Refugee doctors will no longer have to find the money to sit the first partof the test they are required to pass to demonstrate their linguisticcompetence. The General Medical Council has waived the £145 fee for refugee doctors tosit part one of the Professional Linguistics Assessment Board test. The testaims to ensure overseas doctors have the competence and communication skills towork as senior house officers. Dr Edwin Borman, chairman of the BMA’s International Committee, said,”We appreciate this initiative and hope it will be extended to the secondpart of the more expensive PLAB exam. “Currently it takes about 12 to 15 months for the Home Office to processasylum applications and we’re concerned that doctors classified asasylum-seekers may not be able to recommence their studies sufficiently if theyare exempted from this offer. We hope the GMC will extend the initiative toasylum- seekers.” Lew Swift, head of personnel and corporate services at the Walton Centre forNeuroscience, said, “Anything that helps us to recruit doctors in theshortage specialities has got to be a good thing. However, there’s a dangerthat there will be complaints from those who have to pay.” Test fee waived for refugee doctorsOn 24 Jul 2001 in Personnel Today Previous Article Next Article Comments are closed. Related posts:No related photos.
Test fee waived for refugee doctors
May 12, 2021
The 2008 Restaurant Show is taking place at Earls Court 2, from 6-8 October. Celebrating its 20th year, it will feature a central food market, two on-site restaurants, The KNORR National Chef of the Year Competition and The Stage, featuring 20 top chefs demonstrating their skills.The event aims to showcase new, cutting-edge products and services within the fresh, chilled & frozen food, ingredients and drinks sectors. There will also be demonstrations, workshops and interactive stands. Among the exhibitors are chocolate and cocoa product manufacturers – Barry Callebaut, Britvic Soft Drinks, FFI Coffee People, Teapigs, Speciality Breads and Origin Coffee
Last year, Catskill Chill said farewell to their longtime home at Camp Minglewood with an exceptional celebration, bringing out artists like Lotus, moe., Zappa Plays Zappa and a whole lot more. Among the many performers to grace the beloved festival’s stages was Twiddle, who played both a Dead Set and traditional set on the main stage.The Vermont jammers rocked hard during their hour and a half allotment from 2:30-4 AM, welcoming out guitarist Wiley Griffin and keyboardist Todd Stoops during various moments of their jam-heavy set. The set was a sweet one, with Twiddle playing outside the box for a truly memorable set of music. TFortunately, thanks to Catskill Chill, we now have full video of the set! Watch the magic as it unfolds, below.Setlist: Twiddle at Catskill Chill, Hancock, NY – 9/19/15Zazu’s Flight, Beehop (w/ Wiley Griffin on guitar), Wasabi Eruption > The Box > Star Wars Theme > The Box, Brown Chicken Brown Cow (w/ Todd Stoops on keys), Jamflowman>FrankenfooteFull A/V credits for the video below:Video Directed by John DeeneyCamera Operators:Brian OcchipintiJeremy SchanielMichael MooreJared HannaBrian BlaireAudio Engineer – Joe Mango
The new documentary “Citizenfour” centers on a series of candid interviews with Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency employee and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who last year leaked more than 200,000 classified documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance efforts.The film’s action unfolds in a Hong Kong hotel room over eight days, during which Snowden’s revelations about the vast scope of the surveillance programs hit the press. On Monday afternoon, via videoconference, Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig engaged Snowden in another frank conversation.A whistleblower to some, a spy to others, Snowden has been living in exile in Russia for the past year to avoid U.S. espionage charges. For an hour on Monday, he offered listeners a window into his motivations and his thoughts on the national security landscape.Snowden’s actions sparked a global debate about privacy versus national security concerns, a debate that he thinks was desperately needed. U.S. intelligence agencies, he said, were working without oversight, “changing the boundaries of the rights that we enjoy as free people and a free society.” Snowden said that Congress, the courts, and the executive branch of government “had failed” to do anything about the vast expansion of surveillance, either because they were unaware or unwilling.“This led me to stand up and say something,” he said.The U.S. government considers Snowden a fugitive from justice. Last year, prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against him, charging him with theft, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.During his discussion with Lessig, Snowden touched briefly on his background. His grandfather and father were in the military, and his mother and sister still work for the government. He decided to enlist in the U.S. Army, inspired in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He said he later began his intelligence work confident that the government for the most part “did good things and did them for the right reasons.”But he said his perspective shifted as his career progressed, first at the CIA, and later with the NSA as he gained “an increasingly concerning understanding of what happens on the broad scale.” According to Snowden, senior officials in the intelligence community had “become less accountable to the public,” overseeing “programs of mass surveillance that were happening beyond any possible statutory authority.”When he raised his concerns internally “they got nowhere,” said Snowden. He reached out to the press as a last resort, adding that he “never published anything.” Instead he let the press decide whether to publish information and thus allow the public “to participate in the democratic process in order to claim their part in determining the outcome.”After a failed attempt to reach former lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, Snowden contacted Laura Poitras, through a series of encrypted emails in January 2013. At Snowden’s urging, Poitras connected with Greenwald, and together the pair broke the first surveillance story in The Guardian US that June. (Poitras would go on to make the documentary.) Soon after the first story, Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman released a series of articles based on Snowden’s information. Earlier this year, both news outlets were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service.The Pulitzer win proved “this kind of investment,” said Snowden, “is important to the quality of our society.”Why didn’t he go to The New York Times? wondered Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership. Snowden said he wanted to reach a variety of outlets to ensure his information would get out without interference from the U.S. government. Many U.S. newspapers are too institutionalized, hierarchal, and rigid, he argued. He said that the Times, which delayed publishing a 2005 story about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program for a year at the urging of the White House, “has a history of sitting on stories of massive public importance.”During his intelligence work, Snowden said he noticed a critical pivot away from targeted surveillance toward programs that collected mass amounts of data. He called that shift costly and ineffective, a “collect-all” strategy that makes it impossible to keep a close eye on targets that warrant closer attention.“A good example of this is actually the Boston Marathon bombings,” said Snowden. The Russian intelligence services had made the Tsarnaev brothers known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he said, but the FBI only conducted “a cursory investigation.”“The reality is we knew who these guys were, and we knew they were associated with extremism in advance of these attacks, but we didn’t follow up. We didn’t keep watching these guys. And the question is: Why? I believe the reality of that is because we do have finite resources. And the question is: Should we be spending $10 billion a year on mass surveillance programs at the NSA to the extent that we no longer have effective means of traditional, targeted surveillance?”When he had a security clearance he classified as “greater than top secret,” Snowden said he could have done considerable harm if he so chose. But he said his first rule when speaking with the press was that they “do no harm” and only publish stories “with clear public-interest justification.”Lessig asked if Snowden would consider making himself “available to the ordinary criminal process.”“There is no due process for whistleblowers in the intelligence community,” and American defendants are banned from making a public-interest defense before a jury, Snowden said. He said that the U.S. Espionage Act, which is “intended for the prosecution of spies, is being increasingly leveraged to be used as sort of a bludgeon against public-interest journalistic sources and whistleblowers.”Lawrence Lessig interviews Edward Snowden HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden at Harvard Law School on Oct. 20. <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”> <img src=”https://img.youtube.com/vi/o_Sr96TFQQE/0.jpg” alt=”0″ title=”How To Choose The Correct Channel Type For Your Video Content ” /> </a>
Legendary opera singer Plácido Domingo will be celebrated at Harvard with “Giving Voice: A Conversation with Plácido Domingo” on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at 4 p.m. at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy St., moderated by Tamar Herzog, Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and professor of Spanish and Portuguese history, and Anne Shreffler, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music.Presented by the Division of Arts and Humanities, Office for the Arts at Harvard, and Intituto Cervantes Observatory of the Spanish Language in the U.S., this event is open to the public. Admission is free with tickets required, limit of two tickets per person. Tickets are available to students (of any college) and Harvard affiliates beginning Tuesday, April 5, and to the general public beginning Wednesday, April 6, through the Harvard Box Office, Farkas Hall, 10 Holyoke St., 617.496.2222. As of April 6, tickets are also available online (handling fees apply for online and phone orders).Plácido Domingo has sung 147 opera roles and has given more than 3,600 career performances. His repertoire spans the gamut from Mozart to Verdi and Berlioz to Puccini. He performs in every important opera house in the world and has made more than 100 recordings of complete operas, compilations of arias and duets, and crossover discs. He has won 13 Grammy Awards and has made more than 50 music videos.Domingo is the former general director of Washington National Opera; currently he is the Eli and Edythe Broad General Director of Los Angeles Opera, which, under his guidance, has become one of America’s most significant opera ensembles.
The world is full of visual stimuli. And the way we experience them isn’t just the stuff of comic book art, but the essence of life itself, according to Scott McCloud. The locally rooted comic artist and theorist, well-known for his 1993 book “Understanding Comics,” drew a capacity house to the Knafel Center for a talk on “Visual Storytelling, Visual Communication.”Presented by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the talk was introduced by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Institute, and was followed by a discussion with Shigehisa Kuriyama, the faculty director of the institute’s humanities program and a confirmed fan. McCloud’s talk referenced his books and a popular TED talk, but went beyond the comics format to examine the nature of visual perception. Illustrated with a fast-moving backdrop of nearly 300 slides, Thursday afternoon’s talk was by turns whimsical, philosophical, and hilarious.“Visual communication is a two-way street: We all meet the artist halfway,” McCloud said. He began by recalling his childhood in Lexington, Mass., and his roots as an artist. “When I grew up in Lexington, drawing robots and spaceships and later superheroes, I was hoping someone could figure out what was going on in every panel,” he said. “Then when I went to Syracuse as an art student, I found out that visual artists don’t always trust the idea of pictures sending messages. We expect it to be more inscrutable somehow, maybe even beyond meaning. But every picture is still saying something.”McCloud’s central point was that there are no neutral visual decisions: Every visual display we see is meant to communicate something, and every artist who creates one has a specific intention. To illustrate this, he demonstrated how people tend to organize images into certain patterns. He began with the most basic of images, a straight line and two dashes. If the dashes are moved above the line, we’re likely to see them as eyes and a mouth, a human face. “Pattern-finding is a basic human capability that we depend on for our survival, and that a cartoonist also depends on.” — Scott McCloud,“We are animals, and it is our tendency to find ourselves in everything we see,” McCloud said. “This is how we survive as a species … Pattern-finding is a basic human capability that we depend on for our survival, and that a cartoonist also depends on.”To show how people create these patterns, he screened a photo of a church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with two oval windows sitting above a triangle-shaped ledge. And he noted, correctly, to judge from the laughs in response, that most were seeing it as the face of a “confused chicken.”Sometimes the wrong visual decisions have consequences, he said. He pointed to something most people have seen in hotels: the diagram reading, “In case of fire use stairs, do not use elevator.” The standard version, he noted, is “a masterpiece of incoherence.” There’s an overlarge stick man who appears to be running toward the fire, and a couple who appear to be getting fished out of an elevator with chopsticks. With a few simple tweaks, he demonstrated, the diagram could be made not only more pleasing visually, but clearer and more functional.,The good news, he said, is that even non-artists are now more inclined to communicate visually, with the popularity of emojis as an example. This in turn prompts people to consider the messages they send in face-to-face communication. “This is what it is to be alive,” he told Kuriyama during a Q&A session after the talk. “Look at what your body is doing to send these messages. That is fundamental; it should be a part of basic education. Also, it is so much fun.”In a new postscript to his talk, McCloud described a vivid visual experience, a drive that he took with his wife and daughter, Sky, to view last year’s solar eclipse. Like McCloud’s father, Sky is partially blind, and thus has a different experience of the world.“We all build models out of whatever our senses can give us. She has extreme light sensitivity, and sunlight is not fun for her, so she learns how to get the gist of a scene from split-second exposure.” The eclipse itself, he said, was a wondrous example of how nature creates symmetry. “We know that the sun and the moon are not the same size, we know that they are nowhere near each other and nowhere near us. Yet they keep trying to convince us otherwise. So you have to ask, did we really come to see the sky today, or did the sky come to see us?”
Less than 20 years ago, cell phones were considered luxury items used only in emergencies. Today, 4.1 billion people worldwide own cell phones. Most families have at least one, and often multiple, cell phones. Children often are the heaviest users of the technology. “About 75 percent of 4-H-age children have cells phones,” said Arch Smith, interim state leader of the Georgia 4-H program. “And they aren’t using them just to talk to their friends and family members.”Ninety percent use their phones to send text messages, 85 percent to take photographs, 68 percent to send photographs and 55 percent to record videos, he said.“They make 230 calls per month or eight calls per day, on average,” Smith said. “That’s nothing compared to the 1,742 text messages the average teenager types in a month.”Set boundariesEven though cell phones have become a part of everyday life, parents should set boundaries for their use both at school and at home, says Diane Bales, a human development specialist with University of Georgia Cooperative Extension.“The biggest problem with cell phones is the number of students who are addicted to them,” she said. “They spend all of their time texting and not enough time listening.”Bales has seen the overuse of cell phones first hand in the college classes she teaches at UGA. “When a student texts in class, he’s not listening,” Bales said. “If he were texting about what he’s learning that would be different, but he’s probably not.” Many schools have rules about cell phone usage including setting limits on when the phones can be used, where the phones can be used and, in some cases, banning their use on school grounds entirely.“Cell phones aren’t inherently bad, kids just need guidance from teachers and parents on appropriate usage,” she said. “Texting at the dinner table is not an appropriate use.”Bales once observed a student texting on her cell phone while standing at the front of the classroom during a group presentation.“I have it spelled out in my syllabus that it’s inappropriate to text in class and that students will lose points for doing so,” she said. Multi-toolAccording to a survey by Common Sense Media, more than one out of three teenagers admits to using a cell phone to cheat at least once. They also admit to using their phone’s internet access to find answers to test questions. The survey also showed that one out of four teenagers feel accessing notes stored on a cell phone during a test isn’t cheating.“Some of the newer phones have cameras that students could use to take photo of their classmates’ test papers,” Bales said.Bales suggests teachers encourage students to use their cell phones, and other technical devices, to help them with their school work.“If a student has an iPhone, first I’m jealous, but he could use it to work on a research project,” she said. “The technology allows him to look something up on the Internet, find a good source of information and never leave the classroom or his desk.”Bales says teachers and parents should guide students to appropriate resource websites to ensure they use reliable sources of information.In this way, modern technology is being used to benefit the student and spark his interest in new media, she said.According to a survey by the Family Education Network, 85 percent of respondents feel cell phones should be allowed at school, but their usage should be controlled by school administrators.Whether a cell phone is being used at school or at home, Bales recommends having a definite list of rules and consequences for breaking the rules.Students should have a cell phone-use curfew and cell phone-free times, such as during homework hours, she said.“Teenagers have a hard time recognizing limits,” she said. “They need to be told what is appropriate and what isn’t in all aspects of their lives. Cell phone usage is just one area.”
Hayes Group, an integrated marketing, advertising, strategic planning and public relations firm located in Williston, Vermont has won two coveted, 2002- 2003 Golden Web Awards given by the International Association of Web Masters and Designers.The Golden Web Award is presented to those sites whose web design, originality and content have achieved levels of excellence that are deserving of recognition. Voted by the Internet’s leading IT and Web professionals, the IAWMD serves more than 135,000 members and affiliates in more than 145 countries.The Hayes Group won for its own web site: www.hayesgroup.com(link is external) and for the web site the company designed and built for Quadra-Tek, www.Quadra-Tek.com(link is external) of Arlington, Vermont. “While these awards were both a surprise,” said Matthew Hayes, president of Hayes Group, “we’re extremely pleased that the web site we created for our client, Quadra-Tek, a division of Arlington Industries, Inc., was recognized as one of the world’s best. That our own site won is a bonus. I have to admit,” Hayes smiled, “that I’m happy about winning as well.“This award confirms the validity of the global structure of the Hayes Group,” Hayes said. “Our ability to serve a client’s needs with the precise talent required is not limited to employees or geography. The Web construction firm behind these award-winning sites is in India. Concepts were developed at Hayes Group in Williston and approved by two design associates—one in Lisbon, Portugal and the other in New York City, “ Hayes added. “There is no question that the technology which now enables us to tap into a global network of talent positions Hayes Group as a creative marketing communications leader. It also enables us to provide a broader base of creativity to our Vermont clients.”
Sign up for our COVID-19 newsletter to stay up-to-date on the latest coronavirus news throughout New York A New York City man was arrested for allegedly calling up a Nassau County police precinct, claiming to be a terrorist and threatening to kill everyone in the station house last week, authorities said.John Hardy was arrested and charged Saturday with making a terroristic threat and harassment.Police said the 52-year-old Staten Island man called the Third Precinct in Williston Park and said he would place a bomb in the building shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday.Moments later, he called 911 and said that he left a bag containing dynamite inside the doorway of the Third Precinct, according to Third Squad detectives.The building was searched and the threat was found to be a false alarm.Detectives and Bureau of Special Operations officers apprehended Hardy over the weekend.Judge Rhonda Fischer ordered Hardy held without bail Sunday. He is due back on court Wednesday.
9SHARESShareShareSharePrintMailGooglePinterestDiggRedditStumbleuponDeliciousBufferTumblr As a seasoned real estate investor with multiple properties, a couple of your top concerns might be how to continue growing your portfolio and finding new and creative ways to generate income from your properties. The traditional way of renting out a property to a tenant with a year-long lease or longer is not the only option in today’s rental market. Fortunately for many real estate investors, there are alternative and practical ways to generate income from your properties. Here are two creative ways that can help continue to grow your real estate portfolio and generate additional income.1. Rent Short TermYou don’t have to look hard to be creative when it comes to generating income from a rental property. One particular option is renting your property through a short-term rental website, like Airbnb—an online marketplace for people to list, browse, and reserve unique accommodations around the world. Airbnb rentals are available for travelers to rent in more than 65,000 cities and in 191 countries. If done right, this alternative renting method could potentially cover the cost of your mortgage. Think of Airbnb as a more “homey” hotel room with the kind of amenities you’d find in a single family home, rather than a hotel room. Renting out one or more of your properties as a daily rental rather than a long-term lease could bring in serious cash flow with fewer expenses to worry about. Plus, during peak seasons or if your rental is in a location where special events take place—expect top dollar each night.In a study conducted by Airbnb in 2012, the average guest in San Francisco, where the company originated, spent an average of $1,045 for a stay of 5.5 days. The study also found that 56% of the Airbnb hosts use their earnings from renting to pay their mortgage or rent. By collecting daily rental fees, you can save the money you would’ve spent on your mortgage and use toward upgrades to existing properties you own or toward a purchase of another property to further build up your portfolio. There are many alternatives similar to Airbnb that could bring you a new way to generate additional income and help grow your real estate portfolio. continue reading »