THREE BUSINESSES THAT ARE FLOURISHING

It seems like no businesses are flourishing in this economy, but this particular type of business is surprisingly doing well, especially at this time of year! With the combination of New Year’s resolution and the increasing health awareness of the nation, fitness businesses are booming! Learn about 3 particular franchises which have found success here!

Entrepreneur highlights…

Anytime Fitness

Headquarters: Hastings, Minn.
Year it began franchising: 2002
Number of franchises: 1,764
Startup costs: $46,000 to $321,000

Anytime Fitness is the 800-pound gorilla (all muscle of course) of fitness franchises. Even in the face of the recession this 24/7 concept has opened roughly 300 clubs a year and is now on pace to open its 2,000th location in 2012. At the same time new clubs are opening, per-club membership has steadily increased. In 2007, the typical club had 650 members; in 2011 it was 740. Thanks to state-of-the art technology, the clubs needn’t be staffed around the clock. As a result, payroll represents just 10% of operating costs. Virtually no market is too small. The Anytime Fitness Express model, for example, is designed for clubs under 2,500 square feet and in markets with fewer than 5,000 residents.

Planet Fitness

Headquarters: Dover, N.H.
Year it began franchising: 2003
Number of franchises: 473
Startup costs: $1.2 million to $1.7 million

Average monthly membership fees of just $15 and a “no grunting or weight throwing” policy have helped Planet Fitness capture a growing share of clients looking to be fit and frugal. In 2011, membership in the no-frills, no-attitude gym increased a whopping 30% to 3 million. For franchisors that kind of volume translates into average annual membership revenue of $1.7 million per club versus about $1.2 million for the industry average. Meanwhile, average payroll expenses of 28% are quite a bit leaner than the industry’s average of 43%. The higher start-up costs are attributed to considerably larger gyms, which range from 17,000 to 25,000 square feet and can have 80 to 100 pieces of cardio equipment and two full circuits of strength equipment.

Koko FitClub

Headquarters: Rockland, Mass.
Year it began franchising: 2008
Number of franchises: 58
Startup costs: $143,000 to $258,000

Rather than pay $50 or more an hour for a personal trainer, members of Koko FitClub get coached by a virtual fitness guru using the company’s patented “Smartraining” system. For a $59 monthly fee, members gain access to the club and receive a USB drive that contains information about who they are and what they did during their last workout. When they plug the device into any of the club’s cardio or strength machines, they get personalized instructions on how long and how intensely they should work out, and can track their progress online. (Turns out, technology might just improve how we work out.) With nearly 250 franchises sold, Koko FitClubs expects to have 120 clubs open and operating by mid-2012.

Get more information at Entrepreneur!

FIVE TIPS FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

When we go to a party, we love to have someone show us around and introduce us to guests.  So when the party is a social media platform, a newcomer would certainly dream of a host to make a platform feel more like home.

The perfect gracious host may be Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan).  At least that’s the premise of his terrific book, Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.  This book is the first one to provide a primer for Google’s new platform.  It’s a needed tonic. Reportedly driven by Android sales according to Business Insider, Google+ now has 62 million users.

Chris Brogan is no stranger to social media advocates. Brogan co-authored the New York Times bestseller Trust Agents and wrote Social Media 101, which was reviewed here onSmall Business Trends. He has a Top 5 Advertising Age Power150 blog, Chris Brogan, and is a featured Entrepreneur magazine columnist.  I learned about this book while checking out publisher Que’s book list and requested a review copy.

Agreement of material and writer enhances instruction to grow Google+

The book’s structure is an interesting mix of product timing and author experience that works as the “baby-bear’s porridge” of information many small businesses seek – not too large, not necessarily shallow.  Google+ is less than a year old, but Brogan’s writing style can make social media newcomers feel the access to the material.

Brogan’s established perspective contributes value to Google+ for Business, avoiding a huge problem I have seen in a few Facebook guides. Many books, regardless of being phone-book thick or car-owner’s-manual thin, are so bloated with Facebook features descriptions that tactical or strategic recommendations are flat-out overlooked.  Add Facebook changes into the mix, and it can become a second job to infuse new material into your business plans.

However, Brogan’s choice to cover a nascent Google+ with his insights makes one awesome, just-right porridge.  The usages for Google+ is explained with enough flexibility to fit within your organizational structure.

The first three chapters documents why Google+ is essential, while Chapter Four lays out first steps. This is where you’d want to start if you generally understand Google+ already.

The three chapters dedicated to Google+ features are:

• Chapter 5 – circles, the grouping convention in Google+
• Chapter 6 – streaming posts
• Chapter 12 – business Pages

Most of the other chapters provide corporate examples and solid organizational tips.  Chapter 7 may be the most broadly applicable, as it focuses on content.  But Brogan wisely differs from the “content is king” mantra by covering ideas by business type.  He is spot on when he suggest to online store owners to “post profiles and interviews with the owners” as well as to tell writers, photographers, and artists to “start a Hangout.”

Insights made for Hangouts and Circles

Brogan ensures that his revealed experience and tips are tailored to the Google+ environment so that you appreciate the reasons for the recommendation.  Take for example how he notes a key difference with Twitter against managing a Google+ circle.

“On Google+, different than Twitter, I decided not to follow everyone back who adds me. The reason is that the more people I add, the harder it is to manage the stream of information I choose to consume.  You’ll come to your own opinions, and you’ll likely change them a few times.”

This is pretty basic but works well if the reader is starting to differentiate social media platforms.  Brogan goes on to note some cool circle label ideas for a beginner – Local, Thinkers, Competitors, Vendors, Personal Passion, and so forth. And while content suggestions may sound straightforward, they do play into the benefits of the Hangout and Circles features. Brogan get an A for the homework he has done for Google+ for Business.

Shirdi Sai Baba's gigantic statue attracts devotees in Machlipatnam - Tv9

How the world is controlled by effective communication in 20th century

The following would show you the importance of writing essays (communication) than knowing maths;

more importantly this would  give an idea how the world is controlled by effective communication in 20^th century.

 Arithmetic test, 1960s: A logger cuts and sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost of production is four-faiths of that amount. What is his profit?

New Maths test, 1970s: A Logger exchange a set of timber (T) for a set of money (M). The cardinality of Set M is 100. The Set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What cardinality of Set P is profits?

Dumped-down test, 1980s: A Logger cuts and sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost is $80; his profit is $20. Find and circle the number 20.

New age test, 1990s: A Logger cut down a beautiful forest of 100 trees in order to make a $20 profit. Write an essay explaining how you feel about this as a way to make money.

Nanotech Goes Big

At a small factory in Concord, New Hampshire, workers at the startup Nanocomp Technologies are turning carbon nanotubes into paper-thin sheets many meters long. The nanotubes, which are each just a few billionths of a meter wide, are among the strongest and most conductive materials known. For decades researchers have dreamed of using them to make super-efficient electrical transmission lines, suspension bridges that can span several kilometers, and even elevators that convey satellites into space. But while some companies have succeeded in making useful products by mixing nanotubes with resins to create composites, it's been difficult to make materials with properties that reflect those of the individual nanotubes. By making large sheets composed of nanotubes alone, Nanocomp has taken a big step in that direction.

The sheets are still not as strong or conductive as individual nanotubes, but they can provide a lighter replacement for copper and other conventional materials in some applications, including protective shielding for coaxial cables. Nanocomp's first customers are NASA, which has used nanotube sheets to shield a deep-space probe from radiation, and the U.S. military, which could use the sheets to reduce the weight of the electrical cables on unmanned drones by half, increasing flight times.

Nanotubes are made by feeding alcohol and a catalyst into a furnace at high temperatures and pressures. Nanocomp has fine-tuned the process to produce relatively long nanotubes that emerge from the furnace to form networks that can serve as the basis for sheets. Practical large-scale manufacturing is the critical first step to futuristic applications, says John Dorr, the company's vice president of business development. That will get nanotube products out of the lab and to the market at competitive prices.

Revenge of the Electric Car

The Nissan Leaf is the first all-electric car to try to connect to a mass market. Now Nissan is betting on a U.S. factory that can turn out 150,000 cars a year.

• By Mahendra Ramsinghani

Audio »

Fully electric: The Nissan Leaf is powered by lithium-ion batteries. The battery pack is shown in the lower image, where the front of the car faces right. The car's electric motor is attached to the front axle.
Nissan

See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Connected Vehicle.

When General Motors cancelled its EV1 electric car in 2003, some called it a technology tragedy. The cars, which could travel around 60 miles on a single charge of their lead-acid batteries, were taken off the roads and crushed. Protesters staged a mock funeral; others accused GM of failing intentionally. While GM never revealed the actual cost of building an EV1 (the vehicles were only leased, not sold), the company had invested $1.5 billion in the project. But it declared the car an economic failure with no chance of reaching a mass market.
Seven years later, in December of 2010, Japan's Nissan launched the Leaf, a four-door all-electric sedan. The range of the Leaf isn't much better than that of the EV1—100 miles, according to Nissan (but closer to 70 miles in government tests). The major difference this time around is that the Leaf has a definite price tag: $35,200.
That's not cheap. But Nissan thinks the Leaf is the first electric car that will appeal to a mass market. The company says it was able to lower the cost because of improvements in battery technology (it uses more potent lithium-ion batteries) and because it decided to build the batteries itself. In 2012, it plans to open a manufacturing facility in Smyrna, Tennessee, that will be able to turn out 200,000 battery packs—and 150,000 cars—a year.
So far, Nissan has sold about 21,000 Leafs globally, including 9,700 in the U.S. As part of the marketing effort, the company is tracking the cars closely. With the driver's permission, the Leaf's navigation system transmits driving data back to Nissan, where it is studied to see how far people drive and how well the batteries perform. And the car is connected in other ways: the navigation system displays a live list of nearby charging stations, and it sends text messages reminding drivers to charge their cars.

Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan America, told Mahendra Ramsinghani why he thinks "electrification" will spread across the transportation sector.
TR: Let's start with innovation and the electric car. What does the marketplace demand in such a vehicle? Affordability? Driving range per charge?
Perry: First off, from an innovation standpoint the Nissan Leaf represents the world's first mass-produced, mass-market, affordable electric vehicle. As you know, the Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid; the Leaf is a pure battery electric car with zero emissions [from the car itself]. Nobody's done a mass-market electric vehicle before. And second, nobody's done it at an affordable price point.
The range is a marketing challenge, not necessarily a technical challenge. Consider that 72 percent of the population drives less than 40 miles a day. So a car like the Leaf, which has 100 miles of range, more than satisfies people's daily driving habits. To meet the affordability target is important—certainly you can add more [battery] cells, more modules, [and extend the range]—but that leads to more cost, a bigger body, and then you're at $50,000 not $35,000. And now you've just killed your affordability goal.
We made a real car that people can use as their primary vehicle—you've got room for five adults, enough range for their driving habits, and the affordability. All three of them mean mass market.
What was the tipping point from the product development standpoint?
We had a breakthrough in battery design back in 2003 that allowed us to get twice the energy out of a pack half the size and weight and that cost significantly less. And once we had that breakthrough, then we were able to see a path to that affordability target. That was the biggest hurdle. Certainly you can do a project with 500 vehicles or 1,000 vehicles—a little pilot or test. That's not that hard to do. But to set out to build 150,000 vehicles a year—that's a whole different game.
Talk about some of the bottlenecks in the development of a product like this. What kept your team up at night?
What led to some sleepless nights was the decision to vertically integrate the power-train components—the battery, the electric motor, the major components that power the vehicle. One way to do it is to go to a supplier network and try to piece together a kind of jigsaw puzzle with components from supplier A and supplier B. We made the decision early on to build a unique platform totally designed to be an EV, not a conversion of anything else in the lineup. We have a complete assembly line in Osaka, Japan, built up from scratch, especially for the electric motor. The battery construction is done in a clean room—that's also new for an automotive factory.
We're now re-creating all that here in the United States, in Tennessee. It will be the world's largest battery assembly plant—our engine plant will actually be winding away electric motors this time next year. And at full capacity it'll be capable of putting out 200,000 battery packs a year.

How did the Leaf push innovation in other areas besides the battery?
The interiors. We wanted to bring a pure zero-emission vehicle to market, but we wanted to go beyond just the zero-emission story. So the fabrics, the materials, carpet, headliner, parts of the instrument panel—basically all the fabrics that you see inside the vehicle are made out of recycled water bottles. This was first in the industry. Recycled materials had been used in carpeting for homes and businesses, but never within the automotive sector.
Critics might argue that we're shifting our dependence from oil onto lithium—another natural resource that may eventually become scarce.
An electric vehicle, when you compare emissions, is 60 percent cleaner than a gasoline-powered car. That's even including the worst-case scenario when the EV is charged 100 percent by coal-fired electricity. And lithium doesn't burn and dissipate when you charge and discharge it. So any lithium that we actually mine and place in batteries is completely recoverable and reusable, unlike something that combusts and goes up into the atmosphere never to be used again. And our pack has no hazardous materials, no rare metals. It's basically lithium, manganese, and graphite.
I could forget to charge my car on some nights, couldn't I?
We don't forget to charge our cell phones. And the car is smart enough to send you a text or an e-mail reminder.
Are there other ways an electric vehicle means drivers are more connected to the car via their phones or the Internet?
On its own, an electric motor does not necessarily mean you are more connected. But the potential to connect to a smart [electrical] grid or smart charging infrastructure gives a plug-in vehicle more "connectiveness" than a gasoline car. The ability to remotely check the state of charge is a given. There is no need to walk up to the car. You can also turn on the pre-heat and pre-cool from your phone while it's plugged in at a charging station. And soon, we will have the ability to reserve charging locations or see if such a station is occupied before arriving.
Nissan is able to gather data from Leaf drivers. How do you intend to mine this data, and what are you learning?
We have 15 million miles logged in, but it's still early. We have collected rich data on battery performance, vehicle use patterns, actual driving profiles, charging behavior. All of it can be used to improve future designs, plus establish solid "norms" to measure against. For instance, we know the average trip is 37 miles for most consumers, well within the recharge range.
Where do we go from here?
Electrification now is no longer an "if," it's a "when." Electrification is a broad definition that includes pure EVs, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles. In order for us to achieve the new 2025 miles-per-gallon targets [passenger fleets will have to average 54.5 mpg], electrification will become far more pervasive across all manufacturers and power trains. Internal-combustion engines are reaching their limit. Electrification is going to spread across the transportation sector.
So when will that happen? Is it when the utility companies step in and build the charging stations? Government mandates?
To achieve mass-market acceptance beyond early adopters, we need to have multiple competitors with multiple vehicle types for consumer choice, availability in all 50 states and in major metro areas, a rich and diverse charging infrastructure concentrated in key population centers, and ability to travel between population centers using quick charging. I think we are five to seven years away from that.

Cleaner, Cheaper Liquid Fuel from Coal

Hot injector: This injector simultaneously blasts methane preheated to 600°C, and coal, into a gasification reactor, thereby enabling CO2-free production of synthetic fuel.
SRI International

Energy

A new conversion process promises zero carbon emissions during production—but some question whether it will scale.

• Friday, January 6, 2012
• By Peter Fairley

Audio »

SRI International is developing a process that combines coal and natural gas to produce liquid transportation fuels that are substantially cleaner and cheaper to make than existing synthetic fuels.
SRI claims its process addresses three liabilities that have slowed the commercialization of the technology. By blending some natural gas into the conventional coal-to-liquids (CTL) process, the private research lab, based in Menlo Park, California, claims to have eliminated CTL's carbon footprint, slashed water consumption by over 70 percent, and more than halved its capital cost.
Chan Park, a gasification and synthetic fuels expert at the University of California, Riverside's Center for Environmental Research & Technology, cautions that SRI's work is at an early stage. But Park says the process "could be really exciting" as a domestic alternative to petroleum fuel in coal and gas-rich countries such as the U.S.—if it can be demonstrated at pilot scale.
SRI's process is the fruit of a 2008 solicitation by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seeking a cheap, carbon-free CTL process for producing jet fuel. DARPA awarded SRI $1,612,905 to pursue a novel concept: using methane from natural gas as a hydrogen source instead of water in a new CTL process.

Conventional CTL plants blend pure oxygen, steam, and coal at high temperatures and pressures, generating carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas that can be catalytically combined to synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The gasification also generates carbon dioxide, partly from the combustion of some coal with the pure oxygen, and partly through undesirable reactions between water and carbon.
In SRI's process, methane preheated to 600 °C displaces much of the water required, thus reducing the unwanted reaction with the coal. The methane also reduces the amount of heat absorbed by the gasification process, eliminating the need for oxygen and combustion to maintain the 1,400 to 1,500 °C temperatures the process requires. As a result SRI says it can eliminate the use of oxygen-fired combustion that the process requires, making do with zero-carbon renewable or nuclear power instead.
Skipping oxygen not only eliminates a source of carbon dioxide, but contributes substantial cost savings by eliminating the need for an oxygen plant. Further savings are achieved through more efficient fuel synthesis.

SRI estimates that its zero-carbon process will generate jet fuel for $2.82 per gallon, which is under DARPA's $3 target. SRI's projected capital cost for a 100,000 barrel/day plant—$3.2 billion—is well below the $6 billion cost of a CTL plant, but still well above DARPA's $1.5 billion target.
Park says SRI needs to prove its process beyond its "bench-scale" demonstrations in order to provide such cost estimates with any degree of certainty. Based on experience with his own oxygen-less gasification scheme—which is being developed for waste-to-energy plants by Riverside-based spinoff Viresco Energy—Park is skeptical that electrical heating will prove feasible at larger scale.                     
Eric Larson, a research engineer with Princeton University's Energy Systems Analysis Group, says SRI's zero-carbon process could prove to be "technically doable" and still suffer from a critical flaw: producing a carbon-based fuel that will release carbon dioxide when it is burned. "On a life-cycle basis, the fuel is no better than petroleum fuel on greenhouse-gas emissions," says Larson.

"Tectonic Shifts" in Employment

Information technology is reducing the need for certain jobs faster than new ones are being created.

• By David Talbot

A job to do: Much as the Luddites feared mechanical looms 200 years ago, today’s middle-class workers have reason to worry that information technology erodes their employment prospects. Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy

Things Reviewed:Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution 
Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
October 2011

“The Growth of Low Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the U.S. Labor Market"
David Autor and David Dorn
June 2011

Audio »

The United States faces a protracted unemployment crisis: 6.3 million fewer Americans have jobs than was true at the end of 2007. And yet the country's economic output is higher today than it was before the financial crisis. Where did the jobs go? Several factors, including outsourcing, help explain the state of the labor market, but fast-advancing, IT-driven automation might be playing the biggest role.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people have feared that new technologies would permanently erode employment. Over and over again, these dislocations of labor have been temporary: technologies that made some jobs obsolete eventually led to new kinds of work, raising productivity and prosperity with no overall negative effect on employment.
There's nothing to suggest that this dynamic no longer operates, but new research is showing that advances in workplace automation are being deployed at a faster pace than ever, making it more difficult for workers to adapt and wreaking havoc on the middle class: the clerks, accountants, and production-line workers whose tasks can increasingly be mastered by software and robots. "Do I think we will have permanently high unemployment as a consequence of technology? No," says Peter Diamond, the MIT economist who won a 2010 Nobel Prize for his work on market imperfections, including those that affect employment. "What's different now is that the nature of jobs going away has changed. Communication and computer abilities mean that the type of jobs affected have moved up the income distribution."
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee study information-­supercharged workplaces and the innovations and productivity advances they continually create. Now they have turned their sights to how these IT-driven improvements affect employment. In their new book, ­Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and McAfee, its principal research scientist, see a paradox in the first decade of the 2000s. Even before the economic downturn caused U.S. unemployment to rise from 4.4 percent in May 2007 to 10.1 percent in October 2009, a disturbing trend was visible. From 2000 to 2007, GDP and productivity rose faster than they had in any decade since the 1960s, but employment growth was comparatively tepid.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit that more work was being done by, or with help from, machines. For example, Amazon.com reduced the need for retail staffers; computerized kiosks in hotels and airports replaced clerks; voice-recognition and speech systems replaced customer support staff and operators; and businesses of all kinds took advantage of tools such as enterprise resource planning software. "A classically trained economist would say: 'This just means there's a big adjustment taking place until we find the new equilibrium—the new stuff for people to do,' " says McAfee.
We've certainly made such adjustments before. But whereas agricultural advances played out over a century and electrification and factory automation rolled out over decades, the power of some information technologies is essentially doubling every two years or so as a consequence of Moore's Law. It took some time for IT to fully replace the paper-driven workflows in cubicles, management suites, and retail stores. (In the 1980s and early 1990s productivity grew slowly, and then it took off after 1996; some economists explained that IT was finally being used effectively.) But now, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, the efficiencies and automation opportunities made possible by IT are advancing too fast for the labor market to keep up.
More evidence that technology has reduced the number of good jobs can be found in a working paper by David Autor, an economist at MIT, and David Dorn, an economist at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Madrid. They too point to the crucial years of 2000–2005. Job growth happened mainly at the ends of the spectrum: in lower-paying positions, in areas such as personal care, cleaning services, and security, and in higher-end professional positions for technicians, managers, and the like. For laborers, administrative assistants, production workers, and sales representatives, the job market didn't grow as fast—or even shrank. Subsequent research showed that things got worse after 2007. During the recession, nearly all the nation's job losses were in those middle categories—the positions easiest to replace, fully or in part, by technology.
Brynjolfsson says the trends are "troubling." And they are global; some of the jobs that IT threatens, for example, are at electronics factories in China and transcription services in India. "This is not about replacing all work, but rather about tectonic shifts that have left millions much worse off and others much better off," he says. While he doesn't believe the problem is permanent, that's of little solace to the millions out of work now, and they may not be paid at their old rates even when they do find new jobs. "Over the longer term, they will develop new skills, or entrepreneurs will figure out ways of making use of their skills, or wages will drop, or all three of those things will happen," he says. "But in the short run, your old set of skills that created a lot of value are not useful anymore."
This means there's a risk, unless the economy generates new high-quality jobs, that the people in the middle will face the prospect of menial jobs—whose wages will actually decline as more people compete for them. "Theory says the labor market will 'clear.' There are always things for people to do," Autor says. "But it doesn't say at what price." And even as it gets crowded and potentially even less rewarding at the bottom, employees at the top are getting paid more, thanks to the multiplier effects of technology. Some 60 percent of the income growth in the United States between 2002 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of Americans—the bulk of whom are executives whose companies are getting richer by using IT to become more efficient, Brynjolfsson and McAfee point out.
Dramatic shifts have happened before. In 1800, 90 percent of Americans were employed in agriculture. The figure was down to 41 percent by 1900 and stands at 2 percent today. People work, instead, in new industries that were unimaginable in the early 19th century. Such a transformation could happen again. Today's information technologies, even as they may do short-term harm to some kinds of employees, are clearly a boon to entrepreneurs, who now have cheaper and more powerful tools at their disposal than at any other time in history. As jobs are lost, Brynjolfsson says, "we will be running an experiment on the economy to see if entrepreneurs invent new ways to be productive equally quickly." As examples, he points to eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which together allow hundreds of thousands of people to make their living hawking items to customers around the world.
The problem, he says, is that not enough people are sufficiently educated or technologically savvy to exploit such rapid advances and develop as-yet-unimagined entrepreneurial niches. He and McAfee conclude their book by arguing that the same technologies now making industry far more productive should be applied to updating and improving the educational system. (In one promising example they cite, 58,000 people went online to take an artificial-intelligence class offered by Stanford University.)
IT-based entrepreneurship isn't the only potential technological driver of new jobs. Revitalizing manufacturing (see "Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?") could also help. But automation has made manufacturing far less labor intensive, so even a manufacturing revival is not likely to mean a great many new jobs on balance. Likewise, anyone whose hopes are pinned on "green jobs" may be disappointed. Though jobs will be created in the switch to cleaner energy sources, jobs tied to traditional energy will be lost in the same process. Many economists are not certain what the net effect will be. And in any case, these days manufacturing and energy account for small slices of the U.S. economy, which is now driven much more by the service sector. That's why fast-advancing information technologies, with their pervasive reach and their potential to create new services and satisfy new niche markets, may be a better bet for job creation—though the tumult IT is causing in the labor market isn't necessarily going to resolve itself quickly.
Peter Diamond says that one of the most important things the government can do for employment is to take care of basics, like infrastructure and education. "As long as we have so many idle resources, this is the time when it's advantageous—and socially less expensive—to engage in public investment," he says. Eventually, he believes, the economy will adapt and things will work out, once again. "Jobs have been changing and moving around—within the country, out of the country—for a very long time," he says. "There will be other kinds of jobs that still require people." 
David Talbot is TR's chief correspondent.

Binding In Love

“Mother Yashoda wanted to bind Krishna not in order to chastise Him but because she thought that the child was so restless that He might leave the house in fear. That would be another disturbance. Therefore, because of full affection, to stop Krishna from leaving the house, she wanted to bind Him with rope.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Shrimad Bhagavatam, 10.9.12) To an onlooker, binding a child with a rope seems like a cruel type of punishment. No matter what they have done, how horrible a crime they may have committed, a child is a child after all. What can they really do? In this particular instance, the young child’s offense was that He broke a pot filled with butter that had been churned through hard labor. Did He break it out of spite? Did He want to rile up His mother? Was He after a dastardly thrill or schadenfreude, wherein He would delight in the misery of others? No. He was protesting the fact that His mother had abruptly arisen to tend to a boiling pot in the kitchen while she was feeding Him. To show that His attachment to her was real, that He loved her more than any son can love a mother, He responded by breaking the pot she had worked so hard to fill with butter, knowing that she wouldn’t like this. The sweet, young mother, returning to the scene saw what her child had done. Though a youngster, Krishna was wise enough to know that He shouldn’t have done what He did. Therefore His act was certainly done on purpose. In addition, He fled the scene, as He was nowhere to be found. If He had broken the pot accidentally, there would have been no reason to leave. If He knew that what He did wasn’t wrong, why would He have left? In the end, His childish nature would trump His discrimination. Since He stepped in the butter, His footprints made while fleeing the scene gave away His location. Those sacred marks made of butter created the path that led to the cherished delight of Vrindavana   , whom the entire world is searching after. Why is everyone searching for Krishna specifically? Is not every person endowed with a penchant for loving service from the time of their very birth? Do we not seek pleasure? Is not that pursuit at the root of every act? To find pleasure, one needs a corresponding source that never exhausts in distributing enjoyment. As Krishna is the source of the material and spiritual energies, the sumptuous delights He provides through His presence bring the soul the happiness that it desires. Mother Yashoda was shown the way towards this treasure house of joy by the footprints He left. Even when separated from Him, she could remember His sweet form, His muffled, childish speech, and the amazing feats of bravery and heroism He had previously shown. Though this child was in a small form and exhibited all the signs of childhood, He had a seemingly magical influence on some of the most nefarious elements. There was the enchanting witch Putana who had come to Vrindavana in the guise of a beautiful woman. Looking like a nurse, she walked into Krishna’s room and prepared to feed Him milk from her breast, which was smeared with poison. Somehow that Krishna sucked the very life out of the woman, to the point that her original, hideous form revealed itself upon her death. There were other such miraculous events, which Mother Yashoda immortalized by describing them in song. It was while she was singing these songs that young Krishna approached her to be fed. Stopping her churning of butter, the kind mother cherished the vision of her son enjoying her company. Her brief stop in the kitchen was to prevent the milk from boiling over, but she knew that she would soon return to her son. What she didn’t expect was for Him to throw a tantrum and make Himself worthy of punishment. What kind of mother would she be if she let this slide? A guardian is meant to guard, which involves preventing the child from doing things that are harmful. Destroying other people’s property on purpose is an act that brings negative consequences in the future. There is the effect on karma, which is the system managing fairness. We know that if we don’t take a shower in the morning, we will emit a foul odor for the rest of the day. Since we spend time with ourselves throughout the day, we may not notice the smell after a while, but others will. Regardless of what we think of the odor, the act of skipping bathing led to an undesirable consequence in the future. There are other consequences that aren’t as easy to decipher. The reactions from stealing provide an indication of this. If I take something that doesn’t belong to me and don’t get seen by anyone else, I may think that I can get away with it. At the same time though, someone else may steal from me in the future. When that happens, I may bemoan my plight and wonder how such a horrible thing could have happened, but in reality it was just the negative reaction from my karma bearing fruit. The good parent molds their child’s behavior in such a way that they stick to prescribed duties, those which are outlined in a system of dharma. A defining characteristic is the definition of dharma, and when applied to the soul, which is the identifying agent within any life form, the term extends to incorporate the set of rules and regulations aimed at releasing the defining characteristic, bringing it to its most active state. The aim of human life is to achieve the constitutional state by following dharma, which never changes. Our essential characteristic may be hidden from time to time, but it can never be removed. Hence religion    in the Vedic tradition is known assanatana-dharma. Mother Yashoda chased after the culprit Krishna with a whipping stick in her hand. Finally catching Him, she noticed that He was starting to cry tears of contrition. He knew that what He did was wrong, so He admitted His guilt and sorrow through His tears. She noticed that He was showing signs of fear due to the presence of the stick, so she immediately tossed it aside. Thinking that He may run away in fear, the blessed mother decided to tie young Krishna to a mortar. Little did she know that this famous act would earn her son, who has glorious features unlimited in their brilliance, a new name: Damodara. That sweet form of Krishna bound to a mortar is celebrated annually in the month of Kartika through the offering of a light. In the same way that Yashoda bound Krishna to keep Him within her sight, the Supreme Lord binds the sincere devotees    with His enchanting vision, which ensures that they won’t look for transcendental pleasure anywhere else. Why does He not grant this vision to others? If deep down someone is intent on searching for rotten food amidst garbage, what can be done to stop their pursuit? The pure hearted souls, on the other hand, try their best to remain with Krishna, for they know that He is deserving of their attention and that such a practice will benefit them in the future. Sincerity thus forms the determining factor in one’s success in spiritual pursuits. One who regularly chants, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare   ”, increases the likelihood of remembering the Lord at the time of death. The purpose of human life is to remember Narayana [another name for Krishna] while quitting the body. That remembrance will bring the best destination in the next life, for the spirit soul never dies. Indeed, a lifetime is but a demarcation of time, a way to conceptualize the duration of time a spirit soul spends within a particular form of body. With sincerity in the practice of bhakti-yoga, remembrance of God becomes almost second nature. For example, say you’re driving to work on a typical morning when all of a sudden you hear what sounds like a large truck nearby. The sound is foreign because the highway you’re travelling on doesn’t allow trucks. You’re also in the left-lane of the highway, which means that the only cars to your left side - the side where the sound is coming from - are those travelling in the opposite direction. Despite the fact that you can’t see the truck anywhere, the sound seems to get louder and louder. You’re travelling at an average highway speed, so you know that getting close to a truck is not a good thing. In a split second, the sound gets so loud that you start to panic. So stunned that you feel like you’re heart just jolted out of your chest, you unknowingly start chanting the holy names of the Lord. It turns out that the truck sound was actually an airplane flying directly above your car. The part of the highway you just passed through was situated right next to an airport, which frequently has planes landing and taking off from that spot. Though the situation wasn’t that dangerous, the minor scare makes you feel comforted knowing that in a time of distress, the holy name was right there to be held on to for safety. Such good fortune comes only through sincerity, for Krishna stays with anyone who wants His association. Mother Yashoda felt that security when she bound her son, using the pretense of a punishment to keep the elusive Supreme Lord within her sights. The same Krishna can’t be caught by the faithless or those who don’t know of His personal features. Therefore texts like the Shrimad Bhagavatam   , Bhagavad-gita   , and the preachers who teach the glories found within these works try to evoke a sincere dedication to bhakti-yoga in as many people as possible. That dedication brings Krishna’s association and His promise to bind you in a net of transcendental love, one from which happily you can never break free. In Closing: Using a rope and a mortar her son would stay, Though in fear, He could not thus run away. He broke pot of butter so He needed to be punished, But seeing His tears mother’s use of stick finished. Paths of yoga without devotion with difficulty fraught, Not without divine love can Shri Krishna be caught. Best practice is to make remembrance of God automatic, That’s why in teaching bhakti Vaishnavas so emphatic. In Yashoda’s courtyard reservoir of pleasure found, Shri Damodara, who with ropes of affection is bound.

Three Benefits of Windows 8 Storage Spaces

By Joseph Fieber, PCWorld

Small and midsize businesses often can’t afford file servers, and struggle with the best way to provide their users with enough space to store data and keep it safe from hardware failure. Windows 8's new feature called Storage Spaces has three benefits: bringing the safety of RAID to the desktop, creating an expanding space to store files, and providing these features at lower cost than other hardware options.

1. Expandable SpaceHow much disk space do you need, and how reliable is it? Storage Spaces addresses the problem that matter how much space you buy, odds are good that you’ll fill it. Disk space is cheap, and USB drives are easy. This generally results in an assortment of variously sized USB drives attached to your computer, requiring numerous drive letters you need to spread your data across. If you want disk space that's protected against hardware failure, mirroring two disks requires they be identically sized or else you lose the extra capacity of the larger disk. For a level-5 RAID, that strips data across more than two disks, and you lose the capacity of each disk larger than the smallest in the RAID.

To avoid the hassle of having multiple drive letters to store your data on, StorageSpaces allows you to create a virtual drive that you can expand when needed. It behaves much like avirtualmachine, where you can create a disk that pretends to be 100GB in size, but initially may take up only 10GB of real space on your hard drive. As you add data to the virtual disk, the size of the real file grows as needed. Using thinprovisioning, which gives the appearance of more space than actually exists, Storage Spaces can do the same thing, allowing you to create a storage pool in which multiple Spaces can exist that use the space they need, as they need it. If the Space you created fills the maximum size you initially set, you can even reset it to a larger size, resulting in the equivalent of a bottomless disk.

2. Protected Space

Multiple disks can be combined into a pool that can then be used by multiple Spaces. (Credit: Microsoft)Making a bunch of disks look like one is handy, but could be dangerous if one of them should fail. Storage Spaces incorporates RAID technology to provide protection, ensuring that at least one copy of all your data is available, even in the event of a hardware failure. Windows 8 isn’t the first to offer software RAID, as Windows 7, XP and even 2000 included this capability. The difference is that the older versions required a static, predefined assignment of disks, whereas Storage Spaces allows you to dynamically add disks of varying sizes to grow the storage pool while still retaining redundancy of your data.

3. Cheaper Space

What Storage Spaces offers isn’t new, Data Robotics provides a hardware RAID system calledDrobo that offers the same benefits, and other vendors have similar offerings. Unfortunately, these can costs hundreds of dollars for the base device, require specific types of disks, and are limited in expandability to the number of slots in the device. Windows 8 Storage Spaces requires no extra hardware--you connect any internal or external disks that you have, and it uses them. This gives a business the flexibility to add space as needed, with an ever-expanding virtual disk that's protected from hardware failure, keeping its data safe.

Virtual machine

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie, software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC).

An operating system can’t tell the difference between a virtual machine and a physical machine, nor can applications or other computers on a network. Even the virtual machine thinks it is a “real” computer. Nevertheless, a virtual machine is composed entirely of software and contains no hardware components whatsoever. As a result, virtual machines offer a number of distinct advantages over physical hardware.

Virtual Machines Benefits

In general, VMware virtual machines possess four key characteristics that benefit the user:

• Compatibility: Virtual machines are compatible with all standard x86 computers
• Isolation: Virtual machines are isolated from each other as if physically separated
• Encapsulation: Virtual machines encapsulate a complete computing environment
• Hardware independence: Virtual machines run independently of underlying hardware

Compatibility

Just like a physical computer, a virtual machine hosts its own guest operating system and applications, and has all the components found in a physical computer (motherboard, VGA card, network card controller, etc). As a result, virtual machines are completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications and device drivers, so you can use a virtual machine to run all the same software that you would run on a physical x86 computer.

Isolation

While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualized system.

Encapsulation

A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or “encapsulates” a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an operating system and all its applications, inside a software package. Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).

Hardware Independence

Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely different from the physical components that are present on the underlying hardware. Virtual machines on the same physical server can even run different kinds of operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).

When coupled with the properties of encapsulation and compatibility, hardware independence gives you the freedom to move a virtual machine from one type of x86 computer to another without making any changes to the device drivers, operating system, or applications. Hardware independence also means that you can run a heterogeneous mixture of operating systems and applications on a single physical computer.

Use Virtual Machines as the Building Blocks of your Virtual Infrastructure

Virtual machines are a fundamental building block of a much larger solution: the virtual infrastructure. While a virtual machine represents the hardware resources of an entire computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the interconnected hardware resources of an entire IT infrastructure—including computers, network devices and shared storage resources. Organizations of all sizes use VMware solutions to build virtual server and desktop infrastructures that improve the availability, security and manageability of mission-critical applications. 

Poker Bots and Virtual Machines

Let's take a moment to discuss virtual machines, from here on out I will refer to them as a VM. A VM is a simple to use software app from a developer such as Microsoft or Sun Systems (just to name a few of the free ones) which creates a hard drive image of an additional computer on your physical machine, thereby giving you a way to create additional PC's for little or no cost. It looks, feels, and acts just like a regular computer....and is basically the best thing since sliced bread. I see so many newcomers make the mistake of buying their Poker Bot license for their main computer....but then what happens? Because you can't move the mouse or use other programs at the same time it will “tie up” your computer. Well, the VM is here to save the day. Most of the Poker Bot operators who are serious about this hobby, use a VM for ther Poker Bot which allows us to use our main machine as always to surf the web, or email, etc. The only restriction of how many VM's you can make depends on the hardware in your physical computer. For example: I have an ancient Toshiba Satellite laptop that only has 512MB of RAM, and single  core processor, so I installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, "found" a copy of Windows XP, and allocated 330MB of RAM to the VM. Even with this cheap setup I can run 4 poker tables in the background thru the VM, and still am able to watch You Tube videos on the main screen. After installing the VM you will be able to connect to your local home network and transfer files back and forth, such as profiles or hand histories. The main reason I use a VM is when I write a new poker bot profile, I can run it and watch it play on the VM, but have my code pulled up on the main machine and make changes "on the fly" without having to remove the Poker Bot from the table and find a new table after I reload the profile. As you become more familiar with using a VM, I am sure you will find other needs that a VM can be used for as well. If you run into problems setting up your VM, there are several helpful threads and members at Poker Bot  forums that can help you achieve success.

Virtual Machines Virtual Machines - Many of you have probably heard of them, and/or even used them . But for those of you who have not, here is a brief description. Virtual Machines, or OS Virtualization, allows heterogeneous operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical hardware. In a very basic form, imagine running Windows XP, Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, and Linux on the same computer at the same time. Each virtualized operating system, or environment, has access to disk drives, memory, video, input devices, and communications devices, all at the same time, on the same system. Before we conclude this article on how virtualization is used to rapidly and securely deploy security toolsets, we will provide you with links to Virtual Machine software you can work with on a trial bases (or purchase) and at least one that is free of cost.

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How We Use Virtual Machines For Various Testing

Although the majority of the work we do is security assessment, we routinely deploy security measures such as perimeter defense, or enterprise firewall solutions. Many times, we are replacing an existing defense system and need to make sure that when we cut-over to the new system, everything will function properly. For instance, when deploying a firewall, or firewall clusters, we can simulate the cluster design by installed the software into virtual machines, on one physical system, and test the internal firewall to firewall communications. Also, prior to deploying the firewalls, we can create a virtual machine to represent each network protected by the firewalls and test connectivity / communication on each network e.g. Internet, private network, DMZ's, and other protected nets, all with just one system (usually a beefy laptop with a good bit of memory). This method of testing prior to cutting over has proven invaluable and mitigates the risk of serious problems that might present themselves.

How We Use Virtual Machines In Security Assessments

Each time we perform a security assessment for a customer, we utilize specialized and proprietary software / tools. However, once the assessment is completed, and we move on to the next test or new customer, we need to start with a clean platform. We never use the same OS install or instance of tools for different testing phases or different customers.

Using Virtualization, we have pre-created many operating environments such as Windows, Linux, BSD, and Solaris to name a few, with clean installs and hardened operating systems. These pre-created, secure environments also contain all the necessary tools for the type of customer environment and security assessment we will be working on. By using Virtual Machines, we can deploy our testing platforms within minutes, not hours, and feel confident they are secure and ready to function. In fact, we can carry many of these ready-to-go operating environments with us when we travel using high capacity external disk systems. Typically the size of a regular paperback book.

How Else Can Virtual Machines Be Used

The application, use, and benefit of Virtualization is quite broad. For people at home, or technical people who wish to learn new operating environments, Virtual Machines can be a great tool for learning. Instead of purchasing multiple physical machines to install the operating system and applications you wish to become educated on, you can purchase one performance based system, even a laptop, and use virtualization to run them all at once. They can even be configured quite easily to communicate with each other.

Another "big" benefit in using Virtual Machines, is they can be configured to more effectively and efficiently utilize your hardware investment. For instance, instead of purchasing two mid-range systems to run two different applications, you could purchase one an use virtualization to run them side-by-side. In many cases, when using dedicated systems for just one or two applications, the hardware is underutilized. Would it be a wise investment if the server you purchased is only being used at say, "25" percent of its capacity / capability? Virtualization can help you maximize the investment you make in performance based systems, and has the added benefit of server consolidation.