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Source: http://www.facebook.com/BusInsMagazine/posts/578289268860287
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University of Wisconsin, Madison, soil scientist John Parsen says the most common problems can be identified with very low-tech methods. "Many kits assume there's a problem with the soil, and come from a perspective of, how do I fix it?" Parsen says. "In fact, most home soil is probably okay and needs only minor improvements to complement what you already have." Parsen's advice? Simply get your hands dirty.
The Soil Checkup
1. Ribbon Test
Moisten a handful of soil to puttylike consistency. Gently squeeze it between your fingers, creating a ??ribbon? of dirt. If the soil is too gritty to hold a shape, it?s ?sandy. If the ?ribbon breaks after reaching a length of 1 to 2 inches, your soil is loamy, or evenly proportioned with sand, silt, and clay. That?s ?perfect for most ?garden plants. If the ?ribbon reaches 2.5 inches or longer, it?s clayey. Parsen says that adding compost to sandy or clayey soil will create a healthier loam over time.
2. Worm Count
In the potential planting area, dig a 1 x 1 x 1?foot hole and put the soil on a tarp. Sift through and count the earthworms. A dozen indicates ?flourishing life underground. If ?numbers are lacking, add organic material to boost the subterranean environment. Parsen says a shortage may also indicate chemical pollutants. Concerned urban growers can take soil samples with an auger (right) and send them to their local university extension office for comprehensive testing.
3. Drain Test
Fill your worm-count hole with water. If it takes longer than an hour to drain, the area could have a drainage problem?you may want to plant elsewhere.
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The parent company of Bloomberg News will start its own venture capital firm to invest in start-ups, including some companies that its technology reporters write about, Nicole Perlroth reports in The New York Times.
Bloomberg L.P., the parent of Bloomberg News, is forming Bloomberg Beta, a $75 million venture capital fund, which has already begun using Bloomberg L.P.?s money to place bets on young start-ups like Codecademy, a Web site that provides online coding tutorials, and Newsle, a Web service that alerts users to news about friends.
It is not the first time that Bloomberg L.P. has put its money in technology companies. It is a limited partner in Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm with investments in technology companies like Facebook and Twitter. And until shutting it down recently, Bloomberg also ran its own incubator, Bloomberg Ventures, which helped build new businesses that could later be folded into Bloomberg products.
But Bloomberg Beta is the first time Bloomberg L.P. will make direct investments in some of the technology companies that its news operation covers.
Bloomberg Beta?s managing partners say they will operate as a separate legal entity from their parent company, which is Bloomberg Beta?s sole investor. The unit will be based out of Bloomberg?s offices in San Francisco, where many of its technology reporters are also based.
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I had a girlhood crush on an older student called Lisa.
This was during my primary school years. Lisa seemed to have everything. She had lovely clothes and lots of ?em. She changed her hairstyle regularly. She had many friends and was confident and happy and somewhat aggressive and loud. She had a cool big sister who went to high school.
But one day I had the chance to see a note that Lisa had handwritten. In it, she spelled ?great? as ?grate?. And that was the end of my crush.
I was stunned. How could Lisa (a year older than me) have possibly spelt ?great? incorrectly?
Of course, I still see people ? all sorts of people ? misspelling words. I see poor grammar. (I know my grammar is not top notch and yet that doesn?t stop me from writing. I just cross fingers and hope my readers will bear it). I see misplaced apostrophes and lack of appropriate capitalisation and text speak and words run together like a long hashtag.
And I know, from my Lisa the Grate experience onwards, that it?s not social media?s fault.
Social media and reading aren?t mutually exclusive
Yet I continue to hear others blame social media ? and the internet age ? for a decline in literacy standards and personal communication standards in general. To me, this seems like donning the perennial rose-coloured glasses. Were youngsters ever lauded for their spelling and speaking skills? (Not in the ?children should be seen and not heard? era, that?s for sure ?)
To my mind, the popularity of social media supports the importance of literacy and spurs us on to communicate.
We?re encouraged to write, tweet, blog, share, post and read more than ever before.
You can?t turn on a TV or radio station without hearing someone ask for you to contribute your written opinion. ?Tweet us?, ?follow us? ?tell us your thoughts and we?ll read them out on air?.
Emails are a more prevalent form of communication than an office catch up.
Many people would prefer to text rather than make a voice call.
This means we?re asked to write and to write and to write and to write. And we?re asked to read and to ? you get the picture.
And no ? that doesn?t mean we?re better spellers. But heck, we have more of a chance of absorbing sound writing conventions if we?re writing and reading more.
I was delighted, after doing an online search on this topic, to see Margaret Atwood?support this concept. She?s one of my favourite authors. According to the article:
?Thanks to the rise of the internet and of social media, ?I would say that reading, as such, has increased. And reading and writing skills have probably increased because what all this texting and so forth replaced was the telephone conversation,? she continued. ?People have to actually be able to read and write to use the internet, so it?s a great literacy driver if kids are given the tools and the incentive to learn the skills that allow them to access it?.?
Every day I?m served up thousands of tweets linking to thousands of articles. It actually gets a bit much. I know that I can read (and comment on) articles containing inspirational ideas, pondering the future, analysing news and just having some plain ol? fun.
Ten years ago, I listened to a lot of music, read novels, watched free to air television, skimmed through the weekend newspapers and rented movies from the local Video Ezy. I certainly wasn?t fed a stream of content from around the world and many different voices. Today, I read and write more than ever before.
I?m also a member of ?a Book Club that came together due to social media connections and thrives on social media. Our ?Books in Pubs? is made up of Twitter pals; we have a private Facebook Group where we discuss our reading; we use the #booksinpubs tag on Facebook and a lot of us use the Goodreads app to share our reading progress and reviews.
I can also follow some of my favourite authors ? Margaret Atwood (again) on Twitter, and Lee Child on Facebook are two examples. Social media enables me to keep up with what they?re doing and interact and generates excitement for their new releases.
Meanwhile, I?m not sure how Lisa is faring.
Maybe her spelling has improved. I suspect it hasn?t. In which case, I?m glad I?m not her Facebook friend because I don?t think I would enjoy her status updates ?
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Categories: grammar, social media, spelling
Source: http://prakkypedia.prakky.com.au/2013/06/05/lisa-the-grate-social-media-and-literacy/
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1 hour ago
Lifetime
Agnes Bruckner stars as the late Anna Nicole Smith in Lifetime's "The Anna Nicole Story."
Lifetime has revealed a sneak peek of its upcoming biopic "Anna Nicole," and, from the looks of the trailer, the movie will tell a much darker version of Anna Nicole Smith's life than was presented in the opening credits of her early 2000s E! reality show, "The Anna Nicole Show."
Gone are the glamorous cartoon images of Anna sipping on martinis, happily spinning around a pole and shaking it during a Guess! jeans photo shoot. This biopic, which stars "Private Practice" star Agnes Bruckner as stripper-turned-model Smith, strives to tell the Playboy Playmate's real-life story: poverty, pill-popping, partying and all.
The one-minute trailer, set to a dark version of the song "Fame," focuses mostly on how Smith's partying impacted her young son, Daniel (played by four different actors to show the different stages of his life), and also takes a look at her humble roots, her career as a Guess! model, her marriage to 89-year-old Texas billionaire J. Howard Marshall (played by Oscar winner Martin Landau), the Playboy days and her downward spiral as she battled addictions to alcohol and drugs. She died of an accidental prescription drug overdose in 2007 at the age of 39.
"The Anna Nicole Story" also stars Virginia Madsen as Anna's mother, Virgie, Adam Goldberg as Smith's attorney and lover Howard K. Stern, and Cary Elwes as E. Pierce Marshall, the son of J. Howard Marshall who Smith battled in court for years over her late husband's fortune.
While Larry Birkhead is represented in the film (played by Donny Boaz), it doesn't appear that Dannielynn, the baby Birkhead fathered and Smith gave birth to just months before her tragic death, will be mentioned.
"Anna Nicole" premieres Saturday, June 29 at 8 p.m. on Lifetime.
Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/lifetime-reveals-dark-trailer-anna-nicole-6C10197346
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Facing fierce criticism about an epidemic of sexual assault in the military, the military's service chiefs made a rare joint appearance on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. Their mission: to press for commanders to retain control of prosecuting these cases?something select members of Congress are fighting against.
?The risks inherent to military service must never include the risk of sexual assault," Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in his opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He noted that there are "reasonable recommendations" being made by Congress to reform the military justice system, but he called for commanders to "remain central to the legal process.?
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno expressed a similar sentiment in his opening remarks, saying, "We cannot simply legislate our way out of this problem."
He added, "We can and will do better," and specified needed changes to the military's environment as well as to its accountability process.
A Pentagon report released May 7 estimated that 26,000 members of the military were sexually assaulted in unreported incidents in 2012, a 35 percent increase over 2010 incidents. After both the report and the recent arrest of the Air Force's head of sexual assault prevention, select members of Congress proposed legislation to reform aspects of the military justice system.
Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has proposed transferring authority from commanders to independent military prosecutors to prosecute serious crimes including sexual assault. This would require rewriting the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The proposal has drawn sharp condemnation from military leaders, including Tuesday's witnesses.
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who has introduced a bipartisan bill designed to better hold perpetrators accountable, blasted the generals during Tuesday's hearing for not doing enough to fix the issue of sexual assault.
For a start, McCaskill said, she called on the generals to stop reporting all sexual crimes including rape as "unwanted sexual contact," which can include a broad range of offenses.
"We need to know how many men and women are being raped ? and we have no idea right now," McCaskill said.
She called on the generals to work towards "creating a culture where victims are coming forward." She asked generals to stop considering how well someone has served in their capacity as a member of the military -- an aspect of their character-- when deciding whether to prosecute a felony case.
President Barack Obama, during a news conference with visiting South Korean President Park Geun-hye on the day of the Pentagon report's release, had issued a fierce denouncement of sexual assault in the military. "I have no tolerance for this. ... If we find out somebody is engaging in this stuff, they're going to be held accountable?prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period. It's not acceptable," he said.
Obama also said he had spoken with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that morning regarding the need to "exponentially step up our game."
He had added, "We have to do everything we can to root this out," and noted that those affected should understand the president has "got their backs."
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A thoughtful reader suggested that I might enjoy Little House in the Ozarks, a collection of the pieces that Wilder wrote for regional newspapers and magazines.
Heck yes! I got my hands on a copy right away.
I found much that interested me, and I was particularly struck by one paragraph.
?We are so overwhelmed with things these days that our lives are all, more or less, cluttered.
I believe it is this, rather than a shortness of time, that gives us that feeling of hurry and almost of helplessness. Everyone is hurrying and usually just a little late. Notice the faces of the people who rush past on the streets or on our country roads! They nearly all have? a strained, harassed look, and anyone you meet will tell you there is no time for anything anymore.?
Remember, she wrote this in 1924 when she lived on a farm in a rural part of the Ozarks in Missouri.
I think that we often assume that we feel rushed, hurried, and overwhelmed because of the internet, email, TV, and other newfangled contraptions. But here?s Wilder describing the same phenomenon. Maybe that rushed feeling is an aspect of the experience of ?today? for many adults; while we assume that it?s the new gizmos (whether that?s locomotors, automobiles, telephones, or email) that make us feel that way, it?s really always ourselves.
Speaking of Happier at Home ? a large part of that book describes me grappling with the challenge of slowing down time, and creating a sense of leisure and hurriedness.
Do you struggle with this? To develop a sense of unhurriedness, amid the pace of everyday life?
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What?s more fun than a great temporary tattoo? If you love them as much as I do, check out my friend Tina Roth Eisenberg?s site Tattly. Amazing variety!
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Gretchen Rubin is the award-winning author of The Happiness Project, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Order your copy or read some sample chapters from the book. You can also watch the one-minute book video or listen to a sample of the audiobook. She is a regular contributor to Psych Central.Like this author?
Catch up on other posts by Gretchen Rubin (or subscribe to their feed).
????Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 1 Jun 2013
????Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.
APA Reference
Rubin, G. (2013). Don?t Assume That Everything Is So Different These Days. Psych Central. Retrieved on June 4, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/06/03/dont-assume-that-everything-is-so-different-these-days/
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