Mistakes on Scholarship Applications

Every year, aspiring college students and high school graduates spend hours searching for scholarships and grants to help them pay for college, and after sorting through hundreds to find the few they actually qualify for, they have to apply for them.  The application process is certainly much easier than the fielding process, but it can also be the most dangerous time of all.  Mistakes made on those applications can cost time — and, if they are really badly done, money. (more…)

Herbs for Health

Just what are some popular herbs for health and well-being? There are many to choose from. There are some with amazing properties that rival today’s modern medicines.

These situations should prohibit you from taking herbs though. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking any other medicines like prescription, herbal, or over the counter, or have a major health condition like kidney disease, asthma, or HIV/AIDS. If you don’t have any of those conditions, then you are good to go. Just read up carefully on all the requirements regarding different herbs’ uses.

Agrimony is a good herb for indigestion. It can help with diarrhea and other intestinal problems like appendicitis too. The herb actually makes your digestive juices speed up. It helps your liver secrete more, it promotes food being assimilated, and it helps prevents diabetes from forming, and it acts as an excellent blood cleanser. Agrimony is also good for the throat and mouth flaring up, getting bad tonsillitis, having throat problems, and going through oral thrush or inflammation of the mucus membranes inside the mouth. It is a great herb for singers and actors because they can just gargle it around in their mouth before a big concert to help them get prepared.

Aloe Vera is another very good herb. Alexander the Great actually fought a war over it. It is great for scratches, scrapes, and burns. The top reason to use it is because it works just as well as over-the-counter topical creams. You can just keep a plant growing in your house and take off a leaf whenever you get an irritation. It also good to rub on your skin after a sunburn. This is a topical herb. There are many herbs out there, but some are built for internal use and some are built for external use.

Another good herb is rosemary. Rosemary can be used as a healing herb of the mind. Rosemary oil has long been used to help the mind and facilitate positive thoughts. There are a lot of herbs that are drilled down to their essence in the form of essential oils.

Apple Revolutionizes Education, Again

Online education and traditional education have been a seemingly unintentional collaborative endeavor of late, and today’s announcement by Apple, Inc., of it’s new iBooks 2 textbook service will serve to blur the lines between tradition and innovation even more.  iBooks 2 promises to deliver movies, links, multitouch gestures, faster than light searches, photo galleries, visual quiz sections, and 3-D models among other interactive elements to textbooks.  Available for download starting today, iBooks 2 is a free app. So, what about the textbooks themselves?  Where will they come from? (more…)

Education Opens

Last week, the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced plans for free online courses that will allow participants in the program to earn official certifications from MIT.  While the courses themselves will be free, heralding what is likely to become a historic step forward for the open education movement, the certificate at the end of the course of study will be available to students for a “modest fee.”  In an open and free society, many people have begun to adopt libertarian attitudes towards the availability of knowledge and information.  Such information should be free to anyone who wishes to learn it, and there should be some recognition given for the successful completion of independent studies.  The same can recently be said for our society’s increasing intolerance of draconian legislation such as SOPA (or, the Stop Online Piracy Act) scheduled for debate in the House early next year.  Although these two fields are starkly different — education, and digital ownership of copyrighted materials and media — the fundamental change in the attitudes of free people regarding both matters is evident in each forum. (more…)

Peace Corps

The Peace Corps, an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, has three primary goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping Americans to understand the cultures of other countries. The kind of work they do is carried out by volunteers who are deployed to foreign countries for a period of time, usually limited to five years but often much shorter. (more…)