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Sunday, January 27, 2013

Attention shoppers: Another credit card fee is here

1 day

Herb Weisbaum, NBC News contributor

It could soon cost you more to shop with a credit card at some stores. As of this Sunday, Jan. 27, merchants who accept credit cards issued by Visa and MasterCard will be allowed to add a service charge to the purchase price.

Visa and MasterCard had always prohibited merchants from doing this. They agreed to change the rules and allow the surcharge as part of the settlement of an antitrust suit brought by retailers.

The surcharge is supposed to equal the actual cost of processing the credit card transaction, which is typically 1.5 to 3 percent. Under the agreement, the fee is capped at 4 percent. The surcharge can vary based on the type of card. For example, it could be higher for a rewards card or premier card.

Merchants still cannot add a surcharge to debit card transactions.

The big question is: Will any stores do this? Should you worry about paying a credit card surcharge?

?We have discussed the settlement with many, many merchants, and not a single merchant we have spoken to plans to surcharge,? Craig Sherman, spokesman for the National Retail Federation (NRF), said in a statement. The NRF was not involved in the class action lawsuit.

NBC News contacted some of the country?s largest retailers. Wal-Mart,?Target, Sears and Home Depot said they have no plans to add a credit card surcharge.

Credit card surcharges are banned by law in 10 states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

Visa and MasterCard have rules that require retailers to handle credit cards the same way in all of their stores across the country. That means a chain with stores in any of the 10 states where a surcharge is banned would not be able to have a surcharge at any of its stores.

The National Retail Federation points out that under terms of the settlement, a merchant who adds a surcharge to purchases on a Visa or MasterCard would have to do the same with American Express cards. But AMEX prohibits surcharge fees. So a merchant who accepts American Express as well as Visa/MasterCard would not be able to surcharge any of those cards.

?The bottom line is that very few retailers would be able to surcharge under the settlement, and that the vast majority don?t want to surcharge even if they could,? the NRF?s Sherman said.

Ed Mierzwinski, Director of Consumer Programs at U.S. PIRG agrees.

?In the brick-and-mortar world, no one who does any sort of volume business is going to want to surcharge because it will drive their customer crazy and slow down transactions,? Mierzwinski said.

In fact, most consumer advocates believe that except for some small retailers, a credit card surcharge is a non-issue in the short-term.

But Edgar Dworsky, founder of ConsumerWorld.org, worries that over time surcharges will gain traction.

?It?s predictable what?s going to happen,? he said. ?We?re at the top of the hill and we?re going to start going down that slippery slope.?

Dworsky points out that stores factor in the cost of processing credit cards when they price their merchandise. Charging for that again, he said, would be double-dipping, unless stores rolled back their prices ? which no one expects them to do.

?We shouldn?t have gotten to the point, but unfortunately because of the court settlement we have,? Dworsky told me. ?There?s no one standing up for consumers and saying that this is really bad.?

Dworsky points to Australia, where surcharging credit card use began in 2003. At first, few merchants charged the fee.? His research shows that approximately one-third of the sellers there ? including some hotels, supermarkets, department stores and utilities ? now charge extra to use a credit card.?

What about disclosures??
The advocacy group Consumer Action has published a booklet on credit card checkout fees. It warns shoppers to be on the lookout for these fees and advises them to express their dissatisfaction.?Customers shouldn?t stand for it,? said Ruth Susswein Consumer Action?s deputy director of national priorities. ?Our advice is to tell them you don?t like the fee and this makes you want to take your business elsewhere.?

The new rules from Visa and MasterCard require retailers who apply a credit card surcharge to post a notice at the store?s entrance. The exact percentage of the surcharge does not need to be disclosed until the point of sale. The customer receipt must list the amount of the surcharge.

Online stores with a surcharge will not be required to have a notice on the home page. They only need to alert shoppers about this when they reach the page where credit cards are first mentioned. In most cases, that means the final step of checkout when the purchase is being completed.

Not the end of this story?
The settlement that allows merchants to impose a surcharge is only preliminary. The court has yet to issue its final ruling in this case. That?s expected later this year.?

Once that happens, various retailers and business groups plan to challenge the settlement. That could drag into late 2014.

For now, the possibility that the settlement could be modified will probably keep most businesses of any size from instituting credit card fees.

?We?re not convinced this is going to be an issue,? Consumer Action?s Susswein told me. ?They may never do it, but as individual consumers we need to be aware.?

Herb Weisbaum is The ConsumerMan. Follow him on Facebook and Twitteror visit The ConsumerMan website.?

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/attention-shoppers-another-credit-card-fee-here-1C8086499

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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Swiss Federal Lab Claims New World Record For Solar Cell Efficiency

Ok, let's do the math. Total electrical consumption (not all energy usage, just electrical) for the US is about 480 gigawatts. Average insolation is about 1 kw per square meter. At 10% efficiency, that means about 100 watts for every square meter of panel. That means you need 4.8 billion square meters of panels. 4.8 billion square meters can fit into a square 69.282 kilometers on a side. That's somewhere between the size of Rhode Island and Delaware.

Even if you expand that to all energy usage, not just electrical, you're talking approximately 3 terrawatts. So, that's about 30 billion square meters of panels. That's a square about 173.2 kilometers on a side. That's somewhere between the size of Maryland and Hawaii.

So, if you actually sit down and DO the math, you can easily cover US electrical requirements and, in fact the total US energy usage (not counting food energy and not considering the fact that much of that energy usage can't currently be converted to electrical) without coming remotely close to covering the US with solar panels.

Of course, if you'd actually done the math on your own claims, you would have realized that, when you claimed that you could "optimistically" supply 7.5% of the US's electrical supply with 0.01% of the surface area, that would mean that you could "optimistically" supply 100% of the electrical supply with 0.133334% of the surface area, or even pessimistically (let's pretend that the difference between "optimistic" and pessimistic is an order of magnitude) with 1.33334% of the surface area.

So, it's pretty clear that you either didn't do the math yourself, or you just decide to bluff. If you meant something else, like that there are logistical problems in covering that much area, then say so.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/6-gC0hnND2Y/story01.htm

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How cells' DNA repair machinery can destroy viruses

Jan. 21, 2013 ? A team of researchers based at Johns Hopkins has decoded a system that makes certain types of immune cells impervious to HIV infection. The system's two vital components are high levels of a molecule that becomes embedded in viral DNA like a code written in invisible ink, and an enzyme that, when it reads the code, switches from repairing the DNA to chopping it up into unusable pieces. The researchers, who report the find in the Jan. 21 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say the discovery points toward a new approach to eradicating HIV from the body.

"For decades, we've seen conflicting reports on whether each of these components helped protect cells from viruses," says James Stivers, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. "By plotting how much of each are found in different types of cells, as well as the cells' response to HIV, we learned that both are needed to get the protective effect."

Researchers have long known that DNA's code is made up of four building blocks called nucleotides, commonly abbreviated A, T, G, and C. Before a cell divides, DNA-copying enzymes string these nucleotides together based on existing templates, so that each of the new cells gets its own copy of the genome. But because the T nucleotide, dTTP, is very similar to dUTP, a fifth nucleotide that doesn't belong in DNA, the copying enzyme sometimes mistakenly puts in a U where there should be a T.

To prevent this, says Stivers, most human cell types have an enzyme whose job is to break down dUTP, keeping its levels very low. Another quality control measure is the enzyme hUNG2, which snips stray Us out of newly copied DNA strands, leaving the resulting holes to be filled by a different repair enzyme. Certain immune cells called resting cells lack the first quality-control mechanism because, Stivers explains, "They're not replicating their DNA and dividing, so they couldn't care less if they have a lot of dUTP."

This is a critical piece of information, Stivers says, because when a retrovirus like HIV invades a cell, its first order of business is to make a DNA copy of its own genome, then insert that copy into the host cell's genome. If there are many dUTPs floating around in the cell, they will likely make their way into the new viral DNA, and, potentially, later be snipped out by hUNG2. The question, Stivers says, left open by the conflicting results of previous studies, was what effect, if any, this process has on HIV and other viruses.

To address this question, Amy Weil, a graduate student in Stivers' laboratory, measured dUTP levels and hUNG2 activity in a variety of human cells grown in the laboratory, then exposed them to HIV. Cells with high dUTP but little hUNG2 activity succumbed easily to the virus, which appeared to function just fine with a U-ridden genome. Similarly, cells with low dUTP levels but high hUNG2 activity were susceptible to HIV. For these cells, it seemed, hUNG2 would snip out the few stray Us, but the resulting holes would be repaired, leaving the viral DNA as good as new.

But in cells with both high dUTP and vigilant hUNG2, the repair process turned into a hack job, Stivers says, leaving the viral DNA so riddled with holes that it was beyond repair. "It's like dropping a nuclear bomb on the viral genome," he says.

By showing how dUTP and hUNG2 work together to protect resting cells from infection, Stivers says, the study identifies a new pathway that could restrict HIV infection in non-dividing cells. Current anti-retroviral drugs effectively suppress the virus, but, Stivers explains, they miss copies of the virus that hide out in non-dividing cells, and "the minute you stop taking anti-retrovirals, it starts replicating again." He suggests that drug strategies could be devised to target this pathway in affected cells, possibly lessening the pool of viruses hiding out in non-dividing cells. The principle could also be applied to other retroviruses, he says, since they, like HIV, all make DNA copies of their genomes as part of the infection process.

Other authors on the paper were Devlina Ghosh, Yan Zhou, Lauren Seiple and Robert F. Siliciano of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Moira A. McMahon of the University of California, San Diego; and Adam M. Spivak of the University of Utah School of Medicine.

The study was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (grant number GM056834) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Extramural Activities (grant number AI081600).

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine, via Newswise.

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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/DC3IVg5qJY4/130121161751.htm

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Oil price dips, trading muted on US public holiday

The price of crude oil slipped closer to $95 a barrel on Monday, with energy investors keeping to the sidelines as U.S. markets were closed for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Benchmark oil for February delivery fell 9 cents to settle at $95.47 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 7 cents to finish at $95.56 per barrel on the Nymex on Friday.

"Due to the lack of major economic indicators, investors will be looking for some direction to the global equity markets and the U.S. dollar movements," said a report from Sucden Financial Research in London.

A stronger dollar tends to put pressure on oil prices by making crude more expensive for traders using other currencies. On Monday, the euro was down against the dollar, to $1.3314 from $1.3375 on Friday.

A rise in stock markets did help limit losses in commodity markets, but sentiment remained fragile.

Concerns linger about the U.S. economy, with lawmakers wrangling over spending cuts and the nation's debt ceiling, which limits the amount of debt that U.S. government can take on. Though Republican lawmakers were expected to accept a temporary increase, a final deal is still not in sight.

Brent crude, used to price international varieties of oil, fell 9 cents to $11.80 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on the Nymex:

? Natural gas added 6 cents to $3.63 per 1,000 cubic feet.

? Wholesale gasoline rose a fraction of a cent to $2.798 per gallon.

? Heating oil rose 2 cents to $3.072 a gallon.

___

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/oil-price-dips-trading-muted-us-public-holiday-130637896--finance.html

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What Your Web Design Says About Your Business | SEOCIALISE

Monday, 21 January 2013 16:59 Last Updated on Monday, 21 January 2013 16:59 admin

Your web design is important if you want to reach some of the 79 percent of search engine users that will almost always click on normal, organic web links instead of those that are sponsored. In fact, 80 percent of users say they will actively avoid sponsored ads and links in favor of natural results. That means that your web design is going to matter, and that you are going to need the right search engine optimization to be incorporated into that design if you want to get the right results. Fortunately, it is possible for businesses to outsource SEO whenever they need to be sure that they have the competitive edge, but for those that provide it, Seo reseller plans are also available to make sure that clients are connected with the content that they need.

Seo reseller programs can help businesses to focus on social media and web design so that they can get the best results. 75 percent of those who perform a search on the internet find what they are looking for on the very first page, and will not go any further than that. A majority of users will also determine whether or not they are going to stay on a web page within the first six seconds of loading it. That means that you do not have a lot of time or opportunity to impress, but with the right online marketing and web design it may be possible to make that impression as soon as possible. If you want your company to be able to target the 93 percent of internet users who begin their day on the net by performing a search, then your search marketing is going to play a role in that.

With over $200 billion in sales in 2011, eCommerce is becoming a force to reckon with, and web design is helping businesses to achieve their sales figures and totals along the way. Your choice of social media resellers and hosting could play a large role as well, so be sure that your business is working with the right people for the job. Companies will respond to roughly 30 percent of their social media fans and their feedback, so focus counts. Choosing to focus on great web design and social media solutions could be the right call if you want your business to truly shine and stand up against the competition online.

Source: http://www.seocialise.com/2013/01/what-your-web-design-says-about-your-business/

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Alaska Bar Association to offer free legal services on MLK Day ...

The Alaska Bar Association along with the Alaska Court System and the Alaska Legal Services Corporation will host a free legal clinic on Monday in honor of the late Martin Luther King Jr. in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau.

Free legal consultations and referrals in family law, landlord/tenant and public benefits will be available to the attendees on a first-come, first- served basis.?This is the Alaska Bar Association's fourth year hosting the MLK Day event.

?The Alaska Bar Association has followed the national lead of making this a 'day on, not a day off' as a powerful way of building community and providing service," Krista Scully, pro bono director of the Alaska Bar Association, said in press release.??

In Anchorage the event will be noon-6 p.m. at the Mountain View Boys & Girls Club, 315 Price St. In Fairbanks, it's 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at the Rabinowitz Courthouse, 101 Lacey St. ?In Juneau, the event will take place at two locations. The first, Aldersgate Methodist Church, 9161 Cinema Dr., runs 9 a.m.-noon. The second, at the Dimond Courthouse (123 Fourth St.) is 1-4 p.m.?

Visit The Alaska Bar Association for more information.

Source: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/alaska-bar-association-offer-free-legal-services-mlk-day

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60 SEO Tips For Business Owners - UK Business Forums

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60 SEO Tips For Business Owners

SEO results aren?t instant. The results of SEO work done today might not become apparent, and might not be credited by search engines, for weeks, or even months.
You don?t need to submit your website to search engines. They have evolved beyond the point of needing to be directly notified when a new website, or page on a website, is created.
Set-up a Google+ page for your business. Doing so builds trust with Google and improves rankings for localised keywords.
Diversify your traffic sources. Google is a great source of traffic but being 100% reliant on them for visitors puts you in a vulnerable position.
Low quality equals high risk. Low quality backlinks and/or low quality on-site content can easily result in your site being penalised by search engines.
Create content primarily for people, not search engines. There?s no point creating content that ranks well if it doesn?t help people, interest them, or persuade them to buy from you.
Remove duplicate content. You can be penalised for having the same, or very similar, content on multiple pages of your site.
Remove, merge or add to pages with little content on them. Having lots of content-light pages, with short page view times, can result in search engines downgrading all of your site?s keyword rankings.
Claim authorship of your content. Linking your Google+ account to your content improves both rankings and click-through-rate.
Ensure your content is good enough to be on the 1st page. If your content isn?t better than the content already on the 1st page for a keyword then your site doesn?t deserve to rank there.
Make your content engaging for visitors. The more engaging it is, the longer people will stay on your site, and high viewing times signal to search engines that your site deserves good rankings.
Create content to post on other websites and blogs. People are much more likely to link to you if you provide them with content to use on their site.
Balance creating content with marketing content. If you create content without marketing it then people will struggle to find it, and if they can?t find it they can?t link to it or share it.
Write a unique, descriptive title for every page. Within 65 characters you need to make the topic of a page clear to both humans and search engines.
Write a unique, descriptive meta description for every page. Within 160 characters you need to describe the topic of a page in a way that persuades people to click on your site instead of the other sites listed in the search results.
Research keywords before optimising for them. If you choose the wrong keywords, regardless of what you do for on-site and off-site SEO, you?ll get very few visitors and/or visitors who don?t convert into sales.
Use Google?s Keyword Tool. It provides a good list of words and phrases related to the keyword ideas that you enter into it.
Get keyword ideas from other people. They (customers, suppliers, partners, friends, etc.) see your business differently to you and may associate different words and phrases with it.
Long-tail keywords are a great source of traffic. It?s quicker and cheaper to rank for longer, specific keyword phrases, and more than 40% of searches are comprised of four or more words.
Dedicate 1 page of your website to each keyword that you?re targeting. Doing so makes it simpler for search engines to categorise and rank your pages.
Add keywords in the right places. They?re less important than they used to be, but you should still include them in urls, page titles, meta descriptions, header tags and image alt tags.
Avoid keyword stuffing. You?re much more likely to be penalised than credited if you use a keyword phrase repeatedly on a page.
Backlinks affect rankings more than anything else. The number and quality of links pointing to your site will largely determine in what position your site ranks.
Don?t set backlink targets. Link building should be a steady, consistent, on-going process, that doesn?t stop when you reach a certain number.
Get backlinks from relevant sources. Search engines want to display relevant results for each keyword, and links from relevant pages/sites, are a strong signal to them that your site is relevant.
Be prepared to work for backlinks. Generally, the more easily you can acquire a link, the less value it will likely have.
Don?t pay people to link to your website. Not only is it risky, but it?s unnecessary too, as if you have good content and build good relationships then people will link to you for free.
Diversify your backlink profile. Get different types of links from a wide range of IP addresses.
Build backlinks to every page of your website that you want to rank. Get people to link to the inner-pages of your site ? the ones you want to rank for specific keywords ? as well as to the homepage.
Existing relationships are an instant source of backlinks. Most of your suppliers, partners and customers will link to your site if you ask them to do so.
Get the good backlinks that your competition already has. If someone has already linked to one your competitors then there?s a reasonable chance that they?ll link to you also if you give them a good reason to.
Get some backlinks with your target keywords as the link text. This type of link is important, but should make up less than 25% of your backlink profile.
A good percentage of your backlinks should be branded. A backlink profile without lots of branded links (like ?Company Name? and ?www.companyname.co.uk') signals to search engines that you?ve been using manipulative link building tactics.
Sign up for Ahrefs, Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer. Doing so gives you access to extensive backlink data for your site and also your competitors? sites.
Every page of your website should be linked to from at least one other page. Search engines don?t include pages in their results that aren?t linked to either internally (from another page of the same site) or externally (from another site).
Have direct links from your homepage to your most important pages. Doing so passes authority from the homepage to your important pages and improves the rankings of those pages.
Add in-content links to other relevant pages on your website. Whilst not as valuable as external links, internal links do still pass authority and signal to search engines what pages to rank for which keywords.
Link out to relevant websites and blogs. People generally notice if you link to them, and if you link to them, there?s a reasonable chance that they?ll link back to you if you have good site.
Interact with bloggers in your industry. The better people with relevant blogs know you (through social sites, forums, email, etc.) the more likely they?ll be to link to your site and to share your content.
Contact businesses with relevant websites. A good relationship, in which you help promote each others? sites, makes SEO simpler and cheaper for you and for them.
Write press releases to share news and opinions. This is a good way to get content on, and links from, sites outside of your industry and circle of connections.
Phone people to develop online relationships. Emails can easily be ignored or forgotten, but phone calls not so much.
Use your website to build trust and relationships. The more relationships you have, and the more people trust you, the more people will talk about you, link to you, and, ultimately, buy from you.
Add your address and phone number to every page of your website. This builds trust and improves rankings if you?re targeting keyword phrases that contain your town/city name.
Get listed in industry and local directories. Most directories are worthless, however, there should be at least 10 that are relevant to your area or industry.
Ask customers to leave reviews on Google+ and local directories. Positive reviews improve your rankings in Google?s local listings and can be accessed directly from the search results.
Add social sharing buttons to your website. The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more likely they will be to do so.
Social media isn?t a replacement for SEO. Your social strategy should be part of, or should run alongside, your SEO strategy.
Search engines ranks webpages, not websites. Whether or not a page ranks for a particular keyword depends largely on the quality of that individual page, and not the quality of your site as a whole.
Know where you?re ranking. Within Google Webmaster Tools, go to ?Traffic? and then ?Search Queries? to check where your site is ranking for keywords.
Aim to be in the top 3, not just the top 10. If your site isn?t ranked in the top 3 positions for a keyword then you?ll only get a small percentage (less than 10%) of the traffic from searches for that keyword.
Rankings can be misleading. The number of 1st page rankings you have is irrelevant if those rankings don?t convert to visitor numbers and, ultimately, sales.
Don?t worry about PageRank. Sites with a low PR can, and often do, outrank sites with a high PR.
Choose between using www or not using www. Ensure that your site is set to load at either www.domainname.co.uk or domainname.co.uk ? not both.
Adopt a flat website architecture. Any page of your site should be accessible within 3 clicks from your homepage.
Use a simple, clear URL structure. People should be able to guess the topic of a page by looking only at its URL.
Use header tags. Include variations of your target keyword phrases in a page?s H1 and H2 tags.
Optimise your images. Include a page?s target keyword phrase, or variations of it, in the file names and img alt tags of the images on that page.
Optimise your website for mobile users. Your site needs to be clear and simple to use for people accessing it using smartphones and tablets.
Maximise your website?s loading speed. Use Google?s site speed tool and implement the recommendations that they give you.

Last edited by Mark Walters; Today at 11:34.

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Quote:

or low quality on-site content can easily result in your site being penalised by search engines.

Only with minimal content sites, that are putting 10 pages up to game the engines.

Quote:

People are much more likely to link to you if you provide them with content to use on their site.

Common method claimed by the desperate I'm afraid. Its a wonder many bother with it, as you're better off creating content for your own site.

Quote:

Generally, the more easily you can acquire a link, the less value it will likely have

Applies to those who can't be bothered to check out sites in-depth. But usually, translates into the link chaser/seeker doesn't own a site worthy to warrant any link trades.

Quote:

Don?t pay people to link to your website. Not only is it risky

Every site is a lead-generation model that either takes commissions or sells direct advertising. So it can't be that risky if the world is doing exactly that.

Quote:

there?s a reasonable chance that they?ll link to you

I dont think you can count on that these days, with many scrapping their link pages. Its only the resources that get away with link exchanges now, and even now I'd suggest its a v-limited activity, mainly as so many opt for direct advertising.

Quote:

Most directories are worthless, however, there should be at least 10 that are relevant to your area or industry.

How do you know their stats and traffic again?

The total amount of portals sites on the web runs in the thousands, BUT, they all want money ???? Forget pipe dreams about free links on those boys - I'd imagine they'd like to see any beggers and spammers eat dirt, and are happy to aid in that process by increasing their fees. Still, I guess it keeps the forums busy with all the talk.