Bendigo Bank customer? You can assist the club. | Bell Park Sport ...

When you bank with your local Bendigo Bank branch in Geelong, you?re helping to support the Bell Park Dragons. How? It?s simple, Bendigo Bank share a percentage of their profits with the community.

Over the last 12 years Bendigo Bank has contributed more than $2 million in grants and sponsorships to a variety of clubs and organisations in the wider Geelong region.

And now by simply transferring your banking to the Bendigo, a percentage of the profits generated from your account will go to the Bell Park Dragons.
With the local competitions continuing to evolve and strive for greater professionalism we see a need for the Bell Park Dragons to keep abreast of these changes.

We are a progressive family orientated club that strives for excellence and success.
We are also very proud of the social and sporting opportunities we provide to the local community.

By simply transferring your banking to the Bendigo you will be helping the Bell Park Dragons to achieve projects including new change room facilities for our netballers and our junior footballers, the purchase of new cricket
nets, improved lighting for our football ground and a canteen upgrade.

1. Fill in the form?attached and drop it in to your local Bendigo Bank branch.
2. Ask the friendly staff about transferring your banking to the Bendigo or setting up your existing accounts with the Bell Park Dragons.
3. Tell your family, friends and business colleagues today so that we can all support the Bell Park Dragons. It?s as easy as that. You?ll not only find a friendly team at the Bendigo, but also a full range of personal and business banking products including loans, transaction accounts, insurance, credit and debit cards, e-banking, financial advice and
more.

So drop into your local branch today and know that every time you do your banking the Bell Park Dragons benefit.

Bendigo Bank Brochure Part 1
Bendigo Bank Brochure Part 2

Source: http://www.bellparksportandrec.com.au/2013/01/bendigo-bank-customer-you-can-assist-the-club-2/

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TV drama's cancellation causes uproar in Thailand

BANGKOK (AP) ? A Thai TV station's decision to cancel a popular and edgy soap opera mini-series has caused an uproar among viewers and critics who are demanding that the show's final episodes be shown.

Channel 3 announced Friday that it would immediately stop airing the prime-time action drama "Nua Mek 2" after "having considered that some content was inappropriate for broadcast."

The show, which began Dec. 14 and was aired three nights a week, told the story of a fictitious Thai prime minister, his corrupt deputy, black magic and political manipulation. After the station's announcement, the final two two-hour episodes, which were scheduled for Friday and Saturday, were not broadcast.

The station did not further explain its decision to cancel the show, but a Channel 3 executive told a member of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, Thailand's broadcast regulator, that the channel feared the show's content would violate the law, Thai media reported over the weekend.

Some supporters of the series speculated that Thailand's government, which closely monitors television content, had a hand in the cancellation, but government officials denied having pressured Channel 3 to terminate the show.

"Those who know best (about the issue) are the broadcaster, producers and related personnel," Prime Minister's Office minister Warathep Rattanakorn told reporters Saturday.

According to the media reports, the unnamed executive told NBTC board member Peerapong Manakit that the station feared the show's content violated Section 37 of the Broadcast and Telecommunications Operations Act, which prohibits the broadcast of "content that seeks to overthrow the constitutional monarchy, threatens national security or morality, or constitutes profanity or causes severe harm to people's mental or physical health."

The action-packed drama featured repeated dialogue about morals and shed a bad light on politicians.

While it remains unclear what triggered the station's decision to pull the show, scripts posted on the websites of Thai newspapers showed that the prime minister was to be assassinated by the end of the series.

The series' cancellation drew heavy criticism from many viewers who believed it was due to political interference. They urged the station to show the remaining episodes, while some called for a boycott of the channel.

Several Facebook pages sprung over the weekend from supporters of the show.

"How come in this society you're being attacked when you speak the truth? I want the show to run until the end. At least it can open our eyes wide enough to see what our country is really like!!!" a fan wrote on the "Bring Me Back Nua Mek 2" Facebook page, which gained more than 47,000 followers over the weekend.

The Thai Constitution Protection Association said it would seek an order from the NBTC to force Channel 3 to air the two remaining episodes and revoke the broadcast concessions granted to Channel 3.

"It hurts the viewers' feelings and has infringed on the rights of Thai consumers. They have the constitutional right to watch it until the end," Srisuwan Janya, secretary-general of the association, said Monday.

The group said it would seek to petition a court if the broadcast regulator fails to meet its request within seven days.

Censorship is heavy-handed on Thai television, with cigarettes, alcohol and people held at gunpoint blurred, but the cancellation of a show before its end is rare.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tv-dramas-cancellation-causes-uproar-thailand-073145203.html

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Book reviews vie for dreaded Hatchet Job award

LONDON (AP) ? A mauling of Martin Amis and a savaging of Salman Rushdie are in the running for the best bad book review of 2012.

Eight finalists were announced Tuesday for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, a prize set up to reward scathing works of literary journalism.

The nominees include Ron Charles' Washington Post review of Amis' satirical saga "Lionel Asbo" ? a "ham fisted novel" full of "blanched stereotypes" ? and Zoe Heller's assessment of Rushdie's memoir "Joseph Anton" for the New York Review of Books. Heller slammed the author's "magisterial amour propre" and concluded: "The world is as large and as wide as it ever was; it's just Rushdie who got small."

The prize was founded last year by literary website The Omnivore to reward the "angriest, funniest, most trenchant" review published in a newspaper or magazine. Its serious aim is to raise the profile of book critics and "promote integrity and wit in literary journalism."

"Book reviews are, in the main, too fawning and dull," said Omnivore editor Anna Baddeley.

Finalists for the award also include Richard Evans' assessment of A.N. Wilson's "Hitler: A Short Biography" ? "stale, unoriginal material ... banal and cliche-ridden historical judgments" ? and Craig Brown's review of "The Odd Couple" by Richard Bradford. Brown dismissed the book about the friendship between writers Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin as "a triumph of 'cut and paste.'"

Last year's inaugural prize was won by Adam Mars-Jones for a review of Michael Cunningham's novel "By Nightfall" that accused the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of scattering literary allusions like "tin cans tied to a tricycle."

This year's winner, to be announced Feb. 12, will receive a year's supply of potted shrimp from the award's sponsor, a fishmonger.

___

Online: www.hatchetjoboftheyear.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-01-08-Britain-Scathing%20Reviews/id-9d4d17ed5bc24bf1b21ed6616f1f331b

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Self Improvement Times: Women Gaining Self Confidence Through ...

It is common knowledge that men tend to overrate their intellectual abilities. By the same token, women tend to downplay their own. While men often believe they are far more attractive than they actually are, women believe the opposite as well. It is unclear why these differences in confidence levels exist between men and women, but the phenomenon explains why women must work harder to build and maintain a healthy self-esteem. In fact, women gaining self confidence is a common topic in the self-help world.

The good news, however, is that women can quickly boost their confidence if they are willing to make a few changes in the way they think about themselves and life. With the benefits being increased happiness and paving the road to more successful relationships with those around them, it is worth the effort.

Easy Tips To Improve Self-Esteem:

Improve personal appearance. The easiest and quickest way for women to increase self-esteem is to improve their personal appearance. While looks should not matter in a perfect world, this is not a perfect world and an individual's appearance is important. People respond better to others that present themselves in a neat, clean way that says that they care about their appearance.

Luckily, improving one's appearance does not have to be expensive. By researching inexpensive home beauty tips, a woman can immediately take steps towards feeling better. This increased confidence provides motivation to take additional steps towards increased self-esteem.

Foster appreciation. Doing this properly requires an understanding of how human beings work. The physical goal of the human species is survival. Therefore, the automatic part of the human brain works to do this by picking out the negative in the environment. This system keeps the person on alert for potential dangers. The problem is that since it is weighted heavily towards the negative, if all a woman listens to is her automatic thoughts she will overlook the positive aspects of her life and become depressed.

Fortunately, all people also have the ability to choose thoughts. This is why a daily appreciation practice stressing thankfulness is such an important factor when it comes to self-esteem. If a woman does not recognize the blessings of the friends and family that care for her, and that all her basic needs are satisfied, then she will be destined to live feeling that nothing in her world is good enough, including herself. To combat this, it is important to take a moment to be thankful for the good in one's life every day.

Practice affirmations. Thoughts dictate the way people feel and, as discussed above, it is important to take responsibility for controlling these thoughts. Just as it is imperative to be appreciative every day, it is also imperative that a woman recognize her own value as well. To increase self-esteem, a woman should actively and regularly insert positive thoughts into her thought stream while learning to let go of the negative.

Below is a list of healthy, self-affirming thoughts:

- I am smart

- I am happy

- I am relaxed

- I am efficient

- I am capable

- I am well-liked

Become action-oriented. Nothing raises self-esteem faster than accomplishment. Each day, women should select a task that they don't want to do - and do it. When all four steps are consistently followed, the results are sheer magic.

----------------------------------------------------
Are you a woman and you want to learn how to gain confidence in yourself? Take this journey with other like-minded women. Our classes will teach you how to increase your self confidence as you study from women who are experts at different aspects of living an empowering life joyfully. Visit http://lovingyourselfuniversity.com

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Source: http://selfimprovementtimes.blogspot.com/2013/01/women-gaining-self-confidence-through.html

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A Science Teacher Draws the Line at Creation

As a science teacher, I am always curious about people's attitudes toward what I teach. Since more than 40 percent of U.S. adults believe literally what is written in the Book of Genesis?that Earth and the universe were created in six days about 6,000 years ago?and since I was in the neighborhood recently, I decided to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., run by the Answers in Genesis (AiG) Ministry.

The museum has a brand-new planetarium and 70,000 square feet of exhibits claiming that the story of Genesis happened exactly as written. In the main lobby, a large display depicts life just after creation. Richly detailed with plants and rocks, it features a small boy playing, while two dinosaurs graze nearby. According to the exhibits, the stars are younger than Earth (they were created on Day 4), and Noah saved all animal species that we see today from the Flood. Earth had its one and only ice age, lasting a few hundred years.

What disturbed me most about my time spent at the museum was the theme, repeated from one exhibit to the next, that the differences between biblical literalists and mainstream scientists are minor. They are not minor; they are poles apart. This is not to say that science and religion are incompatible; many scientists believe in some kind of higher power, and many religious people accept the idea of evolution. Still, a literal interpretation of Genesis cannot be reconciled with modern science.

Scientists tell us we live in a remote corner of a vast universe that existed billions of years before humans arrived. The universe and Earth could continue just fine without us. We are one species of many on a little planet with an ancient fossil record that shows that more than 99 percent of the species that once lived are now extinct. This speaks to a tenuousness of our existence as a species?an existence we need to protect vigorously.

AiG's biblical literalists, on the other hand, hold that we are God's favorites. We live at the universe's center on a planet God made and maintains for us to use. Earth's resources are here for us to exploit. God protects us and promised he would not destroy Earth again until the end of days. In that scenario, we have little reason to safeguard our existence.

Creationists begin with answers and work to prove that those answers are right. This is antithetical to the scientific process. Scientists who formed the idea of human evolution did not invent the idea and go looking for fossils. Well before Charles Darwin published his treatise in 1859 and well before workers in a limestone quarry in 1856 found strange bones that would later be called Neandertal, scientists struggled to explain what they saw in the natural world and in the fossil record. The theory of evolution was the product of that analysis. That is how science works.

The danger is that 40 percent of the American electorate seems to have forgotten what science is. Considering that our nation put a man on the moon and invented the airplane and the Internet, this development is extraordinary. Yet when much of the electorate faces the complex scientific questions of our day, they do not reject science wholesale, they cherry-pick it. Few if any of them live without the benefits of fossil fuels and electricity. Most are happy to fly in airplanes, take hot showers, heat their homes, drive their cars, watch their televisions and text their friends. They reject science only if it conflicts with their beliefs or asks them to change their way of life.

When Americans selectively reject science, it handicaps us, as a nation, in a knowledge-based global economy. We need to be open when scientific discoveries tell us our actions have consequences, raise doubts about our future and ask us to change. So I'll keep teaching science, not belief. Because if students do not understand how science works, we can destroy our country's future or even threaten our existence on this old Earth.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Comment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/jan2013

This article was originally published with the title Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=fd5eccdf22f27a2c468a02c9d6300681

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Will Your Startup Get Venture Capital or IPO in 2013? - Business ...

Based on the final report for 2012 from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), it may appear that IPOs are back as a viable startup exit strategy. For the full year 2012, venture-backed initial public offerings raised $21.5 billion from 49 listings, and represented the strongest annual period for IPOs since 2000.

Yet 2013 is still projected by The Fiscal Times as a difficult IPO opportunity for startups, due to choppy markets, continuing fiscal uncertainty, and the Facebook fiasco. The dot.com heydays of free flowing venture capital and supercharged IPOs are not back. The market and venture capitalists are looking for business, but with a continuing focus on proven business models.

Sure, there will always some seed funding (10% of overall deal flow), but you can bet that this money goes to entrepreneurs who have been there before and won. Angels are also moving up-stage, leaving a bigger and bigger black hole for new startups. Your friends and family are really the only answer until you have a significant revenue stream.

So what can entrepreneurs do to get to the head of the venture capital investment queue and position their startup for a winning IPO? Here are some key action items that may give your business some visibility:

• Start with an investment-grade business plan. This means build a plan that hits all the hot buttons; problem/solution, executive team, competition, business model, reasonable financial projections, and what?s in it for the investor. Follow with a killer executive summary, investor presentation, and financial model.

• Line up a winning team. You have probably heard me say this too many times, but investors look harder at the people than they do the idea (bet on the jockey rather than the horse). They want founders who have been there and done that before, in the same business domain. Both operating executives and top advisors count.

• Timing is critical. Remember you only have one chance for a good first impression. Don?t try to talk your way to a deal before you have the documentation. Practice every step, including the elevator pitch to get the first meeting. Use friends, family, and angels, if possible, to get a product, revenue, and customers first before the VC connection.

• Identify the right people in the right venture firms. Mass mailing your business plan to every VC in the book won?t get you any credibility or traction. Investment firms specialize by business sectors, and each partner within the firm has a specialty. If you are in ?energy,? do your homework to build a list of the top players in this segment.

• Make a personal connection, directly or indirectly. If you don?t personally know anyone on this list, talk to every professional friend you have to see who they know. Get introduced via one of the social networks, or a professional organization, before you approach a VC with a business proposal.

Overall, remember what VCs are looking for big numbers, in relation to Angels or other potential investors. They are looking for products (not services) that will be "must haves" for customers, not "nice to haves," and they are looking to multiply their money by five to ten times in five years.

That means the target market must be large (at least $500M), proven and growing, with revenue potential of at least $50M within five years. Initial investment targets are usually larger than $2M, sometimes up to $25M or $50M. To make this work, you will need an initial valuation of at least $5M.

According to the latest NVCA industry stats, most venture capitalists predict investment increases in Business IT, Healthcare IT, and to a lesser extent Consumer IT, the latter being the sector of greatest expectations last year. Most VCs see decreases in clean technology investment, medical devices and biopharmaceuticals, so tune your expectations accordingly.

Current market conditions should certainly convince you to be totally thorough, thoughtful and aggressive in your approach and presentations. But now is the time to get started, and remember to work friends, family, and Angels before you tackle the big boys and set your sights on a windfall IPO.

Marty Zwilling

Read more posts on Startup Professionals Musings ?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/will-your-startup-get-venture-capital-or-ipo-in-2013-2013-1

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Gambia detains local AP reporter for second time

JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? A Gambian journalist who contributes to The Associated Press was held by security officials Monday night, according to the Gambian Press Union.

Reporter Abdoulie John went to the National Intelligence Agency offices for questioning Monday afternoon but he was not released, said Lamin Jahateh of the press union, who had accompanied John to the security agency headquarters in the West African country's capital, Banjul.

Security officials later took John to his home and searched it Monday, according to Jahateh who spoke to family members. John remained in the custody of the security agents and had not returned home by night.

John, the editor of the website JoloffNews and a contributor to AP, was previously held overnight by security on Dec. 7 after he covered the release of Senegalese soldiers by a rebel group. AP had been invited to the event and assigned John to cover it. John said the Gambian president's photographer questioned his presence, and an argument ensued. Since that incident John has been questioned several times by the intelligence agency but he has not been charged with any crime.

"AP protests the latest detention of Abdoulie John," said John Daniszewski, AP's senior managing editor for international news, speaking from New York. "John was properly assigned to cover the story and he has answered the same questions several times. We do not understand why authorities continue to question him."

The International Federation of Journalists has "vigorously condemned the harassment" of John and called on Gambian government to stop trying to intimidate him.

Gambia is one of Africa's smallest and poorest countries with a population of about 1.8 million people. President Yahya Jammeh has ruled the country since he came to power in a coup in 1994. Human rights groups have accused the government of Gambia of carrying out arbitrary arrests, summary executions and torture in recent years.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gambia-detains-local-ap-reporter-second-time-224749441.html

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