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Sunday, December 30, 2012

3 Elements of Leadership Power! | Self improvement tips

In an article discussing the need for innovative products and profitable service offerings, Vinutha V., points out that, ?improvements are only the expected results, not the source of competitive advantage. Improved product development through innovation arises from the knowledge and experience of employees.? [Source: The Financial Express - appearing in ZDNetIndia News]

Soft skills, ?holistic development?, ?employee empowerment? and other terms are merely euphemisms for leadership energy ? they are the process, purpose and principle which supply people with knowledge and propel them to take competent action.

?Is not the holy energy of true love ever sagacious, far-sighted and prophetic? Truth is not isolated: it is not a part, but the whole. It is love, and beauty, and joy. The wise man does not believe and opine, but he knows and is the very truth which he utters. His thought is action: his knowledge is love? [Emerson's Essays, by A Disciple, in the US Democratic Review Volume-16, Issue-84]

Leading is an act of energetic purpose ? it?s the directing,

focusing, shaping or configuring of energy towards a desired objective.

Over time and the distance of space, leaders use the energies available to them to become that instrument through whom energy propels the group.

Where does that energy come from? It is already present in many forms and places, specifically it is:

=> inside and outside the organization ? generally called the organization?s environment,

=> a function of an organizational sub-system [usually configured as a department or section with its own unique set of policies, processes & interactions] or from outside agencies that interact with the system,

=> the products, results or energy flows produced by employees and associates.

What does energy look like? Actually seeing energy with

the naked eye is impossible but with the aid of applied knowledge, we can see evidence of its effects.

Every manifestation of energy assumes an aspect of the following forms:

- A physical circumstance or object;

- An intellectual impulse or calculation;

- A spiritual activation or expression;

- A developmental permission or evolution

Skillful leaders sense the truths of energy, they use it to facilitate, enable, empower or enlighten their people. They use moments when energy is at its greatest strength to train or educate people and develop their commitment, self-actualization and abilities even further.

The 3 elements of leadership power are:

=> Enable or empower people [physical & develop]

=> Enlighten or educate people [intellect or inspire]

=> Energize or elevate people [inspire or develop]

We know that leaders like Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Gandhi, George Washington and Jesus Christ have understood these fundamental principles ? think of the substantial legacies left by those leaders, look at how they helped to accelerate the pace and light the way towards change and progress for their followers.

?Leaders aren?t born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that?s the price we?ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.? Coach Vince Lombardi

You can be the channel, instrument and focus through which energy works its magical transformations ? it?s up to you to make it so!

????????????????????

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Bill Thomas is publisher of leadership skills trainingmaterials. courses & programs. ?Your Leadership-UltraNet!? is the Web?s only ULTRA-Performance Empowerment System That Shows You How-To Think-like, Act-like, Behave-like, Believe-like and then Manage-like a Creative, Confident, Persuasive, Highly Effective Leader, Each & Every Day!

http://www.leadership-toolkit.com/skills.html

????????????????????

Source: http://www.moonsbeing.com/2012/12/29/3-Elements-of-Leadership-Power/

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Saturday, December 29, 2012

NASA'S Space Launch System core stage passes major milestone, ready to start construction

Dec. 28, 2012 ? The team designing America's new flagship rocket has completed successfully a major technical review of the vehicle's core stage. NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) will take the agency's Orion spacecraft and other payloads beyond low-Earth orbit, providing a new capability for human exploration.

The core stage preliminary design review (PDR) was held Thursday (Dec. 20) at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and included representatives from the agency and The Boeing Co. Boeing's Exploration Launch Systems in Huntsville is the prime contractor for the core stage and its avionics. Marshall manages the SLS Program.

"Passing a preliminary design review within 12 months of bringing Boeing on contract shows we are on track toward meeting a 2017 launch date," said Tony Lavoie, manager of the SLS Stages Element at Marshall. "We can now allow those time-critical areas of design to move forward with initial fabrication and proceed toward the final design phase -- culminating in a critical design review in 2014 -- with confidence."

The first flight test of the SLS, which will feature a configuration for a 70-metric ton lift capacity and carry an uncrewed Orion spacecraft beyond the moon, is scheduled for 2017. As the SLS evolves, a two-stage launch vehicle using the core stage will provide a lift capability of 130-metric tons to enable missions beyond low-Earth orbit and to support deep space exploration.

The purpose of the PDR was to ensure the design met system requirements within acceptable risk and fell within schedule and budget constraints. An important part of the PDR was to prove the core stage could integrate safely with other elements of the rocket's main engines and solid rocket boosters, the crew capsule and the launch facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Core stage designers provided an in-depth assessment to a board of engineers composed of propulsion and design experts from across the agency and the aerospace industry.

"Each individual element of this program has to be at the same level of maturity before we can move the program as a whole to the next step," SLS Program Manager Todd May said. "The core stage is the rocket's central propulsion element and will be an optimized blend of new and existing hardware design. We're building it with longer tanks, longer feed lines and advanced manufacturing processes. We are running ahead of schedule and will leverage that schedule margin to ensure a safe and affordable rocket for our first flight in 2017."

The core stage will be built at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans using state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment. The plant continues modifying its facilities and ordering materials for construction of the rocket. Michoud has built components for NASA's spacecraft for decades, most recently, the space shuttle's external tanks.

For more information about the Space Launch System, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/sls

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/nasa/~3/FlBBMtAU4Oo/121228100748.htm

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Fearful of ban, frenzied buyers swarm gun stores

The phones at gun shops across the country are ringing off the hook. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has surged since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers and administrators.

By Joseph Pisani,?Associated Press / December 29, 2012

Clerk Lance McCoy shows a variety of weapons including an AR-15 style semi-automatic at Kizer Guns and Ammo near Nacogdoches, Texas. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has jumped since the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six adults.

Andrew D. Brosig/The Daily Sentinel/AP

Enlarge

The phones at Red's Trading Post wouldn't stop ringing. Would-be customers from as far away as New York wanted to know if the Twin Falls, Idaho gun shop had firearms in stock. Others clamored to find out if their orders had been shipped.

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Overwhelmed, gun store manager Ryan Horsley had to do what no employee would ever think of doing just days before Christmas: He disconnected the phone lines for three whole days.

"We had to shut everything off," says Horsley, whose family has owned Red's Trading Post, the state's oldest gun shop, since 1936. "We were swamped in the store and online."

The phones at gun shops across the country are ringing off the hook. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has surged since the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers and administrators. The shooting sparked calls for tighter gun control measures, especially for military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Newtown and in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting earlier this year. The prospect of a possible weapons ban has sent gun enthusiasts into a panic and sparked a frenzy of buying at stores and gun dealers nationwide.

2012 enters the record books. Were you paying attention? A news quiz.

Assault rifles are sold out across the country. Rounds of .223 bullets, like those used in the AR-15 type Bushmaster rifle used in Newtown, are scarce. Stores are struggling to restock their shelves. Gun and ammunition makers are telling retailers they will have to wait months to get more.

Store owners who have been in the business for years say they have never seen demand like this before.

When asked how much sales have increased in the past few weeks, Horsley just laughed.

"We haven't even had a chance to look at it," he says. Horsley spends his days calling manufacturers around the country trying to buy more items for the store. Mainly, they tell him he has to wait.

Franklin Armory, a firearm maker in Morgan Hill, Calif., is telling dealers that it will take six months to fulfill their orders. The company plans to hire more workers and buy more machines to catch up, says Franklin Armory's President Jay Jacobson.

The shortage is leaving many would-be gun owners empty handed.

William Kotis went to a gun show in Winston-Salem, N.C., last weekend hoping to buy a rifle for target shooting. Almost everything was sold out.

"Assault rifles were selling like crazy," says Kotis, who is president and CEO of Kotis Holdings, a real estate development company based in Greensboro. "People are stockpiling."

He left without buying anything.

Luke Orlando's parents were able to get him the 12-gauge shotgun he wanted for Christmas to bird hunt, but his uncle wasn't as lucky.

"At Christmas dinner, my uncle expressed outrage that after waiting six months to use his Christmas bonus to purchase an AR-15, they are sold out and back ordered over a year," says Orlando, 18, a student at the University of Texas.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/irybZIk2fI8/Fearful-of-ban-frenzied-buyers-swarm-gun-stores

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Friday, December 28, 2012

Study hints that stem cells prepare for maturity much earlier than anticipated

Dec. 27, 2012 ? Unlike less versatile muscle or nerve cells, embryonic stem cells are by definition equipped to assume any cellular role. Scientists call this flexibility "pluripotency," meaning that as an organism develops, stem cells must be ready at a moment's notice to activate highly diverse gene expression programs used to turn them into blood, brain, or kidney cells.

Scientists from the lab of Stowers Investigator Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., report in the December 27, 2012 online issue of Cell that one way cells stay so plastic is by stationing a protein called Ell3 at stretches of DNA known as "enhancers" required to activate a neighboring gene. Their findings suggest that Ell3 parked at the enhancer of a developmentally regulated gene, even one that is silent, primes it for future expression. This finding is significant as many of these same genes are abnormally switched on in cancer.

"We now know that some enhancer misregulation is involved in the pathogenesis of solid and hematological malignances," says Shilatifard. "But a problem in the field has been how to identify inactive or poised enhancer elements. Our discovery that Ell3 interacts with enhancers in ES cells gives us a hand-hold to identify and to study them."

In 2000, Shilatifard identified Ell3 as the third member of the Ell (for "Eleven-nineteen lysine-rich leukemia gene") family of elongation factors, proteins that increase the rate at which genes are expressed. "At the time, we didn't think much of Ell3 because it was highly expressed in testes," says Shilatifard, noting that then people thought that sperm were merely vessels used to carry paternal DNA to an egg and that associated factors would have little relevance to the regulation of future gene expression in the resulting embryo.

But a few years back, a curious Open University graduate student working in the Shilatifard lab, Chengqi Lin, started exploring a potential function for the neglected gene by initiating a global search for regions occupied by Ell3 in the genome of mouse embryonic stem cells. His search in collaboration with a bioinformatician in the Shilatifard lab, Alexander S. Garruss, revealed that Ell3 sits on more than 5,000 enhancers, including many that regulate genes governing stem cell maturation into spinal cord, kidney, and blood cells.

"What was interesting was that Ell3 marked enhancers that are active and inactive, as well as enhancers that are known as "poised," says Lin, referring to a transition state from inactive to active. "That indicated that Ell3's major function might be to prime activation of genes that are just about to be expressed during development."

The fact that silent genes can be "primed" for expression was no surprise: researchers knew that the enzymatic machine that copies DNA into the RNA blueprint for proteins -- a protein called Pol II -- often pauses at the start of a gene, presumably revving its engine in preparation to jump across the genetic start gate in response to a developmental signal. However, Shilatifard and colleagues showed several years ago that paused Pol II is not a prerequisite for rapid transcriptional induction.

The surprise came when researchers used a molecular trick to deplete mouse ES cells of Ell3 and then did a "genomic" survey. They found that paused Pol II vanished from the start sites of many genes in Ell3-deficient cells. This means that not only does Ell3 preferentially mark stem enhancers, but also that its presence there is necessary to keep an idling Pol II ready for action.

Most of the current study defines how, when the developmental time is right, enhancer-bound Ell3 cooperates with components of a big-boss elongation factor called the Super Elongation Complex to release Pol II from the start gate, allowing the expression of genes required for stem cell differentiation. Critical among those findings is their observation that mouse stem cells depleted of Ell3 failed to activate genes expressed in mature cell types.

These results alone are cause for any lab to start chilling the champagne, yet a surprising coda to the study, leaves readers with yet another revelation. Collaborating with Fengli Guo, Ph.D., head of the Stowers electron microscopy core, the team prepared highly magnified images of mouse sperm and observed that both Ell3 and Pol II were present, in sperm nuclei.

In mammals, gene expression regulated by Pol II, a process known as transcription, does not begin until the formation of a single-celled zygote, that is, well after the union of sperm and egg germ cells. "It is very significant that Ell3 and other factors that regulate transcription are found in sperm," says Lin, the study's first author. Lin is cautious in interpreting this finding, "but it would be very exciting to further investigate whether transcription factors found in sperm could contribute to the decondensation of sperm chromatin or even further gene activation after fertilization by serving as epigenetic markers."

Shilatifard is also cautious as questions remain to be explored, among them whether Ell3 and Pol II actually contact DNA inside sperm or whether similar processes occur in unfertilized eggs and function in this process. Nonetheless, he feels this finding has fundamental implications, not only for development, but also for where he's going next.

"This work has opened up a whole new area of research in my lab," says Shilatifard, who has in the last decade focused on aberrant gene expression associated with leukemia. "If we find that transcription factors bind to specific regions of chromatin in germ cells, I may focus on germ cells in the next few decades. This would open a huge door enabling us to determine the role of these factors in early development."

Zhuojuan Luo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Shilatifard lab, also contributed to the study.

Funding for the study came from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, the National Institutes of Health (Shilatifard R01CA89455 and R01CA150265), and Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stowers Institute for Medical Research, via Newswise.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Chengqi Lin, Alexander?S. Garruss, Zhuojuan Luo, Fengli Guo, Ali Shilatifard. The RNA Pol II Elongation Factor Ell3 Marks Enhancers in ES Cells and Primes Future Gene Activation. Cell, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.12.015

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/genes/~3/zG_FVBuF9b4/121227130202.htm

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Five questions that will be answered by UFC 155

The UFC's end-of-the-year cards are usually stacked. Despite injuries, UFC 155 is no different. It features intriguing bouts that will answer some burning questions.

Did a knee injury hold back Cain Velasquez the first time he fought Junior dos Santos? When the two first met up last November, Velasquez reportedly had a badly injured knee. He was knocked out in 64 seconds. This time a (seemingly) healthy Velasquez will get to show if he deserves the heavyweight belt.

Has Chris Leben returned to form, for really real this time? Since Leben was on the original "Ultimate Fighter," he has been a man who wrestled with his demons. Most recently, those demons took the form of a banned pain killer which resulted in a one-year suspension from the UFC. Against Derek Brunson, Leben can show he's again the man who knocked out Wanderlei Silva.

Can Tim Boetsch be the next guy to challenge Anderson Silva? Though his original bout with Chris Weidman was called off because of an injury to Weidman, Boetsch still has another opportunity to show he can beat up opponents. He wants a chance to beat up Silva,* and this bout with Costa Phillippou is an opportunity for Boetsch's fighting to shine.

Or should Alan Belcher be the man to take on Silva? It's been more than three years since Belcher lost a fight. His last four fights have been stoppage wins. An impressive win over Yushin Okami could put him in line to fight for the middleweight belt.*

Is Todd Duffee still the knockout artist who once graced the octagon? Back in 2009, Duffee knocked out Tim Hague in a mere seven seconds. After that, the hype train was running behind him full steam. It was derailed when Mike Russow came back to knock Duffee out in the third round of their bout. Duffee was cut from the UFC, and is getting another shot at the octagon on Saturday. He'll fight Philip De Fries on the Facebook preliminaries, and get a chance to show if he can still knock people out very quickly.

*Assuming the next middleweight belt is based on competitiveness and earning a title shot by fighting, not by calling opponents out. Considering what has happened recently in the UFC welterweight and light heavyweight divisions, there are no guarantees.
Related MMA video from Yahoo! Sports

Source: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mma-cagewriter/five-questions-answered-ufc-155-221719074--mma.html

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A Size 2 Is a Size 2 Is a Size 8

'Tis the season ? to return all the gifts that didn?t work out. For many recipients, those gifts will be clothes. Even if you are lucky enough to have an aunt who understands and appreciates your style, you still may not get that coveted reindeer sweater in a size that fits. In part, that?s because America?s clothing size system is rather confusing, as the following article, first published in January 2012, explained.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

If you are like me, you may have had the following deflating experience: After confidently selecting a pair of jeans in your size from the rack, you find yourself alone in a tiny dressing room, desperately in need of heavy machinery to get them onto your body, wondering why, oh, why clothing sizes don?t make sense.

Cheer up! You?re in excellent historical company; people have been moaning about sizes for the better part of a century. ?I don?t know who the mythical size 36 is who forms the basis of sizing,? complained one indignant retail executive in a 1927 New York Times article, ?but average, tall, short, thin and plump women come into a department store and the 36 size fits none of them.? A young Katharine Graham reported for the Washington Post on a similar subject in 1948: ?As most harassed mothers know,? Graham wrote, ?size 5 in a little girl?s dress can mean almost anything.? It?s enough to make you wonder: Was there ever a time when sizes were standardized?

The federal government did take a stab at it in the early 1940s. That was when the Depression-era Works Progress Administration commissioned a study of the American female body, an effort to instill a method to the sizing madness. At that point, the ready-made clothing industry was in its infancy. If your clothes are made-to-measure?as they were in an earlier era, particularly for wealthy women?there?s no need for a standard set of sizes. But as European couturiers were hobbled by World War II, an American fashion industry developed, with New York as its capital city. New York?s all-star cast of designers, among them Claire McCardell and ?Sophie of Saks,? specialized not in couture but in ready-to-wear. And as wealthy women began to purchase premade clothing, pressure mounted to ensure that it fit in a consistent way.

The ready-to-wear sizing system that existed prior to the ?40s was first developed for menswear. Scholars have found evidence of standardized men?s sizing as far back as the Revolutionary War. By the War of 1812, the Army was in the practice of holding stocks of ready-made uniforms sized according to a single measurement, of the chest?based on the assumption that you could deduce from it a proportional understanding of the rest of a man?s body. So, when manufacturers in the early 20^th century began to produce women?s clothing, they based women?s sizes exclusively on a single measurement: the bust.

The only problem? Bust measurements on their own are not particularly accurate indicators of a woman?s size or of the rest of her proportions. As we all know, some small women have very large breasts, and some large women have very small ones. This sizing conundrum was particularly irksome to the Mail Order Association of America, which was well aware by the late 1930s that women often returned clothing because of poor fit.

In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Works Progress Administration gave two statisticians, Ruth O?Brien and William Shelton, a grant to conduct a nationwide survey of women?s measurements. O?Brien and Shelton sent more than 100 trained operatives out into the field, where they measured almost 15,000 women, taking 59 distinct measurements of the female form. When the data came in, O?Brien and Shelton hoped to determine whether any proportional relationships existed among measurements that could be broadly applied to create a simple, standardized system of sizing.

Sadly, the data didn?t cooperate. The best system O?Brien and Shelton proposed was based primarily on height and weight. But the statisticians wisely recognized that women might balk if a sizing system forced them to confront?or tell a sales clerk?their own exact poundage. As an inferior alternative, they imagined a system based on a single measurement of the upper body and combined that with a height index (regulars, longs, and shorts), and a lower body girth index (regulars, stouts, and slims). ?The nomenclature adopted would probably have to be on some arbitrary basis, as is the present system of shoe sizes, rather than representing the numerical values of some anthropometrical measurement,? O?Brien and Shelton wrote, summing up what is perhaps the pair?s most lasting contribution to modern sizing: Even though a measurement can be extrapolated from a size, the actual numbers we use in women?s sizing are not, themselves, measurements.

?It was pretty impressive, what they did,? says sizing scholar Lynn Boorady, noting that they devised something like 27 different sizes. But, she says, ?It was an obscene number, and obviously not useful for anyone manufacturing.? It wasn?t until almost a decade later that the National Bureau of Standards* (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) reanalyzed the O?Brien/Shelton data and came up with an official system?one that has served as the basis for all future systems. Women?s sizes were derived from bust size?with all other measurements based on the proportions of an hourglass figure?and represented by even numbers from 8 to 38. These basic sizes were combined with a T, R, or S, to indicate height, and a plus or minus, to represent lower body girth. The system was published as a commercial standard?a recommendation, legally required only for the pattern-making industry?in 1958. The industry was at first enthusiastic about these recommendations, and major mail order companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward started to adopt these government sizes. But enthusiasm eventually flagged. By 1970, the NBS downgraded its Commercial Standard to a Voluntary Product Standard, and by 1983, the government withdrew the standard entirely, damning future generations to inconsistent fits and many, many mail order returns.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=6c74edf52f6a7c45415f4d6f28dbafae

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Dragonfly Shows Human-Like Power of Concentration

Dragonflies lack humans' big brains, but they still get the job done, according to new research that suggests that these insects have brain cells capable of feats previously seen only in primates.

Specifically, the dragonflies can screen out useless visual information to focus on a target, a process called selective attention. The new study, published Dec. 20 in the journal Current Biology, is the first to find brain cells devoted to selective attention in an invertebrate animal.

Selective attention is crucial for responding to one stimulus among the dozens of distractions that clamor for notice at any given time, said Steven Wiederman of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Imagine a tennis player having to pick out a small ball from the crowd when it's traveling at almost 200 kilometers an hour," Wiederman said in a statement. "You need selective attention in order to hit that ball back into play."

But little is known about how the brain locks onto its targets and ignores all else. To find out, Wiederman, who is from the university's Center for Neuroscience Research, and his colleague David O'Carroll turned to an unlikely animal. The researchers have long studied insect vision, and the dragonfly turns out to be quite adept in that arena. [Photos: Dew-Covered Dragonflies & Other Sparkling Insects]

"The dragonfly hunts for other insects, and these might be part of a swarm ? they're all tiny moving objects," Wiederman said. "Once the dragonfly has selected a target, its neuron activity filters out all other potential prey. The dragonfly then swoops in on its prey ? they get it right 97 percent of the time."

Using a glass probe with a tip 1,500 times smaller than a human hair, the researchers measured the neuronal activity that enables such amazing aerial hunting. A similar process is at work in the primate brain, O'Carroll said in a statement, but researchers weren't expecting to see the same thing in an insect that evolved 325 million years ago.

"We believe our work will appeal to neuroscientists and engineers alike," O'Carroll said. "For example, it could be used as a model system for robotic vision. Because the insect brain is simple and accessible, future work may allow us to fully understand the underlying network of neurons and copy it into intelligent robots."

Plenty of other insects have inspired robot designs. Swiss scientists, for example, have built a hovering drone that mimics insects in its ability to survive collisions with hard objects. Sometimes insects are recruited directly. North Carolina State University researchers reported in September that they'd managed to create cyborg Madagascar hissing cockroaches. The scientists wired a microcontroller to the insects' sensory organs, enabling them to steer the cockroaches' movements.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas?or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook?& Google+.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/dragonfly-shows-human-power-concentration-000311471.html

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