Great Falls Girl Scout's sales savvy brings sweet success
Posted: March 30, 2012 at 1:28 pm
A personal and a professional touch has been the mark of an outstanding cookie salesgirl this year.
Lexi Burcham, 9, sold 1,009 boxes of Girl Scout cookies to her neighbors and at businesses across town.
"I learned it's a lot of work, and you have to put all your effort into it or you won't get your goal," she said.
The Holy Spirit Catholic School fourth-grader was the top salesgirl last year in Girl Scout Troup 3126 when her sales numbered an impressive 521.
Nearly every extra minute of the two-week sales period was packed with cookie selling. Every day after school, she made sales visits. When on the road, she called potential customers.
She called ahead to ask for permission to sell in banks, stores, car dealerships, law offices and restaurants.
Lexi said she wasn't nervous about approaching people, but she did get better at interacting with customers as sales progressed. When they'd tease her, she could zing right back.
Learning to graciously accept rejection was part of the lesson, too. She learned not to take it personally.
If someone said no, "I'd say thank you, hang up and call someone else," she said.
Her mom, Ginger Burcham, said many times she's seen parents do the selling.
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Great Falls Girl Scout's sales savvy brings sweet success
Can Better Data End Global Poverty?
Posted: at 1:27 pm
A leading development economist speaks on the virtues and limitations of a data-driven approach to healing the world's most intractable problems
Reuters
Do free bed nets in some countries lead to more cases of malaria? Could anti-parasite pills raise school attendance in one country and have no effect in another? How cheap does preventative care have to be for low-income families to see the doctor?
There might not be a perfect way to answer these thorny questions on a country-by-country basis. But some leading scientists think the most rigorous answer comes from what they call "randomized controlled trials."
Esther Duflo is widely recognized as the world's leading advocate of randomized controlled trials in development economics. As a methodology, RCTs have been used for over a half-century in clinical medicine, where the effect of a drug or medical procedure is confirmed or denied in scientific experiments involving control and treatment groups. The use of RCTs to address global poverty is a phenomenon of the last decade, but it has caught on with the force of a paradigm shift in economics, public policy, and other disciplines.
Last year, Duflo* and her co-conspirator at J-PAL, Abhijit Banerjee, published a book called Poor Economics: A Radical Rehinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. The book overviews much of what they have learned through RCTs and otherwise, and it stakes a larger claim against "grand universal answers" and "sweeping conclusions" about poverty. Instead, they recommend a data-driven approach that seeks specific, targeted answers to what actually works, what works better, and what works cost-effectively.
Having been trained as a physicist and an engineer, I appreciate and support Duflo's scientific approach to fighting poverty. (Full disclosure: I'm on the board of Innovations for Poverty Action, a close J-PAL partner.) Yet, reading the book, two things repeatedly came to mind: First, the best science requires theory as much as experimentation. Data without good theory is only measurement, not knowledge, and powerful theory is often sweeping. Purely as a practical matter, theory helps to sustain us when we lack data. Second, Duflo and Banerjee seem uncomfortable with their own stance against grand answers. Most of the book's chapters conclude with sections that make general pronouncements about public health, education, microfinance, and entrepreneurship, often not entirely backed up by experiment. Their final chapter, titled "In Place of a Sweeping Conclusion," nevertheless offers five broad statements about poor people worldwide.
I asked Duflo some questions about RCTs and her book over e-mail...
KT: What do you think is the greatest contribution of RCTs so far in international development?
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Can Better Data End Global Poverty?
MMRGlobal Making It Happen to Report Sales Up, Gross Profit Up, Cost of Revenue Down as Heads Toward Meaningful Use in …
Posted: at 1:27 pm
LOS ANGELES, CA--(Marketwire -03/29/12)- MMRGlobal, Inc. (OTC.BB: MMRF.OB - News) ("MMR"), a leading provider of Personal Health Records (PHRs), MyEsafeDepositBox storage solutions and electronic document management and imaging systems for healthcare professionals, plans on filing its 2011 Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2011 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, March 30, 2012 after the close of market. The Company will report increased sales, reduced costs, reduced operating expenses, increased gross profits, and decreased losses. The filing will be followed by a conference call hosted by Bob Lorsch, Chief Executive Officer, and Ingrid Safranek, Chief Financial Officer, at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time / 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time (details below).
Revenues for the year ended December 31, 2011 increased by 45.9% when compared to the year ended December 31, 2010 due to an increase in MMRPro sales, which were up 105%, and biotech licensing revenues, which were up 100%. The Company also saw revenue from investment by customers in private label website development for integration of the Company's proprietary patented Personal Health Record products and services, including Chartis Insurance and E-mail Frequency. E-mail Frequency has advised the Company that it plans on rolling out PHRs to as many as one million member clients in 2012.
Cost of revenue decreased by 8.2% for the year ended December 31, 2011 when compared to the year ended December 31, 2010. Gross profit increased to 161% for year ended December 31, 2011. The Company attributes a significant portion of the decrease in costs to the elimination of certain outside service providers, the development of an internal cost-savings platform and the creation of MMRGlobal Infocom, which now provides operating technology services and website integration and support internally. The cost of revenue decreased primarily due to changes in service providers hosting the Company's products and the formation of Infocom providing services in-house, and the development of the Company's own cost-savings platform(s). As a result, the Company's operating losses were down 51%.
"As a result of meaningful use requirements under the HITECH Act, the Company believes that 2012 is the year that healthcare professionals will seriously focus on how they will offer PHRs in response to criteria that would require at least 90% of all patients with medical records on an EMR to be provided timely access to a Personal Health Record by 2014," said Mr. Lorsch.
Over the past year, the Company has experienced continued success in licensing its portfolio of patents for both biotech and health information technology. It recently had three health IT patents issued, two entitled "Method and System for Providing Online Medical Records" and one entitled "Method and System for Providing Online Records." The Company began licensing its biotech patents in 2010 and has already received $850,000. It expects to receive additional milestone payments from biotech licensing this year and significantly larger milestone payments from biotech in 2014.
The MichaelBass Group, an investment banking and strategic advisory services firm (www.michaelbass.com), issued a special report January 20, 2012 discussing the value of the Company's HIT patents, citing the global market for Personal Health Records at $19 billion, and focusing on the patents issued, pending and owned by MyMedicalRecords, Inc. (http://michaelbass.com/PDF/JAN20MMRF.pdf)
As discussed above, revenues increased by $446,660, or 45.9%, to $1,419,648 for the year ended December 31, 2011 from $972,988 for the year ended December 31, 2010. The Company believes that the other revenues which include website development and PHR integration signal a continued long-term commitment to offer the Company' products and services. Our cost of revenue decreased to $609,212 for the year ended December 31, 2011 from $663,372 for the year ended December 31, 2010.
Gross Margin increased by 57.1% for the year ended December 31, 2011, as compared to 31.8% for the similar period in 2010. Cost of revenue as a percentage of sales decreased by 8.2% and operating expenses decreased 1.0% during the same period.
General and Administrative increased by $181,193 or 4.2% in 2011, as compared to the similar period in 2010, primarily due to higher consulting fees and a non-cash increase in MMRPro amortization expenses. Sales and marketing expenses decreased by $257,502 or 9.6% in 2011, as compared to the prior period in 2010, due to a decrease in the cost of radio and TV ads. Technology development expenses were essentially equivalent to those seen in 2010.
Losses were down 51% from the prior year. The Company lost $8,884,427 of which $2,845,222 was cash and $6,039,205 non-cash compared to total losses of $17.9 million in the previous year of which $4,212,300 was cash. Cash losses were down 32.5%.
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MMRGlobal Making It Happen to Report Sales Up, Gross Profit Up, Cost of Revenue Down as Heads Toward Meaningful Use in ...
Gov. Walker Praised for Ed Reform – Video
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House Ways and Means Committee 3/28/12 (part 3) – Video
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Streaming Server Comparison- #edtech #online #education – Video
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Will Online Education Replace College?
Posted: at 1:26 pm
Will great free courses drive down applications to places like Stanford? That's doubtful. It's more likely that these offerings will help build a stronger university brand.
Reuters
A well-run university is a machine. And as a saying used to go, attributed to a boss of my native Chicago, "Thank God we're a machine. If we lost, we'd be an organization." The old big-city machines served the interests of the powerful, but they stayed in power by delivering services to the 99 percent. And private universities could indeed share their fate if they're inflexible. But actually they're highly sophisticated and adaptable, or else so many high-school students and their parents wouldn't be going to such great lengths to get into them. It's actually the public universities that have been bureaucratically hidebound, passing up opportunities under their noses. As Bill Breen has written in Fast Company, it was Stanford's chief fundraiser who helped John Sperling launch a new style of education:
In 1972, he was chosen to run a series of workshops at San Jose State that would prepare police officers and teachers to work with juvenile delinquents. He built the program around some of the same pedagogical tools that he would later employ at the University of Phoenix: He brought in teachers who were experts in their fields, divided the class into small groups, and challenged each group to complete a project. He was surprised when the enthusiastic students lobbied him to create degree programs. Which is exactly what he did.
Sperling sketched out a curriculum for working adults and pitched it to the academic vice president at San Jose State, who promptly slapped it down. "My university said they didn't need no more stinkin' students, that they had all they could handle," Sperling acidly recalls. "They told me to go back and behave -- be a professor." Naturally, he ignored that advice. Even though he held business in contempt -- as would any right-thinking, left-leaning humanities professor -- the marketplace intrigued him. And he sensed an enormous market for degree-based programs targeted at working adults who were anxious to take the road to higher education.
Gambling that he could take the adult-education curriculum that San Jose State had rejected and make it succeed elsewhere, Sperling set about putting his ideas to work. He sought out the vice president of development at Stanford University, a man named Frank Newman, who threw a dash of reality onto his ambitions. Newman warned that educational bureaucracies innovate only out of fiscal desperation. In a letter, he advised Sperling to "find a school in financial trouble and convince the people running it that your program will generate a profit." Sperling found the University of San Francisco, a cash-strapped, Jesuit-run institution that became his first client.
And none of this is really new; it goes back to the university extension movement of over a century ago and to project like Harvard President Charles W. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books, read by Malcolm X in prison.
Will great free online courses like Thrun's drive down applications to places like Stanford? To the contrary, I think they will increase competition to get in, just as electronic music helped live concerts and online art museum galleries make most people more eager to visit and see the actual original, even when (as with the Mona Lisa) security measures mean that they could see it more clearly on line or in a printed book.
Instead of bashing higher education some Journal contributor should study it as an example of an institutional survivor that weathered the crises of 1893 (during which the University of Chicago was founded), 1929, the Vietnam era, 1970s stagflation, and the continuing recession. How many other great organizations have continued to grow? Online courses, far from the beginning of the end, are another validation of a flexible strategy.
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Milhares de mexicanos fazem aula coletiva de zumba para estabelecer novo recorde
Posted: at 5:59 am
Transcrio
6000 Mexicans preparing to dance their way into the record books.
A crowd of mostly women flocked to the capital city's Zocalo Square for the world's largest aerobics class.
Having cemented their place in history, organisers hope the participants will continue an active lifestyle.
Local authorities are looking to get people out of their houses to enjoy the great outdoors in the sprawling metropolis.
Transcrio em portugus
6000 mexicanos se preparam para entrar danando no livro dos recordes.
Uma multido, na maioria mulheres, se dirigiu praa Zocalo no centro da capital, para participar na maior aula de aerbica do mundo.
Depois de garantir seu lugar na histria, os organizadores esperam que os participantes continuem a levar uma vida ativa.
Autoridades locais esto buscando formas de tirar as pessoas de casa para que possam aproveitar os grandes espaos externos da gigantesca metrpole.
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Milhares de mexicanos fazem aula coletiva de zumba para estabelecer novo recorde
2008 Olympics Alicia Sacramone (USA) Team Prelims Floor Excercise – Video
Posted: at 5:59 am
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2008 Olympics Alicia Sacramone (USA) Team Prelims Floor Excercise - Video
Excercise F 2 – Video
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Excercise F 2 - Video