– Illiteracy is causing irreparable damage to our society. If you think that sounds like an exaggeration, you’re wrong. For proof, check out these illiteracy statistics.

Illiteracy Statistics

In a study of 20 ‘high income’ countries, the US ranked 12th on literacy tests. Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their child. A few other shocking facts:

• 50 percent of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level.
• 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.
• Nearly half of all Americans read so poorly that they cannot find a single piece of information when reading a short publication.

How Illiteracy Affects Job Prospects

• 3 out of 4 people on welfare can’t read.
• 20 percent of Americans read below the level needed to earn a living wage.
• 50 percent of the unemployed people who fall between the ages of 16 and 21 cannot read well enough to be considered functionally literate.
• Between 46 and 51 percent of American adults have an income well below the individual threshold poverty level because of their inability to read.

How Illiteracy Affects Society

• 3 out of 5 people in an American prison can’t read.
• 85 percent of juvenile offenders have problems reading.
• Approximately 50 percent of Americans read so poorly that they are unable to perform simple tasks such as balancing a checkbook and reading prescription drug labels.
• To determine how many prison beds will be needed in future years, some states actually base part of their projection on how well current elementary students are performing on reading tests.

How Illiteracy Costs Taxpayers

• Illiteracy costs American taxpayers an estimated $20 billion each year.
• Illiteracy has been proven to cause children to drop out of school. Dropouts cost our nation $240 billion in social service expenditures and lost tax revenues.

The Fight Against Illiteracy

The fight against illiteracy is a constant battle. Activists are working to strengthen education amongst young people and amongst adults. If you want to join the fight, there are numerous organizations that accept volunteers and donations.

You can also help to prevent illiteracy by encouraging a young person in your life to read. Enroll them in a book of the month club or buy them a book you know they will enjoy reading.

In short, do your part. The fight against illiteracy is important. If we continue to ignore what is becoming a growing epidemic, we set our entire country up for failure.

Statistics for this article were obtained from the following sources: National Institute for Literacy, National Center for Adult Literacy, The Literacy Company, U.S. Census Bureau

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The Wacky World of Student LoansHow banks rip off college students and the government.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Saturday, Sept. 15, 2007, at 7:14 AM ET If you know anything at all about the federal student loan program, you will not have been surprised by the scandal of recent months. The only amazing thing is that it has taken so long to arrive. Here’s how the program works: Banks and other private companies lend money to students. The federal government pays part or all of the interest—currently 7 percent or 8 percent. The government also guarantees the loans.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, the government itself borrows the odd nickel to finance the national debt. This borrowing, obviously, is also guaranteed by the government. For that reason, it carries an interest rate of only 3 percent or 4 percent. If the government can borrow money at 3 percent or 4 percent, why should it be paying 7 percent or 8 percent for the privilege of guaranteeing loans to someone else? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the government to loan out the money itself?

That is the $4 billion question (the approximate annual cost of the interest subsidy). And the answer is: Of course that would make more sense. It is what any levelheaded businessperson would do. And what is stopping the government from behaving like a levelheaded businessperson? Not those head-in-the-clouds Democrats. It’s Republicans, who adopted the student loan “industry” in its infancy, like a stray cat, and have nurtured it and protected it ever since. There actually is a parallel student loan program that does use government funds. It was started in the early days of the Clinton administration. It costs less to operate, and it has not been tainted by scandal. But when the Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994, they pushed through a law forbidding the Education Department to encourage the use of this program. As a result, direct federal loans account for only 25 percent of all student loans.

There is plenty of other encouragement going on. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has extracted fines of more than $1 million each from prestigious institutions like Columbia and Johns Hopkins—and, for that matter, nearly as prestigious institutions like Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. It seems that kickbacks were being paid to university financial aid officers who delivered customers. Some of them even got stock in some of the more specialized, and dubious, student loan companies. When the government is giving away free money—which is what the program amounts to (and I mean giving it away to the banks, not to the students)—it’s worth a good deal to get cut in on such a good deal.

When the student loan abuse story broke, fingers were pointed at the Education Department, which is supposed to supervise the program. The Government Accountability Office minced no words. It called on the department to “develop a protocol to determine the appropriate level of response for cases of non-compliance and assess the effectiveness of these actions to inform and improve this protocol.” Wow. While the Education Department quaked in its boots over that one, Congress more usefully passed a bill substantially reforming the student loan program and cutting the subsidy to banks and other loan providers by 80 percent. President Bush, to his credit, will sign these reforms into law. In fact, he actually proposed some of them in his budget from February of this year. But this puts him at odds with his party.

The student loan “industry,” as it is comically referred to in the newspapers, is an interesting case study in politics and business. To start, it is hardly an industry. There are no factories. The only things it “makes” are loans. Furthermore, it exists only because of a government program. Yet in the four decades since the federal government started it, the student loan business has evolved into a pretty good imitation of an industry, with trade associations, lobbyists, and support from politicians, mostly Republican. This “industry” is so dependent on the good will of politicians, in fact, that the reform bill alone may be enough to queer the deal in which its biggest player, Sallie Mae, is supposed to be bought by a private-equity firm for $25 billion. Even before taking over, the private-equity firm booted Sallie Mae’s CEO on the explicit grounds that he did not have good relations with Democrats. To run this so-called company, in other words, you don’t need to know how to make widgets or even how to make loans. You just need to know how to make nice. But don’t feel too bad for this CEO who suddenly found his Rolodex obsolete: He made $40 million last year and will get millions more if the deal does go through.

But why do Republicans love student loans? Oh, in part the usual reasons: lobbyists and campaign contributions. There is almost sure to be at least one of these firms in your district—the local bank, if no one else. But there is more. Student loans are the clearest example of the common Republican confusion between free-market capitalism and business. Capitalism is an economic system that is held, with some justification, to be the best guarantor of prosperity. Business can be capitalism in action, or it can be something entirely different. There is very little about the student loan program that has anything to do with free-market capitalism. Yet whenever the student loan system comes under criticism, lobbyists, “industry” leaders, and supportive politicians haul out the same old clichés as if they were defending Adam Smith’s famous pin factory itself.

During the recent reform bill debate in the House, for example, a Republican from Texas, Jeb Hensarling, declared that the very notion of reducing the subsidy to private companies was “all part of a Democratic tax-and-spend program.” Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, declared that “we should call this the new Democratic welfare bill,” because it was “taking away personal responsibility from people and giving them out and out payments for loans that they take out.” This may be referring to a part of the bill that would forgive loans after many years for people who devote their lives to public service. Or it may just be nuts.

A so-called “analysis” by an industry expert, which (according to the Washington Post) circulated on Capitol Hill during the debate, worried that the big boys would survive, but the subsidy reductions “may leave smaller lenders unprofitable.” Concern for “small lenders” was a common theme, as if a loan from a ma-and-pa bank, if such an institution exists, would be warmer and cuddlier than a loan from Citibank. Another common theme was that the subsidy cut was part of a covert Democratic effort to drive people into the direct federal loan program—or, as one lender CEO described it, the “one-size-fits-all direct loan program.” This would be no bad thing, but it doesn’t seem to have been the case. I’m not sure what “one size fits all” means here, but if it refers to the interest rate that students and their families have to pay, it’s true that there is only one rate in the government program, compared with many in the private one—all of them higher, but maybe there are people for whom the variety is worth it.

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In a move to lessen if not prevent plagiarism among university students, Google is banning advertisements by essay writing companies and services from its advertising fold. The ban on these kinds of advertisements came after numerous complaints have been filed by university authorities who have numerous incidents of students submitting unoriginal or copied essays and other research reports.

This advertisement ban was welcomed by university authorities but not so much by writing companies who have been in the business of writing for pay activities. Moreso by freelancers who are employed by these companies. Claiming that their business is legitimate, the writing companies said that when they are engaged by students, who incidentally are mostly foreign students, they make it clear to their clients that they should not in any way claim or allude that the article these companies wrote are written by the students themselves.

I think Google is over reacting to the complaints of university authorities. I would have to side with the writing companies argument. After all, they too are legitimate companies which have the right to purchase advertising spots not only from Google, but from other online companies as well.

As for students, better save the name and particulars of the writing companies they are currently dealing with. They might lose valuable services provided by these companies if they don’t bookmark their sites. Sooner or later, you wouldn’t find a good link to a reliable writing company once Google bans advertisements of these companies.

May 22nd, 2007 by Arnold Zafra

P.S

Check Google, custom essays and term paper writing adverts are still there! Why is it so? Did Google change its mind?

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Authors: How to get published, another approach.

Any author who has tried to get published knows just how hard it can be. After all, reaching out to dozens of publishers and just ending up with a pile of “rejection letters” can be disheartening month after month. It sometimes may almost seem harder to get published then to write actually write a book. What is one to do? One certainly does not wish to extinguish the book burning inside oneself. Well, one idea is to think “outside the box.”

Fortunately, for the writer, the world of publishing today, is in the process of rapid transition. Emerging new options, offer tantalizing possibilities for the enterprising author. One creative solution to the problem is to consider “self publishing.” As the saying goes “if you cannot beat them, join them.” Why not become a publisher? Turn the problem on its head, make it the basis for a solution. It is not as daunting as it may sound. Dramatic changes in technology offer new ideas and solutions.

Today, many options exist to help authors publish their books independently. A large part of the process may be figuring out what will work for you and what has worked successfully for others. While the traditional world of publishing is opening up, new worlds in publishing are also emerging. In addition to traditional paperback books, publishing today is increasingly expanding on to the internet. One can certainly explore setting up websites, and publishing ebooks, for example.

Here too, there are numerous opportunities for an enterprising writer. Of course the writer, may need to learn new tools and/or form new alliances with emerging skill-sets. However, authors today, unlike past generations of writers, are very technically savvy. Gone are the days of ribbons and typewriters. Today, most writers create their works on word processors on a computer. Many authors, due to the rapid integration of technology into our lives, feel comfortable enough to experiment with the new internet writing and publishing skill-sets. Some may even argue, that html editors (the editors used to “write web pages”) are in many ways similar to the word processors writers use on a daily basis.

In fact, your current word processor probably has an option to create web pages. (You can try it by saving a file using a “save as” type command, in a “dialog box” that pops up look for the “save as type drop down box” and select htm, html or a similar variant. Click save, and viola you have a web page!) Of course, I do not mean to suggest that technology is always so easy or simple. In fact, often it may not be, as we all know. For many, either to due to constraints of time, skill or desire, their desire to explore new technologies will be limited. But one can always consider hiring or outsourcing tasks one is not interested in.

However, one approaches the problem, there are many options available today to become a paperback publisher or internet website-based ebook publisher. So the next time a publisher brushes you off, don’t take it personally, simply consider the new universe of options that beckons to you. After all, what is stopping you?

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Start your press release with a great headline that will convince the media to read further. “The headline of a press release has one job and one job only,” according to press release guru Paul Hartunian. “The only job of a press release headline is to force the reporter to keep reading. The headline has no other job. Don’t force your press release headline to do anything more than force the reporter to keep reading. That’s a big enough job!”

In press releases, headlines are critical. They’re the first, and often the only, thing the media reads. If your headline doesn’t immediately grab the reader’s attention, your release usually won’t be read.

To seize the media’s attention, link your headlines to:

1) Money,

2) Sex,

3) Health,

4) Controversy.

Remember to grab the media by looking at and reacting to what is in the news! The media does not care about you or your book.They care about how good an interview you are, how you react to something that is going on now- and they want you to help their audience and or readers-

Do your homework! Read magazines, newspapers every day- and watch several TV shows every day- including Today, GMA and CBS Early Show. Couldn’t hurt to watch Oprah too!

Make sure that you know everything you can about the reporter before you speak to him or her. Read all that they have written- do a google search- know where there went to school… Be prepared!

Excerpted from Author 101: Bestselling Book Publicity, by Rick Frishman and Robyn Spizman; http://www.author101.com

Go to http://www.author101.com to get your free “Million Dollar Rolodex”

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