Life, Spirituality, Enlightenment, Finding Happiness
Life, Spirituality, Enlightenment, Finding Happiness.

By: Todd McLeod

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Life, Spirituality, Enlightenment, & Finding Happiness - Video

Here are some photos taken of the eclipse in the U.S., China and Nepal:

The eclipse as seen near the "Enlightenment Giving Power" statue by John Gelert, which sits at the top of the dome of the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, N.J. Julio Cortez/AP hide caption

The eclipse as seen near the "Enlightenment Giving Power" statue by John Gelert, which sits at the top of the dome of the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, N.J.

The Earth's shadow begins to fall on the moon as it goes behind a weather vane shaped like a Spanish galleon on the Freedom Tower in Miami. Wilfredo Lee/AP hide caption

The Earth's shadow begins to fall on the moon as it goes behind a weather vane shaped like a Spanish galleon on the Freedom Tower in Miami.

A photo taken using multiple exposures in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui province. Guo Chen/Xinhua/Landov hide caption

A photo taken using multiple exposures in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui province.

The moon glows red as it rises during a total lunar eclipse as seen in Kathmandu, Nepal. Narendra Shrestha/EPA/Landov hide caption

The moon glows red as it rises during a total lunar eclipse as seen in Kathmandu, Nepal.

The "blood moon" eclipse above the Washington Monument just before dawn on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. Andrew Harnik/The Washington Times /Landov hide caption

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The 'Blood Moon' Eclipse Was Quite A Show

Great Gayathri Mantra 324 Chants For Enlightenment Success Meditation Success Study
Great Gayathri Mantra 324 Chants For Enlightenment Success Meditation Success Study.

By: Om Shri Meditation

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Great Gayathri Mantra 324 Chants For Enlightenment & Success Meditation & Success Study - Video

Joy S. Gilbert, 9-20-14 Pt 2 Enlightenment, Manifesting Omnipresence Omniscience
Joy shares the concept of Crazy Wisdom known within Tibetan Buddhism and discusses how it is a natural manifestation of the Buddha Nature. In fact, someone who is Enlightened will naturally...

By: Joy S. Gilbert

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Joy S. Gilbert, 9-20-14 Pt 2 Enlightenment, Manifesting Omnipresence & Omniscience - Video

View Larger View Larger The Bottom Line Other Business Features Local Stories from ThisWeek More Articles By JD Malone The Columbus Dispatch Wednesday October 8, 2014 1:53 AM

The guys running Mill Street Distillery in Utica didnt get their inspiration to make moonshine from some deep-woods still or a friends basement experiment.

They found distillation enlightenment in Crete.

On various trips, Carlos Ogden, Jeff Thompson and their partners discovered artisanal pot-still liquors in villages across the island. Most of the booze was grappa, made from the second pressing of grapes, and the few bottles they brought home didnt last long.

We couldnt wait another 10 months for another bottle, Thompson said. There was only one way we could do it and not get into too much trouble.

That was to make their own. They laid plans for a distillery and started asking friends what they thought about it. The response was overwhelming.

We said we needed money for a distillery, Ogden said, and there was money coming from everywhere.

They chose moonshine as their standard product because no one else made it in Ohio, it doesnt have to age like bourbon or other whiskeys, and it can be made year round from Ohio corn.

Ogden said he was stunned when he found out no one else in Ohio made or marketed moonshine before last year. It could be partly because of Ohios history as the bedrock of the anti-alcohol movement. In 1919, deep in the Westerville headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League, teetotalers would have raged over a place like Mill Street.

Ogden strides around the year-old distillery, a short jog down a gravel drive off Uticas main drag, in a gray shirt that reads, Moonshine is not a crime.

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Moonshine distillery in Utica launches grappa

GoldRing Project Abundance ENLIGHTENMENT
The Goldring has reached over 20 million people sharing the vision of a better world in the present and the future with glimpses of meaning from the past. Th...

By: rysa5

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GoldRing Project Abundance ENLIGHTENMENT - Video

The Enlightenment- Part I

By: PA History

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The Enlightenment- Part I - Video

Whether seeking to maintain compliance or to drive business value, emerging technologies can unleash tremendous potential.

Just as Buddhist monks endure frigid Himalayan conditions in the pursuit of enlightenment, the financial services industry has weathered multiple financial and regulatory storms, yet still awaits enlightenment. The emergence of recent disruptive technologies may help, however navigating the various complexities internal to banks global operations and regulatory nuancesis of critical importance on the path to enlightenment.

Certain disruptive technologies such as complex event processing (CEP) engines, machine learning, and predictive analytics using emerging big-data technologies such as Hadoop, in-memory, or NoSQL illustrate a trend in how firms are approaching technology selection to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

At the same time, regulatory pressure, widely felt by global financial institutions for US and foreign banking organizations, has created seismic shifts in financial markets, causing banks to reshape business models in terms of services they offer, clients they serve, and products they take to market.

Banks are looking for the panacea to achieve regulatory and profitability goals within their organizations. To be successful, banks must consider the reality of siloed operations and complex legacy technology infrastructures and overlay these emerging technologies to promote unprecedented visibility on operational and regulatory issues and tap into hidden profitability.

In their pursuit of regulatory enlightenment, banks are considering four key drivers, which are accelerating the adoption of advanced technology in the compliance function:

1. The changing role of the CCOUnder Dodd-Frank, the chief compliance officer (CCO) now carries ultimate responsibility to ensure compliance programs, operations, policies, procedures, and technology footprints are effectively meeting newly mandated requirements. Naturally, CCOs have become more involved in technology decisions, helping shape the overall compliance function with more integration points and influence on the business across trading, operations, and risk management. Further, as the CCOs role and area of responsibility expands into oversight of social media interactions of traders and associated persons, it becomes clear that existing surveillance technology is insufficient.

2. Multiple regulatory requirementsWhen one looks across Dodd-Frank, Volcker Rule, DFAST, CCAR, BASEL III, FATCA, and LEI compliance requirements, the sheer number of hours and diverse skillsets needed to ingest, interpret, and plan the regulatory response is daunting. As a result, banks and other financial institutions have had to build core capabilities to interpret, plan, and implement solutions using lawyers, consultants, and internal talent. The check-the-box compliance response, where existing or new point solution technology is deployed, has little positive impact on profitability. Furthermore, the initial investment to achieve compliance is quickly lost as rules inevitably change, as more asset classes are added, new geographies are entered, and business models evolve. In order for compliance technology to be sustainable into the foreseeable future, its ability to evolve with constantly changing business and regulatory paradigms should be viewed as an intrinsic requirement.

3. Multiple geographies and jurisdictions To further complicate matters, regulatory alignment across jurisdictions remains an issue. As a recent example, we dont need to look further than the requirements imposed by the CFTC, SEC, and Federal Reserve for how the differently nuanced rules caused banks delays in interpretation and implementation of a regulatory response --affecting banks globally across holding-company/legal-entity structuring and long-term capital plans. Looking across national boundaries, the problem is compounded with multinational rules and jurisdictions such as FSA, ESMA (e.g., MiFID, EMIR), and JFSA to which compliance is required in a similar but nuanced fashion. Banks also face the challenges of navigating substitute compliance, cross-border implications, and suitability of home-country regulations and whether or not the counterparty is a US person. Emerging regulatory compliance solutions need to accommodate this global need as the effect of nuances and region-specific complexities will continue to be compounded.

4. Business model changesAs banks react to the swath of new regulations, jockey for a position in an unforgiving global economic climate, and seek to shift their business models, they must have access to deeper data and analytics outputs upon which to base their decisions. Historically, banks have used traditional data warehouse and decision support systems, with substantial manual intervention yielding temporally sparse outputs -- and in many cases the decisions are informed by stale or incomplete data. With a banks business model typically spanning 24/7 global operations across multiple legal entities, the banks technology solutions must offer visibility across a complex global and rapidly changing operating model, while accommodating global, regional, and national regulatory requirements.

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4 Factors Driving Enlightenment & Big-Data Adoption in Regulatory Compliance

With more apps moving to the cloud, Cisco Systems Inc.s Raghunath Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer with the companys Data Center Business Group, thinks that Oracle Corp.s commitment to cloud makes sense. So while Oraclehas been touting it benchmark leadership, Cisco has been a key part of Oracles move towards the cloud, and its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) also compares well when benchmarked. Nambiar stopped by theCUBE at Oracles Open World conference to talk with Jeff Frick and John Furrier about UCS benchmarks and his predictions for the future of the data center.

People care about benchmarks, said Nambiar, because they enable comparison based on performance, price, and efficiency in a vendor-neutral way. The numbers are important for customers, vendors, and the organization itself. In terms of setting benchmarks, Nambiar said, Cisco has been doing extremely well. In fact, in the past five years, the company has achieved more than 95 industry benchmark reports.

Many members of the benchmarking community, Nambiar said, are employed by major vendors. Its their task, he explained, to remain neutral so consumers can accurately assess their options. When companies compare against each other, it creates an exciting, competitive environment, Nambiar said, and one from which customers benefit because prices go down while performance goes up.

Nambiar went on to discuss Ciscos relationship with Oracle, touching on Cisco customer use cases for Oracle and detailing that the modern enterprise applications fit into three buckets. These include:

1. Traditional, like transaction processing and enterprise data warehousing, for which Nambiar says Ciscos UCS is a great fit.

2. Emerging, like big data management, in which tools like Hadoop play an important role. Nambiar says that UCS is a good fit for this type of application, and is especially ideal if customers want to combine traditional and emerging applications.

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Enlightenment through benchmarking, the Cisco way|#oow14

To understand whats going on with MNsure, we can appeal to dogs for enlightenment.

Consider a world in which there are only four dog breeds: Border Collies, Huskies, Malamutes, and Utonagans (yes, there is such a thing). All Border Collies live for 17.2 years, all Huskies for 8.1 years, all Malamutes for 1.8 years (poor things), and Utonagans for negative 9.1 years (dying 9 years before they are born; best to overlook the metaphysical implications).

If we then compute the average lifespan, wed find that the average dog lives to be 4.5 years. But does that 4.5-year average lifespan give you any meaningful information about how long your dog will live?

Not really. And what if there were altogether 22,000 dogs, but only 770 of them were Utonagans? Would that change things? Shouldnt the life expectancy be adjusted according to the number of dogs in each breed?

Welcome to statistics.

If we switch from dogs to MNsure providers, the above scenario is part of whats at issue in the debate over the recently announced increase in MNsure rates. Last week, MNsure providers Blue Cross Blue Shield, HealthPartners, Medica, and UCare and the Minnesota Department of Commerce reported the percentage changes in rates for 2015 as, respectively, increases of 17.2 percent, 8.1 percent, 1.8 percent; and a decrease of 9.1 percent.

The strict mathematical average of these four numbers is indeed 4.5 percent. But does that 4.5 percent number give any meaningful information about individual rate increase? It doesn't, for the same reason the average lifespan didnt tell us about how long your dog would live. Unless you are bundling coverage in equal amounts from these four providers, the increase in a persons premium will not come close to a 4.5 percent increase.

The 4.5 percent number gets even more confusing when we consider that the provider with the lowest rates and the most private health plans in MNsure (with 60 percent of them), Preferred One, is leaving the program. The exclusion of Preferred One further skews the statistics, because any Preferred One consumer who either switches to one of the other providers or stays with Preferred One will have a much, er, healthier increase. (We wont even mention that a HealthPartners spokesman said that he wasnt sure how the Commerce Department arrived at the 8.1 percent figure.)

A better measure of the increase is a weighted calculation. That is, the providers with more subscribers would have their increases given proportionally greater significance in computing the overall change. Of the four providers, Blue Cross Blue Shield has 55 percent of the remaining MNsure subscribers (or about 12,300 people); HealthPartners has 30 percent (6,800 people); Medica, an 11 percent share (2,500); and UCare a 3 percent share (770).

Using a weighted measure, the aggregate increase in revenue for these four providers assuming no changes in the subscriber base would be approximately 11.8 percent, which more accurately reflects the increase in premiums. But that 11.8 percent still doesnt take into account the wild card of the 60 percent of MNsure subscribers orphaned after Preferred One jumped ship.

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Why MNsure's 4.5% 'average' rate increase tells us almost nothing about MNsure rates