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When someone uses your name or personal information, such as your credit card number, driver's license number, Social Security number, telephone number, or other account numbers, without your permission, you become a victim of identity theft.
Thieves steal your personal information and use it to open credit accounts, bank accounts, telephone service accounts, and make major purchases in your name. These criminals use your sensitive information to take over existing accounts, or open new accounts. Their criminal activities can result in damage to your credit rating and denials to credit and job offers.
Protecting Your Identity
While there are no guarantees that your identity will never be stolen or compromised, there are several steps you can take to minimize the risks.
Here are a few of them:
- Before you discard your personal information that you no longer need, such as credit card receipts, billing statements, and pre-approved credit card offers, shred them using, at best, a diagonal-cut shredder.
- Create unique passwords and personal identification numbers (PINS) and avoid using easily available information such as mother's maiden name, date of birth, or last four digits of your Social Security number.
- Do not give your Social Security number to people or companies that you do not know.
- Guard your mail from theft. Promptly remove your incoming mail from your mailbox and place outgoing mail in locked collection boxes at your local Post Office.
- As an extra measure of security, install a lock on your mailbox, even if mail theft is not an identified problem in your neighborhood.
- Before disclosing personal information, even to people you know where you shop or do business, insist on knowing the reason(s) your personal information is required and how it will be used.
Thieves can do much damage with what they remove from your mailbox.
Criminals are increasingly creative in the methods they use to get their hands or eyes on your personal information, and ultimately, your money. Here are some of the low-tech techniques they employ:
- Dumpster Diving, one of the easiest ways for them to appropriate your personal information.
- Mail Theft from unsecured residential mailboxes. According to statistics, mail theft most often takes place at unprotected and easily accessible mailboxes in public places.
- Shoulder surfing takes place when a thief watches or listens literally over your shoulder as you enter your PIN into an ATM machine. They may even follow you home or your place of work to gather additional information about you.
Data transferred across the Internet can be intercepted during its journey.
- Phishing and Pharming: While phishing is a scam in which consumers are tricked into entering their personal information via a bogus email and website form, pharming occurs where hackers steal personal information from numerous people simultaneously through something known as "domain spoofing". They take over a DNS server and redirect user information to a new website that they use to gather, collect, "pharm" illegal information.
- Skimming: Thieves quickly and temporarily steal a credit card and run it through a skimmer, a credit card reader that has been reprogrammed to steal information off the card.
Make education about the scams, schemes, and frauds criminals use to steal your identity your priority in view of the rising occurrence of this multi-million-dollar-problem. With education comes prevention. Here are some prevention tips to help reduce the risks:
- Safeguard your personal information. Never take simple things for granted.
- Carry with you only the information you need. Always keep your personal information and documents in a safe and secured place of your choosing.
- Order and review a copy of your credit report at least once a year.
- Shred documents containing your sensitive information before discarding them.
Known as The Master Blog Builder, Etienne A. Gibbs, MSW, helps small business owners and non-profit organizations improve their customer relationship marketing. Often he comes across cases that are red flags calling identity thieves to come in. Hence, he started the "Protecting Your Identity" blog. Contact him at www.MasterBlogBuilder.com for more information.
Heralding a new age in the cosmos, Norwegian Kristian Birkeland predicted that the universe likely consisted of an exotic component that would later be called dark matter. His comments about this subject matter appeared in a description of the Norwegian Aurora Polaris Expedition (1902-1903). Birkeland's ideas about the Expedition were published in the fateful year of 1913 which would see the rise of the socialist Federal Reserve System and the Income Tax in the United States of America, two key components of the communist manifesto. Evolutionary processes were in motion throughout all fields of endeavor. Economics, politics, science and the hearts and minds of men and women were in the balance whilst relativism not truth held sway over the modern imagination. Cosmology would suffer from the same 'evolutionary' mindset and Birkeland wrote as much:
"We have assumed that each stellar system in evolutions throws off electric corpuscles into space. It does not seem unreasonable therefore to think that the greater part of the material masses in the universe is found, not in the solar systems or nebulae, but in "empty" space."
In this fashion, Birkeland predicted that because of the 'evolutions' present within the cosmos most of the matter in the universe must be found in 'empty' space rather than that which is observable in stellar objects. It is currently believed that only four percent of the universe is of this ordinary visible stellar type. Further, about a quarter of the universe is made up of the ubiquitous dark matter with the rest of the cosmos being filled with the even more bizarre dark energy. It was Fritz Zwicky, a swiss astrophysicist working for Caltech, who would further the concept of dark matter through the aegis of the Virial Theorem.
This mathematical relation is a formula which bounds the energy of a set of particles. In another dark year in the steady evolution to slavery since 1933 saw the removal of gold from the accounts of american citizenry, Zwicky used the Virial Theorem in an attempt to ascertain the validity of the dark matter hypothesis. He focussed his attention on the Coma galactic cluster and his analysis provided prima facie confirmation for the existence of dark matter. By evaluating the amount of movement of those galaxies at the periphery of the cluster he was able to approximately surmise the aggregate of all the matter therein.
He was astonished to learn that this sum total of mass is different from a separately computed estimate. This other value was obtained by analyzing the sum total of galaxies and the brightness of the Coma cluster. Juxtaposing this value with the periphery computation he observed that there was a discrepancy of at a minimum four hundredfold. Since the galaxies were insufficiently massive to cause the computed orbital velocities there must be some other mechanism to explain this phenomena. This conundrum became in the scientific lexicon the missing mass problem. Zwicky had established the need for the existence of an invisible source of mass hitherto unknown which must provide the necessary gravitational effect for the cluster.
Thus, it is a fact of the current state of cosmology that the greatest set of evidence for dark matter comes from this galactic gravitational data. Scientists have even made galactic curves describing the rotational properties of stars versus the distance from the galactic center. When the gravitational data is plotted it can be shown that only a small portion of the observed speeds are explicable by classical computations. In other words, there is a scarcity of visible mass in the observed galaxies to attribute the sum total of gravitational effects to visibly observable stars planets and galaxies. Thus, the simplest way to explain this galactic mystery of insufficient mass is to hypothesize a non-detectable type of mass known as dark matter which can be the cause for the gravitational effects.
As more and more data is collected on these and other aspects of the universe, formulae and cosmological postulates are generated describing the results so obtained. Fulfilling the requirements of the aforementioned aspects leads some scientists to propose several different types of dark matter. The four main types of dark matter are called 1- baryonic dark matter; 2- warm dark matter; 3- cold dark matter and 4- hot dark matter. Dark matter ranges from the known to the predicted, from black holes to brown dwarfs to the massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), the neutrino, axions, WIMPS or weakly interacting massive particles and the esoteric neutralino. However, there is an alternative explanation for the gravitational effects which originally created the dark matter concept.
If an incomplete understanding of gravitation is factored into the picture, then it can be asserted that the dark matter interpretation is incorrect because some other cause is generating these phenomena. Several different contending theories have been developed to describe the observed galactic data. In particular, one of the main competing explanations is given by scalar tensor theories which try to combine the teachings of quantum mechanics with gravity. Amplifying these ideas leads to a variety of exotic ideas which challenge our most fundamental notions of physics and astronomy. Other concepts go even further and have been the subject of interest for astronomers like Dr. Riccardo Scarpa since these allow for a cosmology without the inclusion of the enigmatic dark matter.
Dr. Scarpa works at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago Chile using the Very Large Telescope Array at Paranal. With all of his experience in this field, it is interesting to note some of his most recent comments on the superfluous dark matter:
"Dark matter is the craziest idea we've ever had in astronomy. It can appear when you need it, it can do what you like, be distributed in any way you like. It is the fairy tale of astronomy."
In view of these comments one should ask if another scientific idea might be on the verge of collapsing. Indeed, astronomers are routinely using these other theoretical principles on a daily basis in infrared observatories around the world. Thus, it is very likely that we are simply wrong about all of this dark matter. It is within all probability that the only dark matter that we will ever find is that ignorant dark matter between our ears.
Author Bio
Michael Strauss is an engineer and author of Requiem for Relativity the Collapse of Special Relativity, a serious critique on the fallacies of Special Relativity. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.com
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Heralding a new age in the cosmos, Norwegian Kristian Birkeland predicted that the universe likely consisted of an exotic component that would later be called dark matter. His comments about this subj...
The Nobel Laureate is a heavyweight in this field having earned a prize for work on the strong nuclear force and he indicated that what is happening today is very similar to what happened at the 1911 Solvay meeting. Back then, radioactivity had recently been discovered and mass energy conservation was under assault because of its discovery. Quantum theory would be needed to solve these problems. Gross further commented that in 1911 "They were missing something absolutely fundamental," as well as "we are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then."
Coming from a scientist with establishment credentials this is a damning statement about the state of current theoretical models and most notably string theory. This theoretical model is a means by which physicists replace the more commonly known particles of particle physics with one dimensional objects which are known as strings. These bizarre objects were first detected in 1968 through the insight and work of Gabriele Veneziano who was trying to comprehend the strong nuclear force.
Whilst meditating on the strong nuclear force Veneziano detected a similarity between the Euler Beta Function, named for the famed mathematician Leonhard Euler, and the strong force. Applying the aforementioned Beta Function to the strong force he was able to validate a direct correlation between the two. Interestingly enough, no one knew why Euler's Beta worked so well in mapping the strong nuclear force data. A proposed solution to this dilemma would follow a few years later.
Almost two years later (1970), the scientists Nambu, Nielsen and Susskind provided a mathematical description which described the physical phenomena of why Euler's Beta served as a graphical outline for the strong nuclear force. By modeling the strong nuclear forces as one dimensional strings they were able to show why it all seemed to work so well. However, several troubling inconsistencies were immediately seen on the horizon. The new theory had attached to it many implications that were in direct violation of empirical analyses. In other words, routine experimentation did not back up the new theory.
Needless to say, physicists romantic fascination with string theory ended almost as fast as it had begun only to be resuscitated a few years later by another 'discovery.' The worker of the miraculous salvation of the sweet dreams of modern physicists was known as the graviton. This elementary particle allegedly communicates gravitational forces throughout the universe.
The graviton is of course a 'hypothetical' particle that appears in what are known as quantum gravity systems. Unfortunately, the graviton has never ever been detected; it is as previously indicated a 'mythical' particle that fills the mind of the theorist with dreams of golden Nobel Prizes and perhaps his or her name on the periodic table of elements.
But back to the historical record. In 1974, the scientists Schwarz, Scherk and Yoneya reexamined strings so that the textures or patterns of strings and their associated vibrational properties were connected to the aforementioned 'graviton.' As a result of these investigations was born what is now called 'bosonic string theory' which is the 'in vogue' version of this theory. Having both open and closed strings as well as many new important problems which gave rise to unforeseen instabilities.
These problematical instabilities leading to many new difficulties which render the previous thinking as confused as we were when we started this discussion. Of course this all started from undetectable gravitons which arise from other theories equally untenable and inexplicable and so on. Thus was born string theory which was hoped would provide a complete picture of the basic fundamental principles of the universe.
Scientists had believed that once the shortcomings of particle physics had been left behind by the adoption of the exotic string theory, that a grand unified theory of everything would be an easily ascertainable goal. However, what they could not anticipate is that the theory that they hoped would produce a theory of everything would leave them more confused and frustrated than they were before they departed from particle physics.
The end result of string theory is that we know less and less and are becoming more and more confused. Of course, the argument could be made that further investigations will yield more relevant data whereby we will tweak the model to an eventual perfecting of our understanding of it. Or perhaps 'We don't know what we are talking about.'
Michael Strauss is an engineer and author of Requiem for Relativity the Collapse of Special Relativity. To contact the author visit: www.relativitycollapse.com
Examples of major technological advancement within the realm of private enterprise are numerous. Most major technological advancements within society have occurred outside the purview of government intervention. Governments were intended to govern the people. The governments role is to preserve the environment of freedom and democracy so that intellectual curiosity can flourish within this environment. The governments role is also to provide funding, and should not be in the nuts and bolts operation of putting man into space. The ingenuity of man within the realm of private enterprise has resulted in most of the technological advancements we enjoy today.
The cosmos will be explored by man operating from the base of private enterprise and the technology needed to explore the cosmos will be developed within that enterprise. Why is this so. NASA is an agency driven by fear of tragedy. More mishaps will decrease the probability of sufficient government funding. This cycle of fear, mishaps, and the hope for continual funding is one that seems to have no end. But mishaps are part of the business of putting explorers into space. What can better withstand the expected mishaps. A government agency or private enterprise. If a private enterprise fails, it's competitor can step in to fill the gap and the engine of private enterprise can continue to push man into space. NASA is not a private enterprise competing within the world market place.
NASA is not what it used to be during the Apollo days. Given it's current mind set and culture, it will be difficult within this framework to send man out into the cosmos as true explorers. They have given the nuts and bolts of putting man into space to private contractors. But these NASA contractors have the same NASA mind set because they are under the dominion of NASA. There is a fear of mishaps within contractors without true competition within the market place. NASA awards contracts to the lowest bidder. Does the lowest bidder provide the highest level of safety. Once a company is awarded a contract, they remain a NASA contractor for many years and simply become an extension of NASA. Therefore NASA becomes a autocratic agency with it's arms extending outward to many companies. NASA's manned space flight program can do no more then low earth orbit. Year after year of low earth orbit does not excite the American people. Astronauts today are no longer household names. An American president here and there will give a speech saying we are going to Mars. Even President Bush's January 14, 2004 speech seems to have already been forgotten by the American public.
When we went to the moon this was the start of an exploration. A goal was set on May 25, 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, during a speech before a Joint Session of Congress, to reach the moon before the end of the decade. NASA kicked into high gear and achieved one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mankind. We took the first step into space and then just stopped. Since then all of the manned space missions have never gone beyond low earth orbit, and the American public becomes bored easily. To gain the American interest and support of the Apollo days, we must send true explorers out into space. NASA wants to take such small, time consuming incremental steps that by the time comes when the really exciting work begins, the American support and interest may be eroded to the point where NASA may no longer have the financial means by which to accomplish such an endeavor. Hence, the need for private enterprise to accomplish such an endeavor. If we are going to go into the cosmos, then lets do it and stop the futile activity.
A private enterprise is not a bureaucracy. If safety issues arise from qualified personnel within a bureaucracy, these issues may not resonate to the proper people within the organization. A case in point, the knowledge of a strong potential for a O-ring failure at low temperatures between the segments for the solid rocket boosters of the space shuttle, existed within the bureaucracy of NASA before the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. More specifically, this critical information in terms of probability of O-ring compromise was expressed by engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor for the development and production of the solid rocket boosters. This information never percolated upward from Morton Thiokol to the proper people within the NASA organization.
In private enterprise, which is non-bureaucratic by nature, a relatively small group of people are working toward a common goal. In this situation, safety issues which arise will be known by all members of the organization. Safety issues will not get lost in a bureaucracy. NASA depends on it's contractors to deliver a high level of safety. A private enterprise depends on itself to provide a high level of safety. The structure of a private enterprise is more suited to the endeavor of sending out explorers into space. The government should award grants to the most promising companies with the understanding that the sending out of explorers into space does indeed benefit mankind.
Americans are at their best when they compete. Competition is an integral component of American society. What was the driving force that put us on the moon. It was the competition with the Russians. At the present moment in time, this type of competition does not exist. Although, it appears as if China may be a future competitor. Americans need to compete to accomplish something. It is competition which drives the advancement of technology. Why not let companies compete for government funding and let the research and development occur within these companies, and most importantly let them compete. These companies can have the same characteristics of any company that wants to produce a viable product. They will not be under contract from NASA and will operate as a separate private enterprise entity. A company can make money from space tourism and the same company can be involved in sending explorers out into space. Government grants can be awarded based on how strong the potential exists for space exploration. A company can be involved in space tourism, exploration, or can provide a research and development platform. This is the future of man's endeavor into space.
Man will be exploring the cosmos with private enterprise being the driving engine. If one enterprise fails, one of the competing enterprises will win out. Sure there will be some disasters and risks will be taken because that is the nature of the business. But when unfortunate disasters or mishaps do occur, the private enterprise engine will not grind to a complete halt. Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites team have taken the first steps toward this archetypical dream of exploring the cosmos, and they did it with a fraction of the budget that NASA uses and with a team of 130 or so people to boot. They won the Ansari X-Prize by sending a man into space and returning him safely to earth and then they repeated this within two weeks. An absolutely unbelievable accomplishment given the facilities and resources which were available to them. This could only occur within a society where freedom and democracy are regarded as a right to all individuals. The United States is such a society.
Burt Rutan has said that he has never worked a day in his life. He only plays. His passion for his work is what produces results. Burt Rutan and his team represent the core of what makes the United States the greatest country in the world. May be terrorist can get it through their thick heads that freedom does work. Most importantly, Scaled Composites has shown the world what private enterprise can accomplish. Even if Scaled Composite's endeavors never go beyond earth orbit, they have taken the first step within the proper mind set and culture, and this is what will put man into the cosmos. This mind set and culture of pure unadulterated intellectual curiosity is what really will put man into the cosmos. Not NASA's mind set of fear.
NASA has played it's important role by lighting the torch in sending man to the moon. We are now at a point in the history of mankind where that torch should be passed to private enterprise. The developer of the Ansari X-Prize I'm sure shares my thoughts. God has placed the planets and all the stars within the universe there for a reason. It is God's intention for us to move outward into the final frontier. We do this to fulfill the natural curiosity that God has given to us and in the process we better the lot of mankind. Lets go...
Thomas Sullivan, the author of this article is an IT Consultant/Search Engine Optimizer, Pilot, and Space Enthusiast. He manages the website Pilot Portal USA - Pilot Weather Briefing, Flight Schools USA, Aviation Directory. Send questions or comments to Thomas Sullivan. His email address can be found on his website.
Three hundred miles off the Argentina coast in the South Atlantic lay the Falkland Islands, also known to the Argentines as Islas Malvinas. It consists of two main islands, East and West Falklands which lie 300 miles east of the Argentina coast. There are about 200 smaller islands that form a total land area of approximately 4,700 square miles. The only town and capital is Port Stanley.
The English navigator John Davis may have been the first person to sight the Falklands. However, the Argentine version states that "Spanish seamen" were the first without giving further details. Some also say that Ferdinand Magellan was the first to see the islands on his voyage around the world. Another claim is based on one of Magellan's ships deserting the expedition and going back to Spain. While it is true that there was such a ship, there are no original documents to prove the actual sighting of the islands.
The government of the Falkland Islands administers the British dependent territories of South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, and the Shag and Clerke rocks, lying from 700 to 2,000 miles (1,100 to 3,200 km) to the east and southeast of the Falklands.
Argentina has claimed the islands since the early 19th century. Britain had occupied and administered the islands since 1833 and had consistently rejected Argentina's claims. Just like any other conflicts in our world history, claiming and ruling a certain territory initiated war between the Argentines and the British forces. Ownership of the islands has always been a hotly contested issue between the two governments. On April 2nd of 1982, the war began, with thousands of Argentine troops landing on the Falklands.
The British captured about 10,000 Argentine prisoners, all of whom were afterward released. Argentina's defeat severely discredited the military government and led to the restoration of civilian rule in that country in 1983.
After more than 20 years, a shocking revelation unfolds. Research claims that a high number of veterans have taken their own lives since the South Atlantic conflict ended, both from the Argentine and the British troops. The suicide figure was almost half of the number of soldiers who died during the conflict.
There were also allegations that the people in command of the military forces of both countries tried to ignore the issue of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which leaves many sufferers emotionally scarred and unable to work. Some veterans have claimed that their condition was not diagnosed or treated while they were still serving. They added that they were never warned about the effects on their enlistment or discharge from the forces. They were also not given any presentations or debriefings to prepare them for possible effects.
There seems to be a general pattern for war veterans suffering PTSD. They experience recurring nightmares and flashbacks followed by recourse to heavy drinking or drugs then crime. A lot of war veterans ended up in prison often for violence and some of them killed themselves in their cells. While many veterans have been suffering from PTSD, others have simply been unable to cope with the reality of life outside the forces. Many have become caught up in alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, depression, and relationship break-up. PTSD has indeed turned these war veterans towards the path of self-destruction.
The Falklands Conflict was one of the few major naval campaigns to have occurred since the end of the Second World War. As such, the conflict illustrated the vulnerability of surface ships to anti-ship missiles and reaffirmed the effectiveness of aircraft in naval warfare. However, the Falklands War also illustrated the vulnerability of people, especially of war veterans. Even if the war has ended, it has left an imprint that will forever be within their lives.
The Falklands war cost England 255 men, six ships, and more than 1.6 billion pounds. The war lasted 74 days, with 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and three civilian Falklanders killed. The Falklands campaign was considered a great victory for the United Kingdom. The British may have overpowered the Argentines, but both of them suffered the consequences of the atrocity of war and continuously agonizing from it.
Three hundred miles off the Argentina coast in the South Atlantic lay the Falkland Islands, also known to the Argentines as Islas Malvinas. It consists of two main islands, East and We...