Currently in the battlespace we have all types of sensors available to the war fighters of today. They have infrared devices to see heat and can tell if it is human body heat or another animal. They have night vision capable of seeing in fog, pitch-black dead of night or even through enemy smoke screens.

Our Navy has radar and sonar and our Army has infrared and lidar. Total situational awareness is not only a buzz word of the future fighting force it is a reality and a must have to stay alive in the most hostile place on Earth; the modern battlespace, where life expectancies during a battle can be as short as 1 minute. The Iraq war has taught us some interesting lessons in the way of roadside bombs to take out our soldiers and their vehicles. But these roadside bombs need not kill our soldiers, as there is a way to defend against them. How so you ask?

By using special equipment, which sends waves into the Earth below we can sense anomalies in the electromagnetic signatures and detect things which are not dirt or rock. Those things, which are not stone, dirt or rocks will have a different magnetic resonance and be immediately suspect. In the future we will also see tunneling robots, which are used to attack the enemy by going underground to their location and simply breaking ground and then either exploding or seeking out their prey once inside the gates. Think on this in 2006.

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

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Managers talk with the people on their teams every day. Whatever the topic, most of these conversations happen with no stress, little anxiety, and minimal tension. But when the conversation is about an employee’s performance, anxieties often abound. Here are four ways to reduce the tension and defensiveness that too often surround performance evaluations.

1. Don’t wait for the meeting to deliver the performance appraisal form.

I worked for large corporations for fifteen years before beginning my consulting career. Every one of those companies GE, United Airlines, PepsiCo took performance appraisal very seriously. And my bosses at those companies also took their responsibilities for performance evaluation seriously as well. But all of my bosses kicked off the appraisal discussion in a way that was guaranteed to get it off to a bad start. How did they begin? They set up the time for the meeting and then waited until I was sitting across the desk to hand me their completed appraisal form.

At the start of the meeting my boss would give me his appraisal form and I would engage all of my speed-reading skills, whipping through the document as fast as I could to see what he had said about my performance. While I was reading the evaluation (and probably missing some key points in my haste to take everything in) my boss would be behind his desk, pretending to work, but in truth trying to gauge how I was reacting to the evaluation he had written.

What a terrible way to begin! Don’t wait until the meeting starts to give the employee your performance appraisal document. It’s far more effective to go up to the employee an hour or so in advance of the meeting, and say something like this: “Mary, you know we’re getting together at two o’clock to go over your performance appraisal. Here it is. Why don’t you take some time between now and then to review it? Read it carefully and jot down any questions that you’d like to ask.”

Giving the person the appraisal to review in advance of the meeting can lessen defensiveness. It allows her time to think about what you’ve written and prevents spur-of-the-moment reactions. You’ll usually find that giving the person a chance to read what you’ve written in advance produces much more effective business discussions.

2. Set a time frame (and give yourself an extra fifteen minutes).

Your discussion of a person’s performance evaluation may be one of the most important interactions you’ll ever have with that individual; make sure you’ve allowed enough time. In most cases, an hour should be sufficient to review the appraisal document itself as well as discuss many of the other subjects that often pop up during performance reviews development activities, career plans, and future goals and projects. Make certain that the very next activity you’ve scheduled after finishing the review isn’t one that must begin at a set time. If you provide yourself with a little flexibility at the end, you can take the time to wrap up the discussion comfortably.

3. Don’t start by discussing the form itself.

Yes, the form is important, but the form simply serves as the formal record of your assessment of how well the individual has done over the past year. Rather than beginning with the first entry on the appraisal form and moving lockstep through the document item-by-item, it’s more effective to start by asking a general question that requires the employee’s thoughtful consideration: “Tim, you’ve had a chance to read the appraisal. Why don’t you start by telling me how you feel the past year has gone?” Then listen as the individual responds and continue the discussion from there.

4. Don’t fixate on getting the employee to agree with your performance appraisal.

One of the most common questions managers ask me during training sessions involves how they can gain an employee’s agreement with what they’ve written in the performance appraisal, particularly when what they’ve written isn’t entirely favorable. “Don’t try!” is my advice to them.

What is a performance appraisal? It is a formal record of the supervisor’s opinion of the quality of the employee’s work. Pay attention to the key phrase, “. . . the supervisor’s opinion . . .”

Of course the employee is going to have a different opinion all of us believe we’re above average. The goal in the performance review discussion is not to gain the employee’s agreement, although it is nice if that happens, the goal is to gain the employee’s understanding. As long as the employee understands how you came up with the evaluation, you’ve done your job. Of course, he may disagree (particularly if you’ve set the bar high and have tough, demanding standards). But don’t waste time trying to convince a person that you’re right and she’s wrong. The important thing is that she understands your expectations and how her performance was assessed.

There’s a lot more to conducting good appraisal discussions, of course. But these four tips should make a tough job just a little bit easier.

Dick Grote is one of America’s best-known consultants on employee performance management. He is the Chairman/CEO of Grote Consulting Corporation and developer of the GroteApproach web-based performance management system at http://www.groteapproach.com

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RSS gets 100% of your content delivered, but it’s no good if no one subscribes to your feeds.

So your first order of business after planning and creating your feeds has to be promoting them to your visitors.

The only problem is that most internet users still don’t know what RSS is, so you do have your work cut out for. But using the system outlined below you shouldn’t have any problems. Actually, after implementing this system, you should be achieving better results than the majority of publishers out there.

1. HOW RSS FEEDS ARE GENERALLY PROMOTED

RSS feeds are generally promoted using the orange XML or RSS buttons, and often also with buttons that enable visitors to subscribe directly to the feed with their RSS reader.

Usually, if clicking on the RSS button, the visitor only sees a lot of confusing XML code. They in fact need to copy & paste the link in to their RSS reader. But since most still don’t know what RSS is, using this approach will only waste potential subscribers.

To achieve success, you’ll need a different approach.

A] Create an RSS presentation page, on which you explain:

- What RSS is
- How the visitor will benefit from using RSS
- Where they can get a free RSS aggregator (recommend one yourself!)
- How they can install it (provide step-by-step instructions)
- How they can subscribe to your RSS feeds
- Why they should subscribe to your own RSS feeds

Then, on this same page, include the links to all of your RSS feeds.

In addition to the standard orange RSS button, also include direct links for subscriptions via MyYahoo! (get it here http://my.yahoo.com/s/button.html) and other relevant services, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com). There are about 5 RSS readers you should cover with these buttons.

B] Now promote this RSS presentation page as much as you can using all of your available channels.

2. LOCATION AND CONTENT

It’s all about location, just like with the subscription box for your e-zine. If they don’t see it, they won’t subscribe. And if you don’t motivate them enough to check-it out, they’ll just ignore it.

A] Promote your RSS feeds directly below your e-zine subscription box, and always “above the fold”. Promote your RSS presentation page (telling your visitors that’s where they can subscribe to your feeds) on the most prominent locations of your site.

B] If you’re publishing more than one RSS feed, but rather a couple of focused topic feeds, promote each of them next to their topics. For instance, if you’re publishing an RSS feed on E-mail Marketing, promote the RSS feed at the top of the topic home page, and in every E-mail Marketing article you publish. These links should actually be direct subscriptions links to the feeds.

Use this service to cover all of the important readers using just one simple button: http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/

C] Promote your RSS feeds in all of your e-mail messages and e-zine issues.

D] As for the content, don’t just say “Subscribe to receive news from my site”, but rather prepare compelling copy to specifically show your visitors why they need to subscribe to your content in the first place and why they should subscribe specifically to your RSS feeds.

3. ENABLE AUTO-DISCOVERY

Some internet browsers, such as Firefox, make it easy for their users to subscribe to RSS feeds. The browser actually asks the user if he wants to subscribe to the feeds the browser finds on the site the user is currently on.

Yes, this is even more powerful than your e-mail subscription form, since the browser in a way “pushes” the user with your RSS feed subscription.

But in order for the browser to do this, you need to help it out to find your RSS feed.

Just include the following piece of HTML code in the section of your webpages and you’ll be all set:

There are many more techniques and opportunities available to you, from “direct subscribe” links to actually using opt-in forms, but these 7 steps should get you started in the shortest time possible, and help you achieve a better visitor-to-RSS-subscriber conversion rate than the huge majority of sites are achieving today.

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

Rok Hrastnik is the author of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide on marketing with RSS by top RSS industry leaders, experts, developers and top marketers. Find out all you need to know about RSS and how to use it to get your content delivered, win back your customers, make more sales and increase search engine rankings http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa6

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With the increase of the real online casinos facility, now we can see a number of casino sites all over the internet. Also these casino sites open much often and it is a bit harder to select a best site in order to do our casino. So reading this small article will be a good guidance in order to select the best casino accordingly.If you are new internet use and willing to play internet casino, then you will always find the sites which offers huge welcome bonuses. However most of the players interest on these super sites and they start their playing with them.

Anyway when you are selecting an online casino site, you must always look in to the software which is used by the relevant site. The reason is these casino software has a great power to make your game realistic always and make your game nice. Also if the software is not designed properly, then you will not able to feel the best online gaming experience as you expected.

Also with the best online casino games always offer you the fair gaming facility. So these numbers generated always random and any third party person cannot change them or alter them to cheat the game. This has been tested and confirmed that it is really random for the players. So the players will get the chance to play the game with confidence always.

Finally the best online casino games always offer you the best customer care always. Then you don’t have to stay on waiting list to get a response to your query and most of the casino sites now provide 24/7 customer care service. Also most of the modern casino sites now offer, instant phone support and the clients will find it’s easier than waiting for an e-mail response.

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One of the items usually toward the bottom of the list when budgeting for a college education is medical insurance for college students. By And Large, health insurance is not exactly a priority in a student’s mind. When you are in your 20’s you will generally believe that you are immortal and of course you will not suffer from illness. However, this is seldom the case no matter how fit a person may appear. A student health insurance policy isn’t a luxury, it is an essential. Those fortunate to be included in a family policy are more often than not included up until their twenty-third birthday. For anyone who doesn’t have coverage under their family plan, an essential part in budgeting for a college education has to be obtaining an inexpensive medical insurance policy.

So what must a student look out for in an insurance policy for college students? So what’s a deductible? This is an annual amount you have to pay prior to any health benefits starting, in many ways like an auto deductible. An example is, if your deductible is $500, 500 dollars must be paid before claiming financial benefits connected with your policy. What’s a co-pay? When you have paid the deductible, most policies require you to pay a part of the cost of each doctor’s visit, medicine or procedure. This, succinctly, is a co-pay. What is the area of insurance coverage? Numerous plans do include Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) or PPA. Essentially this means particular physicians may possibly be excluded from your “network” and may not be included on the insurance policy. Most policies provide a directory of approved professionals, prior to making a selection do study this thoroughly.

What is catastrophic health insurance coverage? There is frequently a restriction on college student health insurance policies especially with regard to more serious illness, and for most medical insurance for college students, it’s ordinarily lower than any regular insurance plan.

And what are the limits? Inexpensive student medical insurance plans may have various restrictions. It is very important to study any insurance policy carefully to discover what may and may not be included. Have all your medical insurance cards nearby everywhere you go. It’s not only impossible to plan for accidents or illness, they’re also liable to happen when it’s least expected. Acquaint yourself with the details of your inexpensive college medical insurance policy, whether you are included with your parents or with your own insurance policy.

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