Saturday, September 20, 2008

You Can Check That Person's Background Online

By Caden Flynn


The invention of the internet was a master stroke of a genius. It is now possible to find out just about everything about anything or anybody. It has also made it very easy to perform a background check on any person, be they a potential employee or an associate.

You may be wondering why a background check may be necessary. Perhaps you want to find out something about your boyfriend or girlfriend - do they have a secret life? Are they really married? With regards to employees, a background check can tell you if those temporary employees are going to be a risk or not.

A background check is also useful if you require a babysitter or caregiver for your child, or if you are looking at daycare centers. You can't be too careful with the welfare of your children. An online background check will allow you to find out if that person who will be transporting your child has a clean driving record and it will also assure you that they are not on any sexual offenders databases. You do not want to entrust the most valuable part of your life to someone who has speeding tickets or a drink driving record or someone who has a conviction for a sexual offense.

Any business owners who are looking to contract someone new can make use of a background check to investigate the legitimacy of the contractor. The Better Business Bureau in your local area is the best place to start your investigation into contractors as they can tell you if the contractor has any unresolved complaints. It will also provide you with the contractor's mailing address and any company offices.

Dunn and Bradstreet have access to the Federal Employer Identification Numbers of all registered contractors and you can use these to investigate the finances of the organization you are considering. If you are concerned about criminal or unlawful activity, local court documents can be accessed online as well through a background check. It can be as thorough or as brief as you wish. Trusted banks, on the other hand, can give you a whole lot of credit history report for any institution or company that you might want to investigate.

There are times when a background check can take a great deal of effort. Because your time is valuable and better spent on what you do best, it is often best to obtain the services of a company that will perform the background checks online for you. The same is true when you want to effectively work on repairing bad credit. There is usually a fee which is dependent on how much information you require. Some companies will offer subscriptions or memberships for organizations requiring regular ongoing background checks to be performed.

A few years ago, you would have expected to wait at least a few days for information that is now available for you to peruse in a few minutes!

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Protect Yourself From Identity Theft

By Rex Simpleton


Being a victim of identity theft is one of the worst things that could ever happen to someone. However there are certain steps that you can take in order to minimize your risk of becoming a victim of identity theft and here are some of them:

1. If you suspect that someone is using your identity to commit fraud crimes you must contact as soon as possible the fraud departments of the consumer reporting companies in order for them to place a fraud alert on your credit report.

When making a fraud alert, the creditors will contact you if any changes happen with your credit card. If someone opens an account using your name or makes any transactions with your credit card you will be immediately informed. There are two types of fraud alerts: initial alert and extended alert.

The difference between these two fraud alerts is in terms of their duration. The initial alert usually last for ninety days on your credit report while the extended fraud alert stays much longer and last for as long as seven years. You can choose between these two frauds alerts the best one that you think will provide you with a better protection. Plus you only have to contact only one of the consumers reporting companies since it will simply relay to the other two the fraud alert.

2. If you have been a fraud victim you can choose to close your account which has been used for transactions. If you want to check accounts that are opened in your name you should use the ID Theft Affidavit.

3. Also, a good thing is to file a report and inform the police about your identity theft and credit card fraud to make sure that you have a proof of the crime in case your creditors need one.

4. You also need to file a complaint at the Federal Trade Commission because they need to register your case in their identity theft cases database. When filing a complaint you will be informed about any legal issues and any problems that will come up during the process.

Nobody is protected from these types of frauds. All people can do is to try and be careful with their information. All over the internet criminals can take your personal information and use it to gain profit. Make sure that the companies you are dealing with are trustworthy and make sure that their methods of privacy are genuine.

Don't be deceived by those lottery emails saying that you have won something and would require you to fill up some forms asking for personal information. Don't be carried away by the promised price, it would be better for you to confirm with the company whether they have sent you an email or not. And if ever they deny it then make sure that report the fraudulent email that you receive to the Federal Trade Commission so that they can give out warnings to other consumers of the circulating fraudulent email.

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Health and Tai Chi

By Sun Chun Pak


Tai Chi Chuan has been around for several thousand years and though this Chinese system martial arts has many health benefits, many still doubt it.

It is totally acceptable that people still doubt the martial arts.

Hopefully, this article will be able to help clear any doubts that one might have.

To understand how Tai Chi helps one body, first start to know the relationship between the exercise and the oxygen capacity.

Much emphasis is placed on the breathing control in Tai Chi.

Tai Chi involves a great deal of deep and long breathing combined with arm movements that help open up the lung so that complete capacity of the lungs will be reached and they will be allowed to fill up with air.

Many people do not realise the benefit of deep breathing.

For example, did you realize that oxygen is a major factor in the burning of fat? While this does not mean that a tai chi workout will lead to rapid weight loss, it will contribute to weight loss as the exercises burn a low impact amount of calories combined with the calorie burning benefits of increased oxygen intake.

Also, by expanding the amount of oxygen that is taken into the lungs the ability for the lungs to expand their cardiovascular conditioning will significantly increase.

It is the same as doing sprinting to improve the cardio.

There is a huge difference as tai chi is a much lower impact exercise than sprinting and it will not increase lung capacity in the manner that sprinting will, but it does provide a method of exercise for those who may not be able to sprint due to age, weight, conditioning, etc.

In short, Tai Chi benefits are many and you will slowly discover them as you practise this art.

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Friday, September 19, 2008

Strategies to Maximize Productivity and Fuel Innovation

By Meredith B. Fischer


Whether you work for a dot.com start-up, a Fortune 500 company or somewhere in between, chances are you are busier than ever -- busy driving projects, motivating teams, and minding the bottom line, all while managing your workload and striving to meet increasingly higher success benchmarks. So how do you stay on top of it all and do productive work on the things that count? A recent Pitney Bowes study reveals that a significant part of the answer lies in your ability to actively manage and harness the power of your messaging tools. That's right, the phone calls, voicemails, e-mails, sticky notes, and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) that have become so ingrained in your everyday work life are actually pathways to innovation. By connecting you to your colleagues, data, projects and ideas, messaging tools are the means to the end, allowing you to improve your own personal output and benefit bottom line business objectives.

In our fourth annual workplace study, Messaging For Innovation: Building the Innovation Infrastructure Through Messaging Practices we found that the average worker manages 17 projects per week across seven work teams. Workers today are not only using messaging tools to organize their work but to enhance thinking and build the social networks that supply the raw material of innovation. While innovation is a human product that cannot be artificially created, individuals, managers and companies can create an environment in which innovation is more likely to occur. Messaging practices are the key.

As team leaders, managers are responsible for organizing the work as well as team communications. Throughout the project work cycle, teams add or remove members. It is the manager?s responsibility to bring new members up to speed on the team?s communications practices, which are different in each project phase. For example, in the brainstorming and start-up phase, teams usually meet face-to-face. When team members are completing individual project assignments, communications tend to shift to asynchronous methods such as voicemail, e-mail or fax. As the project nears completion, message pace increases and shifts back to real-time communication including face-to-face meetings or phone calls.

To help team members maintain communications protocols and project workflows, our study reveals common best practices to keep everyone in sync and on track:

Self Message. Talk to yourself. Self-messaging connects your personal, office, and mobile lives to reduce stress and overload. Send e-mails and voicemails to yourself, or write things down on the commute home. Use personal codes or shorthand for brevity.

Preview. Rehearse events and project steps to anticipate the unexpected. Try bringing home a printout of your schedule to plan how to tackle project deliverables or possible hurdles. When unexpected challenges arise, you will easily know what to do to keep the project on track.

Index Knowledge. Not only do we need to be in the right place at the right time, but also we need to have the right info with us and be at the right stage of a project. Store important information related to key projects when you run across it. Let the tools remember where this important information resides and bring it up for your use just in time for an important meeting or stage in project work.

Filter and prioritize. Workers in the U.S. send and receive an average of 204 messages from various sources every day, including voicemail, e-mail, interoffice mail, telephone, sticky notes, and postal mail. Create codes to denote the most important e-mail and sort by sender. Create a read only bin for informational communications not requiring immediate action. Hold appointments and check-ins only on certain days at predetermined times.

Rely on humans. Regular co-worker interaction facilitates the social networks that help individuals learn new tools and features, increasing productivity. Pitney Bowes? study revealed that informal training might be more productive and long lasting than formal training courses and manuals because it happens on an as-needed basis.

Establish a communications protocol. Disruptions in workflow occur when individual messaging practices are out of sync with the group. Avoid bottlenecks by establishing when and how different communications should happen. For example, share routine project updates via e-mail. Use the phone for urgent information exchanges or when and immediate response is needed.

In order to free up brainpower needed to tackle the more strategic and innovative work that is so highly valued in today's competitive marketplace, managers should help their team use tools and people to segment, prioritize and schedule thinking as well as tasks.

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

How to Protect Yourself Against Identity Theft

By Darren Cason


It is quite likely that either yourself or an acquaintance has been the victim of a criminal phenomenon known as identity theft. Conservative estimates by the Federal Trade Commission quote figures of around 9 million Americans who each year have their identities stolen. It can be in many different guises. Perhaps your identity is used by a thief to rent an apartment, or to start up a telephone account. Some will establish a credit card in your name. By the time that you make the discovery, usually after receiving a credit card statement or the like, thousands of dollars may have gone astray. You may begin to question your sanity when you notice charges on the statement and can't recall making them and when the debt collector calls, you begin to panic. The purpose of this article is to provide you with some guidance in preventing identity theft from ever occurring.

Step #1: Carefully read over and check every one of your monthly bills. It may be that the thief begins his campaign in a small way, to test whether or not you notice. If you are able to report the false charge as soon as you discover it, your financial institution will place a block to prevent further illegal transactions. If you fail to notice the small charges, though, after just a few months the thief will become more confident and may even spend thousands of your money illegally. It then becomes much more difficult to to get rid of them.

Step #2: Be sure to shred any information that may provide a thief with personal details. It is all too easy for people to simply throw out old bills that often contain their personal details. Believe it or not, there are people out there who are low enough to make a very profitable career from "dumpster diving" - searching through other people's rubbish to get the information they need to steal another person's identity. Piece by piece, they obtain enough information to use your identity for their gain. Be sure to shred any "checks" - you know, the ones that come with the credit card statement - thieves love them. They are also notoriously high in interest rates should you choose to use them.

Step #3: As you religiously monitor your monthly credit card rewards or points, you must also obtain your credit report annually - it is free, so take advantage of it as it will not only assist you in identifying any false or illegal use of your credit, such as an account at Chase flexible rewards programs set up in your name by an identity thief, but it will also help you keep track of any anomalies in the report that required deletion. It is easy to track the points you earned from Chase flexible rewards program. Likewise, a convenient way to obtain these reports is to visit annualcreditreport.com and request a copy from each of the three major credit bureaus.

Step #4: Ensure that all your personal identifying information is held in a secure place. Don't carry important things such as your social security card in your wallet - if you lose it and it is picked up by an opportunistic thief, they will have a field day. All the information they will need to steal your identity is right there for them.

Identity theft is a serious problem and it is on the rise. Many people are forced to spend hundreds of dollars to rectify a situation where their reputation has been compromised. If you choose to follow the above steps you are well on the way to protecting yourself from this insidious problem.

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Ensuring Your Home's Safety

By Ken Thompson


Everyone wants to feel safe in their own home. This is where you should feel most comfortable. This is also where you want your family and friends to feel safe as well. To do this, you may need to get home security equipment in order to make your family as safe as you possibly can. Not everyone needs to get home security equipment, but in today's age of crime, most people will at least need to consider it.

There are a number of reasons why it is essential that you have home security equipment installed into your home. After all, your family needs to feel protected, especially in their own home. However, the only way to really ensure their safety would be to have home security equipment installed in and around your home. If you're looking to buy, you'll discover that a little searching will afford you the best choice in home security equipment.

You first have two options: you can get home security equipment installed by a professional security company with all the features and security that goes along with it, or you can do it yourself with a few essential pieces of home security equipment. Getting these essential elements installed by a company will help you if you are in quick need of a security system and want the support of a company behind you if the alarm sounds.

It's also possible for you to choose the home security elements you would like to have as part of your system, and perform the installation yourself. Often, anyone is able to do it. Installing the system is simple: you map the system you want to establish, you go out and purchase the diverse machinery, and then you position them in the correct places in order for the system to function properly. By doing this, you will avoid paying the expenses of a company while still maintaining the level of security you want.

You can purchase your home security equipment in all types of places. Before you go shopping, search online for home security equipment so that you can better understand your options. You'll be able to see the variations in models and you can compare prices. Furthermore, you can begin to create your own security system with the parts you need and eliminate any parts that aren't necessary.

If you sign up with a company, you will still need to do your research. Researching a security company is just as important as researching a doctor. You need to know what the company is about, the qualifications that they have, and how well they provide customer care and services. Getting referrals and making a few phone calls will help you get the peace of mind you will need in choosing the right home security company.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Home Security Improvement Options

By Bill Gibson


In a perfect world, there is no crime. Alas, we all know that we do not live in a perfect world. Given this fact, it is vital that we take certain steps to fight crime. Adding a security system to your home is one common sense step.

A home security system is a strong step towards protecting your home from criminals. That being said, it is not an excuse to drop your guard. Failing to arm the system or leaving windows or doors open is an invitation for bad results.

Security systems come in a wide variety of applications. They range from the most basic to the type of systems you see in movies. What you should select is typically defined by the neighborhood you live in and your budget.

The first system is one most are familiar with. It is a dog. A dog with some size is a great deterrent. It will bark at strangers and is very protective. Make sure to post dog warning signs to alert everyone to your security system.

After the pup prevention system, we have the alarm system that is not an alarm system. Instead, it simply appears to be. You can buy fake cameras and place them in easy to see areas. The idea is to trick the thieves.

The unmonitored home security system is a very common choice among homeowners these days. Noise is the key. When armed, any tripping of the alarm sensors results in a blaring noise that will wake the neighborhood and scare off the thief.

As you might guess, the monitored security system is the next evolution of the security system. This system makes noise and notifies a security company if it is tripped. The security company will then call you and confirm whether there is a problem. If so, they call the police.

Monitored systems are not cheap. They also have a weakness. They only work if the phone call gets through. A criminal that really wants in can just cut the phone lines. Is it going to happen often? Nope, but you need to be aware of the risk.

From this point, the various security systems available start getting pretty exotic. You can get infrared, pressurized, panic button and all manner of fascinating and expensive systems. Generally, they are overkill unless you have a specific situation that calls for them.

So, what type of security system should you buy for your home? It depends on your area. Unmonitored systems are not that expensive and usually do the job. Of course, a dog is also a good choice.

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Martial Arts: A Fun Way to Get In Shape

By James Collett


Kickboxing began in Europe and America as an alternate to traditional martial arts and is often associated with mixed martial arts. Although not technically considered one of the martial arts, many of the competitors who enter the sport have skills in martial arts and were often among the best competitors in their chosen game. Many trained boxers also get into the sport of martial arts, after a trainer has shown them how to kick.

The rules of a kickboxing meet can change from location to location. The most typical rule of playing that must be adhered to is that a particular quantity of kicks have to occur with each contestant during the space of the round or the contestant will lose points from the score, which could cause them to lose the match. Each of the punches and kicks must come into contact above the belt and the kicking must end if one contestant is down or not standing.

There are a lot of different sorts types of martial arts that may be featured in a match and a lot of the differences in style are geographic in nature. A number of countries, including France, India, and Cambodia, have invented their own techniques of martial arts which can be distinguished by several, such as if the athletes are able to wear shoes or shin gear. In some games, the rules of the match will echo the common type of martial arts performed in that location.

The event originated in Japan in the beginning 1960's due to the fact at the time karate wasn't a full contact activity and the inventor wanted to start a sport that was full contact but still retained the essence of a kickboxing tournament. So kickboxing came to life and quickly grew to countries worldwide. Now, the activity is generally viewed found on televised tournaments and in movies extolling the skills and athletic capability of the hero who makes things right.

Other types of martial arts follow the same basic rules, but with small modifications that allow for the use of an individual style. For example, in the Japanese style of martial arts, elbows and knees may be used to hit your rival and the athlete is allowed to hit below the belt as long as the groin area is avoided.

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