Unlike food produced by humans that need to be preserved in order to prevent decay for a period of time, honey has in-built antifungal and antibacterial properties. The contents, which are mostly glucose and fructose, give it the sweet taste. The sweetness makes it possible to use honey as a substitute for granulated sugar in recipes. Meanwhile, honey has found its way into other products in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. Beeswax, propolis and royal jelly that are commercialized as nutritional supplements, are further products of the honey bee. Sarahmagazine April 2010

Africans, particularly African women, have integrated the healing effects and cosmetic benefits of shea butter into their household ingredients since centuries. But in Europe, shea butter is just being accepted and even less accepted in the USA. The reason, according to people in the business sector, is the smell of shea butter and availability of other competitive vegetable oils. Shea butter is nevertheless gaining acceptance due to novel processing methods, the superiority of its contents and advantages which include the following:

Unsaponifiables; these are components of oil that cannot be converted into soap. They contain valuable vitamins such as vitamin E and A with moisturizing as well as conditioning properties. The moisturizing property keeps the skin soft, fresh and reduces wrinkles.
Depending on the quality, quantity and type of cosmetic product, shea butter helps in healing sunburns, skin rashes, eczema and similar common dermatological issues.
Sarahmagazine April 2010

Building on an enhanced understanding of organizational dynamics and individual psychology, however, we now have the means to evaluate well-being in all its dimensions and draw crucial insights to shape the right practices and programs. As shown below, well-being research involves a series of qu estions around the three components noted earlier and provides insights into a series of organizational drivers that influence well-being positively or negatively, depending on employees’ views.

The Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents five major record labels and a host of smaller labels, was annoyed. “We love the idea of using technology to build artist communities, but that’s not what Napster is all about. Napster is about facilitating piracy, and trying to build a business on the backs of artists and copyright owners,” said Cary Sherman, senior executive vice president and general counsel for RIAA. In December 1999, the RIAA sued Napster for copyright infringement.

The publicity and word-of-mouth attracted more Napster users and inspired the web community to start building its successor for if Napster should be shut down. Early in 2000, file sharing program Gnutella was briefly released by Nullsoft. Although Nullsoft soon withdrew support for the software, programmers started hacking it apart so they could publish the code needed to adapt it and build new software based on it. By 2003, the site www.gnutelliums.com was listing 14 programs based on Gnutella, including Bearshare and Morpheus.

In February 2001, a judge ruled that Napster had to stop the distribution of copyright material through its network. Record companies provided filenames and song titles that should be removed and Napster blocked over 250,000 songs using over 1.6 million filenames.

But that wasn’t good enough. In July 2001, a judge told Napster it must block all files infringing copyright, effectively forcing it to shut down. Napster folded in September 2002 when its sale to Bertelsmann was blocked by a Delaware court. Bertelsmann had invested heavily in the company in the hope it would provide a secure commercial file sharing application.

The RIAA has continued to pursue Napster clones in the courts. In June 2003, it claimed it would use software that seeks pirated music in the file sharing networks to gather evidence against individuals.

The recording industry has been quick to accuse internet piracy of causing a drop in CD sales, but a survey by Forrester Research in August 2002 concluded that’s not true. The company said that frequent digital music consumers weren’t buying fewer CDs and that the 15% drop in music sales over two years owed more to the recession and competition from the booming markets of video games and DVDs. By 2007, Forrester predicted that digital music revenues would be worth US$2 billion as long as record labels made it easy to buy songs from any record label without having to pay a flat subscription fee.

Metallica was among the artists strongly opposed to Napster, and the band launched its own law suit against the company. But not everyone has opposed Napster-like technology. In June 2003, Ween announced that it was developing its own P2P client. WeenAmp would connect fans to a peer-to-peer network for sharing concert recordings and enable them to view webcasts and listen to a Ween radio show. The band said that the software would enable them to get music to fans in minutes and prevent fake or illegal MP3s from being traded as rarities. “The taping community has always done a great job in circulating shows and this should really pull everyone into one central location to trade good sounding shows and other mp3s,” said the band.

In July 2003, owners of the Napster name Roxio announced that it planned the launch of Napster 2 in time for Christmas. This time, Napster will sell digital music on behalf of record companies, but many regret that the rarities and bootlegs will no longer be available and wonder whether the spirit of Napster will survive along with its name.

Napster finally launched in the UK in summer 2004, by which time it was up against Apple’s iTunes and a wide range of other paid-for music sites.

1971 – Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg to make copyright-free works electronically available. The first is the US declaration of independence.

1972 – Bolt Beranek and Newman computer engineer Ray Tomlinson invents email by adapting an internal messaging program and extending it to use the ARPANET to send messages between sites. Within a year, three quarters of ARPANET traffic is email.

1973 – University College of London is one of the first international connections to ARPANET.

1976 – The Queen sends an email from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.

1982 – Scott Fahlman kick-starts smiley-culture by suggesting using the and smileys to convey emotions in emails. His message has been preserved at http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html.

1984 – Joint Academic Network (JANET) built to connect UK universities to each other over the internet.

1986 – Internet newsgroups are born. Rick Adams at the Center for Seismic Studies releases software enabling news transmission, posting and reading using internet-standard TCP/IP connections. His software builds on work begun in 1979 at Duke University to exchange information between Unix machines.

1988 – The first internet worm is unleashed by Robert Morris. It infects about 6000 computers. Although it causes no physical damage, it clogs up the internet and loses hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer time.

1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN invent the World Wide Web to make information easier to publish and access on the internet.

1993 – Marc Andreesen of the National Center for SuperComputer Applications in the US launches web-browser Mosaic. It introduces proprietary HTML tags and more sophisticated image capabilities. The browser is a massive success and businesses start to notice the web’s potential. Andreesen goes on to develop the Netscape web browser.

1994 – Internet Magazine launches. It reports on London’s first cybercafe and reviews 100 websites. It’s billed as the ‘most extensive’ list of websites ever to appear in a magazine. A 28.8Kbps modem costs £399 (plus VAT).

1995 – Digital Equipment Corporation’s Research lab launches search engine Alta Vista, which it claims can store and index the HTML from every internet page. It also introduces the first multilingual search.

1994 – Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web is renamed Yahoo! and receives 100,000 visitors. In 1995, it begins displaying adverts.

1995 – Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com, an online bookseller that pioneers ecommerce.

1995 – eBay is launched to enable internet users to trade with each other.

1996 – The browser wars begin. Microsoft sees the internet as a threat and integrates Internet Explorer with Windows. Netscape and Microsoft go head-to-head, intensively developing and releasing upgrades to their browsers.

1996 – Macromedia Flash 1.0 launches to add interactive animation to webpages. Early adopters include Disney and MSN.

1998 – Google arrives. It pioneers a ranking system that uses links to assess a website’s popularity. Google’s simple design is soothing while existing search engines cram their pages with animated adverts.

1999 – Shawn Fanning launches Napster. The peer-to-peer software enables internet users to swap MP3 music files stored on their computers and to find each other through a central directory. Record labels are furious. By November 2002, they shut it down.

2000 – The dotcom bust. After several years of venture capitalists throwing money at proposals with ‘internet’ on the cover, it all starts unravelling as many of these businesses fail to find a market and other realise they don’t have a business plan.

2001 – US regulators approve the merger of AOL and Time Warner. Shareholders of relative upstart AOL own 55% of the new company. AOL started in 1985 and grew its modest internet connection business into one of the world’s biggest media companies.

2003 – Nearly half of us are connected: UK telecomms regulator Oftel reports that 47% of UK homes have internet access and 58% have a PC. Of those online, 15% use broadband and 92% are satisfied with their service.

2004 – As broadband becomes more popular, media companies start selling music and video online. Napster relaunches as a paid music download store. It’s up against iTunes, Apple’s download store for its trendy iPod portable music players.

This legend tells of an old man who spends his winters in the abandoned fire lookout on the summit of Table Mountain . Like an ancient character in a many-layered story, he is many images woven into one … the wise man on the mountain peak, the hermit in the forest chapel, a monk in his cell studying texts, an elder with a vivid memory of the old time stories and how things used to be, the old man who abandoned the weight of the world to search in the wilderness for the song of his heart….

The story says that before he came to Table Mountain , the man traveled nearly every day of his life. As an anthropologist and linguist, he was obsessed with saving native cultures — myths, languages, folklore, history, songs — and he scribbled nearly every word ever spoken to him. He filled notebook after notebook with observations, insights and shreds of folklore and language. He stashed hundreds of boxes of notes in “safe” places to be retrieved at a later time when something might be done with the raw data. He put what little money he earned into second-hand clothes, fuel for his rig and into notebooks and pencils.

As years went by, his obsession to collect cultures never slowed. He rarely enjoyed his travels or noticed much of the world as it breezed by him. There was too much to be done. Ancient civilizations were being lost, and quickly. Those moments between native informants were shadowed with the worries and troubled dreams of a riveted urgency. As years went by, he forget where the notebooks had been stashed.

Each time he traveled to a new interview, he was certain that a dozen informants were dying at that very moment — perhaps the last speakers of their native languages — and he would never be able to record their stories. They would be lost to the world forever. Once he had a friend run over his legs with a car to keep him out of the army so he could continue working. Another time he gave a dying informant morphine to keep him alive a little longer, long enough to scribble another story and a few more words from a dying language.

More years went by. He grew old. His clothes wore thin. Even on the hottest days he wore a threadbare jacket to hide his shirt that was split up the back. His rig labored and chugged with each trip. He tried to keep up the pace of his youth, but he was tired. The old man slowed down.

One fall morning, as he sat exhausted, he looked away from his field notes and noticed a mountain peak brushed white with a light dusting of new snow. It was beautiful. The longer he gazed at the mountain the less tired he felt. He put his field notes on the ground. His felt light, unburdened. At that moment he replaced his obsession with a new horizon. He let go of everyone else’s stories and began to think about his own.

He stored his field notes in his memory, left behind his rig, and slowly made his way to the summit of the mountain. He climbed the rickety steps to the top of the old fire lookout and looked out upon the world. He tossed away his mental debris and began to contemplate what was left of his life … his own place in the great story of the world.

As winter neared, the old man gathered firewood, got the stove working, carried in food and water, fuel for a lantern, and repaired the old cot and heaped it with blankets. As snowdrifts closed the roads and trails, he gazed upon the landscape where he had spent his life and everything looked foreign.

All winter, during the storytelling season of long nights, his mind traveled through every story he had ever heard. As though stories were as real as the landscape, he put himself into each narrative and began to experience each story as if he were there. As he traveled through stories he traveled through seasons and watched the landscape evolve as each story changed.

In the spring, he walked down the mountain and discovered the relationship between stories and walking … the rhythm and pace of the story, the measured feet of the poetry of the language, each step shuffling through story and landscape, the silence between the words and between each breath of the warm breeze. He spoke new versions of the stories as he walked. The earth warmed, trees leafed out, spring sunlight pushed away the shadows of winter. With each word of each story, with his own presence as the storyteller, the old man recreated his world as spring remakes winter with the warm-hearted telling of its arrival.

The old man walked through shifting storyscapes of spring and summer and into the fall. He never felt alone. His companions were stories and the places where they continue to thrive. Before the first snow, he returned to Table Mountain for another winter of contemplation and story making.

He remembered that he had first come to the mountain with the Takelma elder Gwishgwashan. It was a November day, ages ago. He was on one of his many ethnographic field trips. But this time he returned not as a collector of stories, but as a story himself.

He became a legend. Perhaps someday he’ll become a myth. He soon forgot those fixated field trips of his former life. He forgot his troubled dreams and worries. He even forgot his name. What he remembers are the stories which are the summit of his life. As he looks out from the lookout, he opens his eyes wide and the landscape feels like home.

The story says that he has few visitors. He is gone on his walks for most of the year, and when snow closes the mountain roads, he is cut off from the rest of the world. He is alone in his snowy lookout, spinning and re-spinning tales, in the shadows of the long nights and in the warm glow of lantern-light and firelight. Sometimes someone comes to visit and finds the old man in his lookout. The old man tells one of his stories and the visitor takes the story home where it is told again and again. A few folks have come across the old man on his walks, and likewise, they are each given a story to take home. The stories are not lost after all.

This legend is about many things and so it is destined for a long life. It has been written as it has been told, season after season. The facts shift from version to version but the truths of the legend never falter and remain unchanged as the legend continues to grow. End

(An Excerpt from TREK TO TABLE MOUNTAIN : SEASONS OF STORIES)

Jeanne Sauber of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and Bruce Molnia, a research geologist at USGS, Reston, Va., used NASA satellite and global positioning system receivers, as well as computer models, to study movements of Earth’s plates and shrinking glaciers in the area. “Historically, when big ice masses started to retreat, the number of earthquakes increased,” Sauber said. “More than 10,000 years ago, at the end of the great ice age, big earthquakes occurred in Scandinavia as the large glaciers began to melt. In Canada, many more moderate earthquakes occurred as ice sheets melted there,” she added.

Southern Alaskan glaciers are very sensitive to climate change, Sauber added. Many glaciers have shrunk or disappeared over the last 100 years. The trend, which appears to be accelerating, seems to be caused by higher temperatures and changes in precipitation. In southern Alaska, a tectonic plate under the Pacific Ocean is pushing into the coast, which creates very steep mountains. The high mountains and heavy precipitation are critical for glacier formation. The colliding plates create a great deal of pressure that builds up, and eventually is relieved by earthquakes.

The weight of a large glacier on top of these active earthquake areas can help keep things stable. But, as the glaciers melt and their load on the plate lessens, there is a greater likelihood of an earthquake happening to relieve the large strain underneath. Even though shrinking glaciers make it easier for earthquakes to occur, the forcing together of tectonic plates is the main reason behind major earthquakes. The researchers believe that a 1979 earthquake in southern Alaska, called the St. Elias earthquake, was promoted by wasting glaciers in the area. The earthquake had a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale.

Along the fault zone, in the region of the St. Elias earthquake, pressure from the Pacific plate sliding under the continental plate had built up since 1899 when previous earthquakes occurred. Between 1899 and 1979, many glaciers near the fault zone thinned by hundreds of meters and some completely disappeared. Photographs of these glaciers, many taken by Molnia during the last 30 years, were used to identify details within areas of greatest ice loss.

Field measurements were also used to determine how much the glacier’s ice thickness changed since the late 19th century. The researchers estimated the volume of ice that melted and then calculated how much instability the loss of ice may have caused. They found the loss of ice would have been enough to stimulate the 1979 earthquake. Along with global positioning system measurements made by Sauber and Molnia a number of NASA satellites were used to document glacier variability. Data from Landsat-7 and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) were used to study glacier extent and topography. Currently, NASA’s ICESat satellite is being used to measure how the glacier thicknesses are changing. “In the future, in areas like Alaska where earthquakes occur and glaciers are changing, their relationship must be considered to better assess earthquake hazard, and our satellite assets are allowing us to do this by tracking the changes in extent and volume of the ice, and movement of the Earth,” Sauber said. End

When the offer was presented, the first real challenge in our lives together as husband and wife came with it. They’d called her at work to explain the position and say that they wanted to fly her down to L.A. to discuss the possibilities. When Stacey came home that night and told me about it, my initial reaction was less than supportive. “I am NOT moving to Los Angeles,” I told her, although as far as stances go mine sounded a bit halfhearted, even to me.

The truth was, as much as we loved the Bay Area, we’d never intended to stay there for as long as we had. A year turned into four, and although we’d been in our current, tiny apartment in Sausalito for only ten months, already it was beginning to feel restrictive and tiresome. In fact we’d been talking about moving anyway; it’s just that at that point we were only considering a move back into the City or up a little farther north to Mill Valley.

She came back from L.A. feeling and looking inspired. They wanted to make her a vice president, and the job was doing something she’d always wanted to do. “It just sucks that it’s in La La Land,” she said.
“That really does suck,” I agreed stupidly.
Now, it did eventually dawn on my thick brain that what I should’ve said—like anyone who’d ever read a single Dear Abby column knows—was that if she really wanted to take the job, then the city it was in shouldn’t make that big of a difference. When at last I realized this, I said something to that effect.
“But you’re still in school,” she said. To be exact, I was nine credits short of receiving my M.A. at San Francisco State.
“I could always transfer,” I countered.
“What about your business?” she asked, referring to my modest roster of clients for whom I offer marketing and writing services.
“I can pretty much work from anywhere. And there are plenty of Internet companies down there,” I said.

And so the seed had been planted. For the next week or two we argued the pros and cons of staying and going, weighing each point with care and precision and trying to assign values for each of our reasons. We flip-flopped back and forth, thinking on numerous occasions that at last we’d made a decision, only to change our minds again an hour or a day later. What compounded the dilemma further was the fact that Stacey’s old employer was making a comeback offer in an attempt to keep her. Throughout all of it we argued a little, drank lots of wine, reminded each other that it was a win-win scenario for Stacey’s career, and like any newlyweds had tons of really great sex.
We told some of our friends and family that we were considering moving to L.A., and were greeted with reactions that ranged from supportive to derisive and everything in between. My parents and in-laws of course were proud of Stacey come what may and proud of me for being so supportive of my new bride as to move to L.A. for what was ostensibly her benefit. Most of my close friends, on the other hand, (especially those in San Fran, where there is a general snobbery towards Los Angeles) all thought I was crazy. Some swore up and down that I’d hate it there. Even the ones who understood my reasons—or at least that I must have reasons, of some sort—all seemed to look at me as if I’d just lost a little bit of my manhood.

“You’re letting your wife’s career dictate your life!” they said, if not with their mouths then at least with their eyes.
They may have had a point there, but I tried to look at it more like I was enabling my wife to dictate her own career without my meddling. And wasn’t that admirable?
Finally, a decision was made, and this time the resolution that came with it seemed to stick. I think that after a point all the reasons we had for staying in San Francisco seemed less and less important. It wasn’t like we had a house that we’d have to put on the market or any kids to pull out of a school system. (I felt fairly certain that our dog would adjust to a new dog park without much trouble.) Of course, some of our closest friends were up in Northern California, but we looked forward to getting reacquainted with some old friends in Southern California, and we could always make new ones.

But what I think ultimately proved to be the deciding factor for us was simple. For Stacey, she always would’ve wondered “what if?” had she not taken the job in L.A. In my case, it wasn’t so much that I worried she might someday ask herself what would’ve happened if she had taken that job; I simply couldn’t live knowing that her question might be, “What if Matt hadn’t made me stay in San Francisco?” Once I thought about it that way, there was nothing else to consider.

Notes From The Author: You may e-mail me with any comments about my love story. Matt McAllister is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Writing mostly for the web, his work has spanned topics ranging from sports and outdoor life to business and marketing. His wife, Stacey, has been the topic of more articles than she would’ve liked.

1. Ability to see the big picture and plan accordingly;.

2. Self-discipline;

3. Ability to use time wisely;

4. At minimum, a moderate drive to achieve;

5. Adaptability;

6. Autonomy;

7. Decisiveness;

8. A feeling of control over your own destiny;

9. Having (energy) drive and enterprise;

10. Motivation to grow;

11. Sense of intuition;

12. Ability to spot opportunities;

13. Perseverance;

14. Problem-solving abilities;

15. Risk-tolerance;

16. Self-confidence;

17. Social skills.

As an example, let’s look at John Doe. John has an excellent nose for a good opportunity; he drives his wife crazy with always turning everything into a new business idea. He’s not afraid to make a decision and take the risk. He has a huge drive to achieve; he wants to be rich! John is confident that he can accomplish everything he sets out to do.

Then the reality of the rest of John sets in. He’s not real good in the follow-through; as a matter of fact, he starts one business only to come up with another, and yet another, idea over and over. He writes up proposal after proposal, and always stumbles over the concrete details, such as turning goals and visions into action plans, and projecting budgets. He starts and stops, never stopping long enough to evaluate and plan ahead for the success of the next venture.

John could benefit from postponing his next decision until he hones his problem-solving skills a bit. He needs to understand where he’s gone wrong and plan for success the next time. John also could put his vision for his work and his life down on paper, and learn to use this vision to help choose opportunities that are in sync with his financial and career goals.

John is confusing working hard with getting ahead. He needs to continually evaluate the tasks he is engaged in to determine if he is, indeed, using his time wisely.

And lastly, John would learn a lot from finding a business opportunity that would combine teamwork, successful strategies and skill building to encourage him to apply his abundant perseverance to ONE business until he succeeds.

John can look at this list and see how one strength could compensate for another weakness. If he wasn’t very decisive, he could be spared many a bad quick decision, and strong problem solving skills could bring an eventual understanding of the right path for HIM. What he lacked in self-confidence could be made up for with social skills that enabled him to work well with a mentor or a knowledgeable team. Lack of enterprise or drive could mean he isn’t cut out for over-the-counter or door-to-door retail sales. But he might shine in the backroom day-in-day-out details of getting a job done, or in website-based business.

Oh yeah…and John could also listen to his wife, and just give it all a rest at least one day a week…

About the author:
Glenn Beach is a poet, writer and home business entrepreneur in Nova Scotia, Canada.

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