So! If you've been sitting on an alpha build of a program to track your cat's sleeping patterns, now might be a good time to dig it up and start debugging.
Source: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/17/non-gaming-software-category-added-to-steam-greenlight/
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Associated Press Sports
updated 9:59 a.m. ET Oct. 17, 2012
MILAN (AP) -Italian media have hailed the return of "Super Mario" after Mario Balotelli inspired the Azzurri to a 3-1 victory over Denmark IN A World Cup qualifier.
Balotelli set up Riccardo Montolivo's opener as well as scoring Italy's final goal in his first international match since the European Championship final loss to Spain.
It was also Balotelli's first match at the San Siro since leaving Inter Milan for Manchester City two years ago.
Balotelli says "it's always special for me to play at San Siro, it's a great stadium. One which gives you more emotion. Is it nicer than English stadiums? Yes, there it's a different atmosphere."
Balotelli missed qualifiers against Bulgaria and Malta after undergoing eye surgery, then sat out Friday's win in Armenia because he had a fever.
? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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More news??PST: For a few minutes on Tuesday, it finally came together. And by a few minutes, I mean almost a full half. Fourteen months of promises that we?d see a different kind of soccer started to manifest into real, tangible results.
Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/45222796/ns/sports-soccer/
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Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator has popped out more than a few successful startups. Centzy, Number Fire, Bespoke Post, and Triple Lift come to mind. Not to mention PublicStuff, which recently raised $5 million. But Jon Axelrod, Managing Director of ERA is no fan of resting on laurels, and so the accelerator is making a few important changes.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Aua7-EWHGD4/
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Despite the increasing proliferation of internet marketing and other social and interactive media strategies used by businesses, the indispensability of telemarketing cannot be totally ignored or stated unjustified. There are certain places that can be touched only by phone calls and no other method. Especially in the case of business to business marketing where initially lead generation needs to be done before any further action is taken, over there its only calls that can give you sufficient time to perform market analysis and yet create a contact with the customer base at the same time. Transparency is something which is an intricate part of B2B marketing and it is this transparency which is provided to your business by telesales. Phone calls help your business create a personal contact with your target customers while helping your sales executive to perform other preliminaries of market prospecting and developing a strategy.
Telemarketing helps you segment target and position your product in the market according to the profile you want to make for your product, brand and business. However cold calling has come under the fire of the customers and businesses and most of them try to avoid callers trying to sell them anything and everything. Cold calling is old calling and it is not synonymous with telemarketing. Cold calling followed a matter of fact approach without any feeling or customer relationship management. It attempted to throw the leads over to the sales wall just in order to fill their sales funnel. However similar telemarketing might be to cold calling yet the most distinguishing factor between them continues to be the method and approach followed by them.
Telemarketing involves more processes and marketing mixes than just picking up the phone and making the call. tele-sales tips states the secrets to successful telemarketing campaign.? Deep and thorough analysis of the market along with target customer prospecting. This involves knowledge of the customer, the market in which your product operates; the competitors and other statistics.
? Qualification of the leads after considering their buying prospects, their need analysis and mating of your services and their wants. Accordingly the qualified leads should be scored on the basis of the prospect they are bringing into hot, warm and cold.
? Customer profiling and preparation of the script.
? Carrying on automated marketing campaign and try to acquaint the customers beforehand about your business and the rank it is holding in the market. 30% of the buyers pay attention to the call from companies whose name they know already.
? Get the best callers for your prospects as he reflects the image of your business and is correlative to the perceived brand value of your business in the minds of the customers. For this purpose most of the businesses adopt the services of lead generation company as they have variable callers with multiplicity of skills. So any one can be adopted to suit your business requirements.
? Follow lead nurturing to set an appointment and maintain follow up.
The reason of the growing essentiality of lead generation company is the increasing complexity of the market. Today customers are having more choices than they ever had before, in fact they are having so many choices that it is almost leading to clutter. So for lead generation purpose it has become increasingly important for the businesses to have a unique product, unique strategy and unique approach. Without a unique message and tele-sales tips your marketing and sales funnel will stagnate. For the purpose of effectively reaching the customers and increasing the conversion rates of your sales funnel, lead generation company services are adopted.
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A Food and Drug Administration Agent stands at the doorway of New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012, as investigators work inside. The company's steroid medication has been linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak. FDA spokesman Steven Immergut says the visit is part of the investigation into the outbreak, which has killed at least 15 people and sickened more than 200 others in 15 states. (AP Photo/Bill Sikes)
A Food and Drug Administration Agent stands at the doorway of New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass., Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2012, as investigators work inside. The company's steroid medication has been linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak. FDA spokesman Steven Immergut says the visit is part of the investigation into the outbreak, which has killed at least 15 people and sickened more than 200 others in 15 states. (AP Photo/Bill Sikes)
FILE - In a Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012 file photo, a delivery man walks up to the door of New England Compounding in Framingham, Mass. Federal and state investigators have been tightlipped about any problems they may have seen at the pharmacy whose steroid medication has been linked to a lethal outbreak of a rare fungal form of meningitis, or whether they have pinpointed the source of the contamination. They did disclose Thursday, Oct. 11, 2012 that they found fungus in more than 50 vials from the company. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)
UPDATE gives the latest numbers; map shows states affected by the meningitis outbreak and those receiving suspected tainted medications
FILE - This undated file image made available by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the Exserohilum rostratum fungus. Exserohilum, a kind of black mold, is the primary cause of a number of fungal meningitis cases afflicting people who got steroid back injections for pain. There are numerous ways a fungus might contaminate medications being made in a lab. (AP Photo/The Centers for Disease Control, File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Was it some moldy ceiling tiles? The dusty shoes of a careless employee? Or did the contamination ride in on one of the ingredients?
There are lots of ways fungus could have gotten inside the Massachusetts compounding pharmacy whose steroid medication has been linked to a lethal outbreak of a rare fungal form of meningitis.
The outbreak has killed at least 15 people and sickened more than 200 others in 15 states. Nearly all the victims had received steroid injections for back pain.
Federal and state investigators have been tightlipped about any problems they may have seen at the New England Compounding Center or whether they have pinpointed the source of the contamination. They did disclose last week that they found fungus in more than 50 vials from the pharmacy.
Company spokesman Andrew Paven said by email that criminal investigators from the Food and Drug Administration were at the pharmacy in Framingham, Mass., on Tuesday. The visit was part of a broad federal and state investigation of the outbreak, FDA spokesman Steven Immergut said in an email.
New England Compounding has not commented on its production process or what might have gone wrong, so outside experts can only speculate. But the betting money seems to be on dirty conditions, faulty sterilizing equipment, tainted ingredients or sloppiness on the part of employees.
The drug at the center of the investigation is made without preservative, meaning there's no alcohol or other solution in it to kill germs such as a fungus. So it's very important that it be made under highly sterile conditions, experts said.
Compounding pharmacies aren't as tightly regulated as drug company plants, but they are supposed to follow certain rules: Clean the floors and other surfaces daily; monitor air in "clean rooms" where drugs are made; require employees to wear gloves and gowns; test samples from each lot.
The rules are in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a kind of national standards book for compounding medicines that's written by a nonprofit scientific organization. Most inspections, though, are handled by state boards of pharmacy. Massachusetts last inspected New England Compounding in March in response to a complaint unrelated to the outbreak; the results have not been released.
High-volume production of the sort that went on at New England Compounding also raises the chances of contamination, experts said.
Traditionally, compounding pharmacies fill special orders placed by doctors for individual patients, turning out maybe five or six vials. But many medical practices and hospitals place large orders to have the medicines on hand for their patients. That's allowed in at least 40 states but not under Massachusetts regulations.
Last month, New England Compounding recalled three lots of steroids made since May that totaled 17,676 single-dose vials of medicine ? roughly equivalent to 20 gallons.
"I don't see it as appropriate for a community pharmacy to do a batch of something preservative-free in numbers in the thousands" of doses, said Lou Diorio, a New Jersey-based consultant to compounding pharmacies. Diorio, who has no connection to the investigation or the company, said it is harder to keep everything sterile when working with large amounts.
To make the steroid, a chemical powder from a supplier is mixed with a liquid, sterilized through heating, then pumped into vials, according to Eric Kastango, another consultant from New Jersey who helps compounding pharmacies deal with contamination problems. He is not connected to the company either.
Perhaps the powder was contaminated, either at New England Compounding or another location. Maybe the fungus was in the liquid, some experts said.
Kastango offered additional possible scenarios, related to the large volume produced: Making thousands of doses at a time can take many hours or days. It's possible that a batch could sit for hours or even a day or so before being placed in vials, making it vulnerable to contamination, he said.
It's also likely a pharmacy worker would take a break to get a snack or cup of coffee, to go to the bathroom or to step outside for a smoke, Kastango explained. If the person hurried back and didn't properly wash up or put on new gowns, masks and other safety garb, that could introduce contamination.
Faulty or misused sterilizing equipment is also a possibility. After a 2002 fungal meningitis outbreak linked to a South Carolina compounding pharmacy, investigators discovered that a piece of sterilizing equipment called an autoclave had been improperly used by the staff.
The types of fungus in the latest outbreak are ubiquitous: The first to be identified was Aspergillus, commonly found indoors and outdoors. As more testing of patients was completed, it became clear that another fungus ? a black mold called Exserohilum ? caused most of the illnesses. Exserohilum is common in dirt and grasses.
Most people do not get sick from ordinary exposure to these kinds of fungus, but spinal injections can provide them a pathway into the brain. Doctors are generally leery of using spinal steroid injections that contain preservatives because of fears the preservatives themselves can cause side effects.
Whatever happened at New England Compounding, it probably wasn't unique.
Just last year, there were at least three apparently similar incidents: At least 33 patients suffered fungal eye infections traced to products made by a compounding pharmacy in Ocala, Fla.; at least a dozen Florida patients were blinded or damaged in an outbreak linked to a compounder in Hollywood, Fla.; and the deaths of nine Alabama patients were attributed to tainted intravenous nutritional supplement provided by a compounder in Birmingham.
"These events have been happening once or twice a year for the last 15 years," Kastango said. "We wouldn't tolerate this if a plane crashed once or twice a year. But in health care, we've grown desensitized to these kinds of problems."
___
Online:
CDC outbreak information: http://www.cdc.gov/HAI/outbreaks/meningitis.html
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In essence, you?re being ripped off, and those responsible are taking everyone?s money while assuming very little risk.
David Cay Johnston was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting the inequalities and loopholes that exist in the U.S. tax code and exposing corporate tax evasion. His latest work,?The Fine Print: How Big companies Use ?Plain English? to Rob You Blind, examines his findings about how the U.S. economy has strayed away from capitalism and into ?corporate socialism,? where the free market, its engine of prosperity, has stalled.
Some argue that globalization has caused a smoothing of salaries as developing economies grow. We asked Johnston to make his case about how the alleged subversion of competitive markets could actually be what?s responsible. Here?s our interview with David Cay Johnston:
SmartPlanet: Are our markets competitive or is the game fixed?
David Cay Johnston: A growing number of industries are monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies even as they claim to be in highly competitive markets. Cable, Internet and telephone provide a good example of this. In most places you have one phone company and one cable company offering similarly slow, by world standards, Internet speeds and very similar prices. Computers make it possible for companies to match prices quickly, as airlines do in just a few minutes for millions of fares when one airline changes its pricing structure.
SP: Are we paying too much for goods and services?
DCJ: We pay four times what the French do for a triple play package of cable, Internet and telephone ? and they get worldwide TV, not just domestic; their Internet is ten times faster and instead of two country calling, they get long-distance to 70 countries at no extra charge. All that for $38 compared to the U.S. average of $160 including taxes. By one measure we pay 38 times as much as the Japanese per bit of information on the Internet. In states where the electric utilities were broken up so power generation could be a competitive business prices did not fall. Instead since 1999 they rose 48% more than inflation, compared to just 8 percent in states that retained traditional regulation. Everywhere there is a lack of competition, or only the appearance of competition, we pay way too much.
SP: Which companies and industries owe taxpayers their success? Which are the biggest offenders?
DCJ: Wall Street and the Too Big To Fail Banks are, for now, by far the worst offenders. We put $14.7 trillion, the entire economic output of the nation in 2009, at risk under the George W. Bush administration bailout instead of letting these firms suffer the consequences of their own mismanagement. The 401(k) system has generated huge profits for investment firms even as many accounts shrivel, becoming what I call 201(k)s. ?We have pipelines earning as much as 55% annual profits on their assets, eight times the average for all business. And even though pipelines are exempt from the corporate income tax, they get to collect the corporate income tax in their monopoly rates, inflating profits. The telephone companies collected $360 billion in rate hikes to build an Information Superhighway, but all we got was a two-lane Irish country road where you have to stop now and then while the sheep graze, our Internet having fallen from first to 29th in the world.
SP: Why would big businesses attempt to escape the rigors of the free market, and what effect does that have on the economy and the standard of living?
DCJ: Big companies are escaping the rigors of competitive markets.?When Adam Smith wrote about ?the invisible hand? he was pointing out that it is competitive markets, which create efficiencies, innovation and economic growth. But Smith also warned us in?The Wealth of Nations?in 1776 about how business owners are always conspiring to raise prices and reduce wages, which makes them better off but undoes the benefits of capitalism and slows economic growth. This is a major reason the real median wage (half make more, half less) has been stuck at just over $500 a week since 1999. It explains why the bottom 90 percent had higher incomes in 1973 than now when you adjust for inflation ? and back then most families with children had only one parent working outside the home. In 2010, the year after the Great Recession, the bottom 90 percent say their incomes decline. And of the increase going to the top 10 percent, 37 percent went to the top one percent of the top one percent.
SP: In your book, you single out telephone carriers ? is it really in their interests to hold back universal broadband services? Can you quantify the impact?
DCJ: Remarkably we have created a system in which the AT&T - Verizon duopoly makes bigger profits by holding back the Internet. Verizon will make fiber optic service, the Information Superhighway, available to just 16 million households, not all of whom will buy. AT&T provides fiber to the street, then old-fashioned coaxial cable to your home or business. And if you live in a rural area or even cities like Rochester, where I live in Western New York, your region is never scheduled to get fiber optic service. Building the universal fiber optic service out economic competitors are all building or have built would encourage the invention of new services and products in America, but instead those will be developed in other countries. After all, if there is no way to use a service why would it be invented? In making rules for business we forget that nothing in our Constitution speaks to riches and profits, but the Preamble cites, as one of the six noble purposes of the United States of America, promoting the general Welfare (upper case in the original).
One study, and it is only one study, says that a universal Information Superhighway at the fastest speeds in the world (we average about 5 percent of the top speeds) would increase economic output by two-thirds. That seems too much in my mind, but then look at how much richer America became after the Industrial Revolution took hold in the last third of the 19th century.
?The average family of four now spends $900 per year on state and local subsidies to corporations, more than a week?s average take-home pay for the typical family of four.?
SP: How could laws and rules have been written this way, and why wouldn?t people notice it all happening? Was it a gradual shift or a more recent trend?
DCJ: Amendment by regulation by rule, one step at a time over many years, corporate lobbyists rewrote the rules. Had they done it all in one big bill we would have noticed. But who pays attention to when two words are changed in subsection q or Section 6108 of some federal or state statute. But some of this was done in the open and no journalists reported on it and no politician had an interest in pointing it out. So five states have taken away your legal right since 1913 to telephone service and put in rules that can literally mean you can only get cell telephone service. Worse, 19 states let corporations pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers? paychecks ? you read that right, 2,700 big companies in 19 states get to keep the state income taxes of their employees. The best part, from the companies? point of view, is they don?t have to tell the workers. All of the shift I identify in THE FINE PRINT began in either the 1980s or later, meaning when we abandoned the New Deal for Reaganism, which both parties now embrace.
SP: Is the government itself the problem or is it the lobbying?
DCJ: Government makes the rules, but when the only parties with an interest in writing those rules are rich people, corporations and their professional lobbyists then democracy is corrupted. Lobbying in the sense of a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment. But there is no Constitutional right to give money to politicians so I would ban donations from anyone outside of a lawmaker?s district, ban free travel and prohibit any either lobbying or working for companies a lawmaker?s committees dealt with for life after leaving office, even if that means paying much bigger salaries to members of Congress and state legislatures. The price would be cheap to make sure our laws are balanced and take into account all interests, not just those of big corporations.
SP: Is the government?s approach to regulation harmful to public safety as infrastructure ages? Your book noted how some gas and electric utilities are becoming dangerously dilapidated.
DCJ: Yes. High pressure gas pipelines laid when Truman was president still operate and with distressing results like the 2010 explosion south of San Francisco that blew up an entire city block and killed eight people ? and would have killed many more had it occurred just two hours later. Pacific Gas & Electric, the big Northern California utility, got rates to finance replacing its power poles on a 50-year cycle, but instead is replacing them on a 750-year cycle. Finance types are hollowing out many of our utilities, just as they stripped manufacturing companies and then threw out the shells.
SP: Do we already have a corporate socialist economy? Isn?t that income redistribution upward?
DCJ: Large parts of our economy are corporate socialism, in which profits are privatized and losses socialized. And then there are the growing subsidies. The average family of four now spends $900 per year on state and local subsidies to corporations, more than a week?s average take-home pay for the typical family of four. These policies all take from the many to give to the favored few at the top. New Yorkers are being taxed to give at least $1.4 billion to the hereditary ruler of Abu Dhabi, who is worth tens of millions of dollars. I show how taxpayers gave $5 billion to Goldman Sachs in one deal and billions more in other deals ? and Goldman makes more than one percent of all the profits of all six million corporations in America, so it hardly needs subsidies.
SP: If this has been such a dramatic?occurrence, why has the media failed to cover what?s happening?
DCJ: We used to cover more of this, but the fastest disappearing job in America is journalist. In some cities 75 percent of the reporting jobs are gone. These deals also require journalists with high levels of skills who understand government, regulation, taxes and lobbying, but journalism wages are falling fast. One study showed the average reporter pay is now the national average for all jobs. Consultants have also told newspapers for years that readers want soft features and beautiful layouts more than hard news, which is expensive to produce. That our society worships corporations and the rich also detracts from serious coverage.
SP: People aren?t exactly revolting against the system. What would compel the American people who believe as you do to act to change how the marketplace works?
DCJ: Knowledge. If you do not know that you are being ripped off, and how, then you cannot focus yourself and others on a response. What I write about in THE FINE PRINT should have been page one news in papers across the country ?and had it been many of these outrages would have been stopped. Information is power. The companies that profit from the new rules and laws know that so they work very hard to make things obscure and, if they become known to make them sound complicated. As I show, though, once you understand the principles it is all easy to understand.
SP: What do you suggest can and should be done?
DCJ: We need to restore government consumer advocacy offices, especially for utility regulation. We need to restore simple rules that were virtuously self-reinforcing. These include restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, which for seven decades required that the risky business of underwriting and (more recently) gambling in derivatives be done by companies separate from retail banking. That is, donut stop speculators, just make sure they are not speculating with your paycheck. We need to repeal laws that force secret contracts, including the rule that lets railroads with parallel tracks for all but the last mile of a thousand mike trip charge monopoly prices for the whole distance ? and keep the precise terms secret even when a government agency is the shipper. We need balance and we need to recognize that most regulations are sought by business to protect their turf, thwart competition, raise prices and limit the ability of customers to get redress from unfair deals.
SP: Are Americans too inclined to think they are all future millionaires?
DCJ: Only one in a thousand people can be in the top tenth of one percent, one in ten thousand in the top hundredth of one percent. The data show that these two tiny groups are getting more and more of the wealth and the income gains while those even at the 95th step on the income ladder are pretty much going nowhere. The super rich have gone in a generation from private jets to private jumbo jets; with one American name owning two personal 747s.
Source: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/how-corporations-are-crippling-us-prosperity/2633
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