0 Comments | Daily Post; Liverpool (UK), Jun 28, 2010 | by Tony McDonough
LIVERPOOL developer Iliad has secured millions of pounds in debt funding to complete a pounds 38m student accommodation scheme in the Midlands. The Liverpool-based team of Barclays Corporate are providing the senior debt finance to Iliad for the 656-bed project in Bagot Street, in Bir mingham.
The development is close to Aston University and is a joint venture between Iliad and Cosmopolitan Student Homes (CSH), a subsidiary of Cosmopolitan Housing Association.
Once completed, CSH, the seventh largest student accommodation provider in the UK, will enter into a 35-year lease to manage and operate the property.
The site, which is well located for student accommodation, in close proximity to the city centre and all of Birmingham’s universities, will consist of two blocks providing 656 premier student bedrooms with a 17-storey tower overlooking Lancaster Street.
Tim Molloy, group finance director of Iliad, said: “Iliad is very pleased to have got such a significant project on site in the midst of very challenging times. We look forward to further schemes with Cosmopolitan Student Homes and building on the growing relationship with Barclays.”
The debt facilities were arranged by Ian Wilby, property relationship director at Barclays Corporate. Barclays was advised by Addleshaws and Iliad Group was advised by Hill Dickinson. Mr Wilby said: “Although the economic crisis is global, the property market remains local and there will always be opportunities.
“The student market is buoyant at the moment as student numbers continue to soar and the demand for new accommodation is also very high
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Iowa Review, Fall 2008 by Hillman, Jimmye
The horses of Achilles are said to have wept when they saw Petroklos dead, their immortal natures outraged. So why can’t a porcine sow lament her own heritage and destiny?
His eyes were sharply focused on the objects of a life-long avocation, which had, in the Great Depression, become a source of family subsistence and income. The hogs’ wary eyes reciprocated his focus. Both sides, having made their calculations, appeared content with this moment of mutual accommodation.
His cracked and callused hands shelled corn, which he had shucked at the farm crib. He tossed the empty cobs into a bucket, so they could be used later in our outhouse as the next best substitute for the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. With one strap from his Big Ben overalls unbuttoned and the bib folded open, he shelled the corn, alternately with right hand and left, scattering it in a circular pattern. The hogs were gathering, some in the bush well away from us, others in front on a grassy knoll in the clearing.
The horn of our Ford Model-A had brought the hogs arunning. The honking always started, and continued intermittently, as we descended the hill through the blackjack oaks, dodging stumps and an occasional sinkhole. The horn had replaced his vocal chords as hog-caller, penetrating more effectively into the woods and the far reaches of hog habitat. It got the attention of every hog within earshot. Sound equals food, they soon learned, for hogs are the brightest of farm animals.
That day, a Sunday afternoon in September 1935, a large herd had sensed that a good feeding awaited them. It had been a long, hot, and dry summer in Greene County, Mississippi. Wild food was scarce. We could see that several sows had brought with them their late summer pigs and spring shoats, which dodged the aggressions of two young boars. The boars fought for turf and advantage. Hogs are very knowledgeable about power, and strictly respect its use. Being semi-wild, most were cautious about coming close to us. Occasionally, he would toss a whole ear into the bush to one of the larger animals. One sow seemed to be his favorite, the one he called the “Suddy Sow.”
This is one of my most vivid images of Joseph Levi Jefferson Hillman, my father, known locally as “Bud” Hillman. (How those beautiful given names got exchanged for “Bud” I did not know and still don’t.) While feeding his hogs, he would appear almost transfixed, studying each animal, its size, shape, coloring, markings, including earmarks, even its eating habits and personality. Sunday afternoon hog feeding was part of a weekly routine that had evolved over the years for males in the clan of Charles Hillman, my grandfather. (Such feeding escaped the Victorian condemnation of Sabbath violation accorded to playing sports or shopping or going to the movies. Whenever we had to catch a hog on Sunday, my father would say, “The ox is in the ditch,” and we did it.) My father’s capacity for recording details about hogs was the keenest in the community
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Writing is a creative endeavor, but when you apply for a freelance writing job it’s important to let your words do the talking. On a practical level, not all email clients will display html emails, so what looks to you to like a pretty snazzy email may appear to your prospective client as a big old mess.
6. Show them your references
When you write for a living, it’s important to collect testimonials from clients you’ve worked for before. You can put them on your website, print them in your brochures, and, of course, paste them into your quotes and queries.
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Punjab farmers reap bitter NREGA harvest [Chandigarh]
0 Comments | Times of India, The, Jun 14, 2010 | by Sharma, Parvesh
PATIALA: A cooler beats the intense heat as five tanned men sit around the lavish fare on the table, catching the latest Bollywood flick on a local channel. A neat row of beds awaits them for a well-deserved rest at night. And, there is even a vase of flowers in the room.
Not a club room or a hotel. It’s a labour camp in the heart of rural Punjab, where signs of pampering are evident. For, the times have changed. It is peak paddy sowing season and unlike previous years, labourers to work in the field are scarce. The prosperous Punjabi farmer, who had labourers coming in hordes from impoverished villages of central India to work on his fields, now has a tough competitor – the NREGA.
With jobs being created back home under the scheme, few are now willing to undertake back-breaking work, literally, involving hours of bending to plant saplings, submerged knee-deep in the paddy fields in the middle of scorching heat and searing moisture. This has made retaining migratory labour force a big problem for Punjab, which is heavily dependent on farmhands from central India.
Those who have trickled in have realized their worth and are demanding facilities unheard of and the rich farmers are giving in.
Besides the TV, cooler, freshly cooked food and accommodation, the labourers are now welcome to live in the houses of farm-owners and not in some dilapidated tubewell room out in the farm. Wages have also gone up three-fold. Farmers say seasonal wages have increased from a mere Rs 700 to Rs 2,000-Rs 2,500 per acre, in just about two years.
For labourers arriving at the Rajpura railway station in trains from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it is something their predecessors never could dream of here. The situation is no different in the rest of the state where migratory labourers were always preferred over local farm hands for the cheap wages that they asked for.
The shortage of migrant labour is forcing farmers to camp at railway stations. As trains halt, its a signal for the waiting farmer to start a race and jostle with other farmers to convince migrants by offering good wages, food and even entertainment.
”Just five years ago, not a single farmer ever bothered to visit the railway station as groups of migrants used to go from door-to-door asking for work,” says Gurnam Singh, a farmer who has been waiting at the station for more than 24 hours to put together his work force.
”I have managed to hire just eight migrants after waiting 24 hours at the station. I have offered them a room with a cooler and television. They threatened they would leave my fields if I didn’t provide all that was promised,” said Sukhwinder Singh from Mavi village.
And, the cut-throat competition among Punjabi farmers to hire labourers can put an MNC to shame
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Anaerobic conditioning occurs when exercising at a higher intensity for upwards of 20 seconds. This is the zone when you begin to feel the burn in the muscles as a result of lactic acid production. As such, your body?s ability to tolerate and buffer elevated lactate levels will be improved, allowing you to sustain higher intensities for a longer period of time.
CONCLUSION
Circuit Training is an excellent means of training the body if you are looking to lose body fat and maintain lean body mass. Depending on the protocol followed you will experience any number of the aforementioned benefits. Overall, it is great if you are short on time and are looking for a short workout that will leave you feeling great and more energetic.
References:
Gettman, L.
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Hopeful we can clean up with our range of products
0 Comments | Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, Jun 29, 2010 | by David Laister
A DEVELOPING specialism has led to a new brand launch for a Scunthorpe firm as it concentrates its offer and focuses on becoming a leading player in the healthcare sector.
Medical Hygiene Supplies is a new service from Dale UK, and comes on the back of a growing client base in a wide market.
The nine-strong team has found increasing demand for a one-stop shop for products in medical, cleaning, laundry and janitorial areas for schools, care homes and GP practices, giving bosses the confidence to make the move.
And to mark the launch, what is believed to be the county’s first trade show for such products has been organised.
It will take place at Forest Pines Hotel, Broughton, with suppliers coming face-to-face with those who buy and use the products.
Nigel Armitage, general manager at Dale UK, said: “In the past couple of years we have done a lot of business with schools, care homes and GP practices, and we have become more of a specialist in the healthcare sector.
“We have now developed our own odour elimination product which we have sold very successfully to care homes and to schools too. It is like a friendly bacteria, it is not at all harmful and completely safe to use, and breaks smells such as urine down.
“The business emerged particularly during the swine flu epidemic – we did a lot of other specialist products for the likes of MRSA, E- coli and C-Dif.
“With all these products it led us to the conclusion that we should launch a brand with a name that really reflects what we do.”
Having launched 22 years ago selling paint and maintenance products which are bought in from suppliers, it is a natural evolution for the firm.
Some products are mixed on site, others branded up with the MHS name.
An online retail site is part of the launch too, which could be a major boost to the firm, which has warehouse, office and trade counter facilities in Warren Road, Scunthorpe.
“We now want to become a serious player in the healthcare sector,” said Mr Armitage.
Having initially been planned as a launch event, interest from suppliers was such that Medical Hygiene Suppliers decided to open up a trade show, which takes place between 10am and 4pm on Wednesday, July 7. New product displays and expert advice will be on hand with Crown Paints also showcasing a revolutionary hygiene coating.
Vikan (UK) Ltd, Evans Vandoline and Bay West will all be present.
For more information about the event, call (01724) 855645.
Pharma; Claygate, May/Jun 2010 by Rollason, Craig
Driven by market demands, the error-free warehouse is within reach, according to Craig Rollason, Head of Sales & Marketing for KNAPP UK Ltd. In this article, he describes the technologies bringing the Holy Grail of materials handling ever closer.
The common characteristics of most pharmaceutical products – relatively small size and uniform shape – have made the pharma sector a fertile bed for warehouse automation. Highly efficient A-frames that pick goods fully automatically onto a central belt up to 200 m long are common in pharmaceutical distribution centres worldwide, along with conveyor systems, automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) and robotic palletizers. AU four of these elements feature in the largest pharmaceutical warehouse in Europe, installed last year for The Co-operative Pharmacy in the UK.
The results of such automation are quite staggering. For example, a warehouse is being constructed in Brazil that will handle 5 million single unit picks per day, – a feat that only a few years ago was unthinkable. Competitive pressure in the pharmaceutical wholesale sector is such that the drive for innovation and improvement never stops. Speed and accuracy of delivery are critical for wholesalers to prevent pharmacists from placing their business elsewhere. The resulting pressure on logistics automation providers to improve the performance of material handling systems is currently driving two trends in our business: the universal shuttle concept and the error- free warehouse.
Independent Shuttles
The universal shuttle concept is based on minimizing the number of different technologies used around the warehouse. This has a whole range of benefits including a manageable number of components, high reliability and redundancy, a shorter start-up phase, lower maintenance costs and total system scalability. A number of suppliers are embracing this philosophy. KNAPP’s OSR (order, storage and retrieval) shuttle system, for example, combines shuttle-based storage with pick-to- light stations (Figure 1). With independently operating shuttles on multiple levels in each aisle, served by a lift at the aisle end, the solution achieves up to six times the rate of totes in/ out than a traditional ASRS, while having approximately 20% less footprint for the same number of locations. At a time when increasingly more companies are concerned with lifetime costs, the fact that the OSR uses less than 10% of the energy consumption of a typical ASRS is also a compelling feature. Another key benefit of shuttle-based storage is improved availability – if one shuttle is out of action, only one level is inaccessible, not the whole aisle.
Eliminating the Margin of Error
The other key platform for innovation – the error-free warehouse – embraces a much wider range of logistics technologies. The simple fact is that nothing can rival the flexibility and dexterity of the human frame for some complex order picking processes, but introducing a manual element in the warehouse means there is also the capacity for error. A number of innovations have been developed to mitigate this. For example, special check stations can be integrated into conveyor lines in the dispatch area. These allow all items in a picked order to be automatically checked by 360-degree barcode reading, to prevent the wrong goods or the incorrect quantity being shipped, with the check station also recording the batch numbers of the products dispatched. These final check stations, which have short payback periods, can be coupled with a weight checker to identify suspect totes or can simply be fed a random percentage of orders. Another example of this kind of innovation is the introduction of light curtains in semi-automated picking stations, with the breaking of the light beam verifying that the picked item is being placed into the correct pick-to-tote.
Order Accuracy
Picking accuracy is universally desired, but it is also increasingly becoming a legal requirement. US pharmaceutical companies serving the niche, but growing mail order or ‘central fill’ segment, face a stringent regime of ’3 strikes and you’re out’ regarding misdelivery of controlled substances. The constant threat of the whole warehouse being closed down makes accuracy vital
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Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, August, 2001
By Amy Schatz, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Aug. 31–A Corpus Christi jury awarded more than $15 million Thursday to three elderly Texas women who received faulty hip implants manufactured by Austin-based Sulzer Orthopedics Inc.
It is the first verdict against Sulzer, which faces more than 1,200 lawsuits from patients who received hip and knee implants coated with oil that prevented them from bonding properly. The jury awarded about $4.5 million in actual damages and $11 million in punitive damages
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End in sight, but only if company’s calculations are on the money
0 Comments | Evening Standard; London (UK), Jul 27, 2010 | by Chris Blackhurst
IT seems daft heaving a sigh of relief when a company has just posted a Pounds 11 billion loss, put aside Pounds 20 billion to cover the cost of the worst environmental disaster in US history, and bid farewell to the chief executive. But that is the reaction in the City today at BP’s quarterly results and confirmation that Tony Hayward is going.
The key aspect is that BP believes it will not be found to have been grossly negligent in the Gulf of Mexico tragedy. That being the case, it has put a cap on the final bill for the clean-up, compensation and any litigation, of $32.2 billion (Pounds 20 billion). Given BP’s record in dealing with the fall-out from the explosion that cost 11 lives and led to the mighty spillage, that conclusion must come with a giant caveat attached.
It’s what BP says — not, crucially, the US prosecutors. If they determine the company was to blame then the cost could greatly exceed Pounds 20 billion. But BP say they’re confident that won’t happen.
Staff and shareholders (many of whom are British pensioners who hold shares via their pension schemes) must be praying they’re right. Because it’s hard to see how the firm could ride out such a finding of culpability.
The financial damage plus the harm to its already battered reputation would be too great to bear. In that scenario, bankruptcy protection followed by takeover looms large. That’s not where we are today: the company is signalling that if anyone is deemed to have acted negligently it will be the rig’s operators, who were contracted by BP, and not BP. With American Bob Dudley arriving as chief executive, there is a clear sense of BP hoping a line can be drawn.
The other clear message is that Gulf of Mexico apart, BP is performing extremely well — and would have produced a healthy set of profits
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Institute of Transportation Engineers. ITE Journal, May 2010 by Jackson, Jeremy
CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITY IN HIGHWAY WORK ZONES CREATES CONSTANTLY CHANGING TRAFFIC CONDITIONS THAT REQUIRE REAL-TIME TRAFFIC INFORMATION TO KEEP MOTORISTS INFORMED OF THE CONDITIONS AHEAD. SMART WORK ZONES NOT ONLY HELP INCREASE SAFETY AND MINIMIZE DELAYS, BUT THE COLLECTION OF TRAFFIC DATA CAN BE USED BY CONSTRUCTION PERSONNEL TO MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS.
INTRODUCTION
Smart work zone technology has long been an important part of work zone management, providing motorists with real-time information through variable message signs or through Web sites designed to aid travelers before they ever leave their house. The technology is constantly evolving, enabling engineers and construction personnel to actively monitor work zone operations and make important, real-time and near-real-time decisions in the field.
As part of the Oregon Transporration Investment Act (OTIA) III State Bridge Delivery Program, the Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners (OBDP), in conjunction with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), have been evaluating the use of traffic data gathered using smart work zone technology and its potential applications during a project’s design and construction phases. OBDP is a joint venture between HDR Engineering and the Fluor Corporation and is managing the repair or replacement of hundreds of bridges throughout the state of Oregon, USA, over the span of eight years.
In response to the overwhelming number of highway work zones as a result of bridge construction, ODOT has adopted a proactive policy in dealing with work zone mobility statewide. New mobility standards require that work zone traffic analysis be performed for every project that involves potential impacts to traffic flow. Work zone traffic analysis is performed at the planning stage of every project and is continually revisited throughout design and the end of construction. The use of smart work zone technology to manage mobility is an integral part of ODOTs mission to keep freight and traffic moving through an unprecedented amount of bridge construction on Oregon’s highways.
WORK ZONE TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
Work zone traffic analysis is a tool that identifies the acceptable hours of the day during which traffic lanes can be closed for construction or maintenance activities while maintaining stable and efficient traffic operations. This analysis is critical because lane closure restrictions can preserve highway safety, alleviate cosdy staging strategies and reduce lengthy travel delays. The lane closure restriction hours identified during a work zone traffic analysis are written into the project specifications for a construction project.
Preserving highway safety is the single most important goal of work zone traffic analysis. A recent report on determining the major causes of highway work zone accidents in Kansas, USA, published by the Kansas Department of Transportation and the University of Kansas Center for Research, found that 68 percent of work zone accidents were multi-vehicle crashes. These crashes included head-on, sideswipe and rear-end collisions, where 40 percent of them were caused by heavy trucks. Of these three accident types, the number of rear-end collisions in work zones can be reduced or eliminated through effective work zone traffic analysis.
Determining acceptable windows of time in which a traffic lane can be safely closed requires an estimation of traffic volumes throughout construction and a threshold for maintaining stable and efficient traffic operations. Traditional work zone traffic analysis uses up to seven manual traffic counts for day-to-day and hour-tohour differences and seasonal adjustment factors to account for month-to-month variations in traffic. An example of a weekday, Monday through Thursday, lane closure chart used to determine lane closure restriction hours is shown in Figure 1.
The resulting 24-hour, 12-month estimation of traffic volumes are compared to a free-flow threshold that represents the maximum sustainable volume that yields average travel speeds at or near free-flow conditions. Free-flow thresholds differ depending on the type of work being performed, specific operational issues such as merging or weaving segments and driver population. Traffic volume estimates that exceed the free-flow threshold are highlighted to indicate the hours of the day when a traffic lane cannot be closed during construction.
Given the variable nature of traffic patterns over the course of a construction project, work zone traffic analysis must be performed early on in the project development process and continued throughout design to the completion of construction. During the design phase, the results of the analysis can affect project staging strategies and schedule development and have the potential to change the final design
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