On December 2008 eLottery brought the Spanish lotto to its product range, giving participants globally a vastly bettered opportunity of partaking in this huge Spanish lotto prize fund.

If this is the first time you have come across the Spanish Lotto, let me highlight just how all-important this lotto is to the vast majority of the Spanish population. The Spanish lottery has been a national obsession in Spain for a very long time with tremendous interest generated by the Christmas lotto draw every year. Its a fact that 98 per cent of the population play this Spanish National lottery each Christmas.

There are a few basic reasons why lot’s of Spanish nationals join in the Christmas El Gordo lottery draw.

First Of All, on that point is the incentive of the biggest lotto prize fund of any worldwide lottery game - with over 2 Billion Euros! Secondly, there are in excess of 13 thousand cash prizes to be won. Last, the probability of collecting a cash prize in the Christmas draw are a extremely achievable - one : six.

With the quantity of interest thats afforded to the Christmas El Gordo lottery draw, a lot of individuals are unaware that there is five extra Spanish Lottery draws each year too. These lotto games take place on July, January and November, March and May. Despite the fact that these five lotto games don’t boast the huge prize fund of the Christmas lottery draw, they are big however, ranging from seventy eight million Euros to six hundred and sixty six million Euros. In addition, these lotto games offer almost three times as many prizes as the Christmas lotto draw and betting odds of picking up a money prize of an staggering 1 in 3.

The Christmas Spanish lottery works in a different way to almost all other worldwide drawings. A full lottery ticket ‘billete’ is really costly, costing 200 Euros. However, these lotto tickets are divided up into 10 ‘decimos’ (tenths) costing 20 Euros apiece.

When purchasing your tickets you have the option of buying one decimo, a complete lotto ticket, or a portion of a lottery ticket. If you don’t purchase the full lotto ticket, somebody else will buy the remainder of your ticket. For Instance, if you purchase two decimos, somebody else buys 3 decimos and someone else purchases five and your ticket wins one thousand Euros, and then you will collect 200 Euros, 300 Euros and 500 Euros respectively. Owing to the expense of buying an entire lottery ticket, it is not unusual for households and acquaintances to amalgamate their lotto cash and each purchase a separate ‘decimo’ (tenth).

Labor day is just around the corner and most parents are busy with back to school shopping, while kids are savoring their last sweet days of summer. But there is a growing population of children who are not gearing up to return to school. These are homeschoolers. They do not have to wait to see what classes they were assigned. They choose their own courses of study with help from their parents, an eye toward state requirements and college admissions recommendations, and possibly with the guidance of a Homeschooling Consultant.

“Parents new to homeschooling call me to help them plan curriculum, meet state requirements, and figure out how to provide their kids with social opportunities,” explains Rivka Seeman, a private Homeschooling Consultant based here in New York City. “Parents who are already homeschooling may call to discuss something that is not working, or to find creative opportunities for their children to learn outside the home. Sometimes teenagers find my website and prompt their parents to call. It’s all about giving parents a greater diversity of options so they can provide their children with the education that will be best for them,” Rivka continues. “For some kids that will mean going to school, but for some kids it doesn’t.”

Unlike children returning to school, their education will not take place in one building this year. It will take place at home, at the library, at several museums, at sports classes, at an art class at their community college, at the nursing home where they volunteer, at their home run businesses, at their community gardens, and on a walking tour of the city. It will take place while they lie barefoot in the grass happily reading a good book. They will be learning wherever and whenever and their learning will not stop with the ringing of a bell at 3:00.

More information can be obtained by contacting Rivka Seeman directly at (212) 501-7304 or through the Rivka Homeschooling Consulting website at www.rivkahomeschool.com/.

Everyone likes what they like, “I don’t know art, but I like know what I like!” Okay, true that. When shopping at a market full of photo prints, you’re bound to fall in love with some images and then get your heart broken by the prices these starving artists have applied! So what’s artistically likable and what’s a price doing so far up there?

Ages ago, before phones, Internet and coffee shops, all people could do was paint and sculpt and pass on diseases for a good time. Two text book philosophers wondered what made some art so universally appealing and they wandered the known World to discover and formalize most of our Western rules of composition. They noted chiaroscuro, strong diagonals, repetitive shapes, leading lines and a zany but easy to find, ‘Rule of Thirds.’

Chiaroscuro was the 2D portrayal of objects using plenty of shadowed values giving a rich, almost 3D experience; the first buzz-through noted this as ‘full range’ in photography. Strong diagonals is just what it sounds like with dynamic, heart thumping lines racing across canvases and causing excitement in the minds of viewers. Repetitive shapes almost made patterns that mezmorized viewers and contributed to the balance of an image where a rectangular shape would appear over and over in different forms; or a circle or a bird shape, etc. Leading lines depended upon perspective illusion so that viewers felt they could travel into an image; walk down a path, through an orchard of trees or along a brick wall.

Following The Rule of Thirds is the fastest way to stop taking ordinary snapshots. The entire canvas or frame is overlaid with an imaginary tic-tac-toe board. Nine squares are the results of two lines across and two likes up and down. There are four intersections around the center square. It’s at these intersections that the focus or idea of the image is placed. This is the cure for the painfully dull “centeritis” that snapshots suffer from. It’s the most effective form of composition and the biggest secret weapon of artists. You’ll now notice movie characters off-center, magazine ads obeying this rule and some of your favorite photos employing some of these devices!

So why the $350 price tag at the market? In two paragraphs you just learned how to shot with wisdom and forethought… If they sell one image that week, they make rent. Perhaps the chemicals they used added up to gallons just to print three acceptable images. If the photo is from a far away land, you know they didn’t just beam there, they probably suffered expensive plane trips, lodging, walks through wilderness, tundra or alien cities and might have eaten food while they were away despite their scrawny, artistic-like appearance.

There is every reason to think that they should, finally reward themselves, but not by robbing children of college educations. Take a chance and make an offer. Ask for two prints and thirty or forty percent off. A little note saying ‘all prices firm’ indicates a trust fund baby. They already made rent, they would rather have the story of having sold a print for hundreds of dollars. If you give them the story, you’ll not be thanked, you’ll be ridiculed over caviar and Cheerios while some underground 80’s rock band guitars ‘cultured’ madness in the next room when they get home and call their friends.

Less than a hundred bucks is madness. Chemicals, developing, film, travel and talent are just too expensive to sell short. It’s not insane to think that three or four rolls of lovingly shot film produced nothing to sell. If you find a photographer with a few good prints overall and a low, three digit price tag (unframed), you’re probably face to face with a very respectable and honestly hardworking artist. The rule of thumb is that one roll might yield two to four keepers. One in five keepers are worth selling to strangers. So a little understanding of why you like what you like, a warning of when you’re being fleeced and a little sympathy to the deserving artist in the markets we all love wraps up this essay.

Bryan makes a living teaching and writing about computers regularly for Dinarius, Inc. but still applies his years of photography schooling from time to time. Other free stories and witty advice is available at http://www.Dinarius.com

Baldness is arguably one of the most horrifying illness men and women have ever had to bear. Loads of People consider their hair as; a decisive element of one’s true personality, a fundamental element of one’s self. Hair & hair loss is regularly measured as indicators of one’s present age. That is clearly why people are regularly appalled when faced with the chance of balding. Thus people typically do everything and anything they are able to do and accept everything they are told in order to make sure that they preserve that precious hair of theirs as lush & as healthy as can be.

Baldness can be very common in females and is more familiar following the menopause; however, alopecia will not come about in all cases. In lots of cases the victim will just notice increased baldness and thinning of the skull, several treatment regimes can improve the end result. While alopecia is commonly accepted in men it’s undesirable in women and in loads of occasions it can have unfavourable effects on the person’s emotional condition & self-confidence. Although you should not be worried - hair loss can be treated & stopped if you have identified what causes it & what you need to do. Advanced Hair has helped over 300,000 people around the world with their hair loss technology and superb customer service.

Undoubtedly the most well-known type of baldness seen in ladies is androgenetic alopecia, also known as female pattern alopecia or baldness. This is seen as hair thinning mostly over the crest and sides of the head. It affects nearly 33% of all prone females, even though it is most traditionally observed soon after menopause, though it may start as early as puberty. On average hair fall is close to one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five hairs each day. Luckily, these hairs are re-grown by the mechanisms in the body. It is absolutely true that hair loss takes place when lost hairs are not replaced or when the daily hair shed goes above one hundred & twenty-five hairs. Naturally hair thinning can come from either parent’s branch of the family.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is studying the impact that the severe economic conditions are having on minorities in the UK. The aim of the study is to understand which minorities have been worse affected by the recession and to devise strategies to tackle the problem. The Department for Work and Pensions is assisting the EHRC in the study.

The commission, which often works on issues facing the minorities and in ensuring fairness in society, is hoping that the study will help the government and other relief agencies in targeting help to the groups who are withstanding the worst of the economic downturn.

According to a spokesperson of EHRC, it is very important to realise that not all groups are being affected by the recession in the same way. There are clear indications that the minorities may be facing a worse situation than others are. Old and disabled people may be finding that they are among the first to be laid off by their employers. Students who have just passed out with big education loans will be facing an extremely poor job market. Ethnic minorities or even women may find themselves being discriminated against. People living in the poorer regions of the country may be going through much more hardships than those living in big cities. The spokesperson added that unless a clearer understanding of the true impact is built, it is very difficult to help these groups survive the recession and assist them in participating in the expected economic recovery.

One of the ways in which the commission is hoping to help the minorities is by sensitizing employers towards maintaining fairness in cost cutting measures such as job cuts or salary reduction. Moreover, the worst affected groups can be given government support and trained so that once the economy is back on track again, they can find new jobs and get their lives back on track as well. For a range of accredited training including fire warden training contact the training specialist at Workplace Law Training.

As the highly polluted water is drained from the City of New Orleans back into Lake Ponchartrain, it will have to be monitored. In the last few years leading up to the Hurricane Katrina Disaster the Lake had actually been making a strong comeback and had been considered clean enough to fish in or use as drinking water for the neighboring cities with only a little extra filtering. All that has changed now after the many chemical spills, oil spills and human waste in the water that is now known as the Soup Bowl of New Orleans. It will take many years to get Lake Pontchartrain back in order again to the level it was just prior to the devastation from Katrina.

A new AUV Autonomous Underwater Vehicle research program at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute Research Facility is completely solar powered.

http://www.ausi.org/research/SAUV1.jpg

A group of these AUVs could work in a grid pattern constantly sampling the water and letting Environmental Monitoring engineers know where to put remediation chemicals in order to clean the lake. A recent research project called the RiverNet Project on Lake George, NY seems to hold the ticket to make this all possible. The Solar powered AUV will be able to detect any and all chemical or biological negative trends from the returned and now polluted lake water, which can assist in the management and careful timely improvement of the water quality. This S-AUV is also scheduled to assist in the remediation of the Hudson Bay with 3D sensor monitoring capabilities.

We need to use these modern technologies and research to help us contain the environmental eco-disaster component in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to protect the local and regional water quality for the protection of humans and the surrounding life. Think on this.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

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Drug examine has grown into a general phenomena round the globe. Numerous parties perform drug exams on newly employed individuals or existing employees to reassure a drug-free environment at work.

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Did you know that some maternity units actually have more staff available during periods of full moon?

I’ve always been fascinated by the moon’s effect on nature, so when a friend’s wife conveyed to me what her midwife had told her during the birth of their daughter, I decided to find out more about childbirth, full moon and a possible link.

On speaking to various medical staff involved in natural childbirth, the first thing I learned was that expectant mothers often experience false signs of labor during full moon.

Contractions known as “Braxton Hicks” — sometimes noticeable to the mother and sometimes not — become more pronounced and many travel to the maternity unit in the belief that “it’s time”. Disappointed — or perhaps relieved — they return home, the pains having subsided and with no dilation of the cervix.

While these expectant mothers visiting the clinic with their mistaken signs of labor are part of the reason why extra staff are needed, the major difference is found in the number of women whose amniotic sac — the water — breaks.

Just as some women experience false labor pains, in cases where the water breaking marks the start of childbirth, full moon is the time when it’s most likely to happen.

In order to discover for myself whether this could be true, I asked several female friends how their births had started. Those who responded with “the water breaking” were then asked the date of the birth. On checking this against a moon phase chart, I discovered that almost all had given birth on, or very close to, a full moon.

The theory is that the moon’s gravitational pull effects the amniotic fluid in much the same way as it effects the water in the sea, rivers and even the water that’s otherwise found in our bodies.

As a woman’s body prepares for natural childbirth, the amniotic sac becomes distended so the point where it will easily burst if put under pressure. Under normal circumstances, the pressure of labor contractions bursts the sac. During a full moon, the pressure caused by the moon’s effect on the water inside the sac can cause the same things to happen, but without the accompanying contractions.

When this happens, natural childbirth doesn’t always move forward and with no other signs of labor present, the obstetrician may decide to induce the birth. During my own study of this phenomenon I found that of 8 women whose births started with the water breaking at full moon, 5 of them had no accompanying contractions.

A coincidence? Perhaps. But surely midwives wouldn’t prepare themselves for an increase in natural childbirth activity if there wasn’t some truth in this?

One midwife told me that when it comes to planning childbirth, full moons should always be looked for around the time of the expected delivery. If there’s one within a few days either side, the chances are your baby will be born on that day.

Remember the good old photography days?

Film camera in hand, you would see that perfect landscape, seascape or sunset and shoot off several shots.

Perhaps a couple of weeks later, once you had returned home and finally finished that 24 or 36 exposure film, it was off to the photo-lab to get the film processed.

You eagerly open the packet of photographs, looking for that superb seascape you took, knowing that it would almost certainly be taken up by National Geographic for their monthly magazine spread.

What do you find?

A not too bad photo, but the seascape horizon is crooked, here’s your excuse, I hear you say.. “Well when I took the shot I was standing on the side of a sand dune and quickly trying to get that perfect shot while the little sailboat was still in view”.

Does this sound familiar to all you budding Adam Ansels and/or Lord Snowdons?

The photo is relegated back to the packet never again to see the light of day.

I had many of those packets of not so perfect photos until the digital photography age arrived.

The Digital Darkroom has arrived

The advent of the digital camera and in fact, before that, computerized image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop has completely revolutionized the way we can now resurrect a stunning image from what at face value might have appeared to be just one of those snapshots to be relegated to the shoebox under the stairs.

What I’m going to show you in this article is just one method of taking a mundane snapshot and producing a great shot in as little as five minutes.

The example I’m going to use, is one that I have seen so many times, and have already mentioned above, namely, shots that have crooked horizons, whether this be a landscape, seascape, sunset or whatever.

The source of the image may have come from a scanned negative, scanned print or digital camera image all converted to an image format (most probably .JPG pronounced “jaypeg”) that can be opened in your image manipulation software.

Correcting a crooked horizon

The human eye is remarkably perceptive at picking out features in a photograph that are made up of essentially straight lines and that those lines are not parallel, either horizontally or vertically, with the overall print itself.

These straight lines may well be the horizon, but they may also be an object in your photo that has straight lines such as buildings or walls etc…

I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS, but almost all other image manipulation software packages have similar tools so the method described should be repeatable with your own software package.

The method used will employ a little known relationship between two Photoshop functions, the Measure tool and the Rotate Canvas command.

Step - 1
Open up your image in your image editor (in our case Photoshop) and select the Measure tool which if not visible on the Photoshop toolbar can be found by hovering your mouse over the Eyedropper tool and “left clicking”.

Watch the other options window “fly-out” and select the Measure tool.

Step - 2
Interestingly enough, we are not actually going to measure anything in the real sense of the word, nor use the Measure tool as it is usually used (i.e. measuring the distance between two points within the photograph).

With the Measure tool active, “left click” and “hold” on a spot on the left hand side of the photo (remember our example is a seascape) where the horizon meets the sea.

While still “holding down” the left mouse button, drag to the right hand side of the photo and find a corresponding point where the horizon meets the sea and then release the mouse button.

What happened? .. Well you will see that a white line has been drawn on top of the photo with what looks like little “+” anchors at each end. The line is parallel with our crooked horizon.

Step - 3
Now the marvel begins!! Select the Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary … command and the Rotate Canvas pop-up window will appear.

What you will notice (in the case of Photoshop anyway) is that it has “pre-filled” the pop-up rotate options with the exact rotation information to correct the crooked horizon, 1.5 degrees counter-clockwise in our example on our web-site. Click OK and see what happens ..

The photo has been magically rotated the right amount to correct the crooked horizon!

Step - 4
All that is required now is to do a tight “crop” on the overall photograph and save it.

And there you have it!!
Less than five minutes of digital image manipulation to take that mundane snapshot into a photograph that is very pleasing to the eye.

If you find the steps taking are a little hard to understand in this text based article, you can click on the link at the end of this article to see the same method explained on our website with the aid of example graphical images.

© Gary Wilkinson 2005 - All Rights Reserved

You can see this correction method complete with example images at Correcting Crooked Horizons in Photos

Feel free to re-print this article provided that all hyperlinks and author biography are retained as-is.

Gary Wilkinson is a photographer, photographic restorer and the owner of a photographic retail business.

He is also the publisher of the http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com website, where other methods of correcting common photographic restoration problems are discussed.

There are many hair removal systems available in today’s retail stores, but which ones actually work and give you weeks of peace-of-mind and hair free sensitive skin areas?

Okay, we know that we can purchase razors in all sizes, types and styles, but most razors do not get those small fine hairs and you usually have to shave at least every other day or you have that prickly feeling. This is very unsightly as the short hair poke out of your pantyhose and can even cause runs in your hose. Then there are all types of shaving creams and gels that are suppose to lift the hairs for easier shaving, but you are still left with shaving about every other day.

Then there is waxing. These hair removal systems do in fact rid your body of unwanted hair, but try in on your bikini line. This can be very painful, not to mention time consuming.

There is also a type of laser surgery that guarantees it is a permanent hair removal system. But, who can afford to have a doctor remove unwanted hair, plus the time involved as well.

The cheapest easiest hair removal systems are epilators. These unique hair removal systems were designed especially for women. There are several on the market today that are virtually pain free that can guarantee you will rid your body of unwanted hair for 4 to 6 weeks.

The idea of these hair removal systems is that they use a specially designed head with one or more rows of tweezer type discs that will pull the hair out by the root. When the hair comes out at the root it will take much longer to grow back. You may say, ouch, but in fact they are designed to hold the skin taunt to aid in pain reduction. They are also created with unique heads that do not even touch the skin to ensure that your skin does not become irritated.

In the course of my work I have had nothing but praise from my clients to whom I have recommended epilators.

So, if you are seeking hair removal systems that are convenient, safe, and inexpensive, then you need to compare epilators. You are sure to come up with one which matches your lifestyle.