Freelance Projects, Design and Programming Tutorials
Easyjet has become the first airline to use a new nano-technology coating on its planes in the hope of cutting its fuel bills.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Alcohol misuse is linked to heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The number of people admitted to hospital in the UK because of problem drinking could rise to 1.5 million a year by 2015, a charity says.
Alcohol Concern estimates that it will cost the NHS £3.7bn annually if nothing is done to stop the increase.
It wants alcohol specialists to be employed in all hospitals and GP practices.
The Department of Health said it would publish a new alcohol strategy in the summer.
Thousands of people die each year as a result of their drinking, mostly as a result of alcoholic liver disease.
Drinking is also associated with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
The charity says the number of people being treated in hospital for alcohol misuse has gone from 500,000 in 2002-3 to 1.1 million in 2009-10.
It states that 1.5 million people will need treating every year by the end of the Parliament, if there is no new investment in alcohol services to stop the rise.
The report calls for specialist alcohol health workers to be employed across the health service.
It claims this will in fact save the NHS £3 for every £1 spent.
Don Shenker, chief executive at Alcohol Concern, said: “With the prime minister saying that NHS is becoming ‘increasingly unaffordable’, we can show how billions can be saved simply by introducing alcohol health workers in hospitals to help patients reduce their drinking.
“As problem drinking costs the country so dear, a modest investment in supporting problem drinkers will lead to a three-fold saving, surely a necessity in an economic downturn.”
Primary care trusts in England, which are being abolished as part of government changes to the health service, are criticised in the report for not dedicating enough of their budgets to alcohol problems.
The authors identify the transfer of powers to GPs as an “ideal chance” to transform alcohol services.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health said: “Misuse of alcohol can cause significant harm and the government has wasted no time in taking tough action to tackle problem drinking, including plans to stop supermarkets from selling alcohol below cost and working to introduce a tougher licensing regime.
“It is clear we need a bold new approach to tackling this and other public health issues because so many of the life-style driven health problems are already at alarming levels.
“That is why the newly published strategy for public health sets out plans to ring-fence public health spending, devolve power and budgets to local communities, and work across areas from behavioural science to education to improve public health.
“We will also be publishing a new alcohol strategy to follow on from the Public Health White Paper in the summer.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Social care services are being cut by local authorities The NHS will have to deal with the fall-out from some of the cuts being announced by councils, experts predict.
Health bosses, public health chiefs and charities told the BBC the close working relationship between the two meant consequences were “inevitable”.
They said elderly care, mental health and services for vulnerable young people were the most at risk.
Some fear hospitals could get clogged with extra patients due to the cuts.
There has been a raft of announcements by councils in the past week. Services being cut include leisure services, day centres, social care support and youth services.
Most expect this to be just the start of a series of savings local government has to make after the announcement in autumn’s spending review that its funding is to be cut by a quarter in the next four years.
But now those working in NHS have warned the impact of these cuts will also be felt in the heath service.
Issues raised include:
Hospitals getting clogged with patients who cannot be discharged into the community because of cuts to social care supportChild mental health services suffering as school counselling services are withdrawnHealthy lifestyle drive affected by closing leisure centres and swimming poolsFalls in spending on support for vulnerable young people, including drug abuse and teenage pregnancy services, could see progress stallIncreased hospital admissions because of cuts to community schemes such as day centres and falls prevention services
Dr Frank Atherton, president of the Association of Directors of Public Health, said he was “very concerned” as local government and the NHS often work hand-in-hand in areas such as public health, elderly care and mental health.
“There is real concern. Some of these cuts are short-sighted and are just going to see people develop more serious problems which are then more expensive to treat”
Lucie Russell Young Minds
“When budgets get tight there is always a risk that partnership working suffers. Local government has an important role in supporting people in the community and without that their problems get worse and the NHS has to step in.”
Stephen Lowe, from Age UK, said community services for the elderly played an important role in stopping people’s conditions deteriorating and ending up in hospital.
“Without these services people can go down-hill very quickly and end up in hospital. That is not good for the individual but is also more expensive as well.”
Nigel Edwards, head of the NHS Confederation, which represents managers, agreed, pointing out that as well as increasing admissions, cuts could increase bed-blocking – cases where a patient is ready for discharge but unable to be released because of the lack of services available in the community.
“It is inevitable if you cut services that help people live independently in the community there will be a knock-on effect for the NHS.”
But he added the cuts in services such as leisure centres could also have a long-term effect on issues such as obesity which would again rebound on the health service.
Services for young people are also under threat.
The Department of Health only recently announced extra funding for mental health services, but because these are jointly funded by local government for children there are reports of cuts in some places.
Youth Access, an umbrella group for counselling and advice services, said schemes in places such as Newcastle, Manchester and London were already under threat.
Other youth services funded by local government, including teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, are also facing an uncertain future after the Department for Education announced funding for such projects will be cut by 10% next year.
Lucie Russell, of the charity Young Minds, said: “There is real concern. Some of these cuts are short-sighted and are just going to see people develop more serious problems which are then more expensive to treat.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Revolutions can be short and bloody, or slow and peaceful. Each is different, though there are recurring patterns – including some that were on show in Egypt.
Trotsky once remarked that if poverty was the cause of revolutions, there would be revolutions all the time because most people in the world were poor. What is needed to turn a million people’s grumbling discontent into a crowd on the streets is a spark to electrify them.
Violent death has been the most common catalyst for radicalising discontent in the revolutions of the last 30 years. Sometimes the spark is grisly, like the mass incineration of hundreds in an Iranian cinema in 1978 blamed on the Shah’s secret police.
Sometimes the desperate act of a single suicidally inflammatory protester like vegetable salesman Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia, in December 2010, catches the imagination of a country.
Even rumours of brutality, such as the claims the Communist secret police had beaten two students to death in Prague in November, 1989, can fire up a public already deeply disillusioned with the system. Reports that Milosevic had had his predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, “disappeared” in the weeks before the Yugoslav presidential elections in 2000 helped to crystallise Serbian rejection of his regime.
Death – though in this case non-violent – also played a role in China in April 1989, when students in Beijing hijacked the officially-sponsored mourning for the former Communist leader, Hu Yaobang, to occupy Tiananmen Square and protest against the Party’s corruption and dictatorship.
But although the Chinese crisis set the template for how to stage protests and occupy symbolic city-centre squares, it also was the most obvious failure of “People Power”.
Unlike other elderly dictators, Deng Xiaoping showed energy and skill in striking back at the protesters. His regime had made a billion Chinese peasants better off. They were the soldiers sent to shoot down the crowds.
Protests against Suharto’s “re-election” in Indonesia in March 1998, culminated in the shooting of four students in May, which set off a round of bigger demonstrations and more violence until more than 1,000 were dead.
Thirty years earlier Suharto could kill hundreds of thousands with impunity. But corruption and the Asian economic crisis had imploded support for his regime. After 32 years in power, his family and their cronies were too rich, while too many former backers were getting poorer – a poverty they shared with ordinary people.
“Revolutions are 24-hour-a day events – they require stamina and quick thinking from both protesters and dictators”
What collapses a regime is when insiders turn against it. So long as police, army and senior officials think they have more to lose by revolution than by defending a regime, then even mass protests can be defied and crushed. Remember Tiananmen Square.
But if insiders and the men with guns begin to question the wisdom of backing a regime – or can be bought off – then it implodes quickly.
Tunisia’s Ben Ali decided to flee when his generals told him they would not shoot into the crowds. In Romania, in December, 1989, Ceausescu lived to see the general he relied on to crush the protesters become his chief judge at his trial on Christmas Day.
External pressure plays a role in completing regime-change. In 1989, the refusal of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to use the Red Army to back East European Communists facing protests in the streets made the local generals realise that force was not an option.
The United States has repeatedly pressed its authoritarian allies to compromise and then, once they have started on that slippery slope, to resign.
Longevity of a regime and especially the old age of a ruler can result in a fatal incapacity to react to events quickly.
“Graceful exits are rare in revolutions”
Revolutions are 24-hour-a day events – they require stamina and quick thinking from both protesters and dictators. An elderly inflexible but ailing leader contributes to the crisis.
From the cancer-stricken Shah of Iran via the ailing Honecker in East Germany to Indonesia’s Suharto, decades in power had encouraged a political sclerosis which made nimble political manoeuvres impossible. As Egypt reminds, revolutions are made by the young.
Graceful exits are rare in revolutions, but the offer of secure retirement can speed up and smooth the change.
In 2003, Georgia’s Shevardnadze was denounced by some as a “Ceausescu” but he was let alone in his villa after he resigned. Suharto’s generals had ensured he retired to die in peace a decade later – but his son “Tommy” was imprisoned.
Often there is a hunger among people to punish the fallen rulers. Their successors, too, find retribution against the old leader can be a useful distraction from the economic and social problems, which don’t disappear with the change of regime.
Oxford historian Mark Almond is the author of Uprising – Political Upheavals that have Shaped the World.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Literature’s lust for unrequited love leaves us ill prepared for the reality of what love really is, says Alain de Botton in his weekly column.
From my early adolescence through to my early 30s, my most intense feelings of love were towards people who had little or no interest in loving me back.
Women who already had boyfriends, who meant to return my calls but had a habit of losing numbers, who gently explained they needed a little more time on their own, or preferred not to let sex spoil a valuable friendship.
Far from deserving pity for my fate I was in fact strangely blessed, for my apparent misfortune put me in touch with the most intense of all varieties of love – the unrequited kind.
Anyone who reads even a few novels about love will swiftly recognise that love in literature is almost always impeded in some way. What we call a love story is nothing of the sort, it is merely a story of love’s interruption and delay. It is the record of a gradual victory over a range of obstacles to a happy union (parents, society, shyness, cowardice). With the consummation of love, there tends to be only one thing left for an author to do – end the story.
Romeo is not known for his sense of humour This focus on unrequitedness is of course a great solace for the lovelorn. It means that their feelings are continually heightened and confirmed by what they read. They are trained to dwell on, and even celebrate, the bitter-sweet sensations of waiting for a phone call and microwaving meals-for-one.
My immersion in literature made it natural that I should have been left somewhat unprepared for a most surprising event that befell me in my early 30s. Surprising, that is, for someone whose favourite novels had long included Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (an unhappy quest for love followed by suicide) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (ditto).
I met someone, she didn’t fail to call back, she didn’t prefer to leave it at friendship, she didn’t have to get home for work the next day. We fell in love and got married.
Suddenly, literature ceased to be any useful guide to what to expect. All that my books had prepared me for was an image of continuous perfection, a “happy love” that was essentially without any movement or action. It was a static image, like the sort we might have of a faraway holiday destination, and in a host of ways as unrelated to the reality of love as a postcard is to the reality of travel.
Literature and philosophy often dwell on the way that, soon after meeting our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It seems as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life perhaps, or in our dreams.
In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes explains this feeling of familiarity with the claim that the loved one was our long lost “other half” whose body we had originally been stuck to. All human beings used to be hermaphrodites, recounts Aristophanes, creatures with four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. But these hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two – into a male and female half – and from that day, each man and each woman has yearned to rejoin the half from which he or she has been severed.
“Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself”
I date the realisation that, despite all that united us, my wife was perhaps not the person from whom Zeus’s cruel stroke had severed me, to a moment shortly after our move in together when she introduced me to a kettle she’d bought for the house. It was practical, efficient, but exactly the kind of kettle I hated. If we were actually in love, how was she able to declare a household item beautiful which I found ugly?
It took me only a few moments to shake myself free of that most pervasive and unhelpful of all literary romantic myths: the idea that happy love must mean conflict-free love. Differences between my wife and I gathered over a host of small matters of taste and opinion.
Why did I insist on leaving the pasta to boil for those fatal extra minutes? Why was I so attached to my ragged winter coat? Why did she always park the car with one of its wheels squashed against the kerb? Why was I such a light sleeper? Why did she have to own so many clothes if she wore so few?
It is surely not coincidental that most great lovers in literature are devoid of a sense of humour. It is as hard to imagine cracking a joke with Romeo as it is with Young Werther, both of them seem differently but desperately intense. And with the inability to laugh comes an inability to acknowledge the messiness and complexity of all things human, the contradictions inherent in any union, the need to accept that your partner will never learn to park the car or cook the pasta – but that you love them nevertheless.
Humour renders direct confrontation unnecessary, you can glide over an irritant, winking at it obliquely, making a criticism without actually needing to speak it (“By this joke I let you know that I dislike X without needing to tell you so, your laughter acknowledges the criticism”).
It is a sign that two people have stopped loving one another (or at least stopped wishing to make the effort that constitutes an astonishing degree of what true, mature love appears to be), when they are no longer able to spin differences into jokes. Humour lines the walls of irritation between our ideals and reality. Behind each joke, there can be a hint of difference, of disappointment even, but it is a difference that has been defused and can therefore be passed over without the need for melodrama.
We are taught to imagine that romantic love might be akin to Christian love, a universal emotion that would allow us to declare: “I will love you for everything that you are.” A love without conditions or boundaries, a love that is the embodiment of acceptance.
Marriage doesn’t mean love becomes bland But the arguments that even the closest couples experience are a reminder that Christian love does not well survive the transition into the bedroom. Its message seems more suited to the universal than the particular, to the love of all men for all women, to the love of two companions who will not hear each other clipping their toe-nails.
Married love teaches us that we bring all of ourselves into a marriage – anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and alarm. I continue sometimes to feel unhappy about my work, to worry about my future and to be disappointed with myself and with my friends. Except that now, rather than sharing my sorrows, I tend to blame the person who lives beside me for them. My wife isn’t just a witness to my problems, on a bad day, she can sadly end up being held responsible for them.
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself. It’s a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, you have to be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt yourself.
There have been other surprising things about marriage and the experience of requited love. One of the most challenging is the intense dependence it brings. Proust tells the story of Mohammed II who, sensing that he was falling in love with one of his wives in his harem, at once had her killed because he did not wish to live in spiritual bondage to another.
However far fetched a response, the story nevertheless captures something about the dangers of true love. A marriage is scary in part because it involves putting oneself almost wholly in someone else’s hands. If my wife and I have an argument, we can no longer, as we might have done in the past, go off back to our own flats. There is now only one marital home. But though this constricted space may often be an imposition, in reality, it is also the best medium I have ever encountered for understanding the word compromise.
Most of Western literature seems committed to the idea that love cannot last, it is based on absence and lack and is killed by routine and stability. “When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her,” writes Proust, unhelpfully, but representatively. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place and burns itself out with marriage.
Montaigne declared that: “In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us.” A view echoed by Anatole France’s maxim that: “It is not customary to love what one has.”
But under the guise of worldly cynicism, this approach in fact betrays a quasi-adolescent blindness, for it attributes all the excitement and heroism of love to its unrequited part, while implicitly suggesting that there must be something at once easy and unheroic about the quest for everyday happiness.
As I now recognise, marriage is rarely in danger of being dull, and never in danger of being simple. The word marriage, suburban and colourless in its connotations, in fact hides a welter of intensity and depth that puts to shame the most passionate works of literature.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The Scottish Parliament approve the SNP government’s Budget (Scotland) Bill on 9 February 2011.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Hi,
I am looking for an excellent and creative designer who is affordable and would like to work on a per project basis for my design business. When we have a project that suits your skills we will send you the details and you give us a bid and a time frame.
These are the traits that I am looking for in order of importance:
Very skilled and creative, Affordable, Reliable (sticks to suggested time frames), Good Communication (updates me on progress, easy to get ahold of via email and IM), Fast but good,
Long term partnership for projects
What I am looking for (you don’t need to do all of them):
1. Logo Design
2. Print Design (Flyers, Brochures, Posters, Business Cards, Book Covers, CD Covers, etc.)
3. Graphic Design
4. General Design
What you need to do now:
Send an email to the email address in my contact info below with subject “Scriptlance Designer” and include the following:
1. Your skills (i.e. logo design, business card design, vector design, poster design, etc.)
2. Your Complete portfolio including MANY examples. If there aren’t a lot of examples I won’t be able to choose you because I won’t have seen your work.
Also, importantly, in order to judge your bids and the time it will take you please give us an estimate on each of the below (i.e. $X – 1 day). If some of the items are things that you don’t do, leave them blank:
Vector logo design (please give average bid and timeframe)
Business card design (please give average bid and timeframe)
Poster design (please give average bid and timeframe)
Brochure design (please give average bid and timeframe)
Flyer design (please give average bid and timeframe)
Some of the above we have projects for right now so if we like your bid and skills we might get started right away. We are hoping to bring the chosen bidder many future projects. As my company grows, we will give you the opportunity for making higher bids by letting you know that you can bid higher in the future.
Thanks,
Ryan
Integrating Sunshop to Outside Order Processing. Details have already been sent.
Thanks
I’m looking for someone to scrape a page that contains prices. It’s just a basic HTML page, it doesn’t require anything too complicated to scrape.
File 1: prices.txt
The format of prices.txt will look like this:
“Title 1″;”600”
“Title 2″;”300”
“Title 3″;”1000”
File 2: prices.php
When prices.php is run from a cron job, it will go to the URL (website page) that is to be scraped.
The page contains prices that look like this:
Title 1 – $200 + $99
Title 2 – $300 + $400
etc, etc.
The script will need to compare the prices on the website, to what is in prices.txt
For example, Title 1 is $200 + $99, or $299. The script sees that Title 1 in prices.txt is specified as 600. Since $299 is less than $600, it will send me an e-mail. If the price were over 600, it would not send me an e-mail.
The e-mail to be sent is just a basic one, that contains the title, and the price found.
Other features:
– The script should also send an e-mail if it finds a title on the website that is not found in prices.txt
– When an e-mail regarding a cheap price has been sent, the script should note that it has sent an e-mail, and what price it found. The next time the script is executed from the cron, it should not send another e-mail unless the price has changed. This is just to prevent the script from sending e-mails over and over about the same price.
*Important* – I would also like this script to avoid using a MySQL database.
I have PHP5.x on the server to run the script.
There’s also potential for similar jobs after this one if it all works out! Just give me a shout if you have any questions.
I am looking for a penny auction website very quickly with a lot of different functions
This will include industry standard features plus:
1) Penny Auctions with Bidbutler, etc.
2) Reserve Auction
3) Normal Auction
4) Buy it now store with ability to give credit for prior bids
5) Reserve Auction with Closed bidding after Reserve
6) Members only section with Platinum Penny auctions/normal auctions
7)Lowest Unique Bid Auction
8)Place where users can list their own items for penny auction bid and company gets a percentage
9) Beginner Auctions
10) Ability to clone auction
11)SMS or Mobile App for bidding (can discuss options or do a separate project for a mobile app)
The script must be free of any form of administrative autobidding functions!
The script must be fully tested, SECURE, and 100% bug free. I can with an escrow/milestone type account for both of our benefit. Your bid must also include 6 months of technical support after payment.
We will need this installed and configured on our server including best practices for data security and backup.
We need to be able to have an installation archive with full installation documentation, full source code for making future modifications, and full ownership rights to utilize the script at our sole discretion.
There will be a cash back/rewards system which will mean needing to track not only a Bid Account, but also a crediting system (rewards for bid pack purchase, referrals, reward credit auctions, and others for use within the Rewards Store.
Payment gateways will need to be Paypal, credit cards, and google checkout.
Also, would like to be able to export data for analysis in excel, quickbooks, etc.
I am also open to suggestions for functionality, etc. with the website. Please send me a message with any questions you have.
Thanks.
I need someone to review a desktop app. It is a small app (I’ll tell the name to the winning bidder). I want you to thoroughly explore the program.
Deliverables:
A list of the features
A list of the defects
I want each feature and defect demonstrated in a video (it doesn’t have to be professional quality; I just want some proof that you actually used the app). And finally, (also in the video), I want your honest opinion about the app.
For security reasons you must use the code word “sorrel” with your bid. If you do not, I will not choose your bid.
I need 4 small simple icons created that will need to match the example attached. They will be for 4 different websites. You will need to choose the final colours and symbol that represents the website and create the icons.
I have very basic samples for the sites already but they need to be made to match the example.
I have an ongoing need for logo designers and here is one project i have now:
this logo will be for a company that does weatherization.
the logo most weatherization businesses use is “example 1.gif” but the client doesn’t like the wind design and he wants something more modern and contemporary.
the client likes the wind design on “example 2.jpg” much better.
basically the client likes the house and the sun from “example 1” but the wind from “example 2” and wants a more modern design.
ABOVE the logo should say:
ATX Drywall and Painting
BELOW the logo should say:
Weatherization Works
the client would like to work the color “burnt orange” in the text on the logo….perhaps with a black outline around the burnt orange text.
NO GENERIC BIDS! REFERENCE “TEXAS” IN YOUR BID!! PLEASE SUBMIT EXAMPLES OF YOUR PREVIOUS WORK.
After the response from SEO people, I have decided to change my website using a search engine friendly software.
Wix is where my website currently is. The nice thing about Wix is that I don’t need to know HTML. It’s a drag and drop interface. However, it is mostly flash and there is not an html editor option so that it can be optimized easily. I have began the switch to a new web based software called shopify. It has everything needed to do seo and html editing. Even though most of the site has to be edited by html, it does have drag and drop features that will make it easy for me to add products.
This is my current website:
– http://www.golfsimulatorguys.com/
This is my new website that is unpublished:
– https://golfsimulatorguys.myshopify.com/
So this is what I want(maybe a little more):
– Basically content moved from my current site to my new site
* some content including video on my home page transferred over, also new side bar with submenu of our products and some of the pics and small video players
* the “shop here” will now be the “catalog page”
* the rest of the pages brought over except the “dealer login” page. We will add this later.
* the pages being brought over will use the “NEW THEME” but have similar content.
I’ll pay $200 for this touch up.
Ok once the site is done, which shouldn’t take too long. I want my site Optimized.
BOTH on site and off site seo. If your just a link builder, please don’t respond.
Please be VERY specific on what you will do. Don’t just tell me how good you are and that you will rank me on the first page of Google and then give me all of you references. TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT SEO YOU WILL DO.
I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for SEO and any maintainence of my website. My preference is to pay for performance. That means I would prefer the payments go into escrow. Once completed, the payments then get released to you each month.
NO BIDS OVER $200 PLEASE
ALSO, THIS IS A MUST…I PREFER TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH A PHONE OR SKYPE.
I WILL NOT TAKE ANY OFFER FROM PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT TO COMMUNICATE THROUGH EMAIL AND MESSAGE BOARDS.
I have 33 quotes that need to be placed together into a large collage. Each quote needs to stand indivdually, similar to the first attached example. They then need to be placed on the large collage like the second attached example
There is a lot of text. Some of the quotes are merely one line, others are a paragaph. All the text needs to be easy to read.
