Falls are dangerous for anyone, but they can be particularly worrying for senior citizens whose bodies aren’t as resilient as they used to be. University of Missouri scientists may have a way to prevent those slips. They’ve developed a sensor system…
After a surprise debut and months of previews, Android 7.0 Nougat is ready for primetime. The broad strokes haven’t changed since we first met Nougat back in March (when it was just “Android N”), which means it’s still not the game-changer of an upda…
I was ten minutes early for the meeting with one of our district’s new hires, a middle school music teacher. In my new hybrid role that included coaching/mentoring over seventy teachers in my district, I was visiting Mrs. Green, who had taught elsewhere previously but was still quite new to the profession. She was finishing a lesson with her young charges about rhythm. They each had a drum, which they held silently as my guide dog and I took a seat in the classroom.
“Now, imitate my rhythm,” Mrs. Green stated in a voice that held a mesmerizing blend of authority and invitation. Then she spoke the rhythm that she wanted the students to pound out: “Peanut butter peanut butter peanut butter pie.”
My eyes widened. Food? What’s that doing in a music classroom?
I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. The students, in incredible unison, pounded out the exact rhythm of the words Mrs. Green spoke. “DAH duh duh duh DAH duh duh duh DAH duh duh duh DAH.” Not one stumble, not one overdone or underdone thump. Not one untamed giggle. It was superb!
I continued listening to Mrs. Green interact with the budding young musicians. She asked, affirmed, redirected, supported, celebrated, and calmly expected and received excellence from her students.
When the bell rang sooner than they expected, she reminded the students of how to put the drums back in the right place and how to replace chairs in their proper position. No one scrambled, screamed, or slipped away without doing what was required. Once order was restored, they left.
When I asked Mrs. Green how she managed such smooth operation of the class and such vivid success of the drumming on just the fourth day of school, she said something like this: “How could I not expect these results, when the students are capable and when I know and they know that I will guide them.”
Indeed, how can we not expect the best, when we couple student potential with what we know we can do for students? It is a recipe as simple as peanut butter peanut butter peanut butter pie.
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If you are a small business owner like me, increasing cash flow is practically the center of our professional lives. Although it is crucial for any business, it is especially important for small business owners because we are in business for, and depend on ourselves, as well as our loyal customers. We know that cash flow is critical to the success and survival of our businesses.
It is important to remember that cash flow isn’t profit, and profit isn’t cash flow. Indeed, we can all have tons of profit but no cash sitting in our bank accounts. While sales are the muscles of your business, cash flow is the lifeblood. That said; it is also entirely possible to improve your cash flow without increasing sales. As a small business owner, sales may be hard to come by, but that doesn’t mean your cash flow won’t improve.
Strategies to Increase Small Business Cash Flow:
1. Decrease the time it takes to collect client payment
Known as “days sales outstanding” in the business world, DSO is the amount of time it takes to collect payment from your clients. Once your service or product has been delivered successfully, it is time for your customers to pay up. Look over your financial information and pay special attention to DSO. See how long sales are outstanding, and then try to decrease that amount for future sales by a quarter. Instead of giving clients 20 days to pay, next time, only give 15. Don’t forget to start this strategy with new clients while allowing your current ones to finish their agreed-upon time.
2. Shift costs from fixed to variable
Evaluate your business costs to see if it fits in a variable or fixed cost category. In order to increase cash flow but not sales, it is essential for your business to try to shift some costs from fixed to variable. Take time to evaluate all of your business expenses with care and begin to identify costs that you can move from fixed to variable. Ideally, you will want to tie payments to key performance metrics that align with the timing that the business actually receives a payment.
3. Sell old or excess equipment
Chances are that your company has some equipment that is lying around collecting dust and costing you money. Instead of sitting in storage, that equipment could be making you money! Check out your inventory and decide what can stay and what you can sacrifice. If you haven’t touched it in a long time, now may be the perfect time to say goodbye. If you don’t think you will use it in the next 12 months, consider selling it and investing the cash in something more useful.
4. Collect deposits and process payments quickly
When creating customer agreements, structure them so you can collect payments upon the completion of work. Alternatively, require a larger deposit at the start of the job so you have available cash for the duration of the process. Be sure to send out invoices immediately to avoid waiting for incoming receivables. If you are late to send an invoice, the fault is entirely yours. Customers may be late at paying anyway, so if you are slow to send the bill in the first place, you may end up months behind on collecting receivables.
5. Conduct a credit check
If a client doesn’t want to pay cash, be sure to conduct a credit check. This is your way to ensure that the customer has a trustworthy credit history and most likely will follow through on payments. If a poor credit report comes back, stand your ground; refuse to make the sale. If you decide to work with someone with a poor payment history, you can rest assured that your payments will be consistently late, meaning your cash flow will suffer.
You can find Victoria on her travel blog www.followmeaway.com
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You don’t need to be a Dickens scholar to understand that for many teachers it is both the best of times and the worst of times.
Let’s start with the good stuff. Digital innovation is inspiring imagination. Educators from all over the world are learning how to responsibly blend technology into their teaching, while sharing resource suggestions and best practices with colleagues and their growing professional learning networks.
The freedom to choose an assortment of apps, videos and open educational resources that can augment – if not replace – traditional curriculum for any given unit or lesson plan is empowering. Learning how other teachers put these tools into their own practice via Twitter Chats, EdCamps and other collaborative environments is exhilarating.
Amidst all of this euphoria, however, is the cold reality that rigid standards – intended or not – all too often stifle teacher creativity, sensitivity, and autonomy. This leaves a painful disconnect between everything teachers are learning outside of their classrooms, and what they are expected to share with their students within them. Further, antiquated “sit and get” approaches to professional development can never adequately bridge this gap.
Accordingly, in the age of iPads, Chromebooks and Twitter, teachers are self-organizing to learn from each other how to creatively blend digital innovations into increasingly stringent instructional parameters.
Here are five ways teachers can participate in their own professional development.
Learn to fail
Thomas Edison famously said “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This enlightened point of view requires having a growth-oriented mindset. We are all simultaneously teachers and learners. There is no one proven and defined path for incorporating digitally-inspired ideas and resources into practice. Thus, it is essential to have the freedom to try, fail and iterate on a variety of new techniques. Of course, learning how colleagues and others we get to know in professional learning networks pioneer their own solutions can help you discover your own. My good friend and colleague Julie Keane further explains why we should give teachers permission to fail.
Collaborate with colleagues – inside and outside of your building
Just as you learn from the experiences of others, you should also document and share what new tools you are using in the classroom, which are the most effective, and how your students are responding to them. You can do this with teachers in your department, school and district-wide, as well as with those you meet at conferences and via educator-friendly social networks. I co-wrote a digest detailing A New Recipe for Professional Development with Keane, as well as connected educators Jennifer Williams, Katrina Keane and Meriwynn Mansori.
Participate in a Twitter Chat for teachers
There are hundreds of topical Twitter chats each week where teachers with like-minded interests share ideas around a given topic in their area of expertise. If you are not familiar with how Twitter can be used as a vehicle to grow your own professional learning network, books like 140 Twitter Tips for Educators is a great place to start. The book is written by Brad Currie, Billy Krakower and Scott Rocco, connected educators who started the very popular #satchat chat that takes place every Saturday morning. You can also visit Participate Chats for a full calendar of active chats, as well as educator-tailored tools to share resources and make Twitter conversations easier to follow and share with others.
Go to camp
Beyond getting together in their schools and collaborating online, teachers from all over the world are converging in self-organized EdCamps. These one-day “unconference” events empower teachers to vote on the topics that wish to talk about that day. Multiple sessions around topics like coding, formative assessment and digital citizenship take place. If you can’t attend a free EdCamp or miss a session taking place at one that you went to, Periscope is a great way to tap into sessions you may have missed.
Have fun!
Life is too short not to have fun! Yes, we live in heady times where new tools, platforms and technological innovations seem to arise by the semester (if not the day). Slow down, take a deep breath, and then dive in when the time is right for you. Once you take ownership of your own professional development, you will never want to go back.
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Dwight Howard has made a number of career highlights on the court but off the court the basketball superstar has been making a difference, too.
Through the years, the Atlanta Hawks center’s D12 Foundation has made advancements in its efforts to empower the schoolgirls of Tanzania by providing the nation with educational resources. In July, the NBA star’s foundation hosted a back-to-school event where 463 girls, ages 12-18, were provided with locally-made school supplies, gym shirts and hygiene kits.
After visiting on behalf of the NBA Cares Foundation, Howard says he was later inspired to return to the East African country in 2012 to personally fund the construction of dormitory housing for girls entering secondary school.
“One of the things that I was told was that it’s very hard for women to go to school, and when they do there’s a danger of them being raped or kidnapped and all sorts of things happening with them getting to school,” he said during an interview with The Huffington Post. “That didn’t sit too well with me. And so I just want to do my part to help these women with the opportunity to go to school and learn.”
More than 62 million girls worldwide lack education possibly due to various factors which might include, inadequate resources, school fees, high pregnancy rates and the risk of possibly falling victim to predators during their commutes, according to the United States Agency for International Development. Since 2003, nearly 50,000 pregnant girls in Tanzania have been denied education due to a law that permits schools to refuse to admit or readmit students with “undesirable physical health.”
Given clarity of the vast challenges these young women face, Howard says his foundation met with Tanzanian government officials to discuss the school system’s biggest needs prior to allocating resources.
“I want to show them that they mean something,” he said. “A lot of times I think these women get taken for granted and that’s why they drop out of school and they don’t get education. So my job is to try to help them understand that they’re an important part of our world.”
In addition to providing education to the girls of Tanzania, Howard also wants his efforts to coincide with his foundation’s initiatives surrounding early childhood literacy and youth leadership development.
He went on to describe his overall purpose for cultivating today’s youth as something that will transcend his NBA career.
“This is something that I was put on this earth for, to give back. And I think the best thing you can do with your time is to give,” he said. “For me, just to see these kids grow and go in the right direction it fills my heart with joy.
“A basketball career for me is great, but there’s a time where that basketball career will be over. These kid’s lives can change forever. And that’s something that will continue to go on even after I’m done playing basketball. So I’m doing anything I can for the community and anything I can for the world ― makes me feel a lot better.”
For more info on Dwight Howard’s D12 Foundation click here.
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As a Mom, I can tell you I’m pretty stoked to have my son go back to school. I’m sure I’ve grown a few gray hairs since summer began! Trying to juggle childcare, summer camp, and bored kids is an endless struggle.
My son, on the other hand, isn’t too pleased about having to get up at the crack of dawn. I can’t blame him. He leaves at 6:50 a.m. and returns home about twelve hours later on most days thanks to sports and other extracurricular activities. It’s a long day, made even longer when he can’t fuel up properly. He needs healthy school meals, as well as healthy vending machine snacks, that will keep him going throughout his school day and after-school activities.
Thankfully, schools are offering healthier meals, with more whole grains, fruits and vegetables, as well as meals and snacks with less salt and sugar, and no trans-fats. Can they do better? Sure! And local school wellness policies can help.
Knowledge is Power!
The local wellness policy guides a school district’s efforts in supporting healthy eating, physical activity, and overall child well-being. It gives parents important information, such as how their school district is doing in providing students with healthier school foods.
Providing parents with this information creates trust. Transparency is key to ensuring parents, schools and the community can work together to better support one another as they work towards the same common goal: healthier children.
To learn more about your school’s local wellness policy, talk to your child (ren)’s school principal. You can also call your school district and ask to speak with the person who oversees the policy’s implementation and evaluation.
It’s your right as a parent to have access to the school’s wellness policy of your local school and district. Under the law, they can’t deny you this information so ask for it. Remember, knowledge is power! Use it. Join the school wellness committee and play a direct role in writing and implementing the policies in your local district and school. It will change children’s lives!
Why now?
I often hear this question from other parents: Why now?
The answer is simple. Our children’s health is at stake!
More than one in three children in the US are overweight or obese, and thus at risk for developing diabetes, heart disease, and cancer later in life. Because children spend most of their waking hours and eat up to half of their daily calories at school, schools play a crucial role in building lifelong healthy nutrition and physical activity habits.
Local wellness policies work best when parents, teachers, and community members come together and hold schools accountable for implementing the policies. In order to do this, school officials must make their local wellness policy readily available and transparent to members of the community.
As parents, we have the opportunity, and responsibility, to ensure that schools feed our children’s minds and their bodies!
The ten to twelve hours a day many kids can spend at school needs to be as healthy as possible. Making sure that their school’s wellness policy is in alignment with updated nutrition standards for school meals and snacks, provides nutrition education, is free of unhealthy food and beverages marketing, offers physical activity and physical education, will give our children every opportunity possible to succeed in life, now and in the future.
Together, we can build on the progress our local school districts have already made and improve the school environment to better support learning and our children’s health.
Join the Good Food Force Volunteers and Bloggers to connect with Moms (like me!) who are advocating for healthy foods for our children, families and communities by clicking HERE.
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Me and everyone else. Did you know that were 42 different sporting events officially in the Olympics? Neither did I. And many of them had different versions increasing the number of sports one could watch. NBC boasted of showing the Olympics on 12 channels, although I doubt The Golf Channel was devoted to canoeing unless canoes were used to rescue balls that landed in the drink.
Maybe it’s because I came from “The Roone Arlege School of Olympics.” Roone, for those of you more recently born, was the President of ABC TV News and Sports. He created a Sunday afternoon “must-see” show, The Wide World of Sports. Actually, Many of us Rooneophiles believe he created sports. He was a true genius in showing not just the sport but also the emotions behind it. To Roone it was not a matter of which team or person won or lost. It was about every individual. He invented the Up Close and Personal aspect of sports and news, bringing the viewer inside every thought and action.
I was fortunate enough to be snatched from another luminary, ABC show to work on the Los Angeles Olympics. I covered the events from 7 am to 3 pm. And then since I knew all the various video packages (those Up Close and Personal things) that had aired, asked to sit in through the prime time and late night presentations so that nothing would be repeated. As producers, we were responsible for editing together packages of the rest of the Olympics. He made weightlifting and kayaking as exciting as swimming. Granted there were not the number of ancillary stations broadcasting the Olympics, but even if there were, network would be key. Did anyone see the badminton finals or even know that badminton has 2 n’s in the name? What about weight lifting? What was the heaviest weight lifted? How about Judo? I didn’t even know they had Judo. I missed my favorite; individual synchronized swimming. Please explain how that works. But I also missed team synchronized swimming, which is beautiful and as difficult to master as synchronized swimming. Were you waterlogged after the first few days of the games? Certainly some equestrian event like jumping or dressage would have been welcomed. Biking… We all saw the 40+ gold medal winner drop off at the end in a heap and were only told about women’s fencing because someone wearing a hajib was competing.
Roone also understood news. We would have seen much more about the disgraced doping Russian team and world reaction. We would have met members of the Para-Olympics from Russia, all of who were disqualified. ABC would have jumped on our own disgraced swimmers and their bogus claims of being hassled by Brazilian law officers. Broken bones and injuries? These Olympics had their share. Male French gymnast snapped his leg during a pommel horse landing. Australian female javelin thrower dislocated her shoulder during a throw. His horse trampled a horse groom. A rider crashed into a gate. Most upsetting to look at was the weightlifter who dislocated his arm. It goes on. But Roone would have had medical specialists standing by to discuss all.
Enough whining. Kudos to diving and the great visual explanations of what makes it perfect. It would have been exciting to analyze what makes Michael Phelps’ style so winning? And enough oohing and aahing over Simone Biles. Someone should explain how she could be so “gumby-like”? Animation and more from the experts would have added to the knowledge. The excitement was already there.
Just so you can plan all you will miss in 2020, climbing, karate, roller sports are to be added, and baseball and softball return. Too bad wushu did not make the cut, whatever that is.
To be totally honest, I am most disappointed in not seeing those 6-pack Water Polo players. Please, NBC, bring them to prime time next time. Roone did. He knew his audience appreciated eye-candy along with the gold medals.
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One of the biggest misconceptions about breast cancer is that all breast cancers are alike and they can be cured but nothing could be further from the truth. The hardest part to understand is that treating breast cancer that is in the breast is one thing but when breast cancer leaves the breast area, everything changes. Breast cancer that is found outside of the breast is called “metastatic” or “advanced” breast cancer. For a much better explanation, I have included a link for easy reference.
For those dealing with metastatic or advance breast cancer, the feeling is that they are often the forgotten ones when it comes to the focus that is given to breast cancer, particularly during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It can be difficult for the general population to understand that breast cancer can be found anywhere but within the breast. Therefore, when breast cancer moves to the brain or bones or lungs or liver, the conception is that you now have brain cancer or bone cancer or lung cancer or liver cancer. However, this is not the case as breast cancer that has metastasized or moved to another part of the body is still breast cancer. This same thing applies to other cancers as well. For instance, lung cancer that has moved outside of the lungs to the brain is not brain cancer; it is metastasized or advanced lung cancer. In other words, a cancer is identified by its origin and not by a location to which it has advanced.
Keeping this principle in mind, it becomes easy to understand why those dealing with advanced breast cancer have not been understood and/or heard by the general population. Most believe that with early detection, breast cancer can be stopped and/or eliminated at the source. However, even early detection does not assure that breast cancer has not already metastasized in some patients. Even breast cancer has its own individual DNA and how it acts and how it is treated needs to be adjusted based upon the individual. Furthermore, treatment with existing chemo drugs in advanced breast cancer varies greatly from patient to patient. A particular drug that may work well in one person may do so for only weeks or months before it stops working. That same drug in another person may never work. Certain combinations of drugs may be effective for one person with minimal side effects while the same combination in another person can be devastatingly horrific.
As we look toward Breast Cancer Awareness Month in just a few short weeks, it is my hope that the messages that are shared out across the board will include an increased awareness of metastatic or advanced breast cancer in order to help this community. It is my belief that if the general population is made aware of the need for increased funding for those who are most in need of new treatment options and hope for a better future, more campaigns just might be created to specifically fund research in this particular area. If an emphasis can be placed upon finding the answers about how, when and/or why breast cancer metastasizes in the first place, the hope will then become that breast cancer can be stopped in its tracks before it ever has a chance to move beyond the breast area.
For anyone who has ever dealt with breast cancer, there is always a fear that it will return even if it has been successfully treated. Can you imagine what it would be like if your hope for successful treatment is finding a drug or a combination of drugs that would stop the cancer from growing without making you deathly sick and never knowing how long that treatment might work – if at all? It is my greatest hope that we can place an increased focus on advanced breast cancer and create an increased amount of funding that is dedicated to those who are fighting for their lives on a daily basis with advanced breast cancer.
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It was 3am in the morning. I poured another cup of coffee and got back to my computer. For the last 4 hours I had been stuck revising–or just cutting down to nothing–my latest article.
It had a good idea, best intentions… and that’s kind of it. It was nothing more than the kind of mediocre shit today’s bloggers flood the Internet with.
I was aiming higher.
I wanted my writing to flow like Jame Altucher’s or Ali Mese’s essays. I wanted to have a stronger voice. My inner critic was going nuts.
“I can’t show this to people,” I said, after two more hours of trying to overcome this creative hurdle, and gave up.
I was in a gap.
Where creatives quit
When most creatives start out, they have a false perception that their taste is everything. Taste is just perception. It’s intangible. It’s nothing unless you have the skills to bring it to reality.
And then you reach that painful gap – a gap between taste and skills. You have good taste; you know what draws people in. Then you try to do something yourself and hit a brick wall.
Over the last 5 years, I’ve tried my hand at writing, graphic design, music, and photography. The hardest part of mastering these crafts was realizing that I couldn’t live up to my taste.
I was reiterating to perfection. It took me weeks or months to release something that was still not perfect. That feeling when you work on something for a few months straight and it turns out to be a piece of shit drove me crazy.
I knew I lacked technical skills and practice. But my tolerance for such an amount of crap wasn’t endless.
I always quit there. There is always a breaking point where my perfectionism takes hold. I’m sure I’m not alone.
It’s a good sign
There’s a positive side to this …
If, looking at your own brainchild, you can say “It’s a piece of shit,” that’s a good sign. In a sense. Most likely you have good taste, which will eventually distinguish you from the rest of the blind artists.
I just call them that.
You’ve probably seen lots of professional writers, photographers, or whatever, who have fully mastered their skill. They can create perfect work–technically. But it doesn’t have soul. It it doesn’t have that special thing that draws you in.
Their work doesn’t have something that belongs only to them. It’s a mediocre rip-off of the standard.
You must suck in the beginning. Your work in the first years is an endless stutter. Only your mom can bear how bad you are at this phase. You must hate it.
If you like it, you should be concerned.
Chances are you’ll end up as a blind artist or that poor guy on the Xfactor stage who can’t sing in tune and has no idea why the crowd is booing him out.
Art takes time. Expressing your inner self takes time. Perfection takes time. Taste is a unique fingerprint that can distinguish you from the rest. It’s the backbone of creativity.
But a backbone without flesh is just a skeleton.
The courage to get naked
I tried to find them. This path, however, doesn’t have shortcuts.
It’s a long, bumpy road that you go down naked. You can’t put on some loose clothes to hide your fat belly or skinny legs. All your imperfections and flaws are exposed.
Imperfection sucks, I know. The web curates the best, the most beautiful. It has globalized social comparison and set the bar high.
There’s only one way out.
Getting past this phase comes down to your courage. The courage to create and show something that has many flaws and cracks.
It hurts… I know.
But it’s hard work, lots of crap, and feedback that can bring us closer to our ambitions.
Or maybe it’s just an illusion, a never-ending game.
I don’t know. I haven’t passed this phase yet.
This article has many flaws and cracks in my eyes, and I’m not proud of it. It was saved as a draft for I don’t even remember how long. I didn’t want it to go live, nor do I want now.
But it’s the only way to get there…
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
