 2000 program, which aims to protect endangered species and habitats.

But the Bulgarian government’s failure to enact regulations outlawing extensive developments in such areas has allowed coastal constructions to go ahead almost unhindered. Now there is hardly a stretch of the country’s 220-mile coastline untouched by overdeveloped resorts. Locals are often restricted from accessing beaches whose entrances are flanked by security guards.

Construction of the Black Sea Gardens project, which Foster and Partner’s website describes as “a series of car-free hill towns in an unspoilt setting of oak forests, meadows and river gorges”, is due to start next year. Under the plans, 15,000 inhabitants of Sky Village, Wilderness Village, Meadow Village, Cape Village and Sea Village will be encouraged to leave their cars outside the settlements and go by foot, or use pools of electric cars and shuttle buses instead.

Sky is the first village due to be built, with the backing of a British-Bulgarian investment group. US, Russian and Saudi Arabian investors have expressed an interest in the other hill towns, according to the Bulgarian co-architects, Projects Ltd, which describes the resort as having something for every holidaymaker – “from sportish Club Med types to more contemplative, sleepy types”.

Foster and Partners did not provide anyone to talk to the Guardian, but in a press release it stressed that the resort is designed to blend in with its environment. “The residential clusters are tightly packed and integrated into the contours of the landscape, preserving the majority of its site as virgin terrain,” it read.

Detractors say while the plans might be of a much higher standard than the depressing array of substandard constructions hugging the Black Sea, the sheer scale of the resort will do lasting damage to the natural habitat. The settlements will eat into untouched oak forests, and the invasion of thousands of people and new roads will disturb one of Europe’s major migratory routes for millions of birds, known as via pontica, they say.

“I ask myself whether Norman Foster really knows what he’s getting himself in to,” said Todor Karastoyanov, a musician and protester against the project who frequents the beach and married his wife, Boriana, there last summer.

“We want to try to stop him from making the biggest mistake of his career by building here, because it’s immoral and he might not know that.”

Biliana Voutchkova, a concert violinist holidaying on Karadere beach with her family, as she has done since her childhood, said: “This has been a magnet for those wishing to spend time away from civilisation and to enjoy nature, but soon it will be lost forever and we’ll only realize the consequences once it’s too late.” Dimiter Georgiev, an ornithologist from nearby Varna, said the habitats of numerous species would be “directly disturbed and destroyed by this construction”, including those of otters, butterflies, woodpeckers, honey buzzards, lesser spotted eagles and red-backed shrikes. “We know from experience that these species don’t move elsewhere, they just disappear,” he said, citing the demise of several species of lark, shrike and bunting in areas given over to resort developments.

“We’re not against mass tourism but it should be planned in a proper way, with areas set aside for wildlife to breed. But the problem is so much of the coastal areas have been developed, there’s now hardly any space left, which means the ecosystem’s resilience is greatly weakened, so any new site does not have the moral right to call itself ‘eco’.”

Foster has yet to visit the site, but he has been involved in discussions between the British and Bulgarian teams, according to Georgi Stanishev, the director of Projects Ltd. Stanishev, brother of Bulgaria’s prime minister Sergei Stanishev, insisted that Black Sea Gardens was environmentally ethical and was breaking no laws.

“What we as the Bulgarian team of architects and Foster and Partners are doing is absolutely adequate to the legislation and the laws of this country,” he said, adding that the construction would be sympathetic to its surroundings.

The project was conceived as an antidote to the over-development along the rest of the Black Sea coastline, he said.

Opponents say they will not let the project go ahead without a fight.

“We’re planning to hold protests in Sofia, as well as concerts,’ said Nadezhda Miksimova, of the campaign group For the Nature. “And we will set up a protest camp on the beach itself.”

Tags: 'The, Architecture, Biggest, Bulgarian, Career, Foster's, Mistake, Norman, Protesters, town

The Biggest Fishing Trip of All Time: $1bn Survey Unravels Mysteries of the Deep

A billion-dollar survey of the world’s oceans has so far pinpointed 38,000 marine species – and identified new fish at the rate of two a week. The census of marine life, a concerted effort by hundreds of scientists from more than 70 nations, is in effect the first hi-tech inventory of life in the so called “blue planet”. Oceans cover 70% of the globe. But marine scientists have been pointing out for years that the surface of Venus has been better mapped than the world under the oceans.

The latest “end of term report” by the census scientists assembles data from more than 5.2m new and existing records, and maps the distribution of the 38,000 species. Details of the survey will be unveiled at a meeting in Hamburg next week.

Scientists in Australia, China, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand, South America and sub-Saharan Africa are to form nine new regional networks to create a new “information seaway”. But the worldwide bid to probe life in the seas has hardly begun.

“We have barely skimmed the surface,” said Frederick Grassle, of Rutgers University in the US, who chairs the international scientific steering committee of the census.

“Humans have explored less than 5% of the world’s oceans, and even where we have explored, life may have been too small to see. Thus, opportunities abound to discover species and increase our knowledge of abundance and distribution.”

Life on earth is a mystery: life in the oceans is an even deeper mystery. The seas cover long sloping continental shelves rich in nutrients that drain from the land; huge, muddy abyssal plains fertilised by detritus from the surface; ocean trenches far deeper than the Grand Canyon, and a vast chain of volcanic mountains known as the mid-Atlantic ridge, where submarine hot springs support colonies of living creatures were discovered only about 25 years ago.

All of these habitats are home to living things.

So far, taxonomists have named and described around 230,000 species of marine creature. But there could be 10 times as many, still to be identified.

At the same time, many ocean species are under threat. Commercial fishing has damaged and depleted the north Atlantic cod and the bluefin tuna and reduced the world’s whale population to a hundredth of its original count.

Many of the world’s coral reefs – shelter for rich ecosystems of lagoon creatures – are threatened by global warming, habitat destruction and pollution.

The push for new commercial species now threatens deep ocean fish such as the orange roughie, which take decades to reach maturity. As commercial species disappear, so complex ecological networks are disrupted. So the the census is part of a concerted international effort to make a detailed map of life on the biggest – and most unexplored – region of the planet.

The payoff so far is a $9.5m (£5.1m) ocean biographic information system that pinpoints 95% of all records so far on or near the surface of the sea.

Less than 0.1% of the records are from the bottom half of the water column. So there are depths of knowledge still to be plumbed. Researchers calculate that a creature collected from below 2,000 metres is about 50 times more likely to be new to science than one found in the first 50 metres.

In this year alone, the census has added 106 species of marine fish to the database – an average of more than two new species a week. The total of known fish species in the sea now stands at 15,482. There could be another 5,000, awaiting discovery. The database has also counted 6,800 species of zooplankton, animals that drift with the ocean currents. They could identify another 6,000 over the next decade.

The discoveries rest on a whole range of new submarine technologies, from robot submersibles to a network of seafloor “listening posts”.

Some scientists have concentrated on collecting specimens from 6,000 metres below the surface, off the coast of Angola, or from the hidden world underneath the Antarctic ice shelf.

Others have “tagged” open ocean species, to provide the first ever map of marine “highways” for sharks, turtles and marine mammals. Biologists have found not just new species of octopus, but a new genus – a much larger grouping – of these puzzling animals in the Southern Ocean. Others have been examining colonies of rhodoliths – a kind of coral-like marine algae that moves like tumbleweed – in southern Alaska. Remotely operated vehicles with robot arms have picked up a clam that survives on methane deposits on the sea floor off the coast of Chile, and a new species of mollusc that lives down thermal vents in the Indian Ocean.

Researchers “listening” to salmon in northern California also picked up signals from tagged green sturgeon – rarest of the 26 sturgeon species – as they travelled to the Canadian coast.

Other researchers have explored not the present but the past, to map the change in sea fish populations.

Records from 400 years ago show that cod taken by hand line from the side of a fishing boat could weigh as much as 80lbs (about 36kg). With the advent of trawl nets, more cod were taken but the average size began to fall dramatically.

Oceanic white tip shark numbers in the Gulf of Mexico have fallen by 99% in the last 50 years. Shark populations in the north Atlantic have fallen by from 40% to 90%, depending on the species. Hardest hit has been a once-feared predator, the hammerhead.

Catches of the day

Biologists identified a new species of grenadier in the Tasman Sea, a new species of scorpionfish in the IndoPacific region and a strange finned octopod they nicknamed “Dumbo” at 3,000 metres on the mid-ocean ridge. But other signals from the seas in the past two years have been less cheerful. These include:

Carbon-dioxide exhausts from human industry are not just creating warmer oceans, they are gradually increasing their acidity, scientists reported in August. This could affect corals and marine shellfish – and subsequently the species that depend on them.

American shoppers face an identity crisis. Researchers found in July that 77% of all fish sold in the US as red snapper were in fact some other species.

Marine biologists have identified a “lost world” in the Arctic ocean. The Canada basin is a vast pool of still water walled in by steep ridges far below the surface. In one cruise, researchers picked up 400 unidentified species.

In June, British scientists calculated that 30% of the world’s seas could be protected from all fishing at a cost of £8bn a year. This is roughly what tourists spend each year on ocean cruises.

Project Neptune (North-east Pacific time series underwater networked experiments) is to establish a network of 30 sea-floor “laboratories” 100kms apart and up to 3,000 metres deep, connected by 3,000kms of fibre-optic cable. Students will be able to link to the submarine laboratories via the internet.

The leatherback turtle has outlived the dinosaurs by 65m years. But scientists warned last year that it could be on the road to extinction in 10 to 20 years. Only about 1,500 females now nest in the Pacific.

Tags: $1bn, Biggest, Deep, Fishing, Mysteries, Survey, Time, Trip, Unravels