'Cling-film' solar cells could lead to advance in renewable energy

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Posted: Jul 4th, 2011

'Cling-film' solar cells could lead to advance in renewable energy

(Nanowerk News) A scientific advance in renewable energy which promises a revolution in the ease and cost of using solar cells, has been announced today, Monday 4 July 2011. A new study shows that even when using very simple and inexpensive manufacturing methods - where flexible layers of material are deposited over large areas like cling-film - efficient solar cell structures can be made.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials ("The Nanoscale Morphology of a PCDTBT:PCBM Photovoltaic Blend"), paves the way for new solar cell manufacturing techniques and the promise of developments in renewable solar energy. Scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge used the ISIS Neutron Source and Diamond Light Source at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire to carry out the research.

Plastic (polymer) solar cells are much cheaper to produce than conventional silicon solar cells and have the potential to be produced in large quantities. The study showed that when complex mixtures of molecules in solution are spread onto a surface, like varnishing a table-top, the different molecules separate to the top and bottom of the layer in a way that maximises the efficiency of the resulting solar cell.

Dr Andrew Parnell of the University of Sheffield said, "Our results give important insights into how ultra-cheap solar energy panels for domestic and industrial use can be manufactured on a large scale. Rather than using complex and expensive fabrication methods to create a specific semiconductor nanostructure, high volume printing could be used to produce nano-scale (60 nano-meters) films of solar cells that are over a thousand times thinner than the width of a human hair. These films could then be used to make cost-effective, light and easily transportable plastic solar cell devices such as solar panels."

Dr. Robert Dalgliesh, one of the ISIS scientists involved in the work, said, "This work clearly illustrates the importance of the combined use of neutron and X-ray scattering sources such as ISIS and Diamond in solving modern challenges for society. Using neutron beams at ISIS and Diamond's bright X-rays, we were able to probe the internal structure and properties of the solar cell materials non-destructively. By studying the layers in the materials which convert sunlight into electricity, we are learning how different processing steps change the overall efficiency and affect the overall polymer solar cell performance. "

"Over the next fifty years society is going to need to supply the growing energy demands of the world's population without using fossil fuels, and the only renewable energy source that can do this is the Sun", said Professor Richard Jones of the University of Sheffield. " In a couple of hours enough energy from sunlight falls on the Earth to satisfy the energy needs of the Earth for a whole year, but we need to be able to harness this on a much bigger scale than we can do now. Cheap and efficient polymer solar cells that can cover huge areas could help move us into a new age of renewable energy."

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Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=21973.php

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Master the Art of Saving is in the Carnival of Personal Finance #316

How exciting! I?ve been picked to be in this week?s Carnival of Personal Finance (my 1st time). I?m just tickled purple. A humongus thanks to Prairie Eco-Thrifter for choosing my post Credit Card Happy!

Go check out all the other great posts chosen for the Carnival of Personal Finance #316 over at Prairie Eco-Thrifter.

Source: http://www.mastertheartofsaving.com/2011/07/05/master-the-art-of-saving-is-in-the-carnival-of-personal-finance-316/

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Vegas Bites 2011 ? Eat.Drink.Life.Love.

You can get some REALLY bad food in Vegas ? any fast food restaurant or $2.99 buffet (and there are a lot of those). You can also get some very good food in Vegas (see last year?s dinner at Bouchon as an example). While the city itself is a Hollywood movie set ? inauthentic and a facade ? many places have gotten smart about offering food that is reasonably priced and delicious and at least has the name of a well-known chef attached to it (either as a ?menu advisor,? frequent visitor or anywhere in between).

We were in Vegas for K?s annual family reunion and part of the tradition is a pre-reunion dinner on the town.? K and I and a group of related reunionites dined at Comme Ca restaurant in the Cosmopolitan hotel and casino. I?d never heard of the restaurant nor had I heard of David Myers, the California chef and restaurateur who conceived of the place. It was a large, dim brassiere, nearly empty for dinner on the Thursday evening we were there. We sat at a large booth with a much-touted view of ?Paris? (ha ha, as seen below). But while it seemed sparsely attended, the food was really solid, tasty and very reasonably priced.

View of "Paris" From Comme Ca (photo courtesy of Comme Ca website)

The server was young and seemed a bit out of her element, but the sommelier was knowledgeable and recommended the perfect bottle of wine at the price point we?d chosen. To begin, K had the duck confit ? a rich, perfectly fatty leg of duck entwined with some greenery. I had the crab cake which was chock full of fresh crab and nicely crisp. There were hints of grassy dill in the cake and the red pepper remoulade added a nice little bite.

For the main course, K sunk into braised veal breast and a hot potato croquette, both of which he described as ?frickin? awesome.? I had the crispy skate with fresh haricot vert, lemon, brown butter and capers. The fish was beautifully tender and the preparation simple and excellently executed ? with the butter flavor front and center.

Crispy Skate and Haricot Vert (photo courtesy of Comme Ca website

No one else at the table wanted dessert, but K and I dug in unapologetically. We shared a calamansi (a type of Hawaiian citrus) custard rolled in a shatteringly crisp tuille and accompanied by rice milk sorbet and candied citrus. It was easily the best part of the meal ? elegant, tart and creamy, creative and light.

Because Vegas is a temple of indulgence, the next morning I decided to treat myself to a breakfast cupcake at the Cupcakery (in the lobby of our hotel). I was excited about this breakfast cupcake because how often do you get to eat a cupcake for breakfast!?? Never. Nearly all the cupcakes, however, were absolutely slathered in mounds and mounds of sweet frosting, which I did not want first thing in the morning so I went with their Good Morning cupcake (*of course* they had a breakfast cupcake). It was a simple yellow cake with cinnamon topping and a little glaze. It was also a very blah, dry cupcake. According to their website, ?nobody makes (cupcakes) better or tastier than The Cupcakery.? That is a bold claim and, based on my experience, they are wrong.

We gathered up some family members (including the niece <age 4> and nephew <age 8>) and headed to the Border Grill in Mandalay Bay for lunch. The restaurant is HUGE and spans two floors plus an outdoor patio. K and I were delighted to see that their specials menu included the quinoa fritters and tomatillo ribs that were part of chef Mary Sue Millken?s recent appearance on Top Chef Masters. We?d recently tried our hand at both (ribs here and fritters here)? so we ordered the fritters to compare our version and the restaurant?s (we weren?t hungry enough to nosh on ribs sadly). The quinoa fritters were crispy and nutty and delicious, crispier than ours, but we don?t have a deep fryer. The Border Grill tortilla chips are hot and plentiful, with a sweet tomatillo salsa and creamy guacamole. After filling up on chips and quinoa fritters, no one was even hungry for the main entree, but I gamely charged through two small grilled fish tacos (good, but nothing to cheer about) and K made it through about half of his beef taquitos. It was very good upscale Americanized Latin food. The service was slow and erratic. After we?d received our quinoa fritters, the server brought over a dessert menu. Upon seeing the confused looks on our faces, he paused with a slight deer-in-the-headlights look. We told him we hadn?t even received our entrees yet so he stammered something about making sure we saved room for dessert then sprinted off to check on our lunch.

Mine was a brief visit to Vegas, but it?s always a delicious opportunity to check out some new food. Next year I?ll skip the cupcake and head straight to Jose Andreas? hot restaurant Jaleo ? where K went. Before I arrived in Vegas. And dined without me. Not that I?m bitter about him eating at the place I *really* wanted to dine at. Not bitter at all.

P.S. We are huge fans of the History Channel show Pawn Stars which is filmed at a Vegas pawn shop. We attempted to make a pilgrimage to the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop to check out the joint and meet the Old Man, Rick, Big Hoss and Chumlee. There was a very, very long line in the blazing desert sun. K?s cousin and his wife went earlier in the week, waited in line and got in. They said it was a small, grungy pawn shop and the guys weren?t even there. Just an FYI if you?re going to Vegas and hoping to strike it rich pawning some of your valuables with the Harrison fam.

Tags: Border Gill, Comme Ca, Eat, Las Vegas, travel, Vegas

This entry was posted on July 4, 2011 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Eat - Restaurants, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://eatdrinklifelove.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/vegas-bites-2011/

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Social Network Marketing Online | Online Job Anywhere

Posted on in Network Marketing | 0 comments

You have your internet site but need traffic now? What?s the very best and minimum expensive way of marketing successfully and cheap. Social Network Marketing is a fantastic way to get site visitors and a whole lot of it. You can make yourself become as human as achievable and be extremely individual with your prospective customers. You are no lengthier a computerized robot asking for credit card data, you turn out to be real and genuine in what you do. You make your prospect view you as a very good new friend with typical interests.

There are a ton of Social Network?s this kind of as MySpace, Facebook, MyYearbook, Twitter, the listing goes on and on. So how to get it all up and operating? Produce as several Social Networking sites as doable and make them individual, never generate a page that is all about your company and which is it. Discuss about your likes and dislikes, your hobbies, add some entertaining and quirky images, your hobbies, your family members, where you have been and exactly where you want to go, will not forget your enterprise! Just never make it all organization, that will turn off a ton of potential prospects, and your pocketbook will see the outcomes in the end.

Generate a group for your Social Network and include folks daily to this group.

Add your backlinks, make daily posts, include some photographs, discuss about organization, and make sure this is a business associated group. Create discussion matters in your group so other folks will grow to be lively in your group. Be part of as numerous other groups as you can, this opens up a great deal a lot more potential customers for you that are interested in the business idea currently.

Include as many close friends as you can every day. Submit bulletins about your enterprise day-to-day, chat on line with your pals by means of the internet sites messenger if doable. Find something in common with your Social Network buddies and run with it.

Never ever go in with a income pitch, casually deliver up the topic about what the two of you do for a living.

Often preserve your Social Network Advertising and marketing profile up to date and operating, be a part of chat rooms and discuss your organization. What are the benefits of your company? why do you really like it so significantly? What can make it far better than the rest? When once more never be a tough pushy income guy, if they are genuinely interested in commencing a organization they will ask you about it.

Social Network Marketing and advertising will take some time setting up profiles, composing out all the data, joining and incorporating groups, and many others. but when you do it the initial time your carried out. You wont have to develop a new profile every day, so it can make the process simpler and less difficult as the days go on. Social Networking is one of the least expensive and most price efficient ways to market to a wide assortment of folks with just a number of clicks.

Be exclusive in every thing point you put on your profile, have exciting with it. If you currently have a personalized Social Networking site that you use for your pals, try out to replicate the material of that one particular for your company internet site, just with your extra back links and a little bit about what you have to provide. Publish a blog site if feasible just about your organization and how it functions, will not overlook to fill the description with all the advantages it offers for your prospects. Folks want to know what they are acquiring involved in and how it will assist them and their scenario.

All these guidelines will generate a massive quantity of targeted traffic to your website day-to-day if you stay persistent in your steps.
Social Network Advertising and marketing will get you substantial final results and help your business get off.

If you would like to start a organization and have total assistance and get much more insider information equivalent to this and considerably considerably more. Go to my link beneath.

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Source: http://onlinejobanywhere.com/social-network-marketing-online/

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Q&A: Can I employ Financial Aid Money on books from Amazon.com ...

Question by KOTU: Can I employ Financial Aid Money on books from Amazon.com? How would I access this money if its on my school ID?
I received financial aid money for books?.but I usually just go to the schools bookstore & employ my student ID to access the funds?but this semester im the unique student in a course and the teacher is going to have me order books off amazon and the school will not have it.

Best answer:

Answer by Suba
You will have to pay for it out of pocket and be reimbursed. Or you could ask the school bookstore to special order the book(s) for you. You will need documentation from your teacher that this book is required in order to have it charged to yor finncial aid.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!

Source: http://www.qiyic.com/archives/450

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Tiger Airways, Australian agency in crisis talks (AP)

SYDNEY ? Tiger Airways executives are holding crisis talks with an Australian air safety watchdog after the regulators grounded all Australian domestic flights of a Tiger subsidiary over safety concerns.

Monday's meeting with Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority comes two days after it announced that Tiger Airways Australia's entire domestic fleet was grounded for five business days. The move affects about 35,000 passengers.

The Australian safety regulators say the budget airline twice flew under the minimum allowed altitude. Singapore-based Tiger Airways Holdings Ltd. says the grounding will cost the airline 2 million Singapore dollars ($1.63 million) a week.

The airline says it is cooperating with the safety authority.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oceania/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110704/ap_on_re_as/as_australia_tiger_airways

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NJ paves way on tightening public worker benefits (AP)

TRENTON, N.J. ? The nation's financial downturn left many states in such a precarious position that they were forced this year to make tough decisions on expensive but long-untouchable public employee benefits.

Nowhere was this breakthrough more evident than in union-friendly New Jersey, where a Republican governor aided by Democrats enacted sweeping cost-saving changes that touched pensions and health care simultaneously.

Experts say the overhaul is not only significant in scope, but also marks a pivotal moment as other states look to defuse the ticking time-bomb employee benefit obligations have become as a result of the recession, government benefits becoming more generous than those in the private sector, and poor planning by politicians.

With one bill, New Jersey increased required pension contributions, increased the amount workers will pay for health benefits, raised the retirement age, and eliminated automatic cost-of-living increases for current retirees among other things.

The ideas aren't new, experts said, but New Jersey's success in adopting a comprehensive solution rather than taking a piecemeal approach is noteworthy.

"What New Jersey has done is farther-reaching versions of the reforms done all around the country, but all together at once," said Joshua Rauh, an associate professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

All 50 states have combined unfunded pension and retiree health care obligations that top $1 trillion, according to an Associated Press examination of state balance sheets.

Five states have unfunded public employee pension liabilities of $50 billion or more, and a recent study by the Pew Center for the States found that only 5 percent of states saved toward their obligations for retiree health care benefits.

"The bigger the annual (obligation) bill is for states, the more pressure it puts on them to not spend money on things like education or public safety," said Sue Urahn, the managing director for Pew.

Although New Jersey's powerful public employee unions did not go down without a fight, Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his and Democratic allies in the Legislature managed to circumvent collective bargaining without the turmoil that occurred in several other states ? most notably Wisconsin.

Unlike Wisconsin though, New Jersey suspended ? not eliminated ? collective bargaining on health care for four years. And New Jersey had a much larger pension and health benefits problem to solve.

With underfunded retirement systems short of eventual liabilities by a combined $110 billion, New Jersey's retiree obligations are among the biggest in the country and are growing. Some studies estimated the pension fund in the New Jersey, the nation's most densely populated state, would go broke within the decade.

"There is nothing like the absence of cash to focus one mind's on change," said former New York lieutenant governor Richard Ravitch, who along with other government officials will serve on a new task force to look into states' current money problems and the extent of their debt.

Illinois and California are also in dire straits with each owing more than $100 billion in promises to state and local public workers. Wisconsin, where public protests raged on for days over the GOP-led elimination of collective bargaining rights, falls in the middle of all states in terms of retiree obligations.

While bigger states have bigger debt obligations, smaller Northeastern states ? with more prevalent unions than out West ? fared worse in terms of the percentage they have set aside for retirement funds. As in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Maryland all have pension systems that are underfunded by at least a third, according the Pew Center.

An examination of health care debt reveals an even worse financial picture.

Nineteen states haven't set aside any money toward their health care funds, instead dealing with benefits that far exceed those in the private sector on a pay-as-you-go basis for expenses incurred by current retirees, Pew found.

In 2009, 14 states offered free health benefits to some or all individual state employees, and half as many states also paid for family plans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

What is even more notable than the scope of New Jersey's change to employee benefits, is that normally union-backing Democrats ? albeit only a handful ? helped to pass it. Those who supported it said the state could not wait any longer.

"Unions at the local levels were unwilling to give up any concessions at all," said New Jersey's Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver. "I think at some point you have to put politics aside and solve the problem."

Union officials say politicians have been effective at deflecting blame for years of irresponsible behavior, such as skipping pension payments and borrowing against investments in flush years, by using the economic downturn to portray public workers as the problem.

"They flipped the tables to say `Look at these individuals who have these plans that you don't enjoy anymore and you're paying for it,'" said Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents 300,000 career firefighters in North America.

"They use those debt figures to whip up public fear because people aren't paying attention to what politicians are doing," added Bob Master, the political director for the Communications Workers of America's Northeast region.

Master said that increasing health premiums for current state workers will do nothing to shore up the liability for existing retiree obligations.

Michigan tried to address its health care obligation by making teachers and state workers start paying 3 percent of their pay toward retiree health costs last year under Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Public sector unions sued and the payments are tied up in court because judges have so far ruled that employees can't be forced to pay for retirement benefits they may never get.

New Jersey unions also plan to sue over the elimination of cost-of-living increases, called COLAs, for current retirees.

Colorado, Minnesota, and South Dakota have all tried to reduce COLAs only to face ongoing lawsuits. A few other states have managed suspend them for a year, but no state has been successful in eliminating them totally.

Getting rid of the annual increases achieves a large and immediate savings.

In separate district court rulings on Wednesday, judges in Colorado and Minnesota upheld the reduced COLAs ? a good signal for New Jersey, which allows for them to be reinstated once the pension account becomes 80 percent funded.

"COLAs needed to be addressed head-on ... it's a big cost savings," said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. "It attacks the notion that pensions cannot be changed for existing employees."

But Munnell said the New Jersey legislation was also sweeping for what it gave to unions: the power to sue if the state should once again skip an annual pension payment ? a move intended to ensure that the state doesn't get itself back into trouble when the economy improves.

___

Associated Press writers Rik Stevens in Albany, N.Y., Ann Sanner in Columbus, Ohio, Judy Lin in Sacramento, Calif., Kathy Hoffman in Lansing, Mich., and Roger Schneider in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110702/ap_on_re_us/us_broken_budgets_digging_out

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