A Lees Summit man has earned a congressional Gold Medal award for service.

Corey Austin Daughenbaugh, 23, is one of 276 gold medalists recognized nationally in Washington, D.C. for achievements in four areas - physical fitness, voluntary public service, personal development, and expedition or exploration.

Daughenbaugh, who is a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2011, and was sent directly to St. Johns College in New Mexico to start and complete a Masters Degree. After finishing this August he intends to return to regular duty with plans to teach in the Philosophy Department of the Air Force Academy sometime in the future.

The minimum requirements for completing the Gold Level Medal requirements are the following: a minimum of 200 hours of personal development, 200 hrs of physical fitness activities, 400 hrs of voluntary public service, an expedition consisting of at least four consecutive nights, and a minimum of 24 months work in progress.

Daughenbaugh said he completed 212 hours of personal develop in a variety of leadership or management roles in the Boy Scouts, Air Force Junior ROTC (at Lees Summit North HS), Missouri Boys State, and Civil Air Patrol. For public service volunteer service included ime with the Boy Scouts, Food for the Poor (we worked in Kansas City primarily), AFJROTC, the Mid-Continent Public Library, the Elks Club, Lees Summit Public Works Day, and the Lees Summit Social Services.

He was unable to attend the June ceremony which had CNNs Wolf Blitzer and Thomas P. McDevitt, president of the Washington Times, sharing duties as masters of ceremonies and entertainment by Earth Wind and Fire.

The award is funded by charitable foundations.

Read the original:
Daughenbaugh receives congressional Gold Medal

Sarah Davidson, 18 July, 2012

Ruddick was chief operating officer at the network from 2006 until June 2010 when he made made director of IFA services.

He had been with PTFS since 1998 as compliance director and as an IFA since 1994.

Walton joined the network in October 2010 to oversee the Personal Touchs team of 10 regional sales managers who were recruited by the company that year as part of a new business structure.

Dev Malle, sales and marketing director at Personal Touch, said: "We wish Andy well in any new challenge he takes on and on behalf of everyone at Personal Touch I would like to thank him for his hard work during his time here."

Walton, who could not be contacted for comment, is rumoured to have taken a position elsewhere in the mortgage market.

He was formerly a national account manager at Aegon and spent 12 years at Legal & General where he was a national account manager and broker consultant.

Ruddick could not be reached for comment either.

Read the original:
Andy Walton and John Ruddick quit Personal Touch

WOODSTOCK, GA--(Marketwire -07/18/12)- PeopleClues, an industry leader in workplace assessments, today announced the release of "FeaturingU2.0," an eBook designed to help individuals identify their personal strengths and assets, develop a personal brand and navigate changing employment models. Authored by PeopleClues president Julie Moreland -- with contributions from PeopleClues chief strategy officer Bryan Wempen and client relations manager Cathleen Carlos -- the complimentary eBook is now available for download at http://www.featuringu.com.

A major paradigm shift has occurred in today's workforce, as free agency gains popularity and employees become more opportunity driven. To help individuals understand what it means to be a free agent, even for those who are employees, "FeaturingU2.0," explores real stories of several professionals who have embraced the concept and gained personal and business success. Moreland, Wempen and Carlos also provide resources and exercises to help readers identify their personal assets and possible derailers, and to position themselves as would a company in light of this evolving workforce model.

As president of PeopleClues and co-author of the recently released best-seller, "Women Who Mean Business," Moreland draws on decades of experience in employee assessment, employee selection, HR technology, training and development, and business leadership to help readers highlight the skills and behaviors that make them an asset to companies. Contributing authors and HR industry bloggers, Wempen and Carlos, offer their talent acquisition and social media expertise to deconstruct the workforce paradigm and perception shift and suggest new methods for connecting employers with the right talent.

"Free agency empowers the workforce in a way it hasn't before," said Moreland. "But this shift also requires that each individual be responsible and accountable for their development, brand and positioning. 'FeaturingU2.0' is a guide for individuals across industries, backgrounds and professions that provides the resources and real-life inspiration needed to craft a personal brand and recognize that which makes an individual stand out from the crowd to drive success along their career path."

About PeopleCluesPeopleClues is an award winning global provider of employment assessments for measuring job fit, attitude and level of engagement for candidates and employees. These assessments are built for pre-employment screening, career development, team development as well as training and development. Based in Woodstock, Georgia, PeopleClues provides the assessment tools that allow thousands of companies in 8 countries to make better hiring and training decisions. PeopleClues has also recently launched an industry game changer with its "ACE" "Automated Candidate Experience" product providing Clients a huge strategic advantage in allowing their candidates who have taken the assessments to instantly receive personalized feedback on how to improve the way they present themselves in their resume and interview. PeopleClues strategic partners include Insperity (formerly known as Administaff), CareerBuilder, Bond International (formerly known as VCG Software), Success Performance Solutions, Reliant, Prophecy Healthcare and Getting Hired. For additional information, contact info@peopleclues.com or visit http://www.peopleclues.com.

Read more from the original source:
PeopleClues Executives Share Expert Insight on Identifying and Building a Personal Brand in New eBook

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MlSs0gASvU

17-07-2012 01:56 The course "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application" by Instructional Designer Fatimah Wirth of The Georgia Institute of Technology, will be offered free of charge to everyone on the Coursera platform. Sign up at

See the original post:
Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application with Fatimah Wirth - Video

Online education platform Coursera wants to drag elite education into the 21st century. Yesterday, the academy jumped on board.

(Reuters)

As of yesterday, a year-old startup may well have become the most important experiment yet aimed at remaking higher education for the Internet age.

At the very least, it became the biggest.

A dozen major universities announcedthat they would begin providing content to Coursera, an innovative platform that makes interactive college classes available to the public free on the web. Next fall, it will offer at least 100 massive open online courses -- otherwise known as MOOCs*-- designed by professors from schools such as Princeton, CalTech, and Duke that will be capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time.

Founded by Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, Coursera is one of a handful of efforts aimed at using the web's cost savings to bring Ivy League-quality courses to the masses. Its peers include the joint Harvard-MIT project edX and Udacity, a free online university created by Google executive and former Stanford professor Sebstian Thrun.

But the deals Coursera announced Tuesday may well prove to be an inflection point for online education, a sector that has traditionally been dominated by for-profit colleges known mostly for their noxious recruitment practices and poor results. That's because the new partnerships represent an embrace of web-based learning from across the top tier of U.S. universities. And where the elite colleges go, so goes the rest of academia.

Coursera has previously teamed with Stanford, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan to offer 43 courses, which according to the New York Times enrolled 680,000 students. It now adds to its roster Duke, Caltech, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of Edinberg, and Switzerland's cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne.

Only one school, University of Washington, said it will give credit for its Coursera classes. But two others, University of Pennsylvania and Caltech, said they would invest $3.7 million into the enterprise, bringing the company's venture funding to more than $22 million. Literally, colleges are buying in.

And the bigger the buy-in, the better. The fundamental challenge for U.S. universities as they struggle to contain their costs is figuring out how to teach more students using fewer resources. That's what MOOCs were born to do. In theory, these automated classes have the power to create the first truly radical efficiency gains in the history of higher education, a leap that would take us light years beyond our creaky current system that, as Coursera's Koller noted to me in an interview, is still bound up in traditions that date back to the Middle Ages.

Read the original:
The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education

In a large Chinese banquet hall in Boston hung with open-mouthed dragons and bulbous red lanterns, the hot yogis have taken over. Seventy Bikram yoga teachers are sprawled between the tables. At the helm of it all, clad in a black silk suit, a rhinestone tie, and a diamond-encrusted Rolex, is one of the worlds most famous yoga instructors, Bikram Choudhury.

The small, svelte man from Calcutta runs his hands anxiously through thin, wiry hair that falls past his shoulders from a mostly bare crown. Despite his diminutive looks, his presence clearly commands the room. Heads flick in his direction from other tables, eager for proximity toand attention fromthe man they consider to be their personal guru.

Everyone here practices the Bikram method of yoga, a series of 26 postures and two breathing sequences performed for 90 minutes in a climate-controlled environment of 105 degrees. Its the only correct way to practice yoga, Bikram insists. Everything else is shit.

I have been granted the seat of honor beside him. While everyone else is discussing yoga, we are talking about one of the ugliest lawsuits to occur in this otherwise tranquil world.

I am going to go to trial to get him punishment, to make him an example, so no one will ever have the guts to do that same kind of shit, says Bikram, a man so synonymous with yoga that people are often surprised to learn he is still living and not just a mythical icon.

In September, he sued Greg Gumucio, his former student and right hand man, for copyright infringement. Gumucio once occupied the chair where I now sit. But for the past several years, he has distanced himself from his former mentor, starting his own chain of competing studios, Yoga to the People.

Since 2006, Gumucio has been growing a strong business on the coasts. He charges only $8 for a single class, while a standard Bikram class costs between $15 and $25. The result has been a billowing client roster. A total of nearly 1,000 students pass through Gumucios four New York City studios every day.

Bikram originally turned a blind eye to Gumucios hotter hot yoga until last September, when a Bikram studio in Manhattan was forced to close due to competition from two YTTP studios thriving nearby. Thats when Bikram decided to sue Gumucio for copyright and trademark infringement, unfair business practices, and breach of contract.

Although yoga is a centuries-old tradition, Bikram had copyrighted his particular version under the same protections afforded to choreographers. And he had used it to bat down competitors from practicing it without paying franchise fees.

But Gumucio proved the greatest threat to his multimillion-dollar empire.

Go here to read the rest:
The Hot Yoga War

"What kind of crazy company," a friend emailed me, "pays for yoga classes for their employees and then insists on their right to get the least possible benefit from them?!"

And it does seem ludicrous, both what we've been hearing about Facebook's employee-coddling culture, and the image of a student reaching down from ardha chandrasana (half moon pose), a fairly challenging balance position, to punch in a text. This says so much about our current culture that I look forward to seeing it depicted on a New Yorker cover sometime soon.

Both the yoga community and my colleagues and students at Pixar, where I've been the company yoga teacher and provided wellness support for the past 17 years, have been abuzz with the story of a Facebook yoga instructor fired for insisting that this student turn off her cell phone during class. The consensus seems to be strongly on the side of the teacher, and I've heard much ridicule of Facebook's purported policy, not just from yogis, but from high tech industry friends as well. That email came from a web designer who is one of the most wired people I know, constantly texting during live conversations and never out of touch with his own Facebook page.

This issue hasn't actually come up for me; when a phone rings in my studio, the student who forgot to turn if off always scrambles, red-faced, to take care of it. And in my corporate classes, students don't even bring their phones; yoga is their break from being plugged in, and they don't want it disrupted by technology any more than I do. For the most part, I agree with my friend's assessment. As a yogi, it's disheartening to hear that yoga students would even have to be asked to turn off their phones. But there are two sides to every story.

Bringing yoga into the business world is a tricky mix, one that requires blending two completely different sets of needs, goals, and expectations. While a "no phones" policy is indeed a completely reasonable guideline for yoga classes, the fired teacher was not teaching in a dedicated yoga studio, and unless that rule is explicitly supported by the company she's working for -- and there were two companies in play here, Facebook and Plus One Health Management, the outside contractor that oversees FB's fitness classes and gym -- it's not her policy to set. She can request compliance but not demand it.

I started my career teaching yoga at UC Berkeley, where my classes were held in a basketball court. This was very early in the explosion of yoga into the mainstream, and I was sometimes astonished at what seemed to me extremely rude behavior. But I quickly realized that my expectations were born out of the yoga culture, and not necessarily shared by people coming to classes because their health club happened to offer them. I learned that teaching yoga etiquette -- for example, discouraging latecomers from tromping noisily through a room full of meditators -- was sometimes part of the job, especially when bringing yoga outside of its home environment.

Yoga teachers are only human; like anyone else, we have impatient moments, and times when something pushes our buttons that we handle less than skillfully. So if an incident like the one at Facebook happened in my class, I hope I'd have the presence of mind not to roll my eyes, but I can't swear that wouldn't be my first reaction. Still, glaring at a student with disdain seems out of bounds, no matter how absurd her behavior might seem. Another option would have been to respectfully ask the person to step outside to take care of whatever urgent business needed her attention, and return when she could focus. Imparting those lessons is far more effective when it's done with kindness. And a gentle, supportive approach is more in keeping with the spirit of yoga as well.

Ms. Van Ness is on record as saying that there's nothing "going on at Facebook that couldn't wait a half an hour," but that's a presumptuous statement, and not something she's in a position to decide. Even though I haven't had students use phones in my classes, people do often come in late or let me know they have to leave early for a meeting, and although it's not ideal to take a partial class, I've always felt it was better for them to get some practice time in than to miss it altogether. In my view, as with eating your vegetables, some yoga is better than none. And the job of teaching in a corporate setting is to support the employees' well-being in the context of their own culture.

Does that mean it's okay to text during yoga class? No, of course not. Not only is it detrimental to the student's own experience, it's distracting and rude to the other students as well. However badly this was handled on all sides, the bottom line is that multi-tasking is the opposite of yoga. The whole point is to train the mind to focus and be present through the physical practice. And that's where my high tech friend is absolutely on target. You only have to know a little bit about the physiology of stress, and the holistic effects of yoga, mindful breathing, and meditation to understand that the benefits of these practices are hugely reduced if they're not given full attention. Sort of like serving those vegetables deep fried.

That's something both Facebook and Plus One could benefit from considering: What are the goals for offering these classes, and how does a policy that "employees should be allowed to do whatever they want" affect the quality of what they're providing?

See the article here:
Sandy Blaine: When Worlds Collide: High-Tech Yoga

The firing of yoga instructor Alice Van Ness because she glared at a Facebook employee texting while in a half-moon yoga pose has Sacramento yoga teachers dumbfounded.

"If someone argued for keeping their cellphone with them, I'd kick them out of class and tell them not to come back," said Bill Counter, who has been teaching yoga for more than 21 years at Absolutely Ashtanga Yoga. "That isn't appropriate behavior. Only if they were a doctor expecting a call, I'd understand."

Jennifer Sadugar, founder of the Yoga Solution, works with people dealing with pain, depression and various illnesses. "To do a pose and text is a safety issue. It's a strain on the body, and one could get hurt, or fall and hurt someone else," she said. "Only ER doctors or nurses can put their phones on vibrate, and if they have to text or take a call, they leave."

Laura Francis, instructor at Zuda Yoga, said Van Ness' dismissal was shocking.

"There are absolutely no cellphones in my classes. It's disruptive to other students. I'd ask them to leave if they tried to text," she said. "It's pretty standard policy that you leave your cellphone outside. There isn't a teacher here who would say it's OK to keep it with you."

Last month, Van Ness, 35, of San Carlos was teaching a yoga class at Facebook's Menlo Park campus when one employee was typing a text during the half moon pose, according to the Associated Press.

AP reported Van Ness, who has instructed yoga for six years, asked the class not to use cellphones during the yoga session. Plus One Health Management, which oversees the yoga and gym programs for Facebook, terminated her two weeks later, AP reported, because she had been warned she couldn't enforce a cellphone ban and after the Facebook employee complained that she glared at her. Neither Plus One Health Management nor Facebook would comment for the AP story.

Van Ness' glare cost her job and a third of her monthly income.

Instructors in Sacramento said they go by the assumption that their students understand not to mix cellphones and yoga. "I don't think someone would even try to use a cellphone in my class; I have an understanding with my students about the seriousness of the subject," said Gary Vercelli, Iyengar yoga instructor at the Yoga Solution. "One must respect that yoga has no distractions."

Yoga instructors aren't the only one sympathizing with Van Ness. Her personal website has started to collect an array of supportive comments.

Read more from the original source:
Sacramento yoga teachers back Facebook instructor who was fired

Fencing, despite its masked and padded exterior, hurts.

And not in the physical sense.

You get hurt emotionally, more than anything else, Greg Massialas said. Because its still a confrontation. Its life or death, in a sense.

He should know.

A fencing veteran of three Olympics (1980, 1984 and 1988), Greg was turned away each time and each time without hardware. But after coaching last years USA fencing team, Greg will again return to the grandest of international stages this month for the 2012 London Games.

Though hell return not only as a coach.

When I was five or six, I may have not understood the grandeur of the Games, Gregs 18-year-old son, Alexander Massialas said, the youngest male fencer at this years Olympics. But I told my dad, Hey, Im going to be an Olympic champion.

Given his childhood, the early proclamation is anything but surprising. His youth was one dominated by the sight of his fathers foils and Olympic rings. But the 6-foot-2, 155-pounder a recent graduate of San Franciscos Drew School and the International Fencing Federations No. 13 senior foil fencer in the world never had a blade forced upon his right palm.

I never forced them into doing it. If anything, I actually kind of kept them away from it, said Greg, whos daughter also fences. Its something they wanted to do for themselves. Unless its something you want to do for yourself, you will not be successful, in my opinion.

And so far, the younger Massialas has succeeded. In shuffling schooling and fencing careers for most of his adolescent life, hes collected numerous championships and medals, including a bronze in the 2012 Paris Foil World Cup.

More here:
Father-son duo lead USA fencing team in 2012 London Games

Named one of Time magazines 25 most influential Americans, Stephen R. Covey, bestselling author of the self-help book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," worked to help individuals discover how they can be more effective by making conscious decisions as to how they will respond, act, and think. More than 25 million copies of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" have been sold worldwide since its publication in 1989, but Covey was insistent that what he taught was not original but rather was based on universal principles and mostly common sense he credited himself only with laying the material out. Covey held a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University and spent the majority of his career teaching at Brigham Young University as a professor of organizational behavior and business management. In 1997, Covey co-founded Franklin-Covey, a leadership development organization that aims to help individuals and organizations improve through coaching, mentoring, workshops, and assessment services based on Coveys principles. It is the largest management and leadership development organization in the world.

- Elizabeth Drake,Monitor contributor

Photo: Steve C. Wilson, AP

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are or, as we are conditioned to see it.

Read the rest here:
Stephen R. Covey: 7 essential quotes to commemorate his life