Studies say yes.

Attending college abroad can have a positive impact on your career goals, marketable skills, and employability.

The first and primary impact that studying abroad makes on the lives of students is that it changes and broadens their post-college career goals. 14% of students who studied abroad said the trip had made a minor difference, while 35% said it made a notable difference. A whopping 20% said it made a significant difference.

Although the job market might be slowly improving, it is more important than ever to stand out from other applicants however possible. Research shows that studying abroad gives students additional qualifications that cab improve their chances of landing a position. The desire to work internationally is so strong that studies show 58% of students who have studied abroad are actively pursuing careers in other countries.

Unfortunately, even the most impressive resume only serves as a way toland you an interview, and it is that curcial first meeting that determines whether or not a candidate is hireable. During the interview process, students who have studied abroad can start compelling conversations about their experiences, showcasting the breadth of their perspective and highlighting their impressive credentials.

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5 important things to know about the EU:

1. The European Union has delivered more than 60 years of peace, stability, and prosperity in Europe, and has responded proactively to international crises through foreign development policies and dozens of civilian and military crisis management and conflict prevention operations around the world.

2. The EU is the United States’ most important partner in terms of not only political and economic relations, but also in addressing global challenges like promoting energy security and efficiency, combating climate change, and helping developing nations lift themselves out of poverty.

3. The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc, accounting for almost one-fifth of global trade. The EU’s single market of more than 500 million consumers is the EU’s main economic engine, enabling most goods, services, money, and people to move freely throughout its territory.

4. The EU and its member states collectively are the largest providers of official development assistance around the world.

5. The EU has implemented the most ambitious set of climate and energy targets anywhere in the world.

How the European Unions works:

The European Council: Made of of the hears of state or government of the Member States, along with the presidents of the European Commission and European Council, sets overall EU policy and is the highest political authority in the EU.

European Commission: Proposes legislation, manages and implements EU policies and the budget, enforces European law, and negotiates internationally in areas falling within its jurisdiction.

Council of the EU: Adopts laws (with the EP), coordinates specified policies, develops foreign and security policy, and concludes international agreements.

European Parliament (EP): Adopts laws (with the Council of the EU), voice of EU citizens, directly elected by the people.

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How does music enter our brain? Music originates as vibrations, which form sound waves as they propagate through the air. The outer ear ”catches” the sound waves and direct them into the ear canal where they meet the eardrum before passing into the middle ear. Three tiny bones in the middle ear then amplify the sound waves before they enter the middle ear. Well inside the inner ear, the sound waves enter the fluid-filled cochlea, where the movement of the fluid stimulates tiny nerve cells which convert sound waves into electrical impulses. The auditory nerve then transmits the electrical impulses to the brain, where they will be interpreted as sound.

Many parts of the brain are affected by music; music involves more parts of the brain than any other function that people perform:

-          The tonality involves the prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum and the temporal lobe.

-          The lyrics involve the Wernicke’s area, Broca’s area, the visual cortex, the motor cortex and create emotional responses.

-          The rhythm involves the left frontal cortex, the left parietal cortex and the right cerebellum.

Specific brainwave rhythms are associated with specific smotional and cognitive outcomes. Matching music with brain waves to induce a particulare reponse or state or mind.

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1. Our stomach is full of digestive acid, strong enough to melt zinc. Don’t worry though; the stomach lining renews itself so quickly that the acids don’t have time to eat through that.
2. Lungs consist of over 300,000 million capillaries which are tiny blood vessels. If they were laid out, they would span 1,500 miles.
3. (An average man’s) testicles produce 10 million new sperm cells per day. That’s enough new sperm to repopulate the entire planet in only 6 months!
4. The human bone (especially the femur) is about 4 times stronger than concrete. A cubic inch of bone can bear a load of 19,000lbs (over 8.6 tons).
5. The largest organ in the human body is the skin, each person will shed off nearly 40lbs of it in his or her lifetime.
6. You go to sleep and wake up two different sizes, being tallest right after getting out of bed but shrinking during the day by being weighed down by the forces of gravity.
7. On an average day, the focusing muscle of the eyes moves about 100,000 times. To put that in perspective, this would be the same as walking 50 miles every day for your leg muscles.
8. The average human body gives off enough heat in only a half hour to boil a half-gallon of water.
9. If all the blood vessels in a human body were placed end to end, they would circle the globe with a combined length of over 25,000 miles,
10. A postage-stamp sized piece of circumcised foreskin takes only 21 days to grow enough to cover 3 basketball courts. The lab-grown skin is used to treat burn patients.
11. Humans are the only mammals in the world that cannot breathe and swallow at the very same time.
12. 7 new miles of blood vessels are created for every 1 pound of fat gained.
13. When you blush, your stomach lining also reddens.
14. In your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools.
15. In a female’s ovaries, there are over 500,000 eggs but only 400 of them will ever get the chance to create life.
16. Your feet have about 500,000 sweat glands and have the ability to produce up to a pint of sweat each day.
17. Your nose has quite the memory, and has the ability to remember 50,000 different scents.
18. The air from a sneeze can travel at unbelievable speeds of 100 mph or more!

    

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Number of preventive services women will get with no co-pays that will be phased in starting August 1 2014:

-          Annual well-woman visits

-          Screening for gestational diabetes

-          Testing for the human papilloma-virus, or HPV

-          Counseling for sexually transmitted infections

-          Counseling and screening for HIV

-          Contraceptive methods and counseling

-          Breastfeeding support, supplies and counseling

-          Screening and counseling for domestic and interpersonal violence

The number of women who have already received no-cost coverage of other preventive services under the Affordable Care Ac, such as Pap smears and mammograms, and who will gain access to these new services after August 2014 is expected to be 20.4 million.

These benefits are needed because the percentage of women who report delaying needed medical care because of cost is 52% and the percentage of women who report giving up basic necessities to pay for health care expenses is 32%.

Reproductive health is, however, still under attack. The number of representatives who voted in July 11, 2012 to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away birth control and other preventive women’s service was 244, 239 of which were Republicans. The number of senators who voted for the Blunt Amendment on March 1, 2012, which would have let bosses deny birth control coverage to their employees was 48, 45 of which were Republicans.

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The slow speed and fragility of floppy disks led to the development of optical formats such as the CD-ROM, which was originally designed to be purely a medium for audio recordings. The development of user-writable CDs allowed a user to create perfect reproductions of music recordings every time. This created a feeling of unease amongst the American recording industry, which imposed compulsory royalties on recordable drives and blank media. Later formats such as DVDs and Blu-ray would have increasingly complicated copy-protection systems which hackers would try to defeat in a constant game of cat and mouse.

The creation of high-compression audio formats such as MP3 further complicated the issue as users could compress audio tracks by up to 90%. With the rise of the Internet, these files could also be transferred and distributed to a worldwide audience, bypassing the need for removable storage completely.

With no moving parts to wear out as with floppy disks and less vulnerable to scratch damage as with optical disks, solid-state flash memory is the next generation of portable storage. These small cards are mostly used in small portable devices such as digital cameras and phones. The increasing development of integrated circuits has allowed these formats to grow in capacity exponentially, whilst retaining a level of backwards compatibility.

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Let’s take a look at some of the devices the microprocessor has powered over the past 40 years:

1971: Busicom Calculator – The Unicom 141P calculator was one of the very first devices to feature a microprocessor. Computing as we know it started here.

1977: Commodore PET – The PET is widely acknowledged as the first all-in-one home computer.

1978: Washing machine – The first microchip-controlled washing machines came onto the market, showing the diverse usages of the new technology.

1980: Arcade Mania – Namco introduced Pac-Man in the arcades of the U.S. and sparked a huge craze.

1981: Osborne 1 Laptop – With a 5” screen, and weighing 10.7kg, it really was the “great” grandfather of modern laptops.

1986: Nintendo NES – The gaming industry was revitalized by consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

1991: Computing democratized – Business and personal computing exploded with a wide range of desktops, laptops and even early tablets.

1997: MP3 player – The way we listen to music was forever changed in the late 1990s with the first MP3 players.

1999: BlackBerry – The smartphone revolution kicked off when RIM introduced the BlackBerry 850.

2001: Apple iPod – The iPod was released, and the future of MP3 as the music format of choice is set in stone.

2002: Microsoft Windows Tablet – Almost a decade before the consumer obsession with tablets, businesses were using them for more functional tasks.

2008: Netbook – Netbooks were introduced as small and lightweight devoices for completing simple tasks and viewing media and internet content on the go.

2010: Apple iPad – Tablets hit the consumer mainstream with the launch of the iPad.

2011: Digital Signage – Digital Signage is but one of a vast number of new uses for the microprocessor. Intelligent, internet-connected devices found in everyday life – from industry and retail to agriculture and vehicles.

2011: Ultrabook – The evolution of the PC takes another big step as stylish Ultrabook devices push forward mobile, high performance computing.

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1. Choose a domain name. Find one that is easy to say and spell, and make sure it reflects your business name. Also, stay away from hyphens and numbers.
2. Register your domain name. Use a reliable domain registrar, and consider registering alternates (.net, .info). You may also want to protect your private information with Whois Guard protection,
3. Get web hosting. Your web host displays your page on the web. For true performance, security and expertise make sure you sign up with a dedicated managed WordPress host.
4. Ask your web host for the nameservers, or DNS, for your site and plug this DNS info into your domain name registrar account.
5. Install WordPress. If you use a good dedicated managed WordPress host, WordPress will be pre-installed for you. If not, many hosts offer two-minute WordPress software installation using Fantastico.
6. Choose your theme. Your WordPress theme gives your site a style. Chaning your theme won’t affect your content, just the way it’s displayed. StudioPress offers some really good themes.
7. Set up the basics. Will your home page be a blog or a landing page? Change this in Settings > Reading. In Settings  > Permalinks, use /%postname%/ so page URLs are easy to read.
8. The fun part: add content! Get to work filling your pages with great content. Read Copyblogger to learn how to attract visitors and keep them engaged. After your site is set up, you can focus solely on creating content and attracting visitors.

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At the end of last month, a video emerged of members of the Mexican Gulf cartel using machetes to behead five men from the rival Zetas gang. The month before, a Zetas gang member dumped 49 mutilated bodies in a northern Mexico town square.

This week alone, seven police officers died when they were ambushed by a drug cartel, and the newspaper El Manana, in the city of Nuevo Laredo, announced it was stopping coverage of the drug-related bloodshed after grenades damaged its offices for the second time this year (in one recend incident, 14 severed heads were dumped on the street close to Nuevo Laredo’s town hall in ice boxes).

In Mexico, murders, beheadings, kidnappings and torture are all too common as gangs protect their turf and try to increase their share of a drugs trade worth an estimated $13 billion annually. In the past few years, authorities have killed or captured 22 of the highest-ranking drug generals and seized more than $10.9-billion worth of drugs. There have been more than 55,000 drug-related killings and more than 6,000 disappearances during President Felipe Calderon’s six-year offensive against the cartels.

But a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice says drug demand is increasing and Mexican cartels – who dominate the supply, trafficking and wholesale distribution of the trade – are positioned to meet the rise and keep the drugs flowing across the U.S. border. The seven Mexican drug cartels will solidify their positions with U.S. gangs who sell the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine on the streets of more than a thousand U.S. cities, says the report. The gangs’ proficiency will ensure “that the drugs remain readily available in markets throughout the United States.”

The Drugs and Where They Come From

Methamphetamines

Methamphetamines have become a sophisticated international business, which includes securing supplies from as far away as Asia, processing the methamphetamine in large, elaborate labs in Mexico, and transporting the drugs across the U.S. border via tunnels, commercial vehicles or human mules. Mexico is estimated to supply 70% of the methamphetamine consumed In the United States.

Marijuana

Mexican marijuana production is concentrated in nine states: Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacan, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Sonora and Durango; Guerrero, Nayarit and Michoacan are the traditional production areas, but U.S. intelligence reports say large cartels have shifted their grow-ops to avoid increasing eradication efforts by the Mexican government and to get closer to the United States. The cartels also operate large, open-air-grow-ops in more northerly states, such as Oregon and Washington. There are reports cartels are increasingly building connections to groups east of the Mississippi River.

Cocaine

Cocaine is the most lucrative of illegal drugs. The United Nations estimates that sales of the drug net $88-billion a year on the street. Most shipments of cocaine involve numerous parts of the cartel federations. While the largest federations were once Colombian, now it appears they are Mexican.  The UN estimates two-thirds of the cocaine that left the Andean region of South America for the United States In 2008 passed through the hands of Mexican cartels.

Heroin

Most Colombian heroin flows to the United States directly via commercial airlines – primarily to New York and Miami. The Central America-Mexican corridor appears to serve as a secondary transit route for South American heroin. The drug is moved by cartels to northern Mexico for smuggling across the U.S.’s southwest border in vehicles or on foot.

Source: http://news.nationalpost.com/

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The rubber on your tyres may not be the first thing you think of when buying a car, but remember, they are the only thing connecting you to the road. If the tyres are close to balding, you could be left with a bill from anywhere between £200 and £600 for a new set of boots.

2. Brakes

Like the aforementioned tyres, brakes are very important, and they need to be in good working order. Test-drive the car and do a few emergency stops to ensure that the brakes not only stop the car, but do so in a confident and true manner. If the car has ABS, check that it works! The wheels shouldn’t lock up under hard braking; if they do then the ABS isn’t working.

3. Paintwork

Paint may be boring, it may not be very interesting, but it is a massive part of your car, and if you take any pride in it, you’ll want it to be in good condition. Never buy a car in the rain or in the dark, as any paint issues or rust won’t be easily visible. Things like small scratches are often easily fixed, but if you have dings and bumps, then you might want to consider asking for money off.

4. Check Service History

Service histories are a vital part of buying a used car. Without then, your 64,000 mile bargain could actually turn out to be a 120,000 mile disaster, as with a proper service history you can check just how often the car has been serviced and the mileage on each date, so you know it hasn’t been clocked!

5. Tested & Taxed?

If sounds daft, but if you buy a used car without it being tested or taxed, do you really know what you’re getting? Buying a car you don’t know without an MOT is a dangerous business, as you could be left with one hell of a bill for repairs. Tax, especially in today’s climate, is very expensive, so try and haggle your way to at least six months in the deal.

6. Clutch

All cars go through periods of needing new parts, but if the clutch is about to go, that’s one expense you really don’t need. A clutch can be particularly expensive, so make sure you test that it isn’t slipping or that it doesn’t feel too hard to push down.

7. Check the Company

The internet is one hell of a resource these days; from Trip Advisor to eBay, there’s thousands of ways of checking on the reputation of almost any business in the UK, so use it! If you’re not convinced that the dealer is a reputable one, go online and search. If there’s been a whole host of unhappy customers, then chances are it’ll be online. Don’t trust them just because they have a nice smile, use your head!

8. Dip the Oil

The engine is the power-plant that will keep your car going; it’s the only thing that gives you power, so it needs to be respected. Get under the bonnet and check the oil levels for yourself. If you’ve never done it before, all you need to do is get a rag, find the dipstick, lift it out of the engine, wipe clean, dip it back in and lift out once more and check that the oil level is somewhere between minimum and maximum. If it’s not, you need to ask yourself why.

9. Exhaust Blowing

Press the throttle, does it sound right? The exhaust note should sound, if it’s a standard car without modification, pure and relatively docile. If it sounds like someone’s fitted and induction kit on it, you’ve either got a blowing exhaust or performance modification under the bonnet.

10. Boy Racer

If you’re not a boy racer, the last thing you want is a car that’s been chavved up or raced. The easiest way to make sure it’s not been put through hell is to check the thread depth on the tyres, the clutch and the mileage. If it’s a performance motor, then it may be worth checking forums for best advice on that particular model, so you know you’re not buying one that’s been trashed.

11. Mods

The car industry has seen a large increase in modifications on standard hatchback cars. They range from induction kits, which replace the standard air box and sound ridiculously loud, to massive exhausts, and if you’re not into that type of thing it’s best to ask the seller if the car is standard.

12. Price Checker

Being naïve about the price of the car you’re looking at can be a shocking move, as the dealer will jump on it. Do your research beforehand by using either one of the several text check services that are available or by visiting parkers.co.uk, who give you a valuation for your vehicle.

13. Insurance Group

This applies more to performance-oriented cars, as you can be seriously stung by the insurance costs if you’ve not checked beforehand. Make sure that the car you’re buying is insurable for your budger. Cars like the Honda Civic Type R are group 17 insurance, and will subsequently cost a fair chunk to cover.

14. Cut & Shut

We’re living in a world full of scam artists, and one of the worst scams in the motoring world is the cut and shut. Basically, they badly weld two cars – front and back – together and sell on as if it was the original car. If this car is involved in a crash, the likelihood is it won’t react as it should, and you and your family could be left seriously injured, if not dead. Check the weld points underneath the rubber seals around the car, if they are inconsistent or seem poorly welded, you may have a cut and shut on your hands and you should ring the authorities.

15. Tracking

Does the car drive straight and true, or do you have to point the wheel a few degrees to the right or left to get it to go in a straight line? If it’s the latter, then your tracking might be out, or even worse, the car may have been involved in a crash and never repaired properly.

16. Data Check

Taking a simple data check on the car is a great way of finding out if the car has ever been involved in an accident. It will tell you if the motor has ever been written-off, or if the police are after it. It’s a simple 10-minute phone call to the HPI that could just save you from buying an absolute lemon.

17. Check the VIN

The car’s Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) is a simple but effective way of checking if the car has been tampered with. The VIN on the chassis should match up with the VIN in the logbook – if it doesn’t, the car may have been tampered with.

18. Wear & Tear

Do the interior plastics and seats match with the mileage? If the car has only done 20,000 miles, you shouldn’t really be seeing signs of wear and tear on the seats or plastics on the dashboard, so bare this in mind when looking at the vehicle.

19. Private

If the sale is a private one, always buy from the seller’s home. That way, you always have a home address and number if something turns out to be suspect. If you buy from a pub car park,. You haven’t got a leg to stand on if the worst should happen.

20. Haggle

The last tip would have to be haggle. We don’t do it enough in the UK, but haggling is one of the best ways to secure a bargain on your new car. Using this technique should hopefully reduce the price of the car and make you feel like you’ve got one over on the dealer or seller.

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