Category: Nutrition

  • A Beginner’s Guide to the Different eBay Auction Types.

    A Beginner's Guide to the Different eBay Auction Types.

    Over the years, eBay has introduced all sorts of different auction types, in an effort to give people more options when they buy and sell their things on eBay.

    For every seller who doesn't like the idea that their item might sell for a far lower price than they intend, there's another who wants to shift hundreds of the same item quickly. eBay tries to cater to all tastes. This email gives you an overview of the different kinds of auctions and their advantages for you.

    Normal Auctions.

    These are the bread-and-butter of eBay, the auctions everyone knows: buyers bid, others outbid them, they bid again, and the winner gets the item. Simple.

    Reserve Auctions.

    Reserve auctions are for sellers who don't want their items to sell for less than a certain price – a concept you'll know about if you're familiar with real auctions. They work just like normal auctions on eBay, except that the buyer will be told if their bid does not meet the reserve price you set, and they'll need to bid again if they want the item. If no-one is willing to meet your price, then the auction is cancelled, and you keep the item.

    Fixed Price ('Buy it Now') Auctions.

    Buy it Now auctions can work in one of two ways. You can add a Buy it Now button to a normal auction, meaning that buyers can choose either to bid normally or to simply pay the asking price and avoid the whole bidding process. Some sellers, though, now cut out the auction process altogether and simply list all their items at fixed price. This lets you avoid all the complications of the auction format and simply list your items for how much you want them to sell for.

    Recently, eBay added a twist to fixed price auctions: the 'best offer'. This means that buyers can contact you to negotiate a price, which could be a good way to get sell some extra stock at a small discount. The only downside to reserve and fixed price auctions is that you pay a small extra fee to use these formats. In general, it is more worth using reserve auctions for higher-priced items and fixed price auctions for lower-priced ones – but remember that you can combine the two formats.

    Multiple Item ('Dutch') Auctions.

    These are auctions where you can sell more than one of a certain item. Dutch auctions can be done by bidding. Buyers bid a price and say how many items they want, and then everyone pays the lowest price that was bid by one of the winning bidders. If you have trouble getting your head around that, then don't worry – everyone else does too! These auctions are very rare.

    What is more common is when a seller has a lot of one item, and lists it using a combination of two auction types: a multiple-item fixed price auction. This just means that you can just say how many of the item you they have, and offer them at a fixed price per unit. Buyers can enter how many they want and then just click Buy it Now to get them.

    Now that you know about the different types of auctions, you should make sure that the items you plan to sell don't violate eBay's listing policies. The next email will let you know what's allowed and what is a big no-no.

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  • Entertainment Industry

    Entertainment Industry

    Although kings, rulers and powerful people have always been able to pay for entertainment to be provided for them and in many cases have paid for public entertainment, people generally have made their own entertainment or when possible, attended a live performance. Technological developments in the 20th century meant that entertainment could be produced independently of the audience, packaged and sold on a commercial basis by an entertainment industry. Sometimes referred to as show business, the industry relies on business models to produce, market, broadcast or otherwise distribute many of its traditional forms, including performances of all types. The industry became so sophisticated that its economics became a separate area of academic study.

    The film industry is a part of the entertainment industry. Components of it include the Hollywood and Bollywood film industries, as well as the cinema of the United Kingdom and all the cinemas of Europe, including France, Germany, Spain, Italy and others. The sex industry is another component of the entertainment industry, applying the same forms and media (for example, film, books, dance and other performances) to the development, marketing and sale of sex products on a commercial basis.

    Amusement parks entertain paying guests with rides, such as roller coasters, train rides, water rides, and dark rides, as well as other events and associated attractions. The parks are built on a large area subdivided into themed areas named "lands". Sometimes the whole amusement park is based on one theme, such as the various SeaWorld parks that focus on the theme of sea life.

    One of the consequences of the development of the entertainment industry has been the creation of new types of employment. While jobs such as writer, musician and composer exist as they always have, people doing this work are likely to be employed by a company rather than a patron as they once would have been. New jobs have appeared, such as gaffer or special effects supervisor in the film industry, and attendants in an amusement park.

    Prestigious awards are given by the industry for excellence in the various types of entertainment. For example, there are awards for Music, Games (including video games), Comics, Comedy, Theatre, Television, Film, Dance and Magic. Sporting awards are made for the results and skill, rather than for the entertainment value.

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  • Folksonomy

    Folksonomy

    A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and translating tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomy, a term coined by Thomas Vander Wal, is a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy. Vander Wal explains some of the characteristics of folksonomies by identifying two types: broad and narrow. A broad folksonomy is the one in which multiple users tag particular content with a variety of terms from a variety of vocabularies, thus creating a greater amount of metadata for that content. A narrow folksonomy, on the other hand, occurs when a few users, primarily the content creator, tag an object with a limited number of terms. While both broad and narrow folksonomies enable the searchability of content by adding textual description – or access points – to an object, a narrow folksonomy does not have the same benefits as a broad folksonomy, which allows for the tracking of emerging trends in tag usage and developing vocabularies. Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy. However, tag clouds visualize only the vocabulary but not the structure of folksonomies, as do tag graphs.

    An empirical analysis of the complex dynamics of tagging systems, published in 2007, has shown that consensus around stable distributions and shared vocabularies does emerge, even in the absence of a central controlled vocabulary. For content to be searchable, it should be categorized and grouped. While this was believed to require commonly agreed on sets of content describing tags (much like keywords of a journal article), recent research has found that, in large folksonomies, common structures also emerge on the level of categorizations. Accordingly, it is possible to devise mathematical models of collaborative tagging that allow for translating from personal tag vocabularies (personomies) to the vocabulary shared by most users.

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  • How to Check an eBay Seller’s Reputation (and Why You Should Do It).

    How to Check an eBay Seller's Reputation (and Why You Should Do It).

    When you buy something from an eBay seller, you are giving them your money and hoping that you will get something in return. However many guarantees of safety eBay might make to you, nothing is certain: if you just give your money to scammers all the time without doing any checks then the chances are you won't get all of that money back.

    That's why you should always check the seller's reputation, or 'feedback rating'. This is a quick and easy-to-read summary of their history as an eBay seller, which gives you some idea of whether or not you should trust them with your money. Buying anything is a calculated risk: you want to minimise that risk.

    How to Check Feedback Ratings.

    On each item's description page, there is a box in the top-right hand corner about the seller, with the title 'Seller information'. This contains the seller's name, their feedback score, and their positive feedback percentage, as well as any stars they have earned.

    Different coloured stars are given to eBay sellers depending on their rating, in this sequence: yellow, blue, turquoise, purple, red, green, shooting yellow, shooting turquoise, shooting purple, shooting red. Anyone with a 'shooting' star is an experienced eBay member who you should be able to trust.

    If you click on the seller's name, you can get to a more detailed view of their reputation – their 'member profile' page. This page shows the total number of people who gave them a positive or negative rating, as well as a breakdown by time. You can also see a complete history of all the comments that have ever been left about them, with the most recent first.

    What to Look For.

    You might assume that anyone with a very high number can be trusted, but that isn't always true. It is more important to look at their positive feedback percentage – and you should really consider anything below 99% to be a red flag and investigate further.

    Take a look through the first visible page with the most recent transactions: are there any negative comments? What do they say? Take others' experiences into account, as they could happen to you if you deal with this person. Be careful not to punish sellers unfairly, however, if they did bad things in their past on eBay but have improved since. You should look at the breakdown by time and ignore any negative feedback that was left a long time ago. Equally, though, you should sit up and pay attention if a seller seems to have been left an out-of-character amount of bad feedback in the last month or so.

    Now that you know who to trust, it is worth learning a little more about how the different kinds of auctions work, so that you don't accidentally slip up and make yourself and your feedback page look bad. Our next email will be about the different kinds of auctions you can expect to encounter during your time on eBay.

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  • Tips and Tricks for Using eBay Search.

    Tips and Tricks for Using eBay Search.

    If you know what you're doing, you can quickly find what you're looking for on eBay. Here are a few golden rules.

    Be specific: If you're searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you'll get further searching for 'harry potter rowling philosopher's stone first edition' than you will searching for 'harry potter'. You'll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

    Spell wrongly: It's a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can't spell. Whatever you're looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings – the chances are that fewer people will find these items, and so they will be cheaper.

    Get a thesaurus: You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe your item, for example searching for both 'TV' and 'television', or for 'phone', 'mobile' and 'cellphone'. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

    Use the categories: Whenever you search, you'll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD because you want to buy that CD, you should click the 'CDs' category to just look at results in that category. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don't care about?

    Don't be afraid to browse: Once you've found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click 'Browse' and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

    Few people realise just how powerful eBay's search engine is – a few symbols here and there and it'll work wonders for you.

    Wildcard searches: You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say 'anything can go here'. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for 'car 195*'. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

    In this order: If you put words in quotes ("") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for "Lord of the Rings" won't give you any results that say, for example "Lord Robert Rings".

    Exclude words: Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don't want to appear in your search results. For example: "Pulp Fiction" -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

    Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become '(TV,television)', which would find items with either word.

    So once you've found your bargain item, bid for it and won it, what if it all goes wrong? Don't worry – eBay has a thorough dispute resolution procedure, and we'll cover it in some depth in the next article, so you'll be prepared if the worst happens.

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  • Criticism of Google

    Criticism of Google

    Criticism of Google includes alleged misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy, censorship of search results and content, and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as antitrust, monopoly, and restraint of trade.

    Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program.

    Google's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"; this mission, and the means used to accomplish it, have raised concerns among the company's critics. Much of the criticism pertains to issues that have not yet been addressed by cyber law.

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  • Google AdSense

    Google AdSense

    Google AdSense is a program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, that are targeted to site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering (also owned by Google). In Q1 2014, Google earned US $3.4 billion ($13.6 billion annualized), or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense.

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  • Sport Entertainment

    Sport Entertainment

    Sporting competitions have always provided entertainment for crowds. To distinguish the players from the audience, the latter are often known as spectators. Developments in stadium and auditorium design, as well as in recording and broadcast technology, have allowed off-site spectators to watch sport, with the result that the size of the audience has grown ever larger and spectator sport has become increasingly popular. Two of the most popular sports with global appeal are association football and cricket. Their ultimate international competitions, the World Cup and test cricket, are broadcast around the world. Beyond the very large numbers involved in playing these sports, they are notable for being a major source of entertainment for many millions of non-players worldwide. A comparable multi-stage, long-form sport with global appeal is the Tour de France, unusual in that it takes place outside of special stadia, being run instead in the countryside.

    Aside from sports that have world-wide appeal and competitions, such as the Olympic Games, the entertainment value of a sport depends on the culture and country in which it is played. For example, in the United States, baseball and basketball games are popular forms of entertainment; in Bhutan, the national sport is archery; in New Zealand, it is rugby union; in Iran, it is freestyle wrestling. Japan's unique sumo wrestling contains ritual elements that derive from its long history. In some cases, such as the international running group Hash House Harriers, participants create a blend of sport and entertainment for themselves, largely independent of spectator involvement, where the social component is more important than the competitive.

    The evolution of an activity into a sport and then an entertainment is also affected by the local climate and conditions. For example, the modern sport of surfing is associated with Hawaii and that of snow skiing probably evolved in Scandinavia. While these sports and the entertainment they offer to spectators have spread around the world, people in the two originating countries remain well known for their prowess. Sometimes the climate offers a chance to adapt another sport such as in the case of ice hockey which is an important entertainment in Canada.

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  • free book

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  • Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2010 and 2011

    Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2010

        Marratech e-Meeting – Web conferencing software, used internally by Google's employees. Google acquired the software from creator Marratech on April 19, 2007. Discontinued on February 19, 2010.
        GOOG-411 –Google's directory assistance service, which can be used free of charge from any telephone in the US and Canada. Discontinued on November 12, 2010.
        Google Labs – allowed users to test and demonstrate new Google products.

    Google Products and Services Discontinued in 2011

        Google Buzz – social networking service integrated with Gmail service allowing users to share updates, photos, videos, and more at once. It let users make conversations about things they found interesting. It was released on February 9, 2010. Discontinued by end of 2011.
        Google Dictionary – it was first introduced as part of Google Translate, it then became a standalone service that allowed searching of words and phrases from over 22 languages. Discontinued on August 5, 2011.
        Google PowerMeter – free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
        Real Estate – Real estate listings in Google Maps, launched in July 2009 and discontinued February 10, 2011.
        Google Directory – Collection of links arranged into hierarchical subcategories. The links and their categorization were from the Open Directory Project, but were sorted using PageRank. It was closed on July 20, 2011.
        Squared – creates tables of information about a subject from unstructured data. Discontinued September 2011.
        Google Sets – Generates a list of items when users enter a few examples. For example, entering "Green, Purple, Red" emits the list "Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Black, White, Yellow, Orange, Brown." Described in its 2003 patent filing by creators Simon Tong and Jeff Dean as “an inside peek at how Google groups keywords by concept,” it was discontinued in mid-2011.
        Google Pack – Collection of applications – some Google-created (including Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Talk, and Google Chrome), some not. (Supported Windows XP, Vista, 7). Discontinued on September 2, 2011.
        Google Fast Flip – Online news aggregator that mimicked the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche. Discontinued September 6, 2011.
        Desktop (Mac OS X, Windows 2000 SP3+, XP, Vista, 7, Linux): Desktop search application that indexes emails, documents, music, photos, chats, Web history and other files. It allowed the installation of Google Gadgets. Discontinued on September 14, 2011.
        Google Image Labeler – game that induced participants to submit valid descriptions (labels) of images in the web, in order to later improve Image Search. Discontinued on September 16, 2011.
        Aardvark – Social search utility which allowed people to ask and answer questions within their social networks. It used people's claimed expertise to match askers with good answerers. Discontinued on September 30, 2011.
        Directory – navigation directory, specifically for Chinese users.
        Gears (Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari): A browser plug-in that enables development of off-line browser applications.

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