the Low Budget guys provide this helpful guide to life in college.

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For more information go to our website: www.gddca.org or call us at 760-329-6257

,Guide Dogs of the Desert improves the lives of the blind by creating opportunities for life-changing independence, and by conducting community outreach and education programs.

Guide Dogs of the Desert provides safe mobility, loving companionship and the “miracle of independence” to the blind through the use of a guide dog.

“Walking with a friend in the dark
is better than walking alone in the light.”
— Helen Keller

Duration : 0:7:52

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Studies have shown that seniors who spend time on educational activities have better cognitive function and retain their memories longer than seniors who do not. Additionally, attending educational programs give seniors the opportunity to interact with others of their age group and with younger people as well. This helps alleviate the isolation and depression that many seniors develop.

Seniors living in retirement communities will find no lack of educational opportunities. These communities offer courses on everything from foreign languages to ballroom dancing. There are myriad clubs and organizations available to residents. Outside lecturers and performers are often brought in for extra entertainment. But how can seniors living on their own, outside a retirement community, find appropriate educational programs?

The first place to look for such programs is at the local level. Most communities have a governmental department dedicated to serving seniors in the community. They often publish a list of activities available to area seniors and frequently are able to provide transportation to and from activities. In addition to meal programs and social gatherings, these departments often offer educational courses in many different subjects.

Local public schools are also a good source of interesting courses and opportunities. Many school systems publish a continuing education guide that lists the content, times and prices of classes that are held in the evening or on weekends at public schools. These courses range from academic enrichment like English as a Second Language, to arts and crafts and exercise classes. These courses are open to the community and typically consist of a wide range of people of all ages.

Community colleges also offer a wide range of continuing education experiences. Continuing education courses are taught on a non-credit basis and cost far less than for-credit courses. However, if a senior has the time and inclination community colleges are more than happy to enroll seniors in their degree programs. Seniors may be eligible for a tuition discount, depending on their age. Although some seniors may be intimidated by attending classes with much younger students, the experience can be extremely gratifying. Younger students often appreciate having seniors share their courses and instructors enjoy teaching seniors who are often more disciplined and interested than their younger counterparts.

Finally, the community library often offers activities specifically tailored to seniors like book clubs, discussion groups and the like. Libraries also offer computer literacy courses and courses on how to use the Internet, sometimes tailored specifically to seniors.

Jonathon Hardcastle
http://www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/education-can-be-a-lifelong-process-58957.html

Although Central Florida has never quite lived up to its reputation as “Hollywood East,” many classic – and some extremely medicore – movies have been shot in the Orlando area over the years. The brief list below highlights some of the more notable films that were partly or wholly shot in Central Florida, as well as one cult movie that boasts a significant connection to the Orlando area:

Parenthood [1989] – Directed by Ron Howard, Parenthood starred Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce, Joaquin Phoenix, Dianne Wiest and Keanu Reeves. Although this comedy/drama dealt with the trials and tribulations of a “Midwestern” family, many scenes were shot in Central Florida, including Orlando, College Park and Altamonte Springs. The birthday scene was shot at the now-defunct Mystery Fun House across from Universal Orlando.

Lethal Weapon 3 [1992] – The building that gets blown up in the opening sequence of the film is actually the old Orlando City Hall building, which had been scheduled for demolition anyway. The rest of Lethal Weapon 3 was filmed elsewhere.

Trekkies [1997] – This hilarious documentary on obsessive Star Trek fans profiled a Central Florida dentist, Dr. Denis Bourguignon, who had opened a “Starbase Dental” office full of Star Trek memorabilia and whose staff wore Star Trek uniforms.

The Blair Witch Project [1998] – Although this incredibly successful independent movie was filmed entirely in Maryland, its director and cast all graduated from the University of Central Florida (UCF). Made for about $35,000, The Blair Witch Project eventually grossed nearly $250 million worldwide.

The Waterboy [1998] – The “Bourbon Bowl” game at the end of the movie was filmed at the Citrus Bowl in downtown Orlando. Many of the extras in the scene were UCF students. The Waterboy starred Adam Sandler as “Robert ‘Bobby’ Boucher Jr.,” as well as Kathy Bates and Henry Winkler.

Monster [2003] – Charlize Theron captured an Oscar as “Best Actress” for her portrayal of prostitute and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed for a notorious killing spree during the 1980s. Monster, which also starred Christina Ricci and Bruce Dern, was shot entirely in Central Florida.

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector [2006] – Larry the Cable Guy (real name: Dan Whitney) resides in Sanford, Florida, and his film debut was shot entirely on location in Orlando. Judging by the myriad of negative reviews, critics seemed decidedly underwhelmed by Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and a sequel appears unlikely.

In addition, before Disney closed its Central Florida animation studio at Disney-MGM Studios in 2003, a number of animated films were worked on there such as Mulan (1998), Lilo & Stitch (2002) and Brother Bear (2003), among others. The space is now occupied by an attraction called The Magic of Disney Animation, a behind-the-scenes look at the animation process.

“Disney-MGM Studios still maintains a backlot tram tour that takes you past movie sets and props, as well as Catastrophe Canyon, a showcase for state-of-the-art special effects,” said Kyle Collins, Director of Interactive Marketing for HotelsCorp.com. “In addition, both Disney-MGM Studios and Universal Studios feature a variety of rides and attractions based on popular movies such as Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, Beauty & the Beast, Star Tours, The Great Movie Ride, Revenge of the Mummy, Men in Black Alien Attack, Back to the Future the Ride and Twister . . . Ride it Out, among others.”

Central Florida is also home to the Florida Film Festival, a 10-day event in early April that features American independent films, foreign films, documentaries, regional and family films, animation, narrative films and midnight movies. Past attendees have included Dennis Hopper, Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy and Oliver Stone. The Florida Film Festival takes place at the Enzian Theater in Maitland.

Ryan Wiseman
http://www.articlesbase.com/movies-articles/lights-camera-action-a-guide-to-film-locales-in-orlando-102432.html

Knowledge is the answer to victory and an educated Forex trader will have a greater knowledge of the market, allowing them to make better profits from trading. Getting Forex training will help prevent you from making costly mistakes when it comes to investing and trading. There is a ton of information accessible on Forex trading on hundreds of websites, offering advice. You will learn a great deal from these step by step guides.

However, one main problem with the education available though the Internet is that it is regularly very incomplete and can be short of any real structure. Furthermore, there is definitely a means of finding information, most of it very detailed and good. Searching exactly for what you want and following it all the way through in a logical array can present some problems.

If you are serious about Forex trading, there is little hesitation that you will have to find yourself a fine study course especially on Forex training. A proper learning guide will present the study materials in both a structured and logical manner. Such courses, which are extensively available, will vary in cost from those that are free of charge to those costing thousands of dollars.

There are two types of courses for Forex training available. The first type is an online lesson which normally allows you to tag along the course at one time to suit your way of life. This allows you to learn at a rate that you are comfortable with. The disadvantage is that you are learning alone and it is not easy to find the help that you want if you get run or stuck across something that you do not understand.

The second type is a standard “classroom” course. This kind of course is held regularly in most large cities. This option provides you the benefit of being able to be trained along side other students and with a instructor who can assist you through the problem areas. Against this, you will be required to travel to your Forex training classes and tag on a class schedule. Being absent for a lesson or two may present complexities as it is not easy to make up lost topics.

Whether you choose self study into the art of Forex training or choose another options, Forex training will surely give you the practical knowledge. Keep in mind, that the actual secret to making extensive profits from Forex trading lies in having the knowledge and insight of trading tactics that only a few years experience and practice can bring.

Jason Hamilton
http://www.articlesbase.com/currency-trading-articles/getting-the-proper-forex-education-knowledge-is-profitable-674437.html

There are many people who have gone through many online business guides and doubts about starting a business are starting to creep into their heads. Don’t fret! There is way to earn money online without starting a business, and that is through ghostwriting and freelancing.

Well there is a way to earn money online without starting a business, and that is through freelancing. I have been trying my hand in this and the profits are just great!

If you are good in writing, I suggest you take a look at this route of making money online. It is honest, and you are providing a service to many publishers who need services like this.

What you need to do is go to sites like guru.com and elance.com and bid for services that people require. Some may require you to write an ebook, an article or a report. You get paid between USD$100 to USD$250! The bidding system kind of works like eBay, only the system is reversed – the lower you bid, it is likely that you will get the project. As you build your positive feedback, your chance for a higher income increases as publishers trust your work more.

I recently wrote a short report for someone and got paid an easy USD$150. All this for only 3 hours of work. This means I got paid a staggering USD$50 an hour for just writing at the keyboard.

Imagine if you just find 10 projects a month, it’s not that difficult. You will easily pocket USD$1000-USD$1500 a month. Finally, those English classes in college came useful after all!

Fabian Tan
http://www.articlesbase.com/article-marketing-articles/the-simple-and-easy-guide-to-ghostwriting-and-freelancing-profits-128127.html

The third episode of the College Football Tour Guide, from Los Angeles, CA.

Duration : 0:4:25

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Introduction to Integral Education: An Inspirational Guide by Sraddhalu Ranade. Based on a series of teacher-training workshops conducted across India, this dvd aims to introduce and orient parents and teachers to integral education: a new approach to learning and teaching, a new attitude and mindset that focuses on responding to each child’s unique needs and learning style.

Duration : 0:3:35

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Technorati Tags: dvd on education, inspirational guide, integral education, integral yoga, spirituality, sraddhalu ranade, sri aurobindo, the mother

Once your have decided to earn your degree online, selecting a program is usually the first critical decision you make. There are so many types of degrees available online, which one to choose, how to select, sometimes may make you confuse and hard to decide one. This article will gives you some guideline to get you started.

Decide An Area of Interest

There are a few ways to get a start in selecting an online degree program. You could look within a traditional discipline such as history, art, literature or psychology; or within a professional/occupational area such as engineering, nursing, or education; or simply related to an area of general interest like family studies, the culture of Italy, or environmental issues.

Most online degree programs offered by colleges or universities are having their catalogs customarily organized by department, division, or school. Hence, once you have decided an area of interest, you could start looking and asking for the related online degree programs from these colleges.

Type Of Degree To Earn

What is your educational goal? Are you looking for an associate or bachelor degree, a master or doctorate degree? Each type of degree which associate to the online degree program has it own pre-requirement in admission. An online master degree program may require you to have a bachelor degree to qualify for the program and an online doctorate degree may ask for a master degree for qualification. Some universities do give credit for life experience so that you can waive for certain pre-requirement. Whether you are looking for an associate, bachelor, master or PhD, you can check the pre requirement to your selected online degree program from the school’s admission department.

Go for Specialization In Your Study

For many people, it may be helpful to think of the specialization and then create an appropriate field of study around it. You should feel free to make contact with academic advisors at the schools you are considering and seek answers to all your questions. For your own benefit, it is important to ensure that your school is committed to explaining these elements completely and the schools understand your need to fully comprehend the curriculum development.

The Ability to Transfer Courses

Another point to consider in your decision in select an online degree program is the ability to transfer courses or larger program segments from one institution to another. Not all universities will allow you to transfer all of your credits into their program. Often there are ceilings-six credits or two courses are typical at the graduate level. For undergraduates the allowances are more liberal and can be as much as 75 percent of a bachelor’s degree program. You may want to go for an online degree program that can accept the most on your credits transfer so that you can accelerate or complete you degree faster and save some money because less credits are need to complete the program.

In Summary

Select an online degree program is your most critical decision to make, spend your time to understand your purposes of earning a degree and considering in other factors such as your interest, your career goal and your education budget. These will help you to narrow down your scope and finally choose an online degree program to enroll in.

Jullie Harvard
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-education-articles/a-guide-to-online-degreeshow-to-select-a-online-degree-program-96654.html

The Go Pointer’s Guide to Unforced Errors

By Michael Useem

Author of The Go Point

All in all, our decision-making equipment is pretty sound. We don’t follow the lead lemming over a cliff. We can’t be fooled into thinking that a 99-cent lure is a meal. We don’t try to catch car fenders with our teeth. Then again, it wasn’t a dog who launched New Coke. So there are a few bugs little design flaws of the mind that can have big consequences.

People are clinically overoptimistic, for instance, assigning zero probability to events that are merely unlikely (such as a massive iceberg in the path of a really big ship). We see “patterns” in the random movements of stocks the way our ancestors saw bears and hunters in the scatterplot of the night sky. We make choices that justify our past choices and then look for data to support them. Not only do we make these errors; we make them reliably.

That’s the good news. Predictable errors are preventable errors. And a few simple techniques, like those below, can help you steer clear of the most common wrong turns. They can get you to your go point, that decisive moment when the essential information has been gathered, the pros and cons weighed, and the time has come to get off the fence.

Problem: Authority Is Not Bestowed
Tool: Pursue Responsibility

For some, responsibility is simply bestowed: a princess is handed the kingdom upon the passing of the monarch; a favorite son inherits the family business. For most, however, the authority to make decisions must be actively sought.

Born in the Bronx of an interracial marriage, Jaime Irick thrived from his earliest days by tackling new challenges. In high school, he jumped into sports; at college, he took on social service projects. After graduation, Irick joined the military, qualified as an airborne Ranger, and found himself promoted up the officer ranks. Back in civilian life, he repeatedly asked for larger and stretch assignments. “I’ve never been fully qualified on paper for a job that I’ve had,” he told me, yet he so readily embraced his duties that ever more responsibility came naturally his way. With a new MBA degree in hand, Irick brashly contacted GE’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, with a simple message: “I always wanted to run something.” The personal appeal to the CEO worked. Today, as director of sales in General Electric’s Homeland Protection division, Jaime Irick plays a significant role in one of Immelt’s growth businesses.

Madhabi Puri Buch did much the same at ICICI, one of India’s premier banks, which she joined in 1997. With little experience in fairly specialized fields, she tackled a succession of responsibilities, ranging from Internet trading to mortgage financing. Finally, she asked chief executive K. V. Kamath to give her a crack at running the “boiler room” of the bank, the back office that handles the enormous volume of paper, telephone, and electronic data that surges through the bank every day. “In the past,” she explained, “I had been given assignments where I had no experience. Yet they worked well!” Now she upped the stakes by taking on one of the bank’s least glamorous but most critical operations. Her friends thought she had been “sidelined.” Instead, Buch mastered the essence of still another banking function by taking responsibility for deciding how to remake it.

Problem: Unfamiliar Responsibilities

Tool: Appraise the Past

In embracing new responsibilities, past decisions can serve as a natural curriculum for avoiding future mistakes.

Liu Chuanzhi was working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1984 when his country commenced its momentous liberalization. Inspired, Liu formed what would become Legend Group, at first distributing a few foreign personal computers and eventually morphing into China’s largest PC producer. In 2005, rechristened as Lenovo, the company acquired IBM’s personal computer line, making it the number three PC producer globally. As a young man, Liu had wanted to become a fighter pilot with the People’s Lib­eration Army. Instead, he became one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

When Liu left the state-­sponsored research laboratory in 1984, he knew nothing about how to build an enterprise, so he set about learning to do so by studying his own go points in minute detail. At the end of every week, Liu and his top aides met to review major decisions of the past five days. Many errors were committed, he told me, but the weekly debrief helped “to ensure that we don’t make [the same] mistakes in the future.” Thanks to the reviews and lessons drawn from them, Lenovo was able to weather China’s economic gyrations while others faltered. By routinely looking back on his decision processes, Liu Chuanzhi constructed his own decision template for going forward.

The after-action review can be monthly, quarterly, yearly, or even daily, depending on the decision-making tempo. In July 2004, I watched a wildland fire crew in action against a raging blaze in Yosemite National Park. Every afternoon without fail, the incident commander, operations director, planning chief, and a dozen responsible firefighters gathered to review the present day’s decisions and decide on the next day’s actions. At the end of each of the fact-drenched, disciplined reviews, one of the participants would pose four questions: What had been planned for the day? What actually happened during the day? Why did that happen? And what should be done next time? Round­robin style, each crew member addressed each of the topics. Only in that way could firefighters stay on top of a situation that changed constantly with the fire’s ever­changing momentum. The principle: study the past, even if it is only yesterday, and heed its continuing lessons.

Problem: Inexperienced Gut

Tool: Educate Your Instincts

“Go with your gut.” “Follow your intuition.” “Trust your feelings.” The sayings are commonplace, but do our instincts make good decisions? In fact, blind instinct cannot be trusted, but it can be educated. The main purpose of flight simulators, for example, is to allow pilots to experience unlikely surprises so many times that, should one actually occur, their response will be reflexive. “Train like you fly and fly like you train” is how they put it at NASA’s astronaut training program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Consistent with that dictum, astronauts undergo an exhaustive curriculum that includes some five hundred simulated landings of the shuttle before flying it. No wonder so many of the space travelers are apt to say upon returning to Earth, “When something went wrong, I went into my training mode.”

Practice does not always make perfect, but it certainly helps. When he was named Episcopal bishop for the diocese of Pennsylvania in 1998, Charles E. Bennison drew on the three decades of experience since his ordination to tackle a succession of touchy issues. Despite widespread opposition from priests and laity, he pushed through plans to hire a full­time fund­raiser to shore up finances for the 162­parish diocese. Later, again knowing he would encounter protests, he suspended a church rector who opposed the ordination of women and gays. “Day by day I don’t have too much doubt because I trust my intuitions,” he said. “I may be making big mistakes, but I feel fairly confident on an incremental daily basis that I am in touch and that I am making the right decisions.” That doesn’t mean Bennison jumps to the go point. Far from it. “I’ll stew and waver and listen and take in data and talk to all kinds of people before I feel comfortable with something,” he said. But it does mean, that in getting to go, he consults a well­educated gut.

“If you get educated about something and then you live that, the line blurs between what your instincts used to be and what they are now,” General Peter Pace explains. “Your mind touches on resources it’s not even conscious of touching on.” In the words of Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, that is the “power of thinking without thinking.”

Problem: Analysis Paralysis
Tool: The 70 Percent Solution

Only professors and journalists get paid to say, “On the one hand….” When the rest of us continue to mine and massage the data in pursuit of perfect knowledge and thus perfect certainty we are edging toward that clinical condition of decidophobia, fear of facing a go point.

The Marine Corps battles this syndrome with the “70 percent solution.” If you have 70 percent of the information, have done 70 percent of the analysis, and feel 70 percent confident, then move. The logic is simple: a less than ideal action, swiftly executed, stands a chance of success, whereas no action stands no chance. The worst decision is no decision at all.

Analyze, but not overanalyze: that is the message Hewlett-Packard executive vice president Ann Livermore sends to HP’s Technology Solutions Group, a $30-billion-plus business that en-compasses enterprise storage and systems, software and services, and employs 95,000 IT professionals. She places a primacy on “fast enough” decision making based on sufficient information, not perfect data. GE teaches the same at its retreats. By requiring ranking managers to vote up or down, individually and publicly, on a variety of proposed changes, GE avoids the endless analysis that compromises decision tempo.

Drawing upon his own tumultuous experience as president of Pakistan since 1999, Pervez Musharraf says that while a leader must hear opposing views and engage people in the deliberations, he or she “must never suffer from paralysis.” Moreover, in reaching a decision, rarely are all the data available to be sure of its outcome. “Decisions are two­thirds facts and figures,” Musharraf contends, and “one-third a leap in the dark where you don’t have all the facts.” If you increase the short side of the equation, you’re too impulsive, but if you increase the other side, you’re not a leader.

Problem: Mistakes Happen

Tool: Tolerate Them Once

Short of perfect information and analysis, mistakes are sure to happen. The secret, says Peter Pace, is: “Don’t beat yourself up. If you’re not making mistakes, I don’t need you in my organization,” which in his case includes some 2.4 million uniformed troops. “I want you doing 90 percent right in a big universe rather than 100 percent right in a small universe.”

Charles Elachi directs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s contract agency for unmanned space missions, including the 2004 Spirit and Opportunity Mars landings that found evidence of water between layers of volcanic rock. Given the technical complexity of space flight, Elachi insists that every significant pre-mission decision at JPL receive intense peer appraisal and even outsider review. To ensure disciplined decision making during a mission, he also insists on resilience. “We operate under very heavy pressure,” he says. “Many critical things are riding on our decisions. You have to have nerves of steel. Everyone involved in the project has to keep calm and composed so that we can think clearly about what is happening. Anyone who panics under pressure is just in the wrong business.” To instill those steel-like nerves among his 5,500 employees, Elachi requires less experienced workers to witness JPL veterans making decisions.

Predictably, though, some of JPL’s decisions do go wrong. A mission to Mars in 1998 ended in such a high-­profile, costly failure that the mission’s top two managers were ready to resign. Elachi would not let them. “Normally, when a project fails, people look around for someone to blame,” he says, “but if you hang the person who made the mistake, you’ve also lost a lot of experience.” Instead, Elachi told the two managers, “We have spent $400 million training you. You have to learn from those mistakes, and I’m sure you will not repeat them.” Six years later one of the managers was serving as a mission director and the other as a deputy manager for the highly successful Spirit and Opportunity trips to Mars.

Problem: Rush to Judgment

Tool: Preserve Optionality

Many decisions come with looming deadlines: the battle is lost, the market opportunity gone if you do not act in timely fashion. Even without a deadline it can still be tempting to get the hard business of choice making over with. The more one can tamp down the uncertainties and let the pieces fall in place before deciding, however, the more likely one will reach the right go point.

As U.S. treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999, Robert Rubin faced a string of momentous decisions ranging from the bailout of the Mexican peso to China’s application to join the World Trade Organization. Time and again, Rubin elected to keep his “choices open for as long as possible,” a proclivity that his then­deputy Lawrence Summers calls “preserving optionality.”

As CEO of Scottish Power, an energy producer with major operations in the United States and United Kingdom including extensive wind farms, Ian Russell makes investment decisions entailing hundreds of millions of dollars at a shot. One of his new power plants alone can guzzle $350 million; wind farms have consumed $3 billion. With so much riding on each go point, a rush to judgment on any one decision could result in a strategic error from which recovery would be extremely costly.

Not surprisingly, Russell takes his time in making such choices. “Let’s be careful,” he warns, and to that end he works to ensure that his team understands the decision options, appreciates their upsides and downsides, and knows what might go wrong with each so that the company does not look “foolish in a year’s time.” For decisions of such scope, Russell counsels waiting three, six, or even twelve months to diminish complexity and reduce uncertainty as much as possible before pulling the trigger.

Reprinted from THE GO POINT: When It’s Time to Decide. Copyright © 2006 by Michael Useem. Published by Crown Business, a division of Random House, Inc.

Michael Useem, the author of The Go Point and The Leadership Moment, is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, as well as the director of its Center for Leadership and Change Management. Professor Useem takes his students to the ends of the world — the Antarctic, the Andes, and the Himalayas — to learn about their personal and professional go points. Visit www.thegopoint.com for more info.

Michael Useem
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-articles/the-go-pointers-guide-to-unforced-errors-76580.html