Highly contagious honey bee virus transmitted by mites

Highly contagious honey bee virus transmitted by mites

Friday, June 8, 2012

Researchers in Hawaii and the UK report that the parasitic 'Varroa' mite has caused the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) to proliferate in honey bee colonies. This association is now thought to contribute to the world-wide spread and probable death of millions of honey bee colonies. The current monetary value of honey bees as commercial pollinators in the United States alone is estimated at about $15-$20 billion annually

The research conducted in Hawaii by researchers at Sheffield University, the Marine Biological Association, FERA and University of Hawaii, and reported in the journal Science(8 June 2012), showed how Varroa caused DWV ? a known viral pathogen ? to increase its frequency among honey bee colonies from 10% to 100%. This change was accompanied by a million-fold increase in the number of virus particles infecting each honey bee and a massive reduction in viral strain diversity leading to the emergence of a single 'virulent' DWV strain. As the mite and new virulent strain of virus becomes established across the Hawaiian islands the new emerging viral landscape will mirror that found across the rest of the world where Varroa is now established.

This ability of a mite to permanently alter the honey bee viral landscape may by a key factor in the recent colony collapse disorder (CCD) and over-wintering colony losses (OCL) as the virulent pathogen strain remains even after the mites are removed.

###

University of Sheffield: http://www.shef.ac.uk

Thanks to University of Sheffield for this article.

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Sobering Thought - Business Management Daily

Do you think you may have a few alcoholic employees at work? Does the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) require you to accommodate their alcoholism? Do you have the right policies in place to terminate someone who shows up to work intoxicated?

This new court ruling shows that having the right blend of policies in your employee handbook will help you lawfully terminate an employee who comes to work under the influence without violating the ADA or FMLA ?

Case in Point: George Sechler worked as a manager for a construction company in Texas and had a history of alcohol dependence. For 10 years, Sechler remained sober, receiving pay raises, promotions and eventually became the district general manager. Then Sechler began drinking again after his wife died.

As his drinking increased, his work performance and attendance fell. He requested and was granted leave to receive out-patient alcohol treatment for over a month. Upon returning to work, he signed a return-to-work agreement that required him to attend weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and submit to at-will drug and alcohol tests.

All seemed fine. Until one day when he relapsed and showed up to work apparently intoxicated.?

His employer requested Sechler submit to a drug and alcohol test. He agreed to do so but only if he could drive himself to the testing center. The company refused because it suspected that he was under the influence and could be a danger to himself and the public. He was immediately fired. (The employee handbook included a multi-step disciplinary policy that allowed immediate termination for any employee who refused to participate in a drug and alcohol test.)

Sechler sued under the ADA for failure to accommodate. He also filed an FMLA claim, saying he was retaliated against for exercising his rights for leave to get treatment. Sechler further claimed the company failed to abide by its own step-by-step disciplinary policy.

The ruling: The court sided with the company, saying the quick-trigger firing was proper. Sechler was terminated for violating his return-to-work agreement, the court said. Plus, the company didn?t have to take each progressive disciplinary step because its policy allows for immediate termination if an employee refused to participate in drug and alcohol testing.

There was one big twist in this case. The court let the employee?s FMLA interference claim proceed to a jury trial because the company failed to make his leave as FMLA leave or notify him of his leave rights under that law. (Sechler v. Modular Space Corp., S.D. Tex., 4/18/12)

3 Lessons Learned ? Without Going to Court

1. Have a drug- and alcohol-free workplace policy. Make sure it clearly states that failure to submit to a test results in automatic termination.

2. Provide return-to-work agreements. Ditto above. Make sure it clearly states the employee must follow the company?s drug and alcohol-free workplace policy and submit to at-will drug and alcohol tests.

3. Document FMLA leave and tell employees of their rights. In this case, the court said the employer interfered with the employee?s FMLA rights when it failed to explain to him his rights as required by the statute. Sechler claimed that had his employer told him he could have taken additional leave time off for treatment he would have. In turn, the treatment may have prevented him from relapsing.

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edwin - Iron Together With Metals Meant For Dry Waste ... - News ...

Dry waste recycling turns out to be a lot easier when people take part in wet-dry waste segregation programs. Why should one take part in this kind of plan? Waste segregation actually does quite a few very good points towards the atmosphere and also to individuals at the same time.

?

Dry waste recycling assists people today, firms and a few industries make miscellaneous income. It is for the reason that you will find corporations that acquire recyclable items to reuse or generate new uses for it. Moreover, business expense for garbage dump will reduce.

?

The wet waste is normally soiled things. It consists of but is not restricted to food products, personal hygiene items, soiled foodstuff wrappers and yard waste.

?

Dry wastes are non-recyclable and recyclable items which are not wet, not soiled, may be easily rinsed or cleaned. Dry recycling also consists of iron and metal recycling. Iron, steel along with tin are actually recyclable ferrous metals. Non-ferrous recyclable metals are usually aluminum, brass and also copper. Appliances, automobiles and radiators may also be recyclable metals.

?

Why bother to recycle metals? Metals are precious all-natural sources you will find in deposits that are not replenishable. It?s a good thing that recyclable metals possess everlasting reuse life mainly because it does not lose the material compound and also strength. The agents that collect and sort the scrap metals send it to plants whereby the iron and metal recycling proceed. The plants perform new inspection and more thorough sorting. After sorting, the scrap goes into a smelter for melting at a suitable temperature. Cooling and molding into bars happens after smelting. The bars functions as raw materials for the manufacturers of soft drink cans, business office products like filing cabinets, and home items such as metallic furnishings. A lot more goods can appear from iron and metal recycling.

?

Although iron metal is sturdy, it is low-cost. The great quantity in supply could be a factor why the price for this metal isn?t competitive. Iron makes up chrome steel by combining it together with other metals. There are plenty of utilizes for steel and so there is a demand for dry waste recycling for this metal. Steel is beneficial for tin cans, bridge parts and torn-down structures. Aluminum, like steel, is also valuable for vehicle parts and also appliances. Nonetheless, for home use, aluminum is helpful for doors and house windows. Recycling copper is very important in energy generation and transmission of electrical energy.

?

Iron and metal recycling sustains the metal that the world has. Furthermore, it allows us conserve a lot more power to recycle than to process raw metals. It will even take more time to do so such that it may well result to a slight increase in prices from the products that consumers use.

?

Dry waste recycling is really a plan that everyone need to publicize and apply not simply for individual benefit but also for environmental cause.

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5. Computer Recycling Louisville KY Helps Protect Nature

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Hot-job lists often misleading, overrated

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Registered Nurse Tung Tran hangs an I.V. bag for a patient at the University of Miami Hospital's Emergency Department .

By Eve Tahmincioglu

Hot-job lists tout occupations with endless positions to be had in a host of professions. But in reality, these lists can be meaningless when it comes to ultimately landing a job.

I?m stressing this today because every time we run studies on growth occupations ? done by private companies and the government ? we get a flurry of comments from readers about how some of the so-called hot jobs aren?t hot at all. Some of you are unable to find jobs or good pay in the professions these lists extol as booming, and others were laid off from these supposed growth gigs.

Here?s a sampling of comments we got after a story ran Wednesday on the 10 hardest to fill jobs, including everything from nursing to skilled trades:?

?My son has been looking for a decent machinist position since he got out of college,? wrote Old Dad.

And HookedOnSprockets, a skilled construction worker, noted: ?I laugh at the people who call me; they are desperate for workers but unwilling to pay fair wages.?

A question I posed on Twitter about whether hot-job lists were bogus was largely met with yeas. This tweet is from seasoned college recruiting expert Sharon Wiatt Jones, aka?@WiattJones: ?Yes, they often include college professor. Only about half finish Ph.D. and tenure track positions declining fast.?

Indeed, just because a job is labeled hot, doesn?t mean you?ll find a plethora of jobs where you live, or a fat paycheck. And even if there are lots of jobs that need filling, that doesn?t mean an employer will hire you, because maybe you don?t have the exact experience, or you may be a victim of age discrimination, labor experts stressed.

?There are many factors that go into each individual?s probability to find a given job,? said Enrico Moretti, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, and author of ?The New Geography of Jobs.?

Moretti believes the availability of jobs is largely based on geography.

?There are vast differences across cities in the types of jobs available,? he explained. ?Hot-job lists might give you an average, but what really matters is where you live.?Like the latest unemployment numbers, which were pretty disappointing, but if you look at some regions, or cities, they are actually doing well.?

Another factor is the ever-changing landscape of job opportunities. A shortage in one particular occupation today could end up being a glut tomorrow.

Case in point: nursing. For years, we wrote about reports predicting an impending nursing shortage, and that prompted many people to head to nursing school.

Now, things appear to have turned around. An April report in the New England Journal of Medicine titled ?Registered Nurse Labor Supply and the Recession ? Are We in a Bubble?? by professors at a number of universities found: ??The decade-long national shortage of RNs appears to have ended.?

That doesn?t mean this will be the case a decade from now. The researchers pointed out that:

Over the next several years, many RNs who entered the work force during the economic downturn are likely to leave their jobs once the economy recovers. Yet because there is no empirically based understanding of how recessions affect transitions into and out of the RN work force, employers and work force planners are unable to anticipate how many nurses might choose to leave the work force once a robust jobs recovery begins.

This shows how volatile any occupational prediction can be, and how economic twists and turns can turn today?s hot job into tomorrow?s not job.

In many of the so-called hot business professions, for example, offshoring of jobs has been a source of pain for workers and those wanting to get into these professions and make good money.

A recent report by the Hackett Group on offshoring showed that by 2016 an additional 750,000 IT, finance, and other business services jobs will head to India and other countries where wages are lower than here.

But, the report added, ?additional offshoring in these areas will begin to decline by 2014, and in the next eight to 10 years the flow of jobs offshore is likely to cease, as companies simply run out of business services jobs suitable for moving to low-cost countries.?

Clearly, it?s hard to know on what to base a decision to pick a major, get more schooling or change careers.?

The most detailed national projections on occupations come from the Department of Labor?s Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook. Indeed, many of the top-job lists out there are based on this exact BLS data.?

The report, however, wasn?t created for people looking for an occupation to get into in the near term.

?It was created for high school students to give them an idea of skills and types of jobs that will be available for them,? said Gary Steinberg, a spokesman for the BLS. ?It matches their interests with what?s out there in the workplace in 10 years.?

The BLS does have a great deal of data on job openings right now based on industry, he noted.?

But he cautioned that the data the BLS provides shouldn?t be used as a career decision be-all and end-all. ?It?s one piece of the total picture,? he said. ?It?s guidance and help for people looking at a career change or to know something about an occupation.?

So don't just use a list to make expensive decisions, such as whether to sign up for job training.

"Unless you are already trained in the area or are already in the process of being trained, the job prospects eventually turn scarce or the pay drops significantly due to an excess supply of newly qualified candidates, many of whom are now strapped with debt from getting the training needed," advised?Kevin Burns, director of the undergraduate business career center at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

"The only group that really profited was the institution that sold? the training," he continued. "Be very careful about jumping at a hot job that requires significant debt. Do the math and make sure that the long-term earnings are significantly greater than the debt plus interest required."

If you want to figure out what the hot jobs are nationally or in your region now, Moretti suggested going right to the bottom line: Wages paid for particular positions. (The BLS offers this information nationally and by state available online.)

?If you?re willing to move, look at geographic areas that pay the most; if you aren?t willing to move, look at your own area.?

But, he added, moving may be your best option if you really want to take advantage of growth occupations now.

?The difference in earning potential among American cities is the largest it?s been in 30 years,? he said, adding that as a result, ?the return for mobility is larger than it?s been in 30 years.?

?

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Why Google will soon answer your questions directly

Search engines are morphing into something new: vast brains that don't just show links, but respond directly to questions you ask in everyday language

Editorial: "Do internet companies have all the answers?"

SEARCH engines have barely changed since Google was founded in 1998. Sure, they run on blazingly fast servers and are powered by sophisticated algorithms, but the experience itself is basically the same: users enter a word or two and the engine spits out links to the most relevant pages.

That is about to change.Last month, Google rolled out its "knowledge graph", which serves up facts and services in response to search terms - not just links to websites. It is the latest step in a process in which search engines are morphing into something quite new: vast brains that respond directly to questions posed in everyday language.

"Search does a good job of returning pages," says Shashidhar Thakur of Google. "But we can go beyond that and return knowledge."

Links are not necessarily the best way to answer a query. When I search for "location of Arsenal Football Club", for example, I would prefer to get a direct answer telling me the address of the club's ground in London, rather than a link to a document containing the information. Google and Microsoft's Bing can already provide direct answers to a small number of queries, but the range and depth of those answers is about to expand dramatically.

Over the past few years, Google and Microsoft have been quietly compiling vast knowledge databases to help them do this. Their stores have been built from publicly available information, such as Wikipedia pages, as well as prices from retail websites and user reviews. "All the things that describe an object are scattered across the web," says Stefan Weitz, director of Bing Search. "The challenge is to bring them together."

This open-source data is combined with internally acquired data, such as location information from the firms' respective mapping products. It is all put together to create a "graph": a network of things, such as people and places, and the relationships between them. Google's graph contains 500 million entities linked by tens of thousands of different types of relationships, Thakur says. Microsoft's knowledge graph, which it calls the Satori database, contains 350 million entities, says Weitz.

At Google, algorithms now trawl the graph for information as well as searching the web. When I enter "beagle", for example, I am shown a panel of data on the dog breed as well as links to relevant websites. The selection of data is based on previous searches on this topic, so Google knows in this case that users are interested in things like average height and lifespan.

Microsoft is taking a different tack. Its Snapshot service, due to be added to Bing this month, will use its knowledge graph to serve up links to services associated with the search term. A search for a restaurant, for example, will still return the restaurant's website, but when a user moves the mouse over the link, Bing will give them the option of reading reviews, seeing a picture of the venue or booking a table there. Weitz says that the aim is to guess the real-world action that a user is interested in when they search and to return links that allow them to carry out those actions.

Both Google and Microsoft are also expanding the ability of their search engines to understand queries phrased in everyday language. Combined with the knowledge graph, new kinds of search will become possible. Thakur is working to make Google's search engine answer detailed questions about the world, such as listing all books that have been made into movies, or all volcanoes that erupted between specific dates.

Microsoft's service-oriented approach will be particularly suited to mobile devices, says Weitz. People on the move often want a direct answer to a question, like "how do I get to the nearest subway station?", rather than a link to a page with a relevant map.

The two giants face competition from a recent arrival that has formed a powerful partnership with one of their rivals. Wolfram Alpha, the creation of mathematician and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram, also relies on a vast knowledge store. But unlike at Google and Microsoft, where data is often pulled from websites, the 200-strong Alpha team assembles its knowledge graph from traditional, fact-checked sources and eschews use of Wikipedia. Alpha can also perform data mash-ups, such as comparing stock prices. By drawing on geolocation and air travel data it can even identify the planes flying overhead.

Alpha got a break last year when Apple announced that it was using it as the brains behind Siri, an automated assistant that comes with the latest iPhone. It is the kind of application that Google and Microsoft, which have their own voice-recognition systems, are also looking at.

And Siri may be just the beginning. Voice-activated devices could soon tap into knowledge graphs to do all sorts of things. Want to listen to that 1980s pop song that was on the soundtrack of that action flick you have forgotten the name of? Or identify the digital camera that costs less than $150 and has the best user reviews? You have to trawl a list of links to get an answer, for now, but it will not be long before the graph delivers one in an instant.

When only a human will do

Algorithms aren't much good at answering the nuanced questions that we face in everyday life, such as weighing the pros and cons of products or holiday destinations. For those queries, users might want to try Quora, a question-and-answer site that has taken off since its 2010 launch. The site's answers, which are often detailed and submitted by experts in the subject, have expanded in range since its launch and now cover health, politics and entertainment, as well as business and technology. Although the firm has yet to unveil its business model, investors seem to think it has one. The site recently raised $50 million from high-profile people in Silicon Valley, valuing it at $400 million.

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Nasdaq tries to make amends for Facebook problems

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