Childrens books - how to get them reading and loving it?
There is an old proverb that is applicable in many life situations, none more so than this - "if you give a man a fish, he can feed his family for a day - but if you teach that man to fish, he can feed them all their lives.." (anon) The same can be said for reading.. just giving a child a book might engender a love of reading, but working at it and teaching your child that reading is fun and worthy, can make them an avid book reader for life. One post that I recently read, told of a man who got his little baby boy reading while in the cot. Got the child into such a routine that the baby demanded a book every morning. What a gift! "... Research has proven, time and again, that reading is the key to success. It is a skill that crosses all barriers: economic, religious, ethnic and social. It requires little, if any, financial investment since public libraries are free to use...." [https://buffalonews.com/2019/04/17/letter-spread-the-joy-of-reading-through-books-for-kids/] If you want a smart society, then make people smart. Teach children the joy of getting lost in a book, a great story. It doesn't matter if you are six or sixty six. I have struggled with my own kids to get their heads out of the smartphone or the tablet, and have had limited success. Fortunately, now they are writing songs, so at least some literary effort is being made. So, I would like to suggest that it is up to our generation - (I am a baby boomer) - to generate younger peoples' interest in reading. When I was a young Naval officer, I spent many years away from home - no internet, no smartphones, not much in the way of TV or movies at sea, so, naturally you read - the Navy has a nickname for everything - a good story was a "dit" - various types of dits - 'warries', 'cowdy's' 'detective dits' - probably the most prominent - sometimes a biography or an autobiography, but anything you can read reasonably quickly from your bunk in your limited downtime (not forgetting of course, those highly literary articles that were the only reason we read "Playboy"). Well, it was more or less words on paper so that probably qualified. But I digress. Thousands of new books published every day - how to read them all? Who cares, you can never eat at every restaurant either, but you can have a good, old-fashioned go at it. There is a finite number of letters in our alphabet, and virtually a finite number of words in our vocabulary, so, in theory you could say that there must be a finite limit to the number of books that can be written. Who, in their right mind, would believe that? They say that if you put ten thousand monkeys in a room, each with a word processor, for a long period of time, then, statistically, one of them could write "War and Peace" - I'd like to see that. The human brain is not a logic super computer that works purely on statistical theory. The synapses of our brain don't work on pure logic, and thank goodness. It is this absolute wonder of the human psyche that we need to impart to our children. Whatever intellectual stimulation we dish up they will soak up. Happily, we are seeing a great new trend of people writing more childrens' books - it may be that that is because it is a relatively simple genre to write and is a vehicle that is loved and for which there is huge demand on the newer platforms like Amazon and the like. Whatever the explanation, it seems that the Gen X and now Gen Y parents seem to be adopting it as they are the generations that grew up with social media and electronic platforms and are now seeing that it is important to start their offspring on the right path. If that engenders a love of reading in the coming generations, I will be their greatest admirer. Kids are our future. Let's get them ready for it with the best start we can.
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Recently I set out to do some freelance writing. I wanted to do it because (a) writing is my hobby and I am good at it and (b) to make some money.
So you join up with a freelancing site and register your profile, and one of the first things that you notice is that there are a lot of people registered as writers, from countries where English is not the native language. So, naturally, I see an advantage. I put into my profile that English is my native language and I have been writing it for a long time. Not too long into my newfound career I picked up a couple of jobs to write on various subjects such as doing business in foreign couintries and an article on renewable energy, which I assume was part of a much larger work, and I was being given the job to write as a sub-contractor. No problems there. So, off I go. I wrote the introduction free-hand (about 2,500 words). Completely unique content. Then for the technical material, clearly I consulted country guides and technical guides. This is where it begins to come unstuck, because obviously, when researching, you are going to have to use technical phrases, and if you use someone else's work you attribute it. Personally, I like to use detailed footnotes, but my employer wanted end-notes - no problem. Then I discovered something that I have never needed before, nor come across in my writiing life - PLAGIARISM CHECKERS - tons of them! I have been writing legal, business, trade and technical papers, opinions and advices for well over forty years, virtually on a daily basis and this has opened my eyes. It seems that there is a thriving industry out there of people who will cheat on your behalf, and there is an equally thriving nest of software developers who develop anti-cheating software such as TURNITIN, PC CHECKER, GRAMMARLY and many more, both free and paid versions. Sites such as
An absolute eye-opener! I work through a legitimate freelancing platform. You post your qualifications, take some tests to raise your rankings and all communications is done via their chat bot. However, and naively at first, I learned the hard way how not to get paid. So called "employers" find you on the freelancing site and immediately ask you to communicate outside of the freelance platform on Skype or What's App. Basically, if you fall for that you are likely to do a whole lot of work for no pay. Of course, there is always the sweeterner that "...we have a great team of writers and there will be plenty of ongoing work..". Don't fall for it! I was astounded by the number of people who contacted me to write assignments, and moot papers and basically to cheat for them. I cottoned on to that pretty quickly. Anyway, I digress! So, even though I am prepared to edit some of the material and do a bit of para-phrasing now and then, my unique content is just that - UNIQUE!- and my borrowed content is that which I borrow for the purposes of "fair dealing" and I ensure that I properly atttribute it and do not use huge slabs of other peoples' text, but that was not good enough for my employer, so I decided to invest in some paid Anti-Plagiarism software and I was horrified because my employer (from the Indian continent) would not accept anything other than 100% unique content!, despite the fact that I tried to explain that when doing research that is not the case. Imagine writing a legal opinion and having to quote great slabs of law from cases and statutes only to have your employer tell you that it is plagiarism!! Ludicrous, and even more so when they are simply not understanding the concepts and asking for continual re-writes. Even my professionalism backed up at that point, and I reminded my employer that the project was worth pennies and I was losing money. So, after running it through 3 different plagiarism checkers, I gave up and submitted copy that was apparently 10% plagiarism. The irony is that many of the original phrases that I had written free-hand (straight out of my visceral armoury) were classed as "duplicate content"- imagine that - writing something like "solar energy is produced by the heat of the sun"- not particularly earth shattering, but good old plagiarism checker wants me to know that it is not UNIQUE - as if I didn't already know that. So, I politely thanked my employer and reminded her that I no longer wanted to write for an audience of ONE - by that I mean Mr Google and his algorithms. I prefer to write for people who appreciate my work. Now think about the logic behind this. If you take logical or authoritative writing and rewrite it so that no plagiarism checker can pick up any duplication at all, there is a very good chance that you have bastardised or "dumbed down" the work so much that it is very likely useless and, ironically, if you are going to take someone else's words and twist them into "uniqueness", then how morally honest is that anyway? So that was a worthwhile experience and I will keep doing it, but not for people who only want me to write for their Plagiarism checker. It's a new world out there, folks and the internet never ceases to fascinate me. You can still teach this old dog new tricks (attributed to Anon)! Postscript: I ran this essay, which was written totally in freehand without reference to any source, through one of my plagiarism checkers and achieved a score of 100% , I am happy to say.from Duplichecker.... however, then I ran it through the dreaded PC X Checker and it turns out that my original thoughts are the same as 5 other peoples:
In the realm of business branding and development, moving to digital is all the buzz. So, what precisely is digital promotion and how do we utilize it to promote and improve our digital presence and marketing efforts?
Digital Marketing Defined The shift to digital media will be driven by promotion services, business people, and consumers equally. The ever-increasing requirement to reveal quantifiable results makes going digital a necessity. Most digital websites, social networking sites, and mobile advertising are realising that it is a lot less difficult to track than conventional marketing and advertising media like print advertisements. Added to which is the increasing use of mobile platforms to get the business message across, to find those"buyer-ready" buyers, or to get potential buyers into your sales funnel, and onto your list so that you don't lose them on the first attempt. We will cover sales funnels in another post For businesses, the cost of doing business digitally is very competitively priced and most kinds of digital advertisements are truly competitive. Using an internet site, engaging clients in conversations through social networking and email advertisements are low priced alternatives to publishing advertisements and direct email. These digital solutions are all available to organizations of almost any size, and also help level the playing field for startups, smaller enterprises and independent advisers seeking fresh business enterprises. For example, the speedy pace of life makes digital advertisementing crucial. When individuals have need of products and services, gone are the days of thumbing through a phone book to see them. We whip out our cellular apparatus or check out our computers to get replies – we expect, and get, instantaneous results. Regardless of what size your company is small or large to moderate-sized firm/venture (SMB or even SME) – you are able to effectively promote your company through cheap digital stations. The core of our advertising campaigns is your site. Invest in your Web Site, and be sure that it does the following:
You need to employ a professional website site design firm that’s proficient in web development and search engine optimization. As your website remains the core from which all other channels lead, it needs to be thought of as one of your best company investments. Once you’ve got your internet site right, then you need to establish routine monthly or bi-monthly email campaigns and join clients via social networking. If you’re genuinely on a shoestring budget, then these are efforts need to be done in-house or to get a very low priced agency who will not break your limited budget. Make certain everyone’s time and efforts lead customers back to your own website where they are able to fully participate in your organization, products, and pick the channels whereby they contact you personally. You can put aside some digital advertising and marketing dollars for search engine optimization and pay per click advertisements. Many organizations now rely heavily on being uncovered on the web to acquire new clients. A frequent misconception among business people, when starting out is the "build it and they will come" approach and that just having a site ensures that clients will see it. Your website has to be constructed with the proper phrases and words, metadata, page articles and linking strategies that’ll allow it to reach top search positions. Just building it is "ground zero" - if that is all you do it is like having a shop in a back street with the doors closed and no signs - nobody will find it - you need those signposts on the main street, whatever form that they may take, to point ready buyers to your store. Because many important phrases and phrases have stiff competition for high search positions, you’ll want to enhance your SEO campaigns with pay per click advertisements. Getting started with pay per click promotional initiatives can be somewhat daunting, but with just a tiny bit of time, hard work and education, that can also be accomplished in-house, or even for a fair price through a digital marketing and advertising bureau. Beyond email, social networking advertising and internet search engine marketing tactics, you also have available a bunch of additional digital advertising and marketing methods. Mobile advertisements, radio, tv, electronic billboards plus even more are available as promotion outlets. Whatever digital campaigns you opt for, they have t connect to your base – your website. So, that was digital marketing 101 - we'll folllow with more great advice on a weekly basis. Have a great week! Doing my best to get all of our websites into some semblance of order.
We now run Ozzyoutdoors, the camping goods site, but a bit neglected lately. Butterfly Beauty Club, a beauty and accessories site for people with style and grace who love to wear or share the beauty of the butterfly. Why, you might ask? Well, it's a long story and, essentially our way of researching profitable web niches, and also in testing out new domain extensions such as Dot Club. Rugby Gear Online is an e-commerce store that we run because Rugby is my passion. I don't see us as competing with all the big, licensed fan apparel suppliers - our niche is TRAINING and game equipment and clothing - we see it as a challenge to get into that side of things, but we are also experimenting with Print on Demand products, so a great niche to experiment in. The Affiliate Department Store - this is our newest offering - we are very interested in selling Affiliate products of all kinds, but you can get seriously bogged down in detail and in running around all over the web with landing pages and social media and you can spread yourself seriously thin, so we thought we would put up a portal to centralise all of the Affiliate products that we want to offer. Mediagate Consulting (Pty Ltd) - this is a company that we just incorporated recently, to replace our other partnership, Ozzytraders - mainly for two reasons - Ozzytraders was not the best business name and because our accountant made us set up a company! So there you have it - Mediagate Consulting will be the company that Lillian and I use to run all of our other businesses and anything else that we can think of. Lillian has just set up a business as in INTIMO Stylist, selling top of the line lingerie and Womens clothing. Watch this space!! SOCIAL MEDIA I thought it was about time to start pulling my social media sites into line. We have now turned our Ozzytraders Twitter site into John W Gates (@jongat53). and we will start to standardise our other ones soon, as it alls starts to get a bit confusing, otherwise You know, we have been very active in a number of areas, of late. We are experimenting with a number of dropshipping options. We are selling a range of womens products that are beauty products with a theme -which is the Beautiful Butterfly - we have styled our site the Butterfly Beauty Club. Why not? Many ladies love that theme and we decided to try and sell as many of those types of products as there are products out there! If you are looking for beauty and elegance, and even elegant simplicity please visit us at http://butterflybeauty.club If the GREAT OUTDOORS is your thing then you might want to visit our store at http://www.ozzyoutdoors.com.au ... LEAD TO BROKEN DREAMS..!
How do you spot an email scam? Why are they so prevalent? These days there are billions of emails sent on a daily basis. If you try to send scam messages through social media, there is a very high chance that, with the Social Media platforms and their sophisticated algortithms, you will be caught and blocked, possibly completely banned from using that platform. But with email, many, if not most of the Email Service Providers try very hard with Spam or Junk filters to filter out possible scam traffic but it is a very hard task, as they do not want to overly tax you by putting every possible dodgy email into your Junk Mail folder and a lot of Spam is fairly harmless, so you can't block everything I set my Junk mail settings pretty high and go in there pretty regularly, and I still find a fair bit of mail that I am happy to have in my Inbox. There is also a lot of nuisance mail and probably some Spam mail, but guess what, the Scam Mail still manages to get through into my Inbox on a regular basis. HOT TIPS So, what to do? 1. NEVER, EVER click a link in an email if you are not certain it is totally safe. That is the quickest way to let viruses, trojans, and other nasties onto your hard drive, and worse still, any network that you are hooked into, and to give scammers your personal details. 2. Check the email address of the SENDER - I get emails all the time with a Bank Logo on it or a PAYPAL logo, and these look real, and authentic. So much so, that many people click away with blind trust, only to find that they have, again opened themselves up to a scammer. Always take a second to check where it came from. 3. At the moment, in my country, there are emails and fake phone calls circulating purporting to be from the Australia Federal Police, telling you that you are about to be prosecuted for tax evasion, and probably many more like them. What do you do?
.. in fact, rules 2 and beyond?
Here is some more courtesy of ScamWatch.....
Documents are easily faked. Some will look just like the real thing but others might have warning signs, such as:
Scammers will often try to take advantage when you’re feeling vulnerable and try to extract more money from you through a follow up scam. Some common follow up scams include:
Let us have your comments below with any other tips or experiences. |
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