A decorated Korean War veteran from Massachusetts left North Korea on Monday without fulfilling his mission: to travel the Chosin Reservoir battleground where he was hoping to locate the remains of a friend who was the U.S. Navy’s first black aviator. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The first comprehensive map of the local interstellar medium — the gas drifting between the nearest stars — will not only help theorists better understand the dynamics of our tiny swath of the galaxy, but represents the first crucial step in paving the way for interstellar travel. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes IT
By Kenneth Rapoza, Contributor
This Tuesday in the Delta Airlines Sky Lounge at JFK International in New York there was a guy from London who was two days off his Louisville bound travel schedule because Delta had canceled flights. A young woman in her twenties, standing in line with me to find out why my flight was now three hours late to Boston, said I shouldn’t feel bad: her flight was supposed to leave a day ago to Raleigh. Chalk it up to bad weather or — as George Carlin once said, “broken planes” — still, our airports are some of the best in the world for getting their passengers out on time. According to travel industry monitor, FlightStats, Chinese airports are the worst. The FlightStats figures showed that in June 2013, out of a worldwide analysis, Beijing and Shanghai airports came in last for on-time arrivals and departures. They had by far the worst record for on-time flights – 18.3% and 28.7% respectively leaving those busy airports on schedule. FlightStats came out with their report two weeks ago, but being stuck in JFK for three hours, and listening to people stuck because of delayed Delta flights , had me thinking twice about the reliability of U.S. airports. Truth is, they are not as bad as Americans tend to believe. And despite all the billions of dollars spent on new and modern airports in China, the air traffic controllers cannot get their planes in the air on time. Chinese airline performance makes Delta look like the best airline in the world. China United Airlines had just 27% of its flights arriving on time. Large national carriers like Air China and China Southern also reported massive delays along those same lines. Mainland experts attribute the problem to excessive military control of the airspace and poor urban planning, the South China Morning Post reported on July 12. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
We all need a little faith — Faith Hope Consolo, that is. Consolo is now Chair of Douglas Elliman’s retail real estate division and she’s made it on Crain’s New York’s 100 Most Influential Women list. Many women have a hard time touting their accomplishments and promoting themselves. I know I’m one of them and, believe it or not, so was Consolo. But she got past that roadblock. Consolo shared six ways for pushing past your comfort zone and stepping into the limelight. 1.) Be motivated. For Consolo, it was a matter of survival. She lost her parents when she was young and was raised by her grandmother. Attending NYU, she had wealthy friends and she wanted their lifestyle, which included travel and exquisite clothes. Since she wasn’t born into money, she would have to earn it. 2.) Step outside yourself. Don’t personalize what you’re doing. “Pretend it’s a game,” said Consolo. Perhaps because Consolo initially wanted to be an actress, pretending was easy for her to do. Being self-promotional is just part of the role she is playing. 3.) Put on blinders. Not everyone is going to like you. Consolo doesn’t let what other people say about her get in the way. She’s dogged in the pursuit of what she wants and if one person doesn’t like her, there are plenty of people who do — and I do mean plenty. 4.) Offer assistance. Consolo never stops pushing her agenda, but while she’s pushing her own, she is continually offering assistance. She now has the goods to make things happen for others, but even when she didn’t, there were ways she could help. She volunteered and offered help to the causes she cared about and the industry she is a part of. Consolo never met a committee she didn’t like. There’s a lesson in being a joiner. 5.) Polish your ‘Executive Presence.’ Recently I wrote an article citing tips on building Executive Presence from Rosina Racioppi, WOMEN Unlimited, which trains women to develop skills and mindset-shifts to become leaders. Consolo has Executive Presence down pat in the way she looks, speaks, and acts. She ties it up in a beautiful pink ribbon, which I mean figuratively and literally. She knows how to brand herself including developing Faithisms such as “You need Faith” and after the market tanked “You need Faith now more than ever.” 6.) Build a bully pulpit. Consolo’s bully pulpit is a newsletter called The Faith Report and a column in The Huffington Post called The Faithful Shopper. She frequently interviews people in the industry. It’s a chance to get other people’s viewpoints and a way for her to share her opinions and latest successes. Consolo never misses a chance to lecture at a university and to mentor. Both build relationships with the next generation. It’s also a way to keep track of up-and-coming trends. So the next time you feel uncomfortable touting your successes, get a little Faith. If you enjoyed the article vote for Geri Stengel as a Small …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The report was released Wednesday by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
By Tom Gillis, Contributor As much as I bristle at my heavy air-travel schedule, I continue to find that the metal tube with no WiFi at 30,000 feet provides really high quality disconnected think time that simply doesn’t occur in other facets of my life. I recently went on a program with British Airways where they invited 130 people from Silicon Valley to fly SFO to LHR and work on some interesting social problems. I was struck with the high levels of engagement and enthusiasm of the participants—and in large part I attribute this to the fact that our iPhones weren’t constantly buzzing. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Kristina Moore, Contributor
Coined the business travel event of the year, thousands of industry professionals from around the world are getting ready to attend Global Business Travel Association’s (GBTA) annual convention held August 4 to 7th at the San Diego Convention Center located on downtown San Diego’s scenic harbor. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Wild wolves play an essential ecological role, so researchers must be able to track them accurately. Unfortunately, because wolves travel over wide ranges, tracking them visually is very difficult. The ability to use sound to identify wolves would make wolf surveys much more reliable. PhD student Holly Root-Gutteridge and her team at Nottingham Trent University have developed software that enables them to identify individual wild wolves by their howls. The research appears in the journal Bioacoustics. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By Joanne Camas New Jersey native Maggie Doyne is an amazing young woman who took a year out before college to travel. She ended up in Nepal, met young girls breaking rocks at the side of the road and discovered they were orphans, and founded a children’s home and school. Now she’s mom to 40 kids and runs an elementary school, recently opened a women’s center to teach sewing and other skills, and is breaking ground on a high school. People are naturally curious about her life in Nepal, so Maggie described her food and meals on her blog. “Nepal is one of the most food-deficit countries in the world, yet just about everyone subsistence farms,” she explains. “Food is never wasted and always shared. At Kopila Valley, we try to grow as much of our own food as possible. Every square inch of our yard and our neighbors’ is covered with vegetables and fruit trees. We plant and eat whatever is in season. For example, we’ll grow broccoli, that’s all we eat for 2 weeks and then when it’s finished, we move onto the next vegetable, like green beans, peas, pumpkin, or mustard greens. What we don’t grow, we source from local farmers.” Meat is only on the menu one night a week. “We try to eat animals that we raise,” she writes. “We almost always slaughter and butcher them ourselves. Our entire family eats about 14 chickens for dinner. It’s really sad when one of the uncles comes on the motorcycle carrying them all alive. An hour later they are in our soup. It’s definitely different than buying meat at the grocery store.” Maggie’s interesting in learning about making cheese with her kids. “There is an abundance of yak cheese but we don’t like it all that much,” she says. It smells a little funky.” Any tips for Maggie on cheesemaking? Post any advice here and on the BlinkNow blog, please. And if you’re interested in paying for a nutritious lunch for a Kopila Valley student, click here. Photo: Blinknow.org
Source: Epicurious
A 20-year-old British tourist was found fatally stabbed before dawn on Tuesday at a popular travel resort on the Greek island of Crete, police said. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
By The Huffington Post News Editors
MIAMI — American Express has reached a settlement with the U.S. Treasury Department over more than 14,000 tickets that were issued for travel between Cuba and countries outside the U.S., officials announced Monday.
American Express Travel Related Services, Inc. has agreed to pay $5.2 million to settle potential civil liability for apparent federal violations. The Treasury Department found that foreign branch offices and subsidiaries of American Express issued about 14,487 tickets for travel to and from the island between December 2005 and November 2011.
Read More…
More on Cuba Travel
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
THR is reporting that a TV adaptation of the 1995 Bruce Willis/Brad Pitt sci-fi film 12 Monkeys is near a series order at Syfy.
The pitch, which came from producers Chuck Roven and Richard Suckle, was for there to be a 90-minute “backdoor” pilot that would eventually lead to a straight-to-series order – much like Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica. The original Terry Gilliam film involved a time travel trek to the past in an attempt to unravel the origins of a mysterious virus which wiped out almost all of humanity.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Movies
If you’ve ever engaged in a voice over IP (VoIP) phone call or conducted a video conference over the Web, you’ve probably experienced choppy audio, pixelated video, and other “hiccups” that make these technologies frustrating to use at best and and an impediment to doing business at worst.
Those annoying interruptions are the result of data struggling to get across your network. It’s important for all of the data to get from Point A to Point B, but some types—like streaming voice and video—simply won’t work if the data can’t travel smoothly. You can solve the problem by spending a lot of money for a bigger, faster Internet connection, but the smart way to address the issue is with QoS: Quality of Service.
QoS manages network traffic, and prioritizes certain types of data over others to ensure consistent network quality. It is generally managed at the network router or switch, to direct network traffic appropriately.
Data traveling across the Internet is a lot like vehicles driving across town. If five cars leave a building to drive to a restaurant, there’s a mesh of roads in all directions, and there are multiple potential paths to take. Each vehicle could take an entirely different route, and the car that left first might arrive at the destination last.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
Lonely Planet, the world’s largest travel guide book publisher, announced last week that it is laying off several dozen top editors and publishing staff. The move leaves many wondering about the future of the company, guide books and travel writing itself. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The vacation rental industry is in a prime growth period as travelers look to save money on travel and homeowners look for new means of income. Though the industry has been around for several years, sites such as Airbnb have pushed vacation rentals into the mainstream and brought a flood of new renters and rentees into the market. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Intel’s WiDi technology promises a lot: The third and fourth generations can wirelessly stream up to 1080p video, including copy-protected content such as commercially pressed Blu-ray movies, to a receiver embedded in an HDTV, a video projector, or some other display—or to a stand-alone receiver with an HDMI output that you plug into a display. Two fourth-gen adapters, Actiontec’s ScreenBeam Pro and Netgear’s Push2TV, are each smaller than a deck of cards, with just a couple of ports. How hard could this be?
Pretty hard, as it turns out: Both devices proved enormously complicated to set up. The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix Ultrabook that I used for testing required multiple reboots, driver updates, and reinstallations of Intel’s software. Unless you’re prepared for the possibility of arduous troubleshooting, I wouldn’t bother with either adapter. But if wireless streaming is something you must have, and if your laptop supports WiDi, you might consider Netgear’s product, which was the more reliable of the two—once I got it up and running.
Netgear’s Push2TV is the smaller of the two devices. Each one has a USB port and an HDMI output for connecting to your display. The Push2TV uses its USB port for its AC adapter, which means that you can power it from either your laptop or the provided AC adapter. The Actiontec ScreenBeam Pro has a full-size USB port, but it serves only to update the device’s firmware (you update the Push2TV’s firmware via a Wi-Fi connection). The ScreenBeam Pro relies on a separate connector for power and requires a AC adapter, which makes Netgear’s Push2TV the better travel companion.
Intel’s WiDi software does not support Macs, but it does support a specific list of WIndows 7 and 8 systems (see below for more details on compatibility). It automatically detects the WiDi adapter, sets up a peer-to-peer wireless connection, and initiates a pairing routine that’s similar to the process of pairing Bluetooth devices: The software prompts you to type in a numeric code that appears on the TV. Once you do, the software starts to stream the laptop’s video and audio to the TV. The pairing routine provides security for the connection, which is completely independent of your Wi-Fi network (apart from firmware updates for the Push2TV). You need to pair the laptop and receiver only once, and you can choose to have WiDi connect the two devices automatically when you launch the program.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
By Ralph Jennings, Contributor
It’s more fun in the Philippines, as the country’s tourism slogan goes, but not if you’re doing business with Taiwan this summer. After the Philippine coast guard killed a Taiwanese fisherman on May 9, angry officials in Taipei issued a red travel alert on its maritime neighbor, no fun for airlines, hotels or travel agents. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
President Obama will travel to the Midwest this week to give a major speech about economic revival
Source: My Christian Daily
By Rent.com, Contributor When you start looking for a roommate, you’re all optimism: “I’m going to find the perfect match,” you think. “We’ll be best friends for life!” A few Craigslist searches and coffee dates later, you decide to move in with your new BFF. Things are going great until you suddenly discover you made the wrong choice. Having a bad roommate can be, well, the worst. Here are five examples of the worst roommate ever, so you know what to avoid during your next roommate search: The Stage-Five Clinger While spending time with your roommate is important, if he or she becomes too clingy, you may soon have a problem. Roommates who are constantly wondering where you are going, who with, and why they weren’t invited can be tiresome and troublesome. You don’t want to have to duck your roommate in your own home, so do some sleuthing and ask about your potential roommate’s friends and lifestyle before signing on the dotted line. The Quiet Lurker On the opposite end of the bad roommate spectrum, we have the Quiet Lurker. This ghostly individual tends to keep to his or her self, sit in the corner, and rarely engage in conversation. You’ll find that when you are in the same room together, it feels as if you are living on entirely different planes of the space-time continuum (perhaps time travel is possible after all). The Quiet Lurker rarely speaks, and can make your apartment living situation extremely awkward. The Party Animal While it’s nice to throw a party at your apartment every now and then, living with a Party Animal is not conducive to having a successful 9-to-5 job. The Party Animal is a social butterfly with dozens of friends who seem to constantly occupy your living room as if it were, in fact, their own. While living with someone who enjoys a good party can be fun, make sure you set down some ground rules right away, or you may soon find yourself looking for a new roommate. The Homebody If you have a roommate in college who was constantly homesick, you know what we’re talking about when we reference the Homebody. This person is constantly on the phone, chatting with his or her family back home, or Skyping with friends who have moved far away. Homebodies rarely have many friends in the city in which they live, and spend many a night sitting on the couch texting with friends and watching the latest releases on Netflix. The Obsessive Cleaner While it’s definitely important to have a roommate that values cleanliness, living with someone who is obsessive about it can be disastrous. Your roommate may not be OCD, but if he or she is constantly picking up after you, asking you to immediately clean your dirty dishes and vacuuming under your feet as you watch a movie, things can get uncomfortable quickly–particularly if you have a more laid-back personality. Sometimes you can work things out, but if you really can’t stand your roommate, it might …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
You’ve been there. You’re up late one night trolling job boards and in between travel ads the perfect job opportunity appears. You hear the heavenly hosts cheering you on and rush to update your resume. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
