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Naperville Education Planning: Necessary no Matter what Your Income Level

When my oldest child was in grade school, he decided he wanted to play the tuba. This decision surprised me, but he was happy with his choice and proceeded to surprise us all with a natural talent for the instrument.

Then a random line in an article I read got my hopes up: the article mentioned a student who had earned a full college scholarship due to his tuba-playing skills. Apparently a number of college music departments are in dire need of tuba players. “Aha!” I thought. “Here’s a way to pay for college!”

Unfortunately, my grand scheme hit a sour note when my son quit band. By his sophomore year, he had other interests he wanted to focus on, notably basketball. And although he was good enough to make the high school team (no small feat, given the size of Naperville schools), we never labored under the delusion that his skills would earn him a scholarship at the type of large university he was interested in attending.

Fortunately, we had carried our Naperville education planning beyond the “Gee, I hope he gets a scholarship” stage. We realized early on that education savings, just like any others, benefit from compound interest more greatly the longer you’ve been saving. Good solid Naperville financial planning advice helped us figure out the best strategies and plans for our particular situation.

It wasn’t easy. I was talking to an acquaintance when our boys were still in high school. She expressed surprise that we hadn’t purchased an entire college plan when our son was a toddler. After all, she pointed out, it was such a deal then to get 4 years’ tuition for only $14,000. Well, yes, that would be a great deal. But at the time, that much money totaled half our income! Since we didn’t have the wherewithal for that kind of investment, a slow but steady Naperville education planning strategy would have to work for us.

We combined a number of strategies. We asked doting grandparents to scale back of lavish gifts and instead help us grow our kids’ college funds. As our income increased, so too did our regular deposits into their funds.

Now that our oldest has headed off for school, we’re awfully relieved to have the money set aside that we do. The tuition bills still make me gasp, but they don’t make me cry. And at least I didn’t have to force him to take up tuba-playing again.

Tags: Education, Income, Level, Matter, Naperville, Necessary, Planning

Women’s Study – necessary or not

What comes to mind when someone mentions women’s studies? Perhaps a course on child nutrition, or a programme on employment generation. Otherwise it invites dismissive responses – isn’t women’s studies quite out of date, with gender studies now the only serious discipline globally? The subject of women’s studies is, thus, invariably surrounded by confusion, condescension or worse.

Few are aware of the unique history of women’s studies in India, which emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s, during years of political and social turmoil. A founding generation of teachers, students, young women in the IAS, and activists from different social movements came together in SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai in 1981 for the first-ever conference on women’s studies in India.

Over 300 participants hotly debated how women’s lives and struggles needed to become the focus of new knowledge and interventions, whether by autonomous women’s groups, by the state or within higher education. Interestingly, whatever their differences, they all agreed on one thing – women’s studies should not become a separate discipline in colleges and universities. Rather, questions about women’s status and oppression in society should become a perspective within all subjects, a force of change for education overall.

This was not just an extremely ambitious mandate but also inclusive in scope. Thus, for instance, while new `women-only’ organizations were creating waves in many cities and towns – fighting dowry and rape, working among the rural poor, demanding better wages for women workers and so on, women’s studies was never intended to be for women alone. Male scholars were called upon to share the responsibility of opening up their respective disciplines, and some of them made pioneering contributions like discovering the skewed sex ratio, or analyzing dowry as a modern phenomenon. Teachers hoped to attract men as much as women to discuss new topics in the classroom.

Women ’s studies has traveled almost 30 years since those formative years. What we have today is a vast field of work that has been the creation of many – scholars from history, economics, sociology, literature, psychology, health and so on; activist-intellectuals outside the university system; and bureaucrat-researchers committed to changing public policies. Because this work was often done outside the few women’s studies centers that existed in the early years, its range and scope has not been visible to most of us. It is only too obvious that our institutions of higher education have not been fundamentally transformed by principles of gender justice. Yet, we can point to many changes small and big. Undergraduate and postgraduate courses in all major universities in India have seen syllabi revisions that now include papers on women and gender issues. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has been expanding the number of women’s studies centres across the country by leaps and bounds, and more and more women are claiming new futures through higher education, including from less privileged backgrounds.

A number of university based women’s studies centers have started full fledged degrees in women’s studies at the MA or M Phil level. Others offer special courses and foundational or optional papers to general students. The other interesting development is that though the name “women’s studies” continues to be used in most institutional contexts, what we effectively mean by this is much broader. Not only do we debate the role of men and women in society along with notions of masculinity and femininity, but equally crucially -`women’ is a very complex category as well.

A women’s studies classroom must make room for questions like the following: How did nationalism and, later, the paradigms of development create normative notions of `the Indian woman,’ and how inclusive or exclusive were these norms? How do questions of class affect women’s lives? How do the hierarchies of both caste and gender work simultaneously to shape society, and how do they mould institutions such as family and marriage? How should we respond to questions of sexuality and to the power of the media in our everyday lives?

There are, thus, very different institutional sites for doing women’s studies today. Expanding women’s studies centers will be vital, but also critical are negotiations with conventional disciplines as well as emergent fields like cultural studies, dalit and minority studies. Last, but not least, the unexpected spaces of politics beyond the classroom must be explored. If women ’s studies is to be a live force for questioning gender oppression, then it is absolutely vital that all such spaces continue to proliferate. Only then will we recognize the role that women’s studies has to play in addressing the major issues of our time. Examples could include the long-standing demand for reservations for women in Parliament, and the contradictory forces of globalization. It could be the pink chaddi’ campaign and new protests against patriarchal connections between women and culture. Above all else, whatever it might call itself, women’s studies must always be on the move.

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Tags: Necessary, Study, Women's

Seo – Are Gateway Or Doorway Pages Necessary?

As a general rule, most sites do not need to be enhanced with gateway or doorway pages. This is because a good web site will naturally contain content that uses relevant keyword phrases that potential customers will relate to. This is the same language that will be typed into a search engine box. To put it quite succinctly, if you have quality content on there already you don’t need any extra pages submitted by an SEO professional or different content submitted to several search engines to “cover your bases.”

Usually the matter of gateway or doorway pages comes up for a webmaster that has a site that is overly visual. Web masters that are too cheap or too lazy to hire or write their content also run into this problem. The answer to the dilemma of not having enough content on a site is to add more content, not hire someone to add additional pages from another source to point to your site. Also optimizing your site yourself is often cheaper than hiring an SEO professional to enhance your site with doorway or gateway pages for you. The bottom line here is that adding quality home grown readable content to your site is the best way to increase your search engine popularity and maintain high rankings. Adding doorway and gateway pages is very hit and miss.

Another thing that most people who get doorway or gateway pages done for them don’t realize is how badly they read. As they are written mostly to attract the search engines they are outrageously badly written. The search engines might like them but should a person land on one of these pages they are usually so offended by the greed and hard sell that all the repetitive and boring keywords represent on the page that the actually make the decision not to visit your site!

Tags: Doorway, Gateway, Necessary, Pages

Labour Must Not Cringe From This Puny But Necessary Amendment

The spectacle of the CBI and the Institute of Directors in full war cry is enough to frighten any government. How arrogantly they stamp, rampage and threaten mere elected politicians. Will Labour face them down this time? Here is a real test of Labour’s mettle, or at least of the little mettle they summon up to resist business demands.

The mammoth companies bill lumbering its way through parliament is the longest bill ever introduced. It has taken eight years to devise and been through many DTI ministers under more consultation than any bill ever. It consists almost entirely of things business wants, deregulating and saving companies some £250m. It aims to strengthen shareholders’ powers.

It is so compendious that it is trundling through unreported by most of the media – with one notable exception. The Financial Times all this week has run a loud and intimidating campaign against one clause, with a front-page splash and yesterday’s thundering leader attacking industry minister Margaret Hodge. The subclause they oppose is the only item in this monumental bill that concedes anything to the lobby for stronger corporate social responsibility to protect the environment and communities. It is a weak and puny amendment but better than nothing at all.

The growing influence of the CBI over the once independent-minded and more nuanced Financial Times is sad to behold: now that its former editor Richard Lambert heads the CBI, he seems to not only adopt belligerent CBI narrow-mindedness but to cast the FT under the CBI’s sway too. CBI leaders have just threatened to go over Hodge’s head to Downing Street if they don’t get what they want in a meeting with her on Monday – though of course Downing Street had already agreed this clause: the government is not that out of control. Although Tony Blair gave a facetious reply in the Commons this week, it looks as if he will hold the line against the CBI.

This amendment puts an obligation on directors of public companies to add into their annual business review anything that might be a liability to the company’s profits through danger to its reputation. Directors must list suppliers that might expose the company to risk through social or environmental harm. It is a small step towards transparent reporting of what companies are doing and what is being done in their name by their suppliers and contractors.

At the extreme end, it might oblige supermarkets to reveal contracts with suppliers who are harming their workers by overuse of pesticides. Or gangmasters hiring labour unfairly to pick cockles or dig vegetables. It might reveal child labour making cheap clothes in Asia. It might oblige oil companies to be honest about those protesting at their living conditions in polluted land around oil wells. Closer to home, it might expose big companies that crush weak suppliers by late payment of bills. But that’s optimistic – only things that might affect a company’s performance need be included. However, the ethical-investment market sees it as a way to grow, once investors can see what companies get up to along the supply chain. An ICM poll shows that 90% of the public want companies to be legally obliged to report on their social responsibilities – the CBI has a weak case in arguing that shareholders should be kept in the dark.

However, this clause 423 leaves it entirely up to the company to report what they choose. There will be no set standard, so one company can’t be compared with another. It only includes the 1,300 public companies, leaving out huge private companies such as Virgin or subsidiaries of foreign companies such as Wal-mart-owned Asda. There is a promise to review it in two years, with a threat of mandatory rules if companies fail to report much voluntarily.

Campaigners for greater openness are the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (Core) and the Trade Justice Movement, with over 130 organisations and 9 million members. Jon Trickett had 50 MPs’ signatures on his amendment, enough to push it through the Commons.

Here is the background – and it’s a sorry tale, reflecting badly on the chancellor. The original plan was for all public companies to produce an operating and financial review (OFR) – a much stronger statement to shareholders about anything in their business environment that might affect profits. Hammered out over many years, it was due to come in this year with agreed set standards on what companies must report. But out of the blue the chancellor suddenly told the CBI conference that it was to be scrapped. He tore up years of negotiated agreement on a whim, consulting no one, which appalled those who had forged the agreement, such as Business in the Community.

Now the CBI complains that there was no consultation on this new clause – yet this is only a weaker version of the OFR it was already prepared for. The CBI’s new worries that it means revealing commercial secrets or giving details to animal rights activists have all been rebutted.

Since the Enron and WorldCom collapse, America’s new Sarbanes-Oxley law put heavy regulations on chief executives to sign stringent audits telling shareholders anything that might put the company at risk. Indeed Ed Balls was boasting this week that US start-ups now prefer to register companies with the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM) because of its “lighter touch” regulation. But is that the right way to go? The winners in global business may be those that are completely transparent, where no bad practice in unseen supply chains can put brand reputations at risk.

Will the government buckle at the knees? Margaret Hodge is standing firm. This should be a good place for Labour to pitch its tent. Where is David Cameron? Despite his promise to “stand up to big business when it’s in the interests of Britain and the world”, on this bill he led his party into the anti-corporate social responsibility lobby, of course. Though yesterday he was again telling businessmen, “We need social responsibility”.

Both parties woo business, but Labour always has to cringe the extra mile. At the next budget many expect the chancellor to cut corporation tax again to keep in line with competitor countries that have lowered theirs. But don’t expect the CBI and IoD to change their tune towards Labour, or to praise Labour’s 40-year high in UK company profitability. No, they will continue to pretend Labour is bad for business despite all the evidence to the contrary: political tribalism overrides economics.

But imagine a government that dared stand up to them. On behalf of shareholders, simple questions should be put: why do directors pay themselves obscene sums, a 28% rise in the boardrooms this year, all of it stolen from citizens’ pension funds and Peps? Why does that culture of greed assume they should travel business class? What makes them think they deserve to live in an insulated VIP-lounge social class of their own, on other people’s money? No party dare ask these questions – though on the day when MPs’ relatively modest expenses come under the magnifying glass, why not? Everything politicians do is monitored while the business kleptocracy goes largely unchallenged.

This one small clause will only shed a flicker of light on some of the behaviour of public companies. The good will prosper, the bad may risk exposure. Investors’ right to know is a principle that Labour should have stuck with in the OFR; failing that, Hodge’s second best is better than nothing.

Tags: Amendment, Cringe, From, Labour, Must, Necessary, Puny, This

For Sbir Proposals, Is It Necessary To Have A Functional Company With Infrastructure Or Registration Is Enough

Currently, we have registered the company but have no infrastructure or actual operations since we have been seeking the seed capital to start the operations.
We are planning to submit a grant proposal for SBIR funding. Our question is, for SBIR proposals, is it necessary to have already a functional company with infrastructure or mere registration will be enough while submitting the grant proposal?
Your thoughts/advice/comments will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Ron, N.

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what you need is to list equipment and faciliies.
you can get into a incubator,
or team with a university, or other company.
show the ability to get the job done.
becareful how you word things.
dont say “have no infrastructure or actual operations”

Tags: Company, Enough, Functional, Infrastructure, Necessary, Proposals, Registration, SBIR