Career Connections & Prosperity Center Media (PM); Are credit ...

The Career Connections & Prosperity Center held its grand opening and open house on May 21, 2008. The Center, a United Way of Forsyth County breakthrough initiative led by Goodwill Industries in partnership with Consumer Credit Counseling Service, Family Services Ways to Work Program, Center for Homeownership and Experiment in Self-Reliance, helps families and individuals move toward greater economic stability, higher earnings and home ownership. Services offered include job readiness and placement services, help resolving credit issues, assistance with obtaining low-interest car loans, matched savings programs for homeownership, income tax filing services and personalized finance plans. There are also classes in computer skills, GED, and English as a Second Language (ESL). For more information, please visit www.goodwillnwnc.org
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Question by : Are credit counseling courses really that beneficial?
I want to learn better money management skills and am curious if the on line courses are that helpful. If you have tried them did it seem to help in making wiser, more productive spending habits?
So true. Thanks!

Best answer:

Answer by Judy
This is better:
Go to a bookstore.
Find the very best book you can find on Personal Finance and Debt and Credit Repair.

I am a believer that you can teach yourself anything.
And these books have the knowledge and explain clearly everything.
Where do you think teachers learn from?

Get yourself a couple of great books for about $ 20 each and change your life without paying $ 600 for a course.
/

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

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FBI: 79 teen prostitutes taken off streets

FBI Operation Cross Country has rescued 79 children, victims of child prostitution and arrested 104 pimps nationwide.

By Jeff Black, msnbc.com

A three-day sweep by police agencies across the country has led to the removal of 79 teenagers from a life of prostitution and the arrest of more than a hundred pimps, the FBI reported on Tuesday.

Hundreds of FBI agents and thousands of state and local?law-enforcement officers?targeted the Internet as well as such places as truck stops, casinos and "tracks"?where prostitutes are known to walk the street in the crackdown.

The teenagers -- 77 girls and two boys -- ranged in age from 13 to 17. They are being held in custody until they could be placed with child welfare organizations, Reuters reported.

The FBI said 104 suspected pimps were arrested during sting operations in 57 U.S. cities including Atlanta, Sacramento, and Toledo, Ohio.?

---

It was the sixth nationwide sweep -- called Operation Cross Country -- organized as part of the FBI?s Innocence Lost National Initiative to address the growing problem of child sex trafficking in the United States.

Information gleaned from those arrested often uncovers organized prostitution rings, the FBI said.

"It is clear that child prostitution and sex trafficking do not just occur somewhere else on the other side of the world," Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a partner in the effort, said in a news release. "These insidious crimes are occurring in American cities and the victims are American kids."?

The average age of a child targeted for prostitution in the United States is between 11 and 14 years old, FBI assistant director Kevin L. Perkins told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March.

Police: Mother forced daughter into prostitution

The youngest victim ever recovered through Innocence Lost was 9, FBI spokesman Jason Pack told msnbc.com.

Since 2003, Innocence Lost task forces and work groups have taken more than 2,200 children off the streets, leading to?1,017 convictions, the FBI said.

Perhaps the highest profile case was the 2005 "Precious Cargo" investigation that targeted pimps involved in sex trafficking of children and female adults at trucks stops in Harrisburg, Pa. More than 150 victims were identified, 45 of whom had been identified as being exploited as children. In all, 18 people were indicted on federal crimes in that investigation. The ring leaders, Terrance Williams, aka "Sleazy T," and Eric Kays, aka "International Ross," were both sent to prison for more than 35 years.

People can report suspected sexual exploitation of children at cybertipline.com, or call?1-800-843-5678.

More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:

Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook

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Jesse Jackson Jr. takes leave of absence for ?exhaustion?

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NJ Assembly approves social media protections

TRENTON, N.J.?? Two measures aimed at stopping employers and schools from asking for social media passwords have been approved by the New Jersey Assembly.

Lawmakers voted 75-0 on Monday for the school-related protections and 77-0 for the employee-related measure.

The bills would prohibit employers, colleges and universities from requiring current or prospective employees or students to disclose user names or passwords for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They also would prohibit asking them if they have an account on a social media or networking site.

Business groups have expressed concern about the measures leading to expensive lawsuits. They also want exceptions for investigating claims against employees, like insider trading or sexual harassment.

The Senate has not yet considered the measures.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Pain Management: Open Communication Is Part Of ... - Health Articles

There are many different types of suffering caused by the pains we all have. Back problems, shoulders aches and other maladies will make for a dangerous situation in a lot of day to day activities. Pain management Peabody patients want to have on their side will take several forms as well. Their medical providers will work within several levels for the relieving of this concern.

The first level will be a simple course of anti-inflammatory drugs. Depending on the seriousness, they may or may not be prescription strength. This will be followed by behavior treatment, exercise and physical therapy. Rest and proper nutrition is also suggested as many afflictions are brought on by many things.

A nerve block is among the treatments in level two of this maintenance. It will block the sensation of the pain and can provide relief for quite some time. An electrical pulse machine, known as a TENS unit, will accomplish the same thing, giving the medical personnel a little more time to diagnose and treat.

Level three maintenance will see increasingly more complicated treatments coming into play. These will include spinal cord stimulators and, as a last resort, surgery. There are also pumping units that can keep a level of medications flowing and electrical signals that will help mask this in the end stages of cancer and other maladies.

The surgery that is part of this third level of pain maintenance can cause the patient to become ache free finally, however, there is a high risk of failure for some of these procedures. It is important to note, again, that this suffering is different for different people. No one reacts the same way and some treatments may not work at all for some people.

The most important element of pain management Peabody patients must adhere to is that communication with your medical manager must be followed up on at all times. The hurting that you are experiencing needs to be discussed as openly as possible for anything to be effective. Of course, your doctor?s instructions must be followed, as much as possible, to the letter.

Click here for more information about Pain Management: A Basic Discussion In Levels .

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Possible details of Google Nexus tablet emerge

2 hrs.

Rosa Golijan

Google I/O, the search engine giant's annual developer conference kicks off on June 27. As usual, things will start with a keynote, which may include some product announcements. One blog claims that it already knows which gadget?Google will show off?? a tablet dubbed "Nexus 7."

Gizmodo Australia's Luke Hopewell writes that?the blog's staff has "viewed a training document detailing exactly what?s going to be in the new tablet and how much it?s going to cost."?

According to Hopewell, the tablet will be a 7-inch device built by Asus ??which fits with earlier reports???and contain a 1.3Ghz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, GeForce 12-core GPU and 1GB of RAM.?The tablet will be come in 8GB and 16 GB versions, Hopewell explains. Its screen will supposedly be an IPS?display "with a 178-degree viewing angle, running a resolution of 1280 by 800." (This again matches a prior report by DigiTimes.)

Additionally, there will supposedly be NFC, Google Wallet, and Android Beam technology built into the device along with a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. The battery inside the Nexus 7 will offer 9 hours of operating time.

Hopewell writes that the?8GB version of the tablet will cost $199 and that the 16GB version will cost $249.?(Previous reports suggested that prices would range between $149 and $249, for reference.)

While leaks, rumors, and vaguely sourced reports should always be taken with a large dash of salt, there's been a lot of consistency regarding this particular device. We wouldn't be surprised if we saw it in a couple of days, at the Google I/O keynote in San Francisco, from where we'll be reporting live.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts,?or circling her?on?Google+.

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James A. Shapiro: Experimental Evolution: How Can We Watch Natural Genetic Engineering in Real Time?

I have argued that natural genetic engineering is the real creative process in evolutionary innovation. A central but undocumented feature of my argument is that cells can coordinate separate DNA-change events to produce functional new genome structures. How can experimentalists test this argument?

The experiments will probably involve microorganisms, such as bacteria or yeast. A standard procedure for measuring microbial DNA change (mutation) is to place the microbes in a petri dish where they cannot grow into colonies, count the number of cells deposited, incubate them for a period of time, and count the number of colonies that appear. Each colony arose from a mutational event that overcame whatever prevented growth (e.g., inability to utilize the nutrients provided or to synthesize a needed biochemical). The ratio of colonies to cells placed on the growth medium is the mutant frequency. We can measure how various treatments, such as UV irradiation, change this frequency.

Mutation experiments generally look for changes at a single location in the genome. With modern DNA-sequencing technology, the precise changes are easy to identify. Colonies typically appear two to three days after the appropriate DNA change has occurred. In most cases studied, suitable mutations occur in the population prior to plating. Examining the petri dishes after two or three days indicates the frequency of preexisting mutations.

Longer incubation of the selection plates often produces a large increase in the number of colonies. This indicates that mutations continue to occur under selection conditions. By counting these colonies and analyzing the population dynamics of the selected bacteria, we can determine whether selection affects the process of genome change.

When selection significantly stimulates mutations above prior levels, the process is called "adaptive mutation." Molecular geneticists agree that adaptive mutation (observed in different microorganisms) occurs when selective stress triggers natural genetic engineering activities that carry out DNA changes allowing mutated cells to form colonies.

In some cases, we know the consensus interpretation is correct. Together with my colleague Genevieve Maenhaut-Michel, I confirmed this. We studied an experimental situation where the required DNA change (a special type of coding sequence fusion) was never detected during normal growth but increased at least 100,000-fold after selection.

Other groups confirmed selection stress triggering natural genetic engineering by detecting evidence of "induced hypermutation" at various locations throughout the genome and by direct measurement of mutator function.

It is likely that more complex changes can be triggered by selection conditions. My colleague Bernhard Hauer worked for many years at the large German chemical company BASF. In order to produce certain specialty biochemicals, BASF used microbes. But often the good producer organisms would only grow on expensive nutrients. So Bernhard simply plated them on medium containing economic nutrients, waited for a month or so, and harvested the late-appearing colonies. Unfortunately, this was before the days of rapid sequencing, and we do not know what kinds of DNA changes occurred in the long time before the colonies finally appeared.

In order to look for coordinated natural genetic engineering at multiple locations, one approach is to repeat what Bernhard did but start with well-defined strains. We know that coding sequences that lack transcription signals can be activated by the upstream insertion of mobile elements in bacteria and yeast.

The strategy is to engineer strains that could only grow when multiple mobile element insertions activated several different coding sequences. For example, these sequences might encode proteins needed at various steps of a metabolic pathway (for nutrient utilization or for biosynthesis). Selection for activation of all the sequences together simply involves placing the microbes on a medium where the whole pathway is essential for growth, and then waiting for colonies to appear.

If the initial experiment was to prove successful and colonies did eventually appear, it would be essential to exclude alternative explanations and quantify the coordination. The most important control would be to show that no single activation event led to slow growth on the selection medium. Such growth could enable other activation events to occur independently later during proliferation.

Measuring the individual frequency of each single activating event over the time it took for the combined changes to appear helps quantify the degree of coordination. The expected frequency of truly independent changes would be the multiplied product of the individual frequencies. If the frequency of selecting all the changes at once turned out to be significantly higher than this multiple, there would be evidence for a coordinating process.

To learn how coordination operates, two standard approaches are applicable. One is to sequence the genomes of the individually and coordinately activated strains. Are the DNA changes the same or not? For example, if distinct mobile elements activated individual versus multiple coding sequences, we could conclude that different triggering processes occurred in the two cases.

The second standard approach is to ask if particular control functions are essential for coordinated change to occur. In the case of the starvation-induced coding sequence fusion that Genevieve and I studied in E. coli, we and others demonstrated the roles of regulatory proteases and transcription factors. To identify components of the control network is the first step to figuring out how it operates.

The approach I just suggested is relatively straightforward microbial molecular genetics. It would document cell capacity to generate an expression network by coordinated DNA changes at multiple locations in the genome. I feel confident that it will succeed. It would open a new chapter in experimental evolution.

?

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