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5 Ways New Buyer Behaviors Are Impacting B2B Sales ...

image from www.flickr.comFor many in B2B sales, from senior leaders to sales representatives, it may be a discouraging time. If you follow conventional and social media closely, the storied demise of sales has been told many times. You probably could buy a few lunches if you collected a dollar for every time you heard that buyers are in control and don?t need sales. To you, this sentiment seems like it is taking on mythical proportions. I am not so sure. If I ask myself three simple questions, I think my answers are clear:

Have buyers changed? Answer: Yes
Does B2B Sales need to change? Answer: Yes
Will buyers still require the assistance of B2B Sales? Answer: Yes

I suspect many of you will answer the same way. B2B Sales will continue to matter very much and it will go through periods of redefinitions and transformations over the next few years. Although, in the Social Age, it may seem that people want to be devoid of actual interactions with others in such buying settings, I for one believe buyers are actually seeking more. However, more of what has not defined interactions and relationships in the past.

5 Ways B2B Sales Are Affected

New buyer behaviors are emerging and evolving. The rate of change will, without a doubt, continue to take place at a significant rate. B2B Sales will have to charter a new course that gets them rethinking about how interactions, engagements, and relationships are changing. Let?s take a look at new buyer behaviors and how they are affecting B2B Sales in particular:

Buyers Have New Knowledge Expectations

The instantaneous availability of information and knowledge at buyer?s fingertips puts pressure on B2B Sales to match their expectations when it comes to what we can call knowledge readiness. If buyers are truly able to access information and knowledge for researching as well as assessing potential opportunities and resolutions, then B2B Sales needs to bring more to the table when an actual engagement takes place. B2B Sales needs to pick up where the buyer left off. Let an actual buyer voice be heard:

?Okay, so what gets my goat more than anything is that after I do all the research and such, I finally get to talking to a sales rep. And what happens? They just regurgitate all the stuff I found online. They are not telling me anything new. Just telling me what I already know.?

For B2B organizations today, not only is sales readiness important but so is knowledge readiness.

Buyers Seeking Advisement, Not Ready-Made Solutions

A generalized assumptive statement can be made, based on numerous surveys conducted over the past two years, that buyers are generally 50% to 60% into the buying process before having direct engagement with sales. They?ve done the spade work in looking at potential solutions, scoping out what might be a good resolution, and approximating budgets. This changes the game significantly for B2B Sales. Buyers already know about your ready-made solutions found in their researching. What they seek is skills and knowledge in advising them on how solutions ? modified, customized, and most definitely altered ? will help them to achieve the specific goals and outcomes they seek. The implication for B2B organizations is B2B Selling organizations must have talent that reflects excellent advisory skills.

Buyers Including More People in Their Ecosystems and Networks

Driven by social and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, buyers are able to expand their ecosystems and networks in complex situations. The degree of interdependencies between not only users and influencers but partners, suppliers, and their customers as well makes for more complexity. And once again ? more knowledge needed. Decision-making is getting more participative within ecosystems and networks. B2B Sales will need to adapt and address complexity as well as possess knowledge that makes them an important participant within a buyer?s complex ecosystem and networks. I believe this will be B2B Sales toughest challenge over the next few years. Why? I believe wired into the DNA of selling organizations are systems, training, processes, and the likes all oriented towards the tunnel vision of a single buyer making a non-sophisticated decision. Today?s realities tell us otherwise.

Buying Cycles Are Getting Longer

Counterintuitive to today?s hyper-connected and hyper-speed world is the acknowledgement that buying cycles in complex B2B Sales situations are actually getting longer. Increasing need for more knowledge, more advisement on problem-solving, more modifications and customizations, more participants in buyer networks, and more complex global environments all point towards why buying cycles are getting longer. This means B2B Sales will need to exercise patience in serving in the advisory role and slow down the train on ready-made solutions selling. What we will see here is boiling tension points begin to emerge. Many organizations are still wedded to pipeline thinking and management. Mandated for decades has been to push sales opportunities fast and furiously through the pipeline to meet quarterly projections. Readjusting thinking around this tension point is very much akin to turning a freight ship around in a harbor ? it?s going to take a while and some tug boats are definitely going to be needed.

Buyers Are Relating Differently

Emerging generational differences are beginning to sprout into the workforces. A generation is rising that has little knowledge of a world without an Internet, email, social networks, ubiquitous smart phones, and always on connectivity to their social and professional networks. How interactions takes place and how relationships are formed are undergoing major transformations. The implications for B2B Sales is that it will need to look at their buyer groups and determine how advanced they are along these lines and are they impacted significantly with generational differences. Causing a reexamination of what the coveted ratio between field and inside sales should be in the future. Which is better suited to interact with and relate to the social buyer will be the new determining factor on this ratio ? as opposed to some arbitrary cut off line between large accounts and small accounts.

Where Is B2B Sales Headed?

These emerging new buyer behaviors will contribute towards the changing face of B2B Sales. They will impact traditional vanguards such as sales planning, sales strategies, pipeline management, sales training, and sales hiring. Solving the decades old marketing and sales alignment issue will need to be reexamined as well. Much of the debate has been around functional definitions as opposed to how an organization best coalesces around changing buyer behaviors and dynamics.

There are three things we can be sure of in the future. One, new buyer behaviors will continue to impact B2B Sales. Two, how we define B2B Sales will undergo drastic change. And lastly, B2B Sales will continue to play a vital role in how organizations engage with buyers in the future.

How is your organization being impacted today? What changes are taking place that you see?

(Image by Kenny Madden ? All rights reserved)


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Source: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/02/02/5-ways-new-buyer-behaviors-are-impacting-b2b-sales/

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Work Comp Roundup - Reduce Your Workers Compensation ...

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It is never too late to start thinking about how to be more proactive when it comes to handling your insurance losses. You can implement a program or plan any time, provided you roll it out to the right people and your employees or workers understand the initiatives and reasons behind it.

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Sometimes workers don?t understand how insurance works. Commercial insurance is a monster to address. It is hard to explain how an underwriter comes up with the numbers they do in order to assign a premium to your workplace. But the bottom line that should be communicated is that every dollar that goes out from the insurance company/TPA could affect the insurance cost. If you have higher costs, maybe you cannot give out higher bonuses. Or maybe increased costs result in certain workers not getting a pay raise. All workers will understand when you put it into a sense of how if affects them directly. So let?s go over some simple loss reduction techniques to refresh you mind for 2012:

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1. Make a commitment to promoting safety

If you are going to do this, go all out. You need to establish the rules and procedures, and then you need to come up with a way to drill it into everyone?s mind. The perfect way is by having rules enforced, and violators punished. Not harsh, severe punishments, but more than a slap on the wrist. Make them park in the back of the lot. Make them wear a different color safety hat than everyone else, or a vest that claims they broke the safety rules. Have the punishment be something that is part tongue-in-cheek, but it gets the point across and leads to some good natured ribbing from other coworkers.

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On the other side, reward safety achievements. Use gas cards or coupons for free food as gifts. Do raffles and hand out a few prizes to the person that was the most safety-oriented. Whatever you do, make the reward something more tangible than a pat on the back.

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Also you can post safety rules and violations on signs and place them all over your work floor, in the bathrooms, in the break areas, etc. Make sure they are at eye-level where people can see them, and color them accordingly so they are hard to miss. Use diagrams and stick people to represent the injury that could occur if you stuck your hand into the saw blade with the machine on. If may seem elementary, but your workers will see those drawings everyday and probably laugh at them, but the more they look at them, the more they remember, and the safer they just might be.

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2. Make safety paramount

When you have a safe work environment, you have more productive employees. This is due to the fact that your safe machines are running like they should. Nobody is worried about something breaking or someone getting injured by doing certain jobs. Safe workplaces have fewer workers comp claims.

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Obviously there is a direct link between safety and work comp. The less safe you are, the more work comp injuries you will have. And that leads into higher premium exposure. If your claims skyrocket, the costs increase, and that could increase the cost of your premium for your work comp policy. So it all begins with safety. Safety is the key to keeping comp costs down. Which, in-turn, controls premium cost.

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3. Have well-defined safety policies and the need to implement them

If workers are not following the safety rules, that is a problem. A rare violator that has to wear the vest of shame is one thing. But if you have a guy breaking the safety rules everyday, you have an issue. You have to investigate why the worker is not following the rules. Document your findings, and then follow through with safety training or re-education on the proper safety function for the particular machine or device they may be using. Maybe they were taught by another employee to use the machine incorrectly. Whatever the reason, investigate it, document it, then retrain and follow through until the person understands and is capable of safety operating the device or doing the work task within your defined safety rules and procedures.

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4. Can the employer fire a worker that disobeyed a direct, known safety protocol?

Wow, is this a Pandora ?s Box of a question!!!!! There are numerous case law decisions within any jurisdiction that comment on this matter. I hear this question ALL THE TIME! The answer is "Yes, sometimes" and "No, at other times."?

My advice is to always consult your counsel and adjuster before you do anything. Improper termination may open yourself to a world of fines and legal issues, and even though you think you may be doing the right thing that is not for you to decide. Consult your attorney before ever making such a decision. The choice will vary by accident, and no two will be the same.

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5. Safety violations cost employers money!

If people are hurt, they cannot do their job, which decreases production, which in turn decreases profit. Jobs get completed late, others have to make up for the gap in work, etc. As mentioned earlier, safety violations in any form will always cost you money. The safer you are, the more productive, the more profitable.?

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Think Zero Accidents as your goal! People say, "Oh, that's impossible." But it's only impossible if you don't try. ?

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6. High employee morale helps to reduce losses

Several studies show the link between morale and worker comp losses. Happy workers are happy because they have jobs they like; they have manageable workloads, safe working environments, etc. Disgruntled employees are overworked, underpaid, and under stress. They typically are working with potentially unsafe materials, in an unsafe shop, where there is a lot of risk for injury. Sooner or later they will stumble upon that risk, and injure themselves.

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Actually the studies linking morale to work comp show they are linked up mostly in subjective injuries: back pain, muscle pain, headaches, etc. The more unhappy the workforce, the more subjective claims seem to surface.

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7. Timely claim reporting saves money

And as always, and we say it time and time again, the sooner you get that work comp claim to your carrier to be assigned to an adjuster, the quicker they are on the case, the better the result will be. The more you delay in calling it in, the more it will cost you down the road.? WCxKit

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So, remember, it?s never too late to start thinking about safety, and how it impacts your bottom line. Think carefully about each job task and what risks your workers face. Solicit feedback from your employees. Involve them in this process, and hear what they have to say. The more they are involved, the more they will participate, and the more successful your program will be. Be safe!

Author Rebecca Shafer, JD, President of Amaxx Risk Solutions, Inc. is a national expert in the field of workers compensation. She is a writer, speaker, and website publisher. Her expertise is working with employers to reduce workers compensation costs, and her clients include airlines, healthcare, printing/publishing, pharmaceuticals, retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. She is the author of the #1 selling book on cost containment, Manage Your Workers Compensation: Reduce Costs 20-50% www.WCManual.com.?Contact: RShafer@ReduceYourWorkersComp.com.

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Do not use this information without independent verification. All state laws vary. You should consult with your insurance broker or agent about workers comp issues.

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?2011 Amaxx Risk Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. If you would like permission to reprint this material, contact Info@ReduceYourWorkersComp.com.

Source: http://blog.reduceyourworkerscomp.com/2012/02/7-keys-to-reducing-workers-compensation-losses-in-2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=7-keys-to-reducing-workers-compensation-losses-in-2012

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Keep Fit With Recreation and Sports FijiRugby.com Talanoa:

?Every person is known to have a number of goals that they would like to achieve. One that is bound to be found on a number of individuals list is trying to get fit by losing weight. One of the reasons as to why most people will have this as their number one aim is because losing weight has become much more difficult than it use to be. The main reason behind this is due to the life style that most of us live today.
The human body needs to be able to exert some form of physical activity on a regular basis so that it can burn the unwanted calories. Not being able to burn these unwanted calories will later result in fat build up. The problem of obesity is currently being faced by many all across the globe, especially in the United States of America; where the average waist size is forty plus.
Being over weight has become an increasingly worrying fact for many health experts. For those of you that are already in the over weight category, I?m sure you can understand the consequences that you have to try and deal with. One of the biggest problems that most obese people face in the current day and age is not being able to find clothes that fit them. This can be quite an embarrassing experience especially when one has to go shopping.
Another consequence that all over weight people have to deal with is the likelihood of them suffering from various health implications. It is a medical fact that the more over weight you are, the higher chance you have of suffering from some form of medical illness. The two most common types of medical problems that are commonly associated with obesity include heart attacks and diabetes.
As a result, many health experts are trying to get people to change their life style to a healthier one. There are many ways by which a person can remain healthy without having to do much.
Being able to lose weight effectively requires a combination of things. One of the things that you will be required to do is cut back on your junk food intake. Along with this, you will be required to under go some form of regular physical activity if you want to lose weight permanently.
One of the most popular recreational activities that you could possible do is join a gym. The great thing about a gym is that it is known to have all the necessary equipment that one would need to lose weight. If you find your self having difficulty in using the machinery at the gym, it may be a good idea to hire a personal trainer as well.
If the gym option is something that does not appeal to you, going for a physical sport instead might be the right choice for you. There are many popular sports that you can choose from such as swimming, basketball, football, hockey, soccer and many more.

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Scientist at Work Blog: Wolves, Snow and the Red Dragon

John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University, leads the wolf-moose Winter Study at Isle Royale National Park.

Monday, Jan. 23

Shortly before midnight, our pilot Don Glaser shakes my sleeping bag. The sky has dumped something halfway between snow and rain, and it is freezing to the wings of the Flagship.

We all head to the harbor, wrestling with a northeast wind as we try to stretch nylon covers over the wings. Slush has also begun to bubble up through a nearby crack in the ice. We fear the Flagship?s skis will freeze into the slush, so we prop them up on 4x4s. Then it?s back to bed.

It snows all day. So we occupy ourselves with chores around the cabin: hauling water and setting up a sauna. We also prepare the Red Dragon ? a 25-pound propane tank, 12-volt battery, spark-ignited torch and blower, and a hose, all strapped to a toboggan. As soon as the wet snow stops falling, we?ll need that.

Tuesday, Jan. 24

By early morning, the snow has stopped. The temperature drops, and the northeast wind comes up again. After a bowl of oatmeal by the light of our headlamps, we slog to the harbor. Removing the wing covers, we can see that we put them on too late. Every flying surface of the Flagship is coated with ice. Planes fly because their wings are shaped like a foil. Ice distorts that shape and compromises lift. All the ice will have to be removed.

Luckily, that?s what the Red Dragon does best. We haul the contraption onto the icy harbor next to the plane. Firing up the Red Dragon, we heat the flying surfaces, then brush the ice off as it melts. Ice removal is a delicate affair. The Flagship?s wings are wood covered with fabric. Brush at the ice too hard, and the fabric will tear. Heat it too much, and it will catch fire. For three hours, we gently melt, rub and flake off ice.

Our work, observing wolves and moose, depends on the weather. Waiting for snow or wind to stop is routine. Fixing cold-stricken equipment is standard. Wishing it had been just a few degrees colder, so that wet snow hadn?t frozen to the wings: we make lots of ?if only? weather wishes. But the weather is part of what makes a place, any place, special. And as the weather changes, the wolves and moose have much more at stake than we do. Fighting the weather is futile. Appreciating it, even when it?s not pleasant, is as good as it gets.

By noon, the plane is ready for flight, and by 3 p.m., the wind has lightened up. Rolf Peterson, a co-researcher, and Don depart to look for wolves. They find Chippewa Harbor Pack near the site where we?d seen them a couple days ago. It is clear what kept them there: the carcass of a moose they?d killed. The few remaining bones suggest they?d killed it about five days ago, perhaps the day we arrived. Rolf and Don also find fresh tracks of a lone wolf near Halloran Lake, leaving and then returning to a cedar swamp filled with tracks of the snowshoe hares that probably became the wolf?s dinner.

Rolf and Don spend most of the flight searching for Romeo, a radio-collared male from Chippewa Harbor Pack. Flying at 4,000 feet over the island they should pick up any signal. Static is all they hear.

Wednesday, Jan. 25

I get up at 4 a.m. to fire up the portable generator we use to heat the plane?s engine. I might as well have stayed in my sleeping bag. By 6:30 a.m., the clouds had lowered until they touched the island. Freezing drizzle was threatening, so we put the wing covers on again. Why does the weather keep frustrating our desire to collect information?

In the five days that we?ve been here, we?ve made just two research flights. Actually, that?s a pretty typical rate of being grounded. And on each flight, we?ve gained only fragments of insight. But multiply each observation by the 30 to 40 flights we make each winter, then multiply that by more than five decades. It adds up to a significant bank of data.

I spend each day searching for something significant. During each flight, we record the locations of wolves or their tracks. I have condensed several decades of wolf travel routes onto a single map. We are working to quantify what we?ve long intuited: that the predation risk for moose is greatest near the island?s shoreline. It is easier for wolves to walk along shorelines, where the snow is windswept, and moose are attracted to shoreline habitats because they tend to find better forage there.

Knowing that predation risk decreases with distance from the shoreline is also just a tiny insight. Add this to several other long-term observations and some sophisticated analysis from Robert Montgomery, a habitat expert from Michigan State University, put it all together, and, well, our insight is not in perfect focus yet, but it?s looking as though younger, healthier moose spend more time in these risky shoreline habitats during severe winters than do the aging moose who would be more vulnerable to predation.

It feels good to pore through old maps, recalling individual wolves, many of which are now dead, their travels and lives, and the adventures we had making those observations.

Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8c0de32a246e0260f5e0852a3383ac27

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Leo W. Gerard: Retirees Occupy Century Aluminum

On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other old age ailments. One has suffered a stroke.

These vulnerable people expose themselves to weather extremes although some have no health insurance at all. Century cancelled it. That's why they're occupying Century.

The retirees labored their entire lives for wages and pensions comparably lower than those of other aluminum workers. They did it believing they made those sacrifices in exchange for good, lifelong health coverage. Over the past two years, however, Century evicted them, about 540 retirees altogether, from the insurance plan.

The betrayal burns. Executives at Century, corporate 1 percenters, committed the same sort of treachery that is being condemned by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators representing the victimized 99 percent across the country. Thus the retirees adopted the grandchildren's protest tactic of encampment.

Century shuttered the 50-year-old Ravenswood smelter in February of 2009, throwing 651 workers out of jobs. Century, headquartered in Monterey, Calif., didn't go bankrupt though. It still operates aluminum plants in Kentucky, South Carolina and Iceland. And it didn't immediately cancel promised insurance for retirees.

Nine months after the shutdown, it announced it would terminate as of June 1, 2010 health benefits for retirees eligible for Medicare. Then on Nov. 1, 2010, Century told its retirees who weren't yet eligible for Medicare that it would stop paying for their coverage as of Jan. 1, 2011.

This revoking of earned benefits isn't an isolated incident or a fluke. It is part of a pattern documented by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz in her new book "Retirement Heist." The subtitle is, "How companies plunder and profit from the nest eggs of American workers.

She describes in gory detail how corporations raided worker pension accounts, siphoning off surpluses that would be needed later to prop up plans damaged by the Wall Street collapse. She provides detailed accounts of executives gouging the funds to pay for their own exorbitant retirement packages. She tells of corporate executives ending retiree health insurance and freezing pensions but deceptively calling the changes improvements, so that CEOs could pump up company profits with money that had been pledged to workers.

While breaking promises to workers and violating contracts, these CEO 1 percenters falsely portrayed themselves as beleaguered champions of workers, valiantly attempting to preserve underfunded pensions. Like Costa Concordia Captain Francesco Schettino saving himself while abandoning passengers on his sinking cruise ship, the captains of industry padded their own pockets with pension and health care funds intended for retirees, then deserted the workers. Schultz describes the CEO scams this way in the book:

"In reality, they're the silent pirates who looted the ships and left them to sink, along with the retirees, as they sailed away safely in their lifeboats."

Most of the Costa Concordia passengers survived, but more than a dozen drowned. In West Virginia, most of the retirees are still kicking. A leader among the Century occupiers, Karen Gorrell, explained:
"We may have one foot in the grave, but we are kicking like hell with the other."

But some have succumbed. Gorrell, wife of a 33-year veteran aluminum worker, says Century has retiree blood on its hands.

She tells of two tragedies. There's Bryce Earl Turner who Karen encountered after her first meeting with Century retirees in Ravenswood. He was scared and sick. Both alternatives he faced -- buying private insurance or paying for his leukemia treatments out of pocket -- were way beyond his means. Losing his insurance was a death sentence. The retirees worked desperately to get him more time.

With the help of West Virginia's U.S. senators, Jay Rockefeller and Joe Manchin, and a provision in Obama's health care reform law, the retirees managed to get coverage extended to Sept. 1, 2011. Bryce Earl Turner, 59, who worked 37 years at the aluminum plant, died the next day.

The other tragedy is Sam McKinney. He attended a meeting of the retirees on Feb. 14, 2011. He said he feared losing the insurance because his wife was ill. Karen recounts:

"He was very emotional because he had taken his wife to Charleston to try to get some assistance with her health care costs and had been turned down."

He said, she recalled, that it was hard to believe that in America after a person expended his usefulness to industry, a corporation could coldly cast him aside as if his life had no value.

After the meeting, Sam McKinney took his wife to Outback Steakhouse in Parkersburg for Valentine's Day. As they left, he collapsed and died in the parking lot. Karen is sure the stress killed him. Wrongful stress. Stress he'd not have experienced if Century was good for its word.

Karen says of Turner and McKinney:

"It was murder without a gun."
Though Century failed to fulfill its obligation to pay for retiree health care, it handed its last CEO, Logan W. Kruger, $4.9 million in 2010. That's twelve times more than Americans pay their president, the leader of the free world. Century gave Kruger another $6.2 million to leave last November. Still, he's suing for $20 million on top of that. Century also is defending against a lawsuit filed for the retirees by the United Steelworkers (USW) union, which represented most of the Century workers.

The USW hopes, however, to resolve the dispute outside the courtroom, with the help of the retirees and West Virginia lawmakers. The elderly agitators managed to win the support of the state's U.S. senators, its governor and its legislature. So last year when Century went begging to the state for $20 million it claimed it needed to re-open the Ravenswood smelter, the lawmakers sent Century away empty handed with a directive to settle with the retirees before seeking reconsideration.

Not long afterward, Century booted Kruger, and the new management team is negotiating with the USW and the retirees.

The protesters don't have what they want yet, and they're not leaving their tents until they do.

Century gave the retiree occupiers port-o-potties and installed concrete barriers to prevent cars careening on an icy Route 33 from plowing through the encampment.

Very nice gesture. But resuming payment for promised health insurance would be a whole lot better.

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Follow Leo W. Gerard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uswblogger

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/retirees-occupy-century-a_b_1240105.html

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Sexual healing? Not likely

Monday, January 30, 2012

A new study shows the production of sperm is more biologically taxing than previously thought, and expending energy on it has significant health implications.

In research published in PLoS ONE, Dr Damian Dowling of Monash University's School of Biological Sciences and Professor Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia have investigated the trade-off between sperm quality and immunity.

The researchers used the Australian cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus to prove that the production of quality sperm is expensive and males are strategic about investing energy in the biological process.

Dr Dowling said investigations into life history trade-offs - investment in reproduction versus future reproduction and survival prospects - have historically focused on females.

"This study challenges the traditional view that sex, and sperm production, come cheaply to males. It is typically thought that females must invest heavily into reproduction, whereas males can freely produce millions of high-quality, tiny sperm on demand, with few costs," Dr Dowling said.

"Here we show that the costs are in fact large, and these costs dictate how much effort a male will devote into any given sexual encounter."

The crickets were housed either with sexually immature females, sexually mature females incapable of reproduction, or sexually mature females capable of reproduction. Sperm quality was measured twice and immune function once during the experiment.

Dr Dowling said the male crickets were more likely to produce high quality sperm when housed with sexually mature females with whom they could mate, indicating a strategic investment of energy.

The researchers also found that production of quality sperm appeared to have a negative effect on the crickets' immune systems.

"Males that invested heavily in their sperm paid the price of being more likely to succumb to a bacterial infection. And we are not talking about STDs here - we are talking about how increased investment into the quality of the ejaculate corresponds with general reductions in immune function," Dr Dowling said.

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Monash University: http://www.monash.edu.au

Thanks to Monash University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/117174/Sexual_healing__Not_likely

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Myanmar's Suu Kyi making first campaign tour

(AP) ? Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi made her first campaign tour for parliament Sunday in Myanmar's countryside, advancing a bid that shows how quickly and dramatically politics is changing in this long-repressed Southeast Asian nation.

Thousands of cheering supporters crowded the airport to greet Suu Kyi in the southern town of Dawei and lined the roads shouting: "Long Live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!" ''Daw" is a title of respect in Myanmar.

Many waved bouquets of flowers, and some hoisted babies on their shoulders to glimpse the Nobel Peace laureate, who is revered as Myanmar's icon for democracy. Banners with pictures of Suu Kyi decorated the town.

"People had been afraid to discuss politics for so long," said Aung Zaw Hein, an environmental activist. "Now that she's visiting, the political spirit of people has been awakened."

Suu Kyi, 66, has devoted much of her life to the struggle against authoritarian rule, but spent 15 of the past 23 years under house arrest and has never held elected office. If she wins, Suu Kyi will have limited power in the legislature, which remains dominated by the military and the ruling party, but victory would be highly symbolic and give the longtime political prisoner a voice in government for the first time.

The one-day campaign stop in Dawei follows a series of unprecedented reforms enacted by the nominally civilian government that took over when a military junta ceded power last year. The government has released hundreds of political prisoners, reached cease-fire deals with ethnic rebels, increased press freedoms and eased censorship laws.

The April 1 by-election is being held to fill 48 seats in the lower house of parliament that were vacated after lawmakers were appointed to the Cabinet and other posts last year.

Her party boycotted the last vote in 2010, but registered earlier this month for by-elections after authorities amended electoral laws, enabling her party to legally participate.

The Election Commission must still accept Suu Kyi's candidacy. A ruling is expected in February.

Suu Kyi is hoping to run for representative for the constituency of Kawhmu, a poor district just south of Yangon where villagers' livelihoods were devastated by Cyclone Nargis in 2008.

The vote is being closely watched at home and abroad because it is seen as a crucial test of the regime's commitment to change.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her nonviolent struggle for democracy, has rarely traveled over the last two decades outside Yangon, the country's main city.

Although she conducted one successful day of rallies in two small towns north of Yangon last August, a previous political tour to greet supporters in 2003 sparked a bloody ambush on her convoy that saw her forcibly confined to house arrest at her lakeside home.

Suu Kyi was finally released from house arrest in late 2010, just days after the country's military rulers organized elections widely viewed as neither free nor fair.

In Dawei, a coastal town south of Yangon, Suu Kyi will campaign on behalf of another candidate running for a parliament seat, party spokesman Nyan Win said.

She will make similar campaign trips to other Burmese towns, including the country's second city, Mandalay, in early February before campaigning for her own seat, Nyan Win said.

In Dawei, Suu Kyi will meet party supporters and conduct rallies. The town is home to activists who recently helped persuade the government to ditch construction of a 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant over environmental concerns.

A 400-megawatt coal plant is still planned, however, because it will be needed to fuel a massive industrial complex project that includes construction of a deep sea port, a steel mill and a petrochemical plant. The project also includes railroads and highways that will connect Burma's coast directly to Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-01-28-AS-Myanmar-Suu-Kyi/id-cf22250addf1408e97aeaf66dc827e43

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HP Envy 15 review (early 2012)

If there's one thing we took away from our jaunt at CES, it's this: consumers' appetites for mainstream laptops haven't waned all that much. Even in the Ultrabook category, Intel expects half of the models to go on sale this year will have 14- and 15-inch screens -- as strong an indicator as any that lots of folks aren't yet ready to give up their slightly larger screens, their discrete graphics, their (gasp!) optical drives. While HP recently announced its first Ultrabook for the consumer market, the Envy 14 Spectre, it's fully fleshed out its premium Envy series to include two additional models for people who crave more oomph.

The Envy 15 is the medium-sized member of the crew, with a 15.6-inch screen and the same overhauled design you'll find across the Envy lineup. Delightfully, too, it marks the return of HP's eye-popping Radiance display, and also comes with a generous two-year warranty and full copies of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. And with a starting price of $1,100, it sharply undercuts the 15-inch MacBook Pro, while taking direct aim at other high-end 15-inchers, like the Dell XPS 15z and Samsung Series 7 Chronos. So how does it stack up? Meet us after the break to find out.

Continue reading HP Envy 15 review (early 2012)

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Making memories last

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2012) ? Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called "synapses." But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory.

The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer's disease and prion diseases.

"Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought," says Kausik Si, Ph.D., an associate investigator at the Stowers Institute, and senior author of the new study, which is published in the January 27, 2012 online issue of the journal Cell.

Si's investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University laboratory of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica, which has long been favored by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein known as CPEB (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property.

A portion of the structure is self-complementary and -- much like empty egg cartons -- can easily stack up with other copies of itself. CPEB thus exists in neurons partly in the form of oligomers, which increase in number when neuronal synapses strengthen. These oligomers have a hardy resistance to ordinary solvents, and within neurons may be much more stable than single-copy "monomers" of CPEB. They also seem to actively sustain their population by serving as templates for the formation of new oligomers from free monomers in the vicinity.

CPEB-like proteins exist in all animals, and in brain cells they play a key role in maintaining the production of other synapse-strengthening proteins. Studies by Si and others in the past few years have hinted that CPEB's tendency to oligomerize is not merely incidental, but is indeed essential to its ability to stabilize longer-term memory. "What we've lacked till now are experiments showing this conclusively," Si says.

In the new study, Si and his colleagues examined a Drosophila fruit fly CPEB protein known as Orb2. Like its counterpart in Aplysia, it forms oligomers within neurons. "We found that these Orb2 oligomers become more numerous in neurons whose synapses are stimulated, and that this increase in oligomers happens near synapses," says lead author Amitabha Majumdar, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Si's lab.

The key was to show that the disruption of Orb2 oligomerization on its own impairs Orb2's function in stabilizing memory. Majumdar was able to do this by generating an Orb2 mutant that lacks the normal ability to oligomerize yet maintains a near-normal concentration in neurons. Fruit flies carrying this mutant form of Orb2 lost their ability to form long-term memories. "For the first 24 hours after a memory-forming stimulus, the memory was there, but by 48 hours it was gone, whereas in flies with normal Orb2 the memory persisted," Majumdar says.

Si and his team are now following up with experiments to determine for how long Orb2 oligomers are needed to keep a memory alive. "We suspect that they need to be continuously present, because they are self-sustaining in a way that Orb2 monomers are not," says Si.

The team's research also suggests some intriguing possibilities for other areas of neuroscience. This study revealed that Orb2 proteins in the Drosophila nervous system come in a rare, highly oligomerization-prone form (Orb2A) and a much more common, much less oligomerization-prone form (Orb2B). "The rare form seems to be the one that is regulated, and it seems to act like a seed for the initial oligomerization, which pulls in copies of the more abundant form," Si says. "This may turn out to be a basic pattern for functional oligomers."

The findings may help scientists understand disease-causing oligomers too. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, as well as prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, all involve the spread in the brain of apparently toxic oligomers of various proteins. One such protein, strongly implicated in Alzheimer's disease, is amyloid beta; like Orb2 it comes in two forms, the highly oligomerizing amyloid-beta-42 and the relatively inert amyloid-beta-40. Si's work hints at the possibility that oligomer-linked diseases are relatively common in the brain because the brain evolved to be relatively hospitable to CPEB proteins and other functional oligomers, and thus has fewer mechanisms for keeping rogue oligomers under control.

Other researchers who contributed to the work include Wanda Col?n Cesario, Erica White-Grindely, Huoqin Jian, Fangzhen Ren, Mohammed 'Repon' Khan, Liying Li, Edward Man-Lik Choi, Kasthuri Kannan, Feng Li, Jay Unruh and Brian Slaughter at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri.

The research was supported by the Searle Foundation, the March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Starter Award, the Klingenstein Foundation and the McKnight Foundation.

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

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Journal Reference:

  1. Amitabha Majumdar, Wanda Col?n Cesario, Erica White-Grindley, Huoqing Jiang, Fengzhen Ren, Mohammed ?Repon? Khan, Liying Li, Edward Man-Lik Choi, Kasthuri Kannan, Fengli Guo et al. Critical Role of Amyloid-like Oligomers of Drosophila Orb2 in the Persistence of Memory. Cell, 26 January 2012 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.01.004

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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/~3/VZp3lMiJGDo/120127162409.htm

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