Which of the nation’s top state universities produce graduates who go on to make the biggest bucks?
Among all 50 state “flagship” schools, recent graduates of the University of California-Berkeley earn the highest median starting salary, at $53,100, according to CollegeMeasures.org. In comparison, new graduates at the University of South Dakota in the small town of Vermillion earn the least, at $35,900.
State flagship universities are typically the most prestigious public university in each of the 50 states. Such school typically attract higher performing students, receive greater financial support from their respective state governments and enjoy the best graduation rates among public institutions in the United States.
State flagships whose grads earn the highest starting salaries
1. University of California-Berkeley: $53,100 2. University of Maryland: $50,600 3. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor: $50,600 4. University of Virginia: $50,500 5. University of Connecticut: $49,500 6. University of Texas: $49,100 7. Penn State University: $48,600 8. University of Wisconsin: $47,900 9. University of Delaware: $47,300
10. University of Washington: $47,100
State flagships whose grads earn the lowest starting salaries
1. University of South Dakota: $35,900 2. University of Montana: $37,400 3. University of South Carolina: $39,400 4. University of Hawaii: $40,300 5. University of Oregon: $40,600 6. University of Kentucky: $40,600 7. University of Missouri: $40,900 8. University of Nebraska: $40,900 9. University of New Mexico: $41,100 10. University of Mississippi: $41,200
The salary figures were generated by research firm PayScale.com and made available through CollegeMeasures, which among other things lets people compare how private and state schools compare in terms of salaries, grad rates, freshman retention rates and more.
For those dreaming of attending UC Berkeley, meanwhile, the cost may be prohibitive if you aren’t a Californian. The price tag for non-residents is nearly $56,000 a year.
Breakthrough:South Korean scientists have developed a technology that will allow Smartphones to diagnose diseases.
When we are feeling under the weather a visit to the doctors’ surgery or hospital is a necessary evil to find out what is wrong with us.
But, if a team of scientists have their way, we may soon be able to get a diagnosis for our illnesses simply by using a mobile phone from the comfort of the armchair.
Backed by government funding, South Korean scientists have developed new mobile-phone technology designed to diagnose disease.
Incredibly, this could result in instant diagnosis’ for illnesses from just a droplet of blood or saliva on a Smartphone’s touchscreen.
And those behind the revolutionary technology say the recognition rate is almost 100 per cent accurate and as effective as conventional medical equipment.
The technology was developed on the basis of the touchscreen’s capacity to detect the minute electrical signals generated by a fingertip’s touch.
That ability is called ‘capacitive sensitivity’.
A team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology said when its technology is commercialised, it will revolutionise diagnostic medicine around the world.
Professor Park Hyun-Gyu says his team’s research will enable mobile phones to diagnose a range of diseases from cancer to diabetes.
He said biomolecules, like those produced by diseases, transmit similar signals that a touchscreen can recognise.
Mr Hyun-Gyu said: ‘If you have a certain type of DNA or proteins, the touchscreen would react in the same way as a finger’s electrical signal is detected.
The team believe they are the first to demonstrate that a touchscreen can be used to detect biomolecules.
But researcher Won Byoung-Yeon says more work needs to be done before the technology is perfected.
He said: ‘Currently, we’ve reached the level where we can detect certain biomolecules’ existence or concentration, but we can’t define what the biomolecule is.
‘Therefore, we’re producing a film covered in a substance which can selectively react to certain biomolecules so that we can determine what those biomolecules are.’
Once it’s moved beyond the laboratory, the team believes the technology could transform diagnostic techniques, and save billions in healthcare costs.
It could be applied to inexpensively diagnose diseases in environments like nursing homes or mobile clinics, and radically reduce the necessity and expense of sending samples to a lab for testing.
The International telecommunications Union says billions of people use mobile phones around the world every day.
The idea of exposing their touchscreens to saliva or blood samples may not appeal to many, but according to Mr Hyun-Gyu’s team the practice will one day save time, money and lives.
You got to find somebody who likes the same stuff. Like, if you like sports, she should like it that you like sports, and she should keep the chips and dip coming. – Alan, age 10
No person really decides before they grow up who they’re going to marry. God decides it all way before, and you get to find out later who you’re stuck with.
– Kristen, age 10
WHAT IS THE RIGHT AGE TO GET MARRIED?
Twenty-three is the best age because you know the person FOREVER by then.. – Camille, age 10
HOW CAN A STRANGER TELL IF TWO PEOPLE ARE MARRIED?
You might have to guess, based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids. – Derrick, age 8
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR MOM AND DAD HAVE IN COMMON?
Both don’t want any more kids. – Lori, age 8
WHAT DO MOST PEOPLE DO ON A DATE?
Dates are for having fun, and people should use them to get to know each other. Even boys have something to say if you listen long enough. –Lynnette, age 8 (isn’t she a treasure)
On the first date, they just tell each other lies and that usually get them interested enough to go for a second date. – Martin, age
WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE?
When they’re rich. – Pam, age 7( Love her )
The law says you have to be eighteen, so I wouldn’t want to mess with that. – Curt, age 7
IS IT BETTER TO BE SINGLE OR MARRIED?
It’s better for girls to be single but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them. – Anita, age 9 (bless you child )
HOW WOULD THE WORLD BE DIFFERENT IF PEOPLE DIDN’T GET MARRIED?
There sure would be a lot of kids to explain, wouldn’t there? – Kelvin, age 8
And the #1 Favorite is …….
HOW WOULD YOU MAKE A MARRIAGE WORK?
Tell your wife that she looks pretty, even if she looks like a dump truck. – Ricky, age 10
Apple (APPL) and the iPhone 5 have been the center of speculation this week ever since the Wall Street Journal report that the company had cut parts orders for its latest model by as much as a half. Now a respected market research firm is suggesting that Apple grossly overestimated demand for the iPhone 5.
According to DisplaySearch, the initial iPhone 5 production run was too big to sustain, as Brooke Corthers reported at CNET. Paul Semenza, senior vice president of analyst services at DisplaySearch, said the firm started to hear about cutbacks just before New Year’s:
“It was a very quick ramp up. The Q4 [estimate] was originally about 61 million displays [for the iPhone 5]… that may be dialed back, but anything near that number is still huge,” he said, referring to an estimate of display shipments for the iPhone 5.
“That would support the theory that the ramp was too much to sustain.”
In comparison, in the last calendar quarter of 2011, during which the wildly popular iPhone 4S was announced on October 4, Apple sold 37 million units.
When the iPhone 5 was released, Apple said that pre-orders sold out 20 times faster than previous versions. The company might have had reason to think that demand for the iPhone 5 would be far larger than that of any previous model. And yet the sale of 61 million displays would suggest that Apple had expected nearly double the sales at a time when Google (GOOG) Android-based units were dominating global smartphone sales. The question is whether Apple was overly optimistic in setting its orders
.Apple’s stock has taken a beating since the Journal report on Sunday. It currently sits around $486, below $500 and far off the high of $705.07 earlier in the year.
RELATED ARTICLE:
FORBES: Apple Says iPhone 5 Demand Outstrips Supply As Pre-orders ‘Shatter’ Previous Records
Do you feel deprived having only monitor on your desk? Would you like a second one, but don’t want to shell out the money? If you have an iPad, you can take advantage of the device’s high-resolution screen and use it as if it were fancy wireless monitor.
A number of apps can transform your tablet into a display, but until recently they cost a few bucks. Now, Avatron has just released a free version of its popular Air Display app.
Air Display is a great little second screen for your PC or Mac, but it costs $10. The free version of Air Display has all the same features and abilities, but it adds advertising to the mix, so you have to contend with an ad on your extended desktop.
Not only does Air Display extend the desktop, it also takes advantage of the iPad to let you use it as a touchscreen. That’s handy, but anyone with meaty fingers won’t want to do that all the time, as it can be hard to aim at Windows controls. It’s the same problem that Windows 8 users are finding when they try to touch their way around the desktop. Speaking of Windows 8, though, beware: the app does not work with the newest version of Microsoft’s operating system, so you’ll need Windows 7 or older system versions.
One of my favorite features is that Air Display (and Air Display Free) works in both “portrait” and “landscape” modes — just rotate the iPad and it automatically changes.
Consider Air Display Free on a trial basis. If you like the way that it works, $10 gets you a version without advertisements on your desktop.
Although it bumped Burger King out of second place by positioning itself as a more upscale fast-food burger chain, now Wendy’s is supersizing its value menu by adding a second tier of under-$2 items in addition to a core group of 99¢ offerings.
The company missed analysts’ earnings expectations last quarter, while rival McDonald’s recovered from an October dip in sales by heavily promoting its dollar menu. (The thousands of McDonald’s stores that stayed open on Thanksgiving helped lift sales too.)
Wendy’s appears to be taking a page from McD’s playbook. Industry publication Burger Business reports that the chain plans to roll out its “Right Price Right Size” value menu, now being tested in some locations, systemwide next year.
In a conference call last month, president and CEO Emil Brolick told investors, “We have lost some share in the value-menu area,” and said the new menu would help the company reverse that slide. Brolick said one culprit was a lack of consistency among franchisees as to which items were on the menu, which confused customers.
According to research firm Technomic, Wendy’s took the No. 2 spot from Burger King among fast-food burger brands last year. Helped along by Burger King’s sluggish response to changing tastes among fast-food diners, Wendy’s stole the King’s crown by focusing on higher-end (and higher-priced) items like bigger, more natural-looking patties and specialty sandwiches like an asiago ranch chicken club.
The problem was, it got almost too good at aligning itself with the higher end of the market. “The new menu is intended to better balance Wendy’s overall menu, which had gotten top-heavy through [the addition] of higher-priced sandwiches,” Burger Business observed.
“We do believe that the number of price-value-sensitive customers out there is not insignificant,” Brolick told analysts. He’s right. Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant-industry analyst at research company NPD Group, says fast-food diners, especially those under 35, are abandoning combo meals in favor of the dollar menu to save a few bucks.
Wendy’s new 99¢ menu will include six core items: value-sized chicken nuggets, fries, soda, small Frosty, junior cheeseburger, and crispy chicken sandwich. There will be a second tier of more profitable items priced from $1.29 to $1.79 that franchisees can choose to offer or else charge what they want, as long as prices stay below $2, Burger Business said. More choice for customers, higher margins for Wendy’s — everybody’s happy.
Burger King’s slogan is “Have it your way.” Maybe Wendy’s should be “Have it both ways.”
For many people, the days of booking a conference room equipped with an overhead projector so you can display content from your laptop are over. Increasingly, you need to show off documents on the go — away from the home office, and maybe not even on a laptop at all, but rather on your phone or tablet.
One solution? Turn your iPhone into a portable projector.
The ipico Hand-held Projector is a cool piece of hardware. Weighing less than 4 ounces and roughly twice as thick as an iPhone, it easily slips into your bag or pocket. Connect your iPhone to the projector via a pop-up docking port, and it can beam the iPhone’s display on a nearby wall. The image can be as small as 5 inches or as large as 50 inches, and the 960-by-540 pixel output is surprisingly good for many kinds of content.
Unfortunately, the projector doesn’t simply reproduce whatever’s on the iPhone’s display, like a traditional projector would do. Instead, you need to run the ipico app, which lets you choose specific kinds of content. You can play videos stored on your iPhone, for example, as well as photos, YouTube videos, Facebook and websites.
It’s with websites that ipico starts to become really useful for business. Navigate to Google Docs, for example, and you can display any of your Google documents on the wall from your phone.
Another useful function for the ipico: You can project the iPhone’s camera, which means you can use it to project a close-up view of hardware or paper documents — handy for a live demo before a large audience.
The ipico Hand-held Projector costs $129 and works with phones older than the iPhone 5 (such as the 4s, 4 and 3GS. It comes with a short USB cable for charging the integrated Li-Ion battery. The company says the battery is good for about 90 minutes of run-time.
If only constructing a skyscraper were as easy as stacking Legos. Then, we’d be throwing together 200-story towers in a matter of weeks, just clicking blocks together until we got bored. But the idea isn’t so far-fetched: if China’s Broad Sustainable Building Corp. is doing its math and crossing its ts properly, it could be topping out a 2,749-ft.-tall skyscraper — the world’s tallest — in just three months.
Starting in January, the race will be on against what seems to be an impossibly short deadline. Broad is allotting just 90 days to construct the 220-story tower, dubbed Sky City, in the city of Changsha, in China’s southeastern Hunan province — meaning the building will go up at a rate of about five stories a day, according to Construction Week Online.
It’s not only the speed, though; it’s the height. Upon completion, Sky City will be 32 ft. taller than the Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world. It’ll also go up 24 times quicker. Upon completion, the tower will contain a school, hospital, 17 helipads and apartments for 30,000 people, according to online design magazine Dezeen. It’s unclear, though, if it will have a lobby — the regimented prefab construction has prohibited wide open spaces on the ground floor of previous Broad buildings, Wired explains.
Broad began as an air-conditioner manufacturer but diversified after developing a new method of constructing prefab skyscrapers, whose components slot together like Erector Set pieces. According to Wired, the company’s founder and chairman Zhang Yue was inspired by the immense devastation of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which killed more than 68,000 people, to develop quake-friendly building designs; the sturdy modular style Broad pioneered is 95% prefabricated in the company’s factories in Hunan province.
As of September, Broad had built 17 of the prefab structures, all but one in China, and fast: the company put up a 15-story hotel in just two days, and a 30-story tower in just 15. The structures are as bland as a Sears Catalog Home, and as pretty as a stack of plywood, but for Zhang, it’s not about style. Broad’s buildings use less concrete in the floors and less steel in the support beams, reducing the weight and increasing its earthquake resilience — Zhang says his buildings are meant to withstand a 9.0-magnitude temblor.
Indeed, the towers’ blandness and adaptability is part of the plan: Broad plans to monetize its housing concept by licensing the technology to countries across the globe. Franchisees can then build the pieces locally to prevent the exorbitant cost of shipping the prefabricated pieces.
As for Sky City, Broad plans to start laying the foundation at the end of November, with the three-month race against the clock starting at the end of the year and running through March. Ladies and gentlemen, get out your stopwatches — this one could be a nail-biter.
According to NASA’S official web blog, Astrobiologist, there are over 300 books at Amazon.com that deal on the issue of the 2012 Doomsday prediction. Many internet websites say the world will end on Tuesday, December 21, 2012. Remember the Millennium scare? It came and went without much of a whimper because of sufficient planning and analysis of the situation, without which, could have caused the eventual meltdown of man’s modern information infrastructure.
In fact, the 2012 phenomenon, which covers a wide spectrum of eschetological beliefs, has originated mostly from two celebrated hypothesis: the culmination of the Mayan Calendar and the discovery of a planet named Nibiru. The Mayan Calendar controversy, in particular, is said to be widely attributable to a claim made popular by Michael G. Coe, a prominent American archaeologist and author of several books. In one of his books, The Maya, he wrote that “there is a suggestion … Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th [b'ak'tun].” Unlike the 52-year Calendar Round still used today among the Maya, his basis was the Long Count Calendar that kept time roughly in units of “20: 20 days made a uinal, 18 uinals (360 days) made a tun, 20 tuns made a k’atun, and 20 k’atuns (144,000 days or roughly 394 years) made up a b’ak’tun.” “Thus,” he concluded, “… that our present universe [would] be annihilated [in December 2012] when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion” on the 13.0.0.0.0. Using the most common conversion to our modern calendar (the Gregorian Calendar) the end of the “Great Cycle” corresponds to 11:11 Universal Time (UTC), hence the doomsday prophecy is to strike on December 21, 2012.
“Far from being a date on a calendar when something will automatically happen, the elders are telling us that it is up to us how we traverse these challenging times…” declares Alejandro Cirilo Perez Oxlaj, leader of the National Council of Mayan Elders in Guatemala.
Although several scholars followed Coe’s interpretation as the basis for their controversial hypothesis, one illustrious American historian who taught in Princeton and with a PhD to his credit, also claimed the date, 21 December 2012, in his book, The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology. Joseph Arguelles argued that sometime in “13th August 3113 BC the Earth began a passage through a ‘galactic synchronization beam’ that emanated from the center of our galaxy, [and] that it would pass through this [same] beam during a period of 5200 tuns (Maya cycles of 360 days each), and by 13.0.0.0.0 (21 Dec. 2012), [he believed that] the Maya would have aligned their calendar to respond to this phenomenon.”
In contrast, contemporary researchers disputed that,”while the end of the 13th b’ak’tun would perhaps be a cause for celebration for the Mayans,” it did not intend to mark the end of their calendar. ”There is nothing in the Maya or Aztec or ancient Mesoamerican writings to suggest that they prophesied a sudden or major change of any sort in 2012″, said Mayanist scholar Mark Van Stone. “The notion of a ‘Great Cycle’ coming to an end is completely a modern invention.” Mayanist scholars Linda Schele and David Freidel argued that the Maya “did not conceive this to be the end of creation, as many would have suggested.”
The other sought-after controversy which rose over the horizon in 1976 was the discovery by the ancient Sumerians of the planet named Nibiru. In his book, The Twelfth Planet, writer Zecharia Sitchen claimed that based on the Mayan writings he documented from ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer, it identified a planet Nibiru orbiting the sun every 3500 years. Although Sitchin denied making claims about the doomsday prophecy, the idea of Nibiru as a wayward planet in a collision course with Earth was made popular in 1996 by Nancy Lider, a Wisconsin woman who founded the website Zeta-Talk. Lider claimed she was an extra-terrestrial contactee chosen to warn mankind of an object of this magnitude that would enter the local system and create gravitational disorder in the system which would ultimately annihilate humanity. The prediction subsequently spread beyond Lider’s website and adopted by other doomsday groups on the internet, mostly of which identified with the 2012 phenomenon.
When the blockbuster film, 2012, was released in November 11, 2009, the prophetic association of internet harbingers, conspiracy theorists, the cultists, the Preppers, the UFOlogists, etc. had apparently a field day. Generating $770 million at the box office worldwide, filmmaker Roland Emmerich of the Hollywood fame credited the works of Coe for inspiring his disaster movie. To lend credence to their apocalyptic claims, even major cable channels, History, Discovery and the National Geographic have joined the bandwagon by airing special documentaries such as the End of Days, Last Days on Earth, 2012 Apocalypse, Doomsday Preppers, etc. which suggest that the doomsday phenomenon might really occur on 2012. Now whether these claims are credible or not is not the issue here but whether the nagging human need to uncover the truth can be adequately satisfied.
From the beginning of recorded time, mankind has been fascinated about the end of the world and making predictions about how and when it might happen. Most major religions have their own theories on the topic and, throughout their history, as much as 1,000 prophecies have been attributed to the end of times. However, biblical inferences about great earthquakes, famine and pestilence, sea turning into blood, hailstorms, rumbling sounds and birds falling from the sky, hurricanes and flooding, etc. which portend about the world coming to an end are lately showing eerie similarities with current global events.
NATURE FREAKISH SHOW: A rare meteorological phenomenon called a Skypunch is when ice crystals form above the high-altitude cirro-cumulo-stratus clouds, then fall downward, punching a hole in the cloud cover.
Since this year has begun, identical phenomenon and calamities have transpired across the globe almost every day and progressively without letup. Recently, this blog received a 35-minute video being circulated in the email (it may be viewed at the end of this blog). It contains a collage of news feeds and live accounts from major networks like CNN, Fox News, BBC, etc. which easily give shivers to the most cynical. But whether these global cataclysms are true presages from the bible, science apparently has veritable claims over these natural phenomena — that they were simply ordered by themselves. Or it is the beginning of the end of the last bastion of life, as we know it? Or perhaps life on earth was meant to be sui generis, in itself, despite the Xenologists’ claim that the universe would be an awfully waste of space if life did not reside in it.
When a life-changing cataclysm is prophesied to happen, and it does not, can it be said that it is to the credit of prayerful and powerful intervention of the Buddhists monks, convent nuns, the Muslims, Hindu and Jewish Rabbi, all praying in a single supplication to some cosmic force, to lift all of humanity from the extinction? Or can humanity simply rise to the occasion and be grateful that life has existed on this planet for almost 3.5 billion years. And every time a disaster threatens its very existence, it’s strength and resiliency to survive it are once again renewed. But as always, human nature is replete with interesting choices and recourse.
As the zero hour is fast approaching, literally hundreds of thousands of websites have posted on the subject. ”Ask an Astrobiologist”, a NASA public outreach website, receives over 5000 questions from the public on the subject since 2007, some asking whether they should kill themselves, their children or their pets. To satisfy those nagging questions, this post is adding a link Ask An Astrobiologist, which posts the most popular questions about Doomsday 2012, and answered by a group of scientists at the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI).
What’s about you? What are your thoughts about the 2012 Doomsday theory? Are you stockpiling food, water and ammo or are you one of those who will just wait and let it pass? But at the end of the day, what can you really do if the world is coming to an end? Is there a point to all these brouhaha except to take it with a grain of salt?
Walt Disney Co. (DIS) agreed to buy George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Ltd. for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, adding “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” to a roster of film properties that includes “Iron Man” and “Nemo.”
About half of the price will be paid in cash and the balance in stock, Burbank, California-based Disney said today in a statement. A seventh “Star Wars” film is planned for release in 2015.
The acquisition brings to Disney, which paid a combined $11 billion for Pixar and Marvel over the past decade, two of the most lucrative movie franchises ever. The “Star Wars” films and their re-releases have generated $4.54 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to Box Office Mojo. The “Indiana Jones” pictures have collected $1.95 billion.
“If Disney is really trying to focus on the tentpole, event pictures, and given that this is something that has huge carryover value in the parks and merchandise business, it certainly makes sense,” said Matthew Harrigan, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities in Denver. “This is just the paradigm of the sustainable Hollywood franchise.”
Disney fell 0.4 percent to $50.05 on Oct. 26, the last trading day before Hurricane Sandy forced markets to shut down. The stock has gained 34 percent this year.
Kathleen Kennedy, co-chairman of Lucasfilm with Lucas, its founder and sole owner, will become president of Lucasfilm, reporting to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn, according to the statement.
