More than 2 million cribs from seven companies were recalled Thursday amid concerns that babies can suffocate, become trapped or fall from the cribs.

Most of the cribs were drop-sides, which have a side rail that moves up and down so parents can lift children from them more easily. That movable side, however, can malfunction or detach from the crib, creating a dangerous gap where babies’ heads can become trapped, leading to suffocation or strangulation.

The companies involved in the recall were Evenflo, Delta Enterprises Corp., Child Craft, Jardine Enterprises, LaJobi, Million Dollar Baby and Simmons Juvenile Products Inc.

No deaths were associated with the cribs, but there were reports of at least 16 entrapments of infants. In one case, a child was found unconscious and later hospitalized.

Parents are urged to stop using the cribs and contact the manufacturers for repair kits to immobilize the drop-side or information to make the cribs more secure.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes ‘from a deep slumber’ sometime around 2013. In a new warning, NASA said the super storm could hit like ‘a bolt of lightning’ and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services, and national security — unless precautions are taken. Scientists believe damage could extend to everyday items such as home computers, iPods, and sat navs. “We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” said Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division. “I believe we’re on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.” Fisher concludes. “We take this very seriously indeed.”

New research suggest that more than 3 billion years ago, the northern plains of Mars were covered by a vast ocean that blanketed more than a third of the red planet.

Previous spacecraft investigations have pointed to possible signs of an ancient ocean on Mars. Still, this idea has been challenged for decades, as past evidence has been uncertain, and the matter remains one of the greatest open questions when it comes to researching the red planet.

Now scientists have analyzed global databases of river valley networks on Mars, as well as deposits left behind by ancient deltas. Their research suggests 29 deltas they investigated — more than half of all those in the databases — sat at roughly the same height some 3.5 billion years ago, apparently ringing a vast ancient ocean shoreline in the northern lowlands of Mars

“Our findings lend credence to the existing theories regarding extent and formation time of an ancient ocean on Mars,” said researcher Gaetano Di Achille, a planetary geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Moreover our test suggests that early Mars could have likely had a global water cycle similar to the present hydrological configuration of our planet.”

The elevation of the newly proposed shoreline also broadly matches up with the outlets of ancient river valley networks, indicating a globally uniform water level on ancient Mars.

“It is a very basic scheme on our planet — rivers form deltas when opening into the seas and oceans and these are ideally formed at the same elevation, the mean global sea level, across the planet,” Di Achille said.

All in all, the researchers estimate the ocean would have covered nearly 36 percent of Mars’ surface — a body of water encompassing more than 31 million square miles (81 million square kilometers), an area greater than the Atlantic Ocean.

“It is surprising how our results are compatible with previous independent studies based on totally different approaches,” Di Achille said. “Of course, our paper will not say the final word on the debate about the Martian ocean, but we are adding a significant piece to the big puzzle.”

One significant open question is where the water went after the disappearance of this ocean. “Hopefully the next missions to Mars, like for example MAVEN, will help to answer this question and provide new insights into the history of the Martian water and the presence of an ancient ocean on Mars,” Di Achille said.

Di Achille and his colleague Brian Hynek detailed their findings in the June 13 online issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Amazing how even in this modern day and age of people becoming more and more familiar with technology how we can still be fooled by scammers and bots. (A “bot”, for those that are not technologically savvy, is an automated program designed to spam you till you cry pretty much.) Sure, we know how to tell whether or not somebody that’s sending us an email is legitimate, and most sites that you go to these days have a “captcha”, which is designed by nature to determine man from machine.

However, it’s funny how we still fall for the old trick to this day. Of course now, bots are using social networking sites like <a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> to get their message across.

And if this starts sounding like a public service announcement, trust me, it is.

<a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> has been seeing a lot of this going on lately, where someone will come on board, and start sending out friend requests like nobody’s business. And then, once they reach a certain amount of friend requests sent within a certain timeframe, Facebook will ask for that particular user to slow down the friend requests or the account will be suspended. But yet, somehow, Facebook’s initial efforts don’t seem to work as well as I’m sure they’d hoped, because the bots continue to send out requests after waiting a certain time length.

Once these bots have enough friends, that’s when they start sending nasty messages to the user via wall, instant message, or P2P message. Mission accomplished.

While this may seem like a nuisance, it’s a security breach that could end up getting a lot worse. Who’s to say that the friend requests stop at spam bots? Next thing you know, your <a href=”http://facebook.com”>Facebook</a> account is hacked into, your password is changed, and goodbye Facebook account.

So if you receive a friend request from somebody, do what I do and make sure it’s legit. If there are mutual friends, ask the friends that you do know if that person is legit before accepting that person’s friend request. If you know the person who’s sending you the friend request, even better.

Because while a blind leap of faith can sometimes land you on your feet, 90% of the time, you’re just jumping right into a bottomless ravine.

Corporate Management, Human Resources, Employment Law, Contract Negotiations, Marketing, Accounting International Business Management and Business Ethics, to name a few, are among the mandatory courses taken in the hopes that a degree, albeit a simple piece of paper, will guarantee the success of the entrepreneurial endeavors pursued following it’s bestowment. What is reiterated by professors, mentors and protege experiences, is that there are three pillars of successful business development and ownership, customer service, cost and quality and only two of the three are achievable. Realistically, pursuing all three will lead to deterioration and failure.

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Now you can sing-along!

Lyrics can be found in the comments.

One Way Backlink building is something that’s becoming a lot more important to the success of your search engine marketing plan. The times involving website link trades are coming to an end. They are a poor use of your time and efforts and if this is still your primary linking technique, you might be almost certainly getting left behind. With search changing at a drastic speed, the need for a fresh link building way of thinking has never been so important. Obtaining back-links is more complex as compared to e-mailing out hundreds of pleading email messages to webmasters within your market, requesting backlinks for your web site. You need to start thinking about information and how this enables you to drive specific back links to target web pages. Here are some link building ideas to help you build one way links:

1. Competition Analysis / Acquisition

It’s still one of the best places to begin prior to deciding to create your link building method. The advantages of performing competition analysis isn’t just in generating a list of website link targets, but in putting together a landscape for your marketplace, that highlights areas from which you can get hyperlinks. A few of the best tools on the market are MajesticSEO, SEOSpyglass, LinkResearchTools from CEMPER.com, SEO X Ray (Firefox plugin) as well as the plugin SEO for Firefox. Still one of the best ways of performing link research is to use Yahoo Site Explorer. Pay attention to which kind of back-links your competitors are getting. Are they one way links from content areas (within a website page) or are they all navigation based, i.e. footers, weblog side bars etc.

2. Content Ideas

Once you’ve completed competitive analysis. You need to develop an index of content and articles ideas to surround your target keyword. Among the best ways of rank for your given search phrase is always to make your site an expert for the subject matter. Work with Google Insights to research thoughts regarding relevant content and articles about your search term. This gives you fantastic information on relevant matters that individuals are actively searching for.

3. Produce a Marketing List

Once you’ve a list of content to generate, you can investigate the top places to market that content. This will make sure you have an immediate list of people to market your content to. By way of example, if you’re offering content based on “LandScaping Software”, you can run a few commands like:

“landingscaping software”   “review”   blog

“landscaping software”   blog

intitle:”landscaping software”   top   list

The options are endless. Try to get bloggers whose content gets republished by other websites. This is definitely an extremely effective way of building lots of one way links for your content. Content marketing is something that should be in your link building arsenal in 2010 and can generate a lot more links than an outdated article marketing strategy.

As a website manager or owner  you’ve likely determined that DRIVING TRAFFIC to your site is a critical first step to getting  the success that is so important  to your business . But if your site has  reached a reasonable level of success with this first step, then you will certainly be keenly aware that TRAFFIC alone is not the secret to your websites success.  It’s equally critical that you convert your traffic into leads or actually sales .  Let’s briefly discuss some ideas that YOU can implement to find success in both of these steps.

First let’s look at how you can get  more traffic to your site.  What is it that would cause someone to really WANT to come to your site in the first place ?  The answer is INFORMATION!  Regardless of whether you are a car dealership, a non-profit, an art gallery, or a pet store , the reason why people will end up on your site is because they are searching for information.  But it’s not JUST information that they seek .  The Internet is FULL of information!  More than that, they are seeking a source of information that is trustworthy  !  It’s just like any other business or personal interaction.  We desire  to work with people that are trustworthy  .  So in order to draw  traffic to  your site you must first fill it with good  content  that your targeted customers are looking  for.  Then you must present that information in a way that helps your site visitors to begin to trust you .  

Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s ALL there was to it !  Unfortunately this, ‘Build it and they will come” strategy  is NOT enough anymore for most websites.  The Internet is simply TOO full (and growing exponentially) of information for your prospects to find you and learn to trust you without some help.   For this to happen,  you need  to grow your own  network of online ‘references’ that serve to authenticate your site as a trustworthy authority .  These ‘references’ are much like job references that you give to a prospective boss who  wants to authenticate your experience before hiring you  .   On the Internet,  these references take the shape of ‘links’, from other relevant and trustworthy sites back to your website  .  Notice the sites must be relevant, trustworthy and respectable.    This is very important as it helps the search engines and each of your prospective site visitors to prove that you are   a website they want to do business with .

So as you work on step #1 of DRIVING TRAFFIC to your site, consider  all of your efforts in this way.   Consider  what you do on all of the  social networking sites.  Make sure that your content and  your activity on those sites is legitimately helping to authenticate your business and helping  people trust you and your information enough to purchase from you.

Next, as your site picks up traffic  , it is important  that you convert those visitors into REAL BUSINESS. The  aspect of website conversions is often overlooked in favor of focusing on driving traffic.  But this is often a fatal flaw .  If you think about  this strictly from a financial perspective, it often costs 10-20x more time and money to GET visitors to your site than it takes to convert your existing traffic into actual customers.  In other words , the time and tools needed to improve your website conversion ratios is often FAR LESS expensive than those needed to get the traffic on  your site in the first place.  So focusing on your website conversions is often a great place for you to gain  some substantial ROI very quickly if you have not previously focused much attention on it . Track everything, track your calls, track your leads and your sales.

Just like ‘driving traffic’, there are also MANY things that you can do to improve your website conversions.  The two most critical elements that will give you the greatest initial improvement on website conversions are the ‘First’ and the ‘Last’ impressions that you give  your site visitors. This time during their visit is when  your site visitors are most impressionable and when you have the greatest opportunity to help  them to become customers or ‘take action’ in some specific  way. You don’t want to  be pushy, but make sure that your landing pages and your contact pages have specific language  of what benefits you are offering to each of your site visitors.  And finally, be certain  that you make it easy for them to take advantage of those specific benefits. As you fine-tune these efforts you may also find it helpful to use some website conversion tools to embed in your site that have proven success with increasing your website conversions and creating  more leads and business  for your organization.

Author: Roland Graham, Founder, Leadcrafters

Online companies go through great lengths to create successful search engine optimization strategies for their sites. Why not take advantage of this when you are creating your own strategy? I’m not suggesting stealing a competitors strategy or blindly copying a strategy, but I do think success leads tracks. Follow these tracks and they might just lead you to success as well. I wrote this article to give you some tips on how you can analyze your competitors websites for more insight on how they have obtained their rankings.

The first thing you will need to do is determine who your competitors are in your field. Seek these companies out by doing searches in the major search engines. Take screen shots of the sites that come up on top for future use. Visit these search results again in a few days to see if they have dramatically changed in any way. When you come back, check to make sure the same competitors are still on the first page. Have these sites shifted at all? Are all of the sites still there?

The web pages that have stayed on the front page over the last few days are probably doing so for a reason, so click into these sites now. Take a look at the keyword density on the page. This can be done manually by copying and pasting the text into an open office document on our computer. Following this go to file, then properties, and then check the word count. Write this number down for later use. Next go through the document and see how many times the keyword is listed. Once you have these two numbers, you can do some division to determine the keyword density. For example, a page with 200 words and a keyword mentioned 4 times, has a keyword density of 2%. We determined this by dividing 4 by 200. The keyword density that is bringing your competitor success may be a good starting point for your keyword densities.

After you’ve finished this task, hit the back button and look at the search result once more. Study the title tag and determine its keyword density in the same manner you used on the actual site. Remember that your title tag should have a good keyword density, but should also draw visitors into your site. You won’t have people clicking on your title tag if you simply list the keywords X number of times among various spam words.

These first three methods have given you a good idea of who your major search engine competitors are and how they have their pages setup. This information alone will give you insight into how they have obtained their page ranking.

External criteria should be analyzed next for a clear picture of what your competitor is doing. You can do this yourself by manually checking links, or you can hire a company with solid search engine optimization packages for sale. Doing a task like this takes considerable time, and it may be best to leave it to the pros.

Thank you for reading this article on studying the competition. I hope the information you learned today brings you closer to the success you deserve.