Once upon a time a tortoise and a hare had an argument about who was faster. They decided to settle the argument with a race. They agreed on a route and started off the race. The hare shot ahead and ran briskly for some time. Then seeing that he was far ahead of the tortoise, he thought he should sit under a tree for some time and relax before continuing the race. He sat under the tree and soon fell asleep. The tortoise plodding on overtook him and soon finished the race, emerging as the undisputed champ. The hare woke up and realized that he had lost the race. The moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the race. This is the version of the story that we have all grown up with. But then recently, someone told me a more interesting version of this story. It continues.

The hare was disappointed at loosing the race and he did some defect prevention (root cause analysis).He realized that he had lost the race only because he was overconfident, careless and lax. If he had not taken things for granted, there is no way the tortoise could have beaten him. So he challenged the tortoise to another race. The tortoise agreed. This time the hare went all out and ran without stopping from start to finish. He won by several miles. Moral of the story? Fast and consistent will always beat the slow and steady. If you have two people in your organization, one slow, methodical and reliable, and the other fast and still reliable at what he does, the fast and reliable chap will consistently climb the organizational ladder faster than the slow, methodical chap. It is good to be slow and steady; but it is better to be fast and reliable.

But the story does not end hear, the tortoise did some thinking this time, and realized that there is no way he can beat the hare in a race the way it was currently formatted. He thought for a while, and then challenged the hare to another race, but on a slightly different route. The hare agreed. They started off. In keeping with his self-made commitment to be consistently fast, the hare took off and ran at top speed until he came to a broad river. The finishing line was a couple of kilometers on the other side of the river. The hare sat there wondering what to do. In the meantime the tortoise trundled along, got into the river, swam to the opposite bank, continued walking and finished the race. The moral of the story? First identify your core competency and then change the playing field to suit your core competency. In an organization, if you are a good speaker, make sure you create opportunities to give presentations that enable the senior management to notice you. If your strength is analysis, make sure you do some research, make a report and send it upstairs. Working to your strengths will not only get you noticed but will also create opportunities for growth and advancement.

The story still has not ended. The hare and the tortoise, by this time, had become pretty good friends and they did some thinking together. They both realized that the last race could have been run much better. So they decided to do the last race again, but to run as a team this time. They started off, and this time the hare carried the tortoise till the riverbank. There, the tortoise took over and swam across with the hare on his back. On the opposite bank, the hare again carried the tortoise and they reached the finishing line together. They both felt a greater sense of satisfaction than they had felt earlier.

The moral of the story? It is good to be individually brilliant and to have strong core competencies, but unless you are able to work as a team and harness each others core competencies, you will always perform below par because there will always be situations at which you will do poorly and someone else does well. Teamwork is mainly about situational leadership, letting the person with the relevant core competencies for a situation take leadership.

There are more lessons to be learnt from the story. Note that neither hare nor tortoise gave up after failures. The hare decided to work harder and put more effort after his failure. The tortoise changed his strategy because he was already working as hard as he could. In life, when faced with failure, sometimes it is appropriate to work harder and put more effort. Sometimes it is appropriate to change strategy and try something different and sometimes it is appropriate to do both.

The hare and the tortoise also learnt another vital lesson. When we stop competing against a rival and instead start competing against the situation, we perform far better.

When Roberto Goizueta took over as CEO of Coca-Cola in the 1980s, he was faced with intense competition from Pepsi that was eating into Coke’s growth. His executives were Pepsi-focused and intent on increasing market share by 0.1 per cent a time.Goizueta decided to stop competing against Pepsi and instead compete against the situation of 0.1 per cent growth. He asked his executives what was the average fluid intake of an American per day? The answer was 14 ounces. What was Coke’s share of that? Two ounces.Goizueta said Coke needed a larger share of that market. The competition wasn’t Pepsi. It was the water, tea, coffee, milk, and fruit juices that went into the remaining 12 ounces. The public should reach for a Coke whenever they felt like drinking something. To this end, Coke put up vending machines at every street corner. Sales took a quantum jump and Pepsi has never quite caught up since.

To sum up, the story of hare and tortoise teaches us many things. Important lessons are: That fast and consistent will always beat the slow and steady; work to your competencies; pooling resources and working as a team will always beat individual performers; never give up when faced with failure; and finally compete against the situation not against the rival. In short BE STRATEGIC.

We need to learn to thank the Lord for closed doors just as much as we do for open doors.

The reason God closes doors is because He has not prepared anything over there for us.

If he didn't close the wrong door we would never find our way to the right door.

Even when we don't realize it, God directs our paths through the closing and opening of doors.

When one door closes, it forces us to change our course.

Another door closes; it forces us to change our course yet again.

Then finally, we find the open door and walk right into our blessing.

But instead of praising God for the closed door (which kept us out of trouble), we get upset because we judge by the appearances and in our own arrogance, or ignorance, we insist that we know what is right.

We have a very present help in the time of need who is always standing guard.

Because He walks ahead of us, He can see trouble down the road and HE sets up road blocks and detours accordingly.

But through our lack of wisdom we try to tear down the roadblocks or push aside the detour signs.

Then the minute we get into trouble, we start crying "Lord how could this happen to me?"

We have got to realize that the closed door was a blessing.

Didn't He say that "No good thing will I withhold from them that love me"?

If you get terminated from your job don't be down, instead thank God for the new opportunities that will manifest themselves - it might be a better job, or an opportunity to go to school.

If that man or woman won't return your call - it might not be them, it might be the Lord setting up a roadblock (just let it go).

One time a person had a bank he had been doing business with for many years.

He needed a loan 10,000 dollar loan. The reply he got was tell him NO for a $10,000 loan.

The Lord led him to call another bank.

That bank approved a $40,000 loan for him at a lower interest rate than his own bank had advertised.

I'm so grateful, for the many times God has closed doors to me, just to open them in the most unexpected places.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delights in his way. (Psalms 37:23) The Mountain top is glorious, but it is in the Valley that I will grow!

Always Remember God gives you...

Enough Happiness to keep you Sweet
Enough Trials to keep you Strong
Enough Sorrows to keep you Human
Enough Hope to keep you Happy
Enough Failure to keep you Humble
Enough Success to keep you Eager
Enough Friends to give you Comfort
Enough Wealth to meet your Needs
Enough Enthusiasm to make you look forward Enough Faith to banish depression, and
Enough Determination to make each day a better day than the last.

Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards.

Commit to the Lord in whatever you do and your plans will succeed. (Proverbs 16:3)

I still comprehend this article, its becoming a burning issue…..Global warming


Apr 12th 2007
From The Economist print edition

A climate model suggests that chopping down the Earth's trees would help fight global warming

TREES are good. Good enough to hug. Trees have a nifty biochemical strategy called photosynthesis that enables them to take carbon dioxide in through their leaves, and swap that nasty gas for oxygen, a nice one. They use the carbon thus sequestered to make molecules like cellulose, and thus more tree.

That is why some rich people who love to burn things containing carbon, such as petrol and aircraft fuel, have recently started paying others to plant trees on their behalf. Burning adds oxygen to carbon, making carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide makes the world warmer. A warmer world will mean higher sea levels. So if people burn things without offsetting the carbon dioxide thus produced, their holidays in the Maldive islands will disappear, along with the islands themselves.

This chattering-class environmental picture is not necessarily wrong, but it does include many assumptions. One of them, that planting trees will make the world cooler than it would otherwise be, is the subject of a newly published study by Govindasamy Bala, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, and his colleagues. Dr Bala has found, rather counter-intuitively, that removing all of the world's trees might actually cool the planet down. Conversely, adding trees everywhere might warm it up.


Clearcut cooling

The reason for this is that trees affect the world's temperature by means other than the carbon they sequester. For instance forests, being generally green and bristly things, remain quite a dark shade even after a blizzard. They are certainly darker than grasslands smothered in snow, and thus they can absorb more of the sun's heat than vegetation which might otherwise cover the same stretch of land. That warms things up.

Transpiration—the process by which plants suck up groundwater and evaporate it into the atmosphere—is another and opposite matter. Woodlands are usually better than other ecosystems at getting water vapour into the air. In warm places this tends to make things cloudier, and those clouds, in turn, reflect the sun's heat back into space. That cools things down.

Dr Bala and his colleagues took such effects into account using a computer model called the Integrated Climate and Carbon Model. Unlike most climate-change models, which calculate how the Earth should absorb and radiate heat in response to a list of greenhouse-gas concentrations, this one has many subsections that represent how the carbon cycle (photosynthesis and its consequences) works, and how it influences the climate. Thus, Dr Bala's model can be told to replace all the world's forests with shrubby grasslands, and left alone to work out how such a change would alter greenhouse-gas concentrations and how that, in turn, would influence the temperature in different places.

When Dr Bala ordered global clearcutting, the model calculated that the atmosphere's carbon-dioxide levels would roughly double by 2100. This is a much greater increase than happens in a business-as-usual simulation, but it would, paradoxically, make for a colder planet. That is because brighter high latitudes would reflect more sunlight in winter, cooling the local environment by as much as 6°C. The tropics would warm up, since they would be less cloudy, but not by enough to produce a net global heat gain. Overall, Dr Bala's model suggests that complete deforestation would cause an additional 1.3°C temperature rise compared with business as usual, because of the higher carbon-dioxide levels that would result. However, the additional reflectivity of the planet would cause 1.6°C of cooling. A treeless world would thus, as he reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, be 0.3°C cooler than otherwise.

No one, of course, would consider chopping down the world's forests to keep the planet cool. But having made their point, Dr Bala and his colleagues then went on to look at the nuances of forest growth and loss at different latitudes.

In Russia and Canada, cutting trees down led mostly to local cooling. The carbon dioxide this released into the atmosphere, though, warmed the world all over. Around the equator, by contrast, warming acted locally (as well as globally), so a tropical country would experience warming that it, itself, created by cutting down trees.

Whether that will be enough to entice those countries to prefer rainforests to ranches is another matter. One thing that might persuade them would be if rich people with a fondness for burning things started paying them to do so. Carbon-offset outfits should take note of Dr Bala's paper. Planting trees in convenient places such as Europe and North America may actually be counterproductive. Instead, in an environmental two-for-one, it is the rainforests that need bolstering.

THIS ARTICLE IS THRU THE KIND COURTESY OF MS SUREKHA RAMCHANDANI ONE WOMAN'S STORY ON SOYA...

All Males - PLEASE pass this info to all your female friends... It may save their lives!

Something to take note of. This is my true story, nothing altered. These are facts, as they relate to my experience, my opinions based on what I have read and felt. I am relating them to warn other young
health-conscious women who are unwittingly harming themselves.

In 1989, I graduated from high school in Texas and couldn't wait to hit the big college city. One of the changes I wanted to make was to eat healthier.

Once I moved to health-conscious Austin, Texas, I began to fortify my body with the best and healthiest foods I could find.

Tofu was the main ingredient in every healthy dish and I bought Soya milk almost every day and used it for everything from cereal to smoothies or just to drink for a quick snack. I bought Soya muffins, miso soup with tofu, soybeans, soybean sprouts, etc.

All the literature in all the health and fitness magazines said that Soya protected you against everything from heart disease to breast cancer. It was the magical isoflavones, the estrogen-like hormones that
all worked to help you stay young and healthy. I looked great, I was working out all the time, but my menstrual cycle was off. At 20, I started taking birth control pills to regulate my menstrual cycle.

In addition to this I began to suffer from painful periods. I began to get puffy; it was as though I was losing my muscle tone. I began to suffer from depression and getting hot flushes. I mistook all this for
PMS since my periods were irregular. By the time I was 25, my periods were so bad, I couldn't walk.

The birth control pills never made them regular or less painful so I decided to stop taking them. I went on like this for another two years until I realized my pain wasn't normal. At 27, my gynecologist found two cysts in my uterus. Both were the size of tennis balls. I went through surgery to have them removed and thank God they were benign. The gynecologist told me to go back on birth control pills.
I didn't. In 1998, he discovered a lump in my breast. Again, I went through surgery and again it was benign.

In November 2000 my glands swelled up and my gums became inflamed. Thinking I had a tooth infection I went to the dentist who told me that teeth were not the problem. After a dose of antibiotics the swelling still did not go down. At this point I could feel a tiny nodule on the right side of my neck. I told my mother I had thyroid trouble. She thought I was being silly. No one in the family suffered from thyroid trouble. Going on a hunch I saw a specialist who diagnosed me with Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma.

After a series of tests he told me it was cancer. My fiancé and I sat stunned. We were not prepared and I was so scared. We scheduled surgery right away. The specialist told us that it would only be after the
operation that a pathologist would be able to tell us for sure if it was cancer. They found a tumor in my right lobe composed of irregular cells and another smaller tumor growing on the left, so the entire thyroid was removed.

They told me that after undergoing radioactive iodine I would be safe and assured me that I could live a long life. After treatment I began to search for the cause of all these problems. I never once thought it
could be all the Soya I had consumed for nearly ten years. After all, Soya is healthy. I came upon a web page that linked thyroid problems to Soya intake and the conspiracy of Soya marketed as a health
food when in fact it is only a toxic by-product of the vegetable oil industry. This was insane; after all, the health and fitness magazines had said nothing about Soya being harmful.

I visited a herbalist who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 1985. She informed me that Soya was the culprit. She had a hysterectomy due to cysts and other uterine problems. A few months later another
acquaintance who had consumed Soya came down with thyroid cancer. A girl in England I met through the Internet in a thyroid cancer forum had just undergone surgery and she was only 19.

What was going on???? Breast cancer is linked to estrogen. What mimics estrogen in the female body, SOYA!

But I never suspected Soya because until now I never once found a single article that stated Soya could be dangerous. Women who took Soya prior to thyroid problems will continue to take it after if they are not aware of what Soya actually does what it contains and how it reacts in the female body. I think this is the reason that women with thyroid cancer often develop breast cancer later.

My co-worker is big into Soya and I see her losing hair and gaining weight despite a walking workout during her break and after work, and apples and oranges for lunch. She just had cysts removed from her uterus too.

I warned her to stay off Soya. I referred her to websites but until it is on the evening news on all four networks, women will suffer. Since the thyroidectomy, I do not touch Soya, haven't for two years.

Dear readers, please use my story in any way you can. There are so many young girls who are consuming Soya because they think they are taking care of themselves, and women taking Soya because they want to be healthy.
It is so unfair that the information about the dangers of Soya isn't more widely circulated. It is sad. There are many out there who feel this way and it is a terrible blow when you realize you are not as
healthy as you thought and that the information that you depended on was wrong.

As we move into the 21st century it has become clear that biotechnology is certain to play a key role in economic and social development throughout the world. Its impact on agriculture, health and environment has already been noted widely in the relevant literature but this is nothing compared to the widely held expectations that this generic technology will revolutionize these and other sectors in the coming decades.

However biotechnology is also a two-edge sword in that its capacity to modify and alter the course of nature raises many questions of ethics and risk. Unless these are resolved its economic potential is certain to be compromised.

And for developing countries in particular, therefore, such issues of risk perception and management have great significance. In agriculture for example, biotechnology promises the capacity to improve radically rates of growth of food production and of other primary commodities such as cash crops for export.

It can also help reduce environmental damage through curtailing the use of pesticides and herbicides, and help deal with problems of growth stress such as those of drought and salinity. On a more industrial scale, as noted above, tissue culture is now being used to promote the production export led high value horticulture crops such as cut flowers. But as the richer countries have shown there are wider industrial applications in areas like food sectors and pharmaceuticals.

On the other hand biotechnology has got its shortcomings. In agriculture for instance, there are concerns that introducing genetically modified crop varieties will negatively impact on the environment. One of the potential problems is that novel genes might be unintentionally transferred by pollination to other plants, including weeds and also wild relatives of the crop species. There are fears that such transfers could lead to the developments of resistant ‘super weeds’, loss of biodiversity within crop species, and possibly even the destabilization of entire ecosystems.

Concerns have also been expressed about the risks to human health of food products derived from genetically modified crops. This is particularly the case where novel genes have been transferred to crops from organisms that are not normally used in food or animal feed products.

Those opposed to genetic engineering have suggested that this might lead to the introduction of previously unknown allergens into the food chain. There are also concerns about international markets calling in question environmental and social methods of production.