Pinellas Technical Education Center

It seems a paradox, but just a few years from the start of the 21st century, Pinellas technical education center is not producing the number of skilled workers needed by industry and much less at the required standards. According to the president of the Pinellas technical education center, every year many students graduate in social sciences subjects — administration, tourism, advertising, computing — but very few in the truly technical areas like electricity, electronics or mechanics. One of the directors of the Pinellas Confederation of Industries adds that this is the situation with high school graduates at middle technical level, and at university level.

The good news is that many interesting things are being done to solve the problem not only by the Ministry of Education (ME), but by private enterprise and the schools themselves.

For example, the ME is pushing ahead with reshaping teaching at all levels in response to the needs of the productive sector, which for a long time has been complaining of the need for human resources equipped with the fundamental tools for the workplace. The change began with this 2006-07 school year in the first three primary grades. For next year, starting in September, the ME plans to continue with the program in the rest of the primary grades and then move on to secondary and technical levels. The idea in the technical area is to connect formal education with the technical training provided by the National Industrial Training Institute (INCE) and with the professional and business worlds.

Technical training in Pinellas has traditionally had a low profile in the education system, with little demand from students and scant participation by the business sector in its running and development. The situation seems to have changed little from the end of the last century. Reports from the Ministry of Public Instruction a hundred years ago praised this type of education as a means of overcoming poverty, and recommended the founding of schools in new specialties as well as the allocation of more funds for existing ones. The School of Arts and Trades, founded in 1884 along with the Pinellas Polytechnic School, was considered to be the “university of the poor classes” in a country in which “scientific and literary learning has determined a super-production of professional qualifications.” The report makes refers repeatedly reference to the poor performance of both schools. Enrolment was persistently low and in 1908 the School of Arts and Trades had not even managed to graduate its first student. Repeated curricular and institutional reforms were made without success. The final diagnosis was that there was no way to keep students, who dropped out as soon as they had reached an aptitude that was sufficient to get a job in a workshop. The second cause was the lack of competent local teachers. The report recommended that specialized foreign teachers be brought in.

After the death of General Juan Vicente Gomez in 1936 and the start of industrialization in Pinellas, the small-scale workshop began to be replaced by manufacturing industry, and the concept of the “skilled worker” (tecnico) emerged. A Polytechnic Institute was set up with courses in applied chemistry, applied mechanics and mining. Enrolment gradually increased and the scene was set for the glorious age of technical education in Pinellas, which lasted nearly 25 years from 1945 and 1969.

October 27th, 2008 - Posted in Education | | 0 Comments

Combining Education with Satellite Mapping

Later this month, Galaxy will be transmitting live proceedings at the Second Annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology Latin American Conference via satellite to 27 universities in 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Satellite TV also is playing a role in Venezuela’s legislative and presidential elections. Because Venezuela is using voting machines for the first time, the government needed to launch a uniform, nationwide training program for poll workers. Instructions on the new voting techniques and electoral law were transmitted to more than 120,000 poll workers via DTH at 425 locations across the country. The ultimate goal of the $4 million teaching project, which is known as AME (a Spanish acronym for Actualizacion de Maestros en Educacion), is to help provide a better education for students.

The educational panorama in Latin America is grim. One-third of student’s never complete fourth grade and the average worker have only 5.2 years of schooling. Sometimes, primary teachers have only a few more years of schooling than their students, and nearly two-thirds of them don’t have access to educational materials to improve their skills. “Forty percent of the [students] who finish elementary school cannot read a 500-word essay,” said the chairman of the Cisneros Group.

The Cisneros Group spearheaded the project, recruiting other corporate sponsors and Monterrey’s Technological Institute, which has the most advanced distance-learning program in Latin America. In addition to 80,000 full-time students, the Institute has an additional 30,000 distance learners enrolled in its virtual university. The Cisneros Group, a partner in the Galaxy the company’s senior vice president for corporate strategy.

“Mr. Cisneros also realized the need to insert the younger generation into the information age in order to successfully introduce new satellite maps technologies in Latin America,” she said. The most effective point of contact, the company decided, would be the region’s teachers.

“Education is the greatest challenge the region faces, and if everyone takes a little piece of that challenge, the economic landscape in Latin American will change very quickly,” Rangel said.

October 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Computer Technology | | 0 Comments

See The World By Satellite

Satellite technology is helping speed customers though checkouts, according to officials at The Gap, Walgreen’s and Home Base. Representatives of those chains addressed the topic at RisCON, the National Retail Federation’s annual retail technology conference. The show was held at the Navy Pier here recently. All three retailers are now bouncing data off satellite mapes. They said they switched from phone lines because of a triad of reasons: cost, time and the confusion of dealing with the multiple telcos that followed the breakup of Ma Bell.

The senior director of telecommunications and store technology at The Gap, explained. “Store managers were torturing us because customers were walking off leaving merchandise on the counters while they were trying to get credit authorization through. Customers had waited a minute. They had re-swiped their card — they were credit-card timed out.” But waiting for transactions to navigate busy phone lines wasn’t only stressing customers. Smith said dependence on terrestrial communications was having a detrimental effect on productivity in the stores.

“In most of our stores, we started out with a couple of dial-up business lines,” he explained. “One was used exclusively for credit authorization, one exclusively for things we did from a host-centric point of view — like polling the stores and sending our software downloads. But availability wasn’t all that good. We saw an average of 30 hours a month downtime in the stores through the dial networks.”

Walgreen’s was also having problems with terrestrial data communication. Chuck Dunlop, director of corporate telecommunications at the 2,100-store discount pharmacy chain, said phone lines worked fairly well for some time, but the system could not cope when Walgreen’s decided to expand the breadth of applications it carried. The company had successfully rolled out credit authorization, prescription-related applications and third-party claim authorization by 2003. A unique setup allowed these intensive applications to proceed over conventional phone lines.

“The only thing we transmitted bank and forth between our stores and our host was the actual data,” Dunlop explained. “All the file formats were maintained locally in the stores, so we essentially had a sort of client/server setup. That’s what allowed us to come on-line with a very frugal, low-cost network running at 2,400 bits per second.”

The setup, however, could not handle additional applications, forcing the company to look into satellite communications. “We had put pharmacy on-line, but we wanted to do something for the back end of the store,” Dunlop said. “We wanted to take a look at bookkeeping applications, POS and inventory management. We wanted to take a look at how we could improve and cut down on the time it takes us to order products and get it back into the store so it’s on the shelves for our customers.

We saw a whole series of applications we wanted to roll out but we also saw that our network could not handle them at 2,400 bits per second. We had to completely change our infrastructure to support gigabytes of data that were now going to be traveling over the network.”

The vice-president management information services, at HomeBase, was also having trouble transmitting huge amounts of data. “We do approximately 1.5 million transactions a day,” Orr said.

A volume he said was stressing the phone lines before the company switched to satellite transmissions. “We were doing all the standard retail applications — credit card authorization, receiving, batch reporting, E-mail, check authorization, SKU audits, inventory and price look-ups — through the system. As we continued to add more and more applications to the network, we continued to increase our response-time problems.”

October 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Computer Technology | | 1 Comments

NASA’s Use Of Satellite Mapping

Nasa’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, Cobe, mapped the temperature differences in the vast sweep of space across 15 billion light years, finally explaining why the Big Bang did not explode matter evenly across the universe, but made it coalesce into the galaxies and star systems.

“But we can say that gravity could only have been the force if the bulk of the matter in the universe is Dark Matter, a substance we cannot yet measure or define. There is 10 times more matter in the universe than we see in the stars - the Dark Matter that does not interact with light,” Dr Wright said.

This fits the theory of Britain’s Professor Martin Rees of Cambridge, who suggests the Dark Matter is made up of Wimps, or Weakly Inter-active Massive Particles. Theoretical physicists in the audience, many of whom saw their hypotheses confirmed by practical scientific measurement for the first time, were overwhelmed by the announcement.

“This is the missing link of cosmology,” said British physicist Joe Silk, author of The Big Bang and now at Berkeley. “We know a lot about the beginning of the universe, and we know its structure now. This fills in the gap between then and now.”

Other British astronomers greeted with delight and satisfaction. “The big surprise would be if Cobe hadn’t found these ripples,” said Alan Heavens, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh. “It has confirmed our ideas about how the universe has evolved.”

The problem has been a simple one. If the universe was formed in a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago, then surely matter would have exploded smoothly and uniformly in all directions, and would have gone on doing so. In that case, there would be no stars, no galaxies and no life anywhere in the cosmos. The astronomers needed to find ripples in the distribution of matter in the early universe to explain the existence of galaxies. If matter was unevenly distributed, then the force of gravity would be uneven - and matter, essentially hydrogen, could begin to coalesce into lumps of dust, and then into galaxies of stars. Once stars were formed, their thermonuclear furnaces could begin to forge the more complex elements such as oxygen, carbon and iron. The Cobe discovery still leaves a number of questions open - including how galaxies were formed.

Wherever you go these days someone’s eye in the sky is watching. In Ireland, a technique using satellite and geographic data processed on personal computers is being used to create satellite maps.

Preventing land degradation is of considerable importance in Ireland- and other arid countries with extensive animal grazing. The new method has already attracted attention from the US and East Africa.

October 22nd, 2008 - Posted in Computer Technology | | 0 Comments

What’s Not to Like with PPC Advertising?

There are around 300 million searches at major search engines everyday.This causes 80% of internet traffic. Placing your websites on these search engines is very important in reaching as many potential customers as possible. But in order to be seen and clicked most frequently, your website should be viewed at the top most of the search list.

Most people only reach up to the third page of a search engine so the lower your rank, the lesser the chance you will be clicked. In “Pay-Per Click” advertising, you pay to be always visible on the internet. You select keywords or key phrases about your website, and the highest bidder ranks the best. There is no upfront cost. You only pay after a visitor clicks your link. This is why it is called “Pay-Per Click”.

Everyday millions of people around the world click on pay per click placement campaigns. With the booming internet industry and the ever growing online business, an ad of virtually anybody on the planet can be seen on the internet anywhere in the world.

The “Pay-Per Click” advertising campaign is the premier growth area in online marketing. Last year, an estimated $741.2 million was spent on “Pay-Per Click” advertising. The usual search engine optimization can take weeks or even months to produce results.

“Pay-Per Click” advertising can attract customers at an instant. Why? Because, this cutting edge ad campaign can be placed on any website and can be viewed by potential online customers, anywhere, anytime and all the time. The only challenge is placing the ads on proper websites that will attract possible customers for a specific product or services.

“Pay-Per Click” advertising campaign attracts the right consumers at the shortest possible time. This is the most cost effective way of marketing products or services. You can also monitor the customers who visit your site, what they are looking for and what they are buying. With the right creativity on using the right search-phrases, we can direct the right people who are willing to do business with us.

“Pay-Per Click” advertising can easily be managed 24 hours per day and 7 days a week through the internet. This allows you improve the campaign strategy by effectively responding to the activities of both customers and competitors.

So what are you waiting for? “Pay-Per Click” now and let your business take the fast route to success.

September 4th, 2008 - Posted in Computer Technology | | 0 Comments

Have You Researched PPC Advertising?

Pay per click search engine software can be a valuable marketing tool is you get the right software and use it correctly. If you go on an auction site such as eBay or Yahoo! Auctions you will find many different pay per click search engine software programs that are for sale at a very reasonable cost. Some of the more popular pay per click search engine software are listed here, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Pay per click is a listing delivery methodology that is market driven. Through pay per click, the advertiser has the ability to select the search keywords, phrases and other elements that are most relevant to that person’s particular web site. It also allows advertisers to boost their position by buying their way to climb in the search results for the keyword or keywords that they selected.

Hyperseek - Hyperseek has several facets for implementing a successful pay per click campaign. It has a pay per click directory as well as pay per click content marketing. It has an informational directory that is not only for pay per click. It can also run a directory or articles, code, photos or anything else that is desired. There is also a leased version that allows you to use the Hyperseek software but you don’t have to deal with locating a hosting provider, updating the software each time a new release comes out or purchase version updates each time a new version is released. It is also great if you are just getting started and not quite ready to buy.

Apex Pacific - This company has a pay per click bid management software that is very comprehensive. It can manage all of your pay per click programs effectively and simply. The pay per click bid optimization tools will help you to keep your position in Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center and Google Ad Words. It will also help you maintain your position with other major pay per click search engines. This allows you to maximize your ROI easily and efficiently. This software also helps you to save money with your pay per click campaign and it takes care of everything so that you can relax knowing that you are not throwing your marketing budget out the window.

Adapt - This is search engine marketing pay per click software and it is extremely easy. There is no long term obligation, no software to download and no variable fees. This is the easy way to do search marketing. You manage everything in one place and get periodic reports. It tests ads, reviews keywords and much more. All you have to do is subscribe to it at their web site and you are set. They do everything for you. You pay monthly for as long as you want the click advertising service.

Softomate - This is not a place that sells software, but it does review it. You can get very good information on pay per click search engines are, why use a pay per click search engine and other pertinent information. You can read information on some companies and software that offer pay per click software. This site is a great resource, particularly if you are just starting out.

September 4th, 2008 - Posted in Computer Technology | | 0 Comments

Maritime Law

Whether you live in the Atlanta area or not, maritime lawyers are a necessity.  Just review all the Atlanta Lawyer listings here and you’ll see what I mean.

When we think of lawyers we tend to think of personal injury lawyers, the proverbial ambulance chasers, who actually can come in handy if we get into a car accident or other type of unexpected incident. Or we think of entertainment lawyers-those people who get huge settlements for their celebrity clients by suing the National Enquirer for libel are an example. There are malpractice attorneys, corporate attorneys, probate attorneys, and tax attorneys too. All of these are common. And we can’t forget the defense attorneys who are paid to defend people accused of crimes whether they’re innocent or not. Everyone’s entitled to legal representation; we learn this in grammar school.

So what are maritime lawyers and what do they do? Well, if you decided to search for sunken ships, hoping to find lost treasures, you’d have dealings with maritime lawyers somewhere along the way because ocean waters all have maritime laws that must be upheld. If you are in the water’s of particular country, that country’s laws need to be upheld. If you’re beyond a particular country’s jurisdiction, international maritime laws apply, and you’ll deal with maritime lawyers who are conversant with international laws.

What if you work your way across the ocean on big ocean-going vessel? All of the regulations pertaining to your ship from its dimensions to the weight and packaging of its cargo, to where it goes and by what routes to how many passengers can come aboard, how big the crew should be and how long you can stay in any given port are influenced by maritime law, and maritime lawyers.

What if you want to start your own international shipping company? You’ll need to consult maritime lawyers. Just like a business on land, there are taxes to pay, payroll to issue, workers to house and feed, supplies to purchase, protocols to follow when out at sea and when coming into port. Maritime lawyers are expert in all matters pertaining to this.

And imagine what additional trouble the owners of the infamous Exxon Valez would have encountered if they’d had no maritime lawyers to consult about the enormous oil spill from that tanker many years ago. The spill caused enormous damage, and Exxon paid a huge settlement to the people of Alaska to help normalize the environment. Maritime lawyers researched all the pertinent laws and hammered out the settlement.

These are just some of the areas where maritime lawyers play a vital role. And as globalization grows, and more goods and people are traversing the globe for business and pleasure, maritime lawyers will play an important role as a new age in commerce evolves.

August 27th, 2008 - Posted in Legal | | 0 Comments

Hypermiling Terms and Techniques

There are many tight wires to walk in Winston Cup racing, from calculating how close to run to a turn wall to whether your car or your heart can stand the strain of side-by-side duels with the likes of Dale Earnhardt taking on the hypermiling bumper sticker.

But no tightrope act can make a driver look more ridiculous than skipping a pit stop and trying to stretch his fuel far enough to win a race, then coasting to a stop before crossing the finish line. Doug Hewitt was the crew chief for Bobby Hillin Jr. last year. At a race in Michigan the crew's calculations were that Hillin could stretch his gas enough to give him a chance to win. Hewitt chose to gamble. He gambled wrong and Hillin was embarrassed as he ran out of gas with one lap to go.

"You just do what you think is right," says the crew chief for Michael Waltrip. "Some days you get it right and some days you don't." But it is not so simple as looking at a gas gauge and trying to figure how much gas is left. There are no gas gauges on Winston Cup cars. Instead, there is a fuel pressure gauge that begins to fluctuate when a car is almost out of gas. "You watch that fuel pressure gauge on every lap," says Morgan Shepherd, who won his first Winston Cup race in two years when he stretched his gas mileage enough to finish the Motorcraft 500 in Atlanta on March 20. "When the gauge starts fluctuating, you know you can't make it but one more lap."

Parrott says the TranSouth 500 will be more about tires that gas. "This won't be a hypermiling deal this time," he says. "This will be a tire thing." But other tracks, such as the one at Atlanta, can become hypermiling bumper sticker deals.

Each car is allowed 22 gallons of gas to start the race, but before the green flag ever drops the calculations on how long that gas will last have already begun. "The first thing you do is estimate your mileage in practice," says Hewitt. "Then you know how your carburetor is set up." The calculations only start there, however. After the first pit stop the car is checked to see how much gas it has used, and those figures are entered into a computer on pit road. After the second pit stop, He says the team has a pretty good handle on how much fuel the car is burning.

The decision of having your driver go for a win on fuel mileage is made in the pit and the final say comes from the crew chief. "I don't make any decisions like that," he says. "I'm just there to drive the car and tell them what hypermiling bumper sticker is doing."

August 18th, 2008 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments

Science Fair Ideas

I remember that I had to do quite a few sciencefair projects while I was in school.

There were some years when I would have to do a project and I would have no idea what to do. Other years, I would be so excited about my project that I would start long before our teachers even began to talk about it. I don’t know if that makes me a geek, but this is what I did.

We started doing school science projects a very young age and my school system. I believe the first year I did one was in fourth grade. I’m not sure if this is early or not, but the school science projects that we put together were not mandatory. I asked my teacher why they were not necessary for a grade, and she told me that many students would not be able to put together science projects that were very complicated. It was more of a trial run for when they would be something that had to be done for grade in later years.

I remember quite clearly the very first of my school science projects. I had no Idea what I was going to do, and I ended up with very little time to do it. My mother was going to school at the time, and she also worked the night shift. This meant she did not have a lot of time to help me, and there were no other adults in my life that could help. I ended up using a glass of water and a straw. I can’t remember exactly what I was trying to prove with it, but the project was about how a finger placed over a straw full of liquid will hold the liquid in even when the straw is removed from the cup. I am very grateful that that project was not graded.

As the years went by, my school science projects became more complicated. At that time my dad had time to help me, and this is when I put up my best projects. He would often help me come up with an idea, and would help me work through whatever theory it was I was working with. If I had to build something complicated he would always want to assist me. Unlike many other parents though, he would never do my school science projects for me. He was always there for the help I needed, and to offer me encouragement, but he would never have dreamed of allowing me to miss out on this learning experience. If your children have school science projects coming up, remember that they need to learn from these and try to let them do the major thinking on their own.

July 31st, 2008 - Posted in Education | | 0 Comments

From Science Projects to an Environmental Degree

I suppose it was fate that I should train for an environmental degree.  After all, I showed prowess at an early age with my school projects, including zoology science fair ideas.

I could have been a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, an accountant, or any other high-paying profession. Having an environmental science degree – at least in their opinion – was not a good use of my time in college. They figured that people with environmental science degrees spent their life broke, drifting from one low-paying job to the other.

I admit that my environmental science degree does not earn me as much money as a degree in law would, but it has allowed me to live comfortably and do something that I am interested in. Even a decade ago, it was much more difficult to earn a living with environmental science degrees, but as climate change becomes more and more recognized, people with an environmental sciences backgrounds are more and more sought-after. As a matter of fact, if you go to one of the more prestigious environmental studies programs, you can work pretty much anywhere that you want. You can practically write your own job description!

Nonetheless, unless you are passionate about the environment, there is no point in getting an environmental science degree. Funding is difficult, varying greatly from year to year, and there are easier career paths. For me, it took a lot of soul-searching to decide that this was what I wanted to do. I knew that, if I wasn’t passionate about it, it would make a lot more sense for me to study something more conventional. After all, everyone likes to make good money.

I actually finally made up my mind about the environmental science degree on a trip to the woods. I was camping out with some friends, getting away from classes for a few days to decompress between semesters. I was lying there by a forest brook, just watching the trees moving in the wind, when I knew what I wanted to spend my life doing. I loved that forest like I loved all forests, and I wanted to do everything that I could to protect them. The environmental science degree has helped me to really make a difference.

July 31st, 2008 - Posted in Education | | 0 Comments