Highway training made mandatory for new drivers.

Dubai: Training to drive on the highway for a minimum of two hours has been made mandatory to obtain a driving licence in Dubai, officials announced yesterday.

"After passing the road test, drivers will now have to undergo driving lessons along the highway, with trainers beside them, before they are issued a driver's licence," said Ahmad Hashim Behroozian, CEO of the Roads and Transport Authority's (RTA) Licensing Agency.

"This will ascertain the drivers' ability to cope with the vehicle as well as other vehicles on the road."

He was speaking at the launch of the unified curriculum for all driving institutes in Dubai.

The unified curriculum for training and qualifying those wishing to obtain driving licences for light motor vehicles has been distributed to all institutes and has been put into effect since the start of this year, he said.

Training on the highway is just one of the changes the new curriculum will introduce. Other significant changes include mandatory night driving lessons and lessons on sudden braking in case of emergency situations.

"It is a complete training package, which takes the learner from attitude development and road safety awareness to vehicle familiarisation, from driving in simple to complex road networks to night driving until finally to freeway driving."

At present, every driving school has its own curriculum. "They all cover the major skills but by unifying we have put a structure around the training process and based on this the schools can come up with improvements," Behroozian said.

The new curriculum — delivered in Arabic, English and Urdu — has two components. The theoretical component comprises eight basic lectures and videos — including road rules, attitude and accident case studies — which are mandatory for trainees to attend as they cover safety standards and groom them to become able drivers, he said. The practical component comprises five basic stages including emergency braking, parking exercises, night driving and highway driving.

No additional costs

The number of mandatory lessons will still continue to be 40 lessons. This way the curriculum will not mean any additional costs for the trainees, Behroozian said, adding that the drivers will benefit from better training at the same cost.

The curriculum will follow a systematic progressive teaching method, whereby trainees will have to demonstrate their proficiency before being allowed to progress to the next step.

Three specific areas along the highway have been identified by RTA for training drivers, Hussain Al Saffar, Director of Drivers Training and Qualification department at the RTA, told Gulf News.

The road connecting the Business Bay crossing to Al Hadiqa Road, Emirates Road from near the Sharjah boundary up to Al Aweer Interchange and Al Aweer road leading towards Hatta are the areas identified.

"While driving along the highway, trainees will not be assessed because they would already have passed the road test. But the training is a means of managing risk on the highways," he said.

Asked if the new curriculum will make it easier or harder for aspiring drivers, Sultan Al Marzouqi, Director of the Drivers Licensing department, said that the RTA's focus is on allowing only safe drivers on the roads.

"The pass rate at driving tests has more than doubled recently, going from 17 per cent on average between 2008 and 2010 to 30 per cent in 2011. Accidents and deaths have also come down. This means drivers are being trained better," he said.

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/traffic-transport/highway-training-made-mandatory-for-new-drivers-1.970757

WILL WORLD END IN 2012?

The end of the world is near—December 21, 2012, to be exact—according to theories based on a purported ancient Maya prediction and fanned by the marketing machine behind the soon-to-be-released 2012 movie.

But could humankind really meet its end in 2012—drowned in apocalyptic floods, walloped by a secret planet, seared by an angry sun, or thrown overboard by speeding continents?

And did the ancient Maya—whose empire peaked between A.D. 250 and 900 in what is now Mexico and Central America—really predict the end of the world in 2012?

At least one aspect of the 2012, end-of-the-world hype is, for some people, all too real: the fear.

NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist Web site, for example, has received thousands of questions regarding the 2012 doomsday predictions—some of them disturbing, according to David Morrison, senior scientist with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

"A lot of [the submitters] are people who are genuinely frightened," Morrison said.

"I've had two teenagers who were considering killing themselves, because they didn't want to be around when the world ends," he said. "Two women in the last two weeks said they were contemplating killing their children and themselves so they wouldn't have to suffer through the end of the world."

(Related gallery: "Apocalypse Pictures—Ten Failed Doomsday Prophecies.")

Fortunately, with the help of scientists like Morrison, most of the predicted 2012 cataclysms are easily explained away.

2012 MYTH 1
Maya Predicted End of the World in 2012

The Maya calendar doesn't end in 2012, as some have said, and the ancients never viewed that year as the time of the end of the world, archaeologists say.

But December 21, 2012, (give or take a day) was nonetheless momentous to the Maya.

"It's the time when the largest grand cycle in the Mayan calendar—1,872,000 days or 5,125.37 years—overturns and a new cycle begins," said Anthony Aveni, a Maya expert and archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

The Maya kept time on a scale few other cultures have considered.

During the empire's heyday, the Maya invented the Long Count—a lengthy circular calendar that "transplanted the roots of Maya culture all the way back to creation itself," Aveni said.

During the 2012 winter solstice, time runs out on the current era of the Long Count calendar, which began at what the Maya saw as the dawn of the last creation period: August 11, 3114 B.C. The Maya wrote that date, which preceded their civilization by thousands of years, as Day Zero, or 13.0.0.0.0.

In December 2012 the lengthy era ends and the complicated, cyclical calendar will roll over again to Day Zero, beginning another enormous cycle.

"The idea is that time gets renewed, that the world gets renewed all over again—often after a period of stress—the same way we renew time on New Year's Day or even on Monday morning," said Aveni, author of The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012.

2012 MYTH 2
Breakaway Continents Will Destroy Civilization

In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth becomes a deathtrap as it undergoes a "pole shift."

The planet's crust and mantle will suddenly shift, spinning around Earth's liquid-iron outer core like an orange's peel spinning around its fleshy fruit. (See what Einstein had to say about pole shifts.)

2012, the movie, envisions a Maya-predicted pole shift, triggered by an extreme gravitational pull on the planet—courtesy of a rare "galactic alignment"—and by massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it.

Breakaway oceans and continents dump cities into the sea, thrust palm trees to the poles, and spawn earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters. (Interactive: pole shift theories illustrated.)

Scientists dismiss such drastic scenarios, but some researchers have speculated that a subtler shift could occur—for example, if the distribution of mass on or inside the planet changed radically, due to, say, the melting of ice caps.

Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts, and tackles this 2012 myth in 2012: Countdown to Armageddon, a National Geographic Channel documentary airing Sunday, November 8. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and part-owns the National Geographic Channel.)

Maloof says magnetic evidence in rocks confirm that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years—slow enough that humanity wouldn't have felt the motion (quick guide to plate tectonics).

2012 MYTH 3
Galactic Alignment Spells Doom

Some sky-watchers believe 2012 will close with a "galactic alignment," which will occur for the first time in 26,000 years (for example, see the Web site Alignment 2012).

In this scenario, the path of the sun in the sky would appear to cross through what, from Earth, looks to be the midpoint of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which in good viewing conditions appears as a cloudy stripe across the night sky.

Some fear that the lineup will somehow expose Earth to powerful unknown galactic forces that will hasten its doom—perhaps through a "pole shift" (see above) or the stirring of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's heart.

Others see the purported event in a positive light, as heralding the dawn of a new era in human consciousness.

NASA's Morrison has a different view.

"There is no 'galactic alignment' in 2012," he said, "or at least nothing out of the ordinary."

He explained that a type of "alignment" occurs during every winter solstice, when the sun, as seen from Earth, appears in the sky near what looks to be the midpoint of the Milky Way.

Horoscope writers may be excited by alignments, Morrison said. But "the reality is that alignments are of no interest to science. They mean nothing," he said. They create no changes in gravitational pull, solar radiation, planetary orbits, or anything else that would impact life on Earth.

The speculation over alignments isn't surprising, though, he said.

"Ordinary astronomical phenomena are imbued with a sense of threat by people who already think the world is going to end."

Regarding galactic alignments, University of Texas Maya expert David Stuart writes on his blog that "no ancient Maya text or artwork makes reference to anything of the kind."

Even so, the end date of the current Long Count cycle—winter solstice 2012—may be evidence of Maya astronomical skill, said Aveni, the archaeoastronomer.

"I don't rule out the likelihood that astronomy played a role" in the selection of 2012 as the cycle's terminus, he said.

Maya astronomers built observatories and, by observing the night skies and using mathematics, learned to accurately predict eclipses and other celestial phenomena. Aveni notes that the start date of the current cycle was likely tied to a solar zenith passage, when the sun crosses directly overhead, and its terminal date will fall on a December solstice, perhaps by design.

(Take a Maya Empire quiz.)

These choices, he said, may indicate that the Maya calendar is tied to seasonal agricultural cycles central to ancient survival.

2012 MYTH 4
Planet X Is on a Collision Course With Earth

Some say it's out there: a mysterious Planet X, aka Nibiru, on a collision course with Earth—or at least a disruptive flyby.

A direct hit would obliterate Earth, it's said. Even a near miss, some fear, could shower Earth with deadly asteroid impacts hurled our way by the planet's gravitational wake.

Could such an unknown planet really be headed our way in 2012, even just a little bit?

Well, no.

"There is no object out there," NASA astrobiologist Morrison said. "That's probably the most straightforward thing to say."

The origins of this theory actually predate widespread interest in 2012. Popularized in part by a woman who claims to receive messages from extraterrestrials, the Nibiru doomsday was originally predicted for 2003.

"If there were a planet or a brown dwarf or whatever that was going to be in the inner solar system three years from now, astronomers would have been studying it for the past decade and it would be visible to the naked eye by now," Morrison said.

"It's not there."

2012 MYTH 5
Solar Storms to Savage Earth

In some 2012 disaster scenarios, our own sun is the enemy.

Our friendly neighborhood star, it's rumored, will produce lethal eruptions of solar flares, turning up the heat on Earthlings.

Solar activity waxes and wanes according to approximately 11-year cycles. Big flares can indeed damage communications and other Earthly systems, but scientists have no indications the sun, at least in the short term, will unleash storms strong enough to fry the planet.

"As it turns out the sun isn't on schedule anyway," NASA astronomer Morrison said. "We expect that this cycle probably won't peak in 2012 but a year or two later." (See "Sun Oddly Quiet—Hints at Next 'Little Ice Age'?")

2012 MYTH 6
Maya Had Clear Predictions for 2012

If the Maya didn't expect the end of time in 2012, what exactly did they predict for that year?

Many scholars who've pored over the scattered evidence on Maya monuments say the empire didn't leave a clear record predicting that anything specific would happen in 2012.

The Maya did pass down a graphic—though undated—end-of-the-world scenario, described on the final page of a circa-1100 text known as the Dresden Codex. The document describes a world destroyed by flood, a scenario imagined in many cultures and probably experienced, on a less apocalyptic scale, by ancient peoples (more on the Dresden Codex).

Aveni, the archaeoastronomer, said the scenario is not meant to be read literally—but as a lesson about human behavior.

He likens the cycles to our own New Year period, when the closing of an era is accompanied by frenetic activities and stress, followed by a rebirth period, when many people take stock and resolve to begin living better.

In fact, Aveni says, the Maya weren't much for predictions.

"The whole timekeeping scale is very past directed, not future directed," he said. "What you read on these monuments of the Long Count are events that connected Maya rulers with ancestors and the divine.

"The farther back you can plant your roots in deep time the better argument you can make that you're legit," Aveni said. "And I think that's why these Maya rulers were using Long Count time.

"It's not about a fixed prediction about what's going to happen."

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

MOVEMBER CHANGING THE FACE OF MEN'S HEALTH.

What is Movember All About.

The Movember Foundation was co-founded by Luke Slattery, Travis Garone, Adam Garone and Justin Coghlan in 2004. The Foundation is a not for profit organisation dedicated to having an everlasting impact on the face of men’s health. Movember started in Australia and has since grown to a global movement, running official campaigns in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States of America, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, South Africa and Finland. The idea of Movember came from a conversation between Luke Slattery and Travis Garone the year before the Foundation was established. Luke and Travis were watching the world go by and critiquing the comeback of fashion trends from the past when the question was raised, why no return of the moustache? Both felt that the Mo could do with a revival. So, with the seed of an idea, Luke and Travis talked a couple of mates into growing a moustache for one month and with that, Movember was born. In 2003, just 30 Mo Bros took part. The rules were simple; start on Movember 1st clean shaven and spend the remainder of the month growing a Mo. No money was raised; the idea was simply to see who could grow the better moustache. It wasn’t until 2004, having been overwhelmed by the conversations prompted by the previous year’s growth, that the founders decided to develop the idea into a cause that gave birth to the Movember Foundation. Having recognized that men, unlike women, were lacking a way to engage in their own health issues, they saw an opportunity to attach a purpose to growing a Mo, and began to look for a cause for which they could raise a bit of money and awareness in 2004. Together, they came across the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia(PCFA) representing a health issue about which very little was known at the time. In 2004, 450 Mo Bros took part and got their mates, friends and families to sponsor the growth of their Mo’s and, to everyone’s surprise, they raised $55,000. It was the largest single donation the PCFA had ever received Today, Movember takes place around the world. Motivated and inspired by what was happening in Australia, a further nine countries- New Zealand, USA, Canada, UK, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and Ireland - now embrace the Mo in an official capacity each November. In addition, Movember is aware of Mo Bros & Sistas supporting the cause right across the globe, from Russia to Dubai, Hong Kong to Denmark and everywhere in between. Movember will continue to work to change established habits and attitudes and make men aware of the health risks they face, thereby increasing early detection, diagnosis and effective treatment. More importantly however, Movember’s success will remain with its ability to stay true to its origins, mates and moustaches, which is how it all began.

Creative Concepts Advertising Dubai - Staff Supporting to raise funds and awareness for men’s health.

A few things to ponder…

Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?

Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are flat?

Why do banks charge a fee on ‘insufficient funds’ when they know there is not enough?

Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?

Whose idea was it to put an ‘S’ in the word ‘lisp’?

What is the speed of darkness?

Why is it that people say they ‘slept like a baby’ when babies wake up every two hours?

If the temperature is zero outside today and it’s going to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold will it be?

Do married people live longer than single ones or does it only seem longer?

How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?

Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?

Did you ever stop and wonder……

Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, ‘I think I’ll squeeze these pink dangly things here, and drink whatever comes out?’

Who was the first person to say, ‘See that chicken there… I’m gonna eat the next thing that comes outta it’s bum.’

Why do toasters always have a setting so high that could burn the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

Why is there a light in the fridge and not in the freezer?

Why do people point to their wrist when asking for the time, but don’t point to their bum when they ask where the bathroom is?

Why does your Obstetrician, Gynaecologist leave the room when you get undressed if they are going to look up there anyway?

Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours? They’re both dogs!

If quizzes are quizzical, what are tests?

If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, then what is baby oil made from?

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?

Why do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?

Stop singing and read on…….

Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog’s face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him on a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

Does pushing the elevator button more than once make it arrive faster?

“Thank-You” makes you a better client servicing person.

Came across this article written by Laura Spencer, from North Central Texas- Two Special Words that Will Make Your Clients See You Differently. Even though these might seems like a little word to you, but saying these 2 words does mean a lot to your client at all times.

It shows them that you CARE, APPRECIATE and SINCERE.

It makes them feel that they are IMPORTANT, VALUED and ACKNOWLEDGED.

Five Times to Thank a Client or Prospective Client

Here are five occasions when you should consider thanking a client or prospective client:

1. When they’ve met with you personally. Say something like, “Thank-you for taking the time to meet with me yesterday.”
2. When they’ve interviewed you by phone. Say something like, “Thank-you for considering me for this project.”
3. When they’ve gone out of their way to provide with support for a project. Say something like, “Thank-you for the help and support that you provided on XYZ project.”
4. When you enjoyed the work that you did. Say something like, “Thank-you for giving me the opportunity to work on XYZ project. I really enjoyed it.”
5. When you enjoyed dealing with the client as an individual. Say something like, “Thank-you for working with me on XYZ project. I think that we make a good team.”

BUT, watch out for the “Thanks-You” hurdles:

1. The insincere thank-you. Don’t tell the client that you enjoyed working with them or on their project if you both know it’s not true. Most clients can sense when you’re being insincere.
2. The inappropriate thank-you. Don’t thank your client for the support they gave you if they didn't give you any help, and so on.
3. The overblown thank-you. A thank-you need not be excessive to be effective. Don’t make your client uncomfortable by fawning on him or her or offering inappropriate gifts.

So, now it’s your turn! Thank You :)

STEVE JOBS DIDN’T MAKE ANYTHING - He made it all happen.

I found this interesting article about Steve Jobs. The headline said, “STEVE JOBS DIDNT MAKE ANYTHING” and I wanted to keep on reading it. But then the article ended saying “HE MADE IT HAPPEN” which is what he DID and this is what all leaders do. Enjoy and hope this will give you some inspiration to reach for the stars!

Ashik Jabir-Senior Account Manager

Posted on 16 November 2011 by Dave Trott

Steve Jobs didn’t actually make anything himself.

He wasn’t a designer, an animator, a writer, or an engineer.

But without him none of those guys would have made anything.

Because he made their ideas happen.

Sure, truly creative people come up with wild, exciting ideas.

But unless someone makes it happen, it stays an idea.

And eventually, just like smoke, it dissipates.

Steve Jobs encouraged them to have wild ideas.

The wilder the better.

Then Steve Jobs made those wild ideas happen.

Take the music industry.

MP3 players existed before the iPod.

What was different was Jobs’ clarity of vision.

All the existing MP3 players were really complicated to use.

They were full of buttons and instructions.

More like tiny computers.

Really fiddly and awkward.

Steve Jobs’ vision was to say “The complexity doesn’t belong in the MP3 player. It belongs in the desktop computer.”

And, in that flash of vision, he repositioned the entire market.

All the music downloading would be done on the iMac.

Then the music would be organized, into playlists.

Then they’d be downloaded to the iPod.

So the iPod was as simple as possible, purely for playing.

With just one dial to scroll through the music.

It immediately made everything else obsolete.

In fact the entire system made everything else obsolete.

It was a closed loop.

Because iPods had to be downloaded from iMacs.

So iPods sold iMacs.

Which, in a flash, gave Jobs’ another vision.

He realized he could pull marketing money away from the iMac, a sector where everyone else was competing.

And put it into selling iPods.

He pulled $75 million out of iMac advertising and put it into iPod advertising.

Like he says, the sector didn’t justify a hundredth of that.

But it allowed him to blow all the other MP3s of the water.

Because he was the only manufacturer with a closed-loop system,

He was actually selling iMacs more efficiently by selling iPods.

And he totally dominated the music sector.

Which, in turn, made him able to grow iTunes into a phenomenon.

Because, with that spend, the only music advertising any of the rock celebrities saw was for iPod.

It was bigger than MTV had been.

So no one wanted to be left out.

Because their music was currently being downloaded for free by systems like Napster.

It was costing them a fortune.

If they could get on board the iPod, they’d make money and they’d look cool.

They’d be seen as part of the new wave of music.

People like U2, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger began calling Steve Jobs and offering to appear in the advertising for free.

Just to be associated with the iPod.

They wanted the image to rub off on them.

And that’s what Steve Jobs did for the people who make things.

The musicians got to make money from their music.

The designers got to see their innovative designs produced.

The engineers got to see their pipe-dream systems actually built.

All because a bloke who couldn’t play, or design, or build, did something much more important.

He made it all happen.

How to stay on top of Google's search rankings.

In May 2009, a year after being in business, OneNewsPage.com founder Marc Pinter Krainer woke up to see internet traffic on his site turning to almost zilch - that too overnight. Krainer, who had raised money a few months back from investors, was not only red-faced but perplexed too about the reason for this drop. Only later did Krainer discover that the dip was because of Google Penalty, whereby your site will show up lower on Google Search.

"It may have been an accidental deletion, or deliberate. Maybe because it was a competition to Google's own news website," Krainer told ET during an India visit. The reason for the penalty, he says is still unknown. But it hurt him very badly because like thousands of websites, being crawled by a Google Search crawler is a must for OneNewsPage.com to generate traffic.

Websites face Google Penalty - also called the Sandbox Effect - where they may be subject to filtering to prevent them having their full impact. It occurs when a website doesn't conform to its standards in terms of quality, content or is found using subversive optimisation techniques.

"If a site isn't appearing in Google search results or it's performing more poorly than it once did, one can check out our help centre article to try to identify and fix potential causes of the problem," said a Google spokeswoman.

Subversive optimisation is another reason for such filtering. Historical use of links as a "vote" for ranking web documents can be subject to manipulation. Google has filed patents that seek to qualify or minimise the impact of such manipulation, which Google terms as "link spam". Link spam is driven by search engine optimisers who manipulate Google's page ranking by creating lots of inbound links to a new site from other web sites that they own.

THE PENALTIES

The penalties can be both manual - actually demoting a site -- or algorithmic, where changes in the search algorithm causes a website to move down. For one, a '-30 penalty', which Google applies when a website fails to use effective search optimisation techniques, lowers the site's position on Google.com down by 30 places. A '--60 penalty' will lower your site down by 60 places on search. A '--950 penalty' will make your site slide on Google.com by 95 pages - you are almost not there.

A similar penalty was faced by Adam Raff, CEO and founder of Foundem.com, a UK price comparison site. Like Krainer's, Raff's website also faced a Google Penalty but for three years. Unlike Krainer, Raff went to court following which,the European Union has started investigating Google's Penalty system last year when Foundem, and Microsoft reportedly said that Google was demoting their sites manually since they competed with the search major.