After more than two decades of relatively little Atlantic hurricane activity, the past decade saw heightened hurricane activity and more than $150 billion in damage in 2004 and 2005. This paper normalizes mainland U.S. hurricane damage from 1900–2005 to 2005 values using two methodologies. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if storms from the past made landfall under another year’s societal conditions…

…The 1970s and 1980s were notable because of the extremely low amounts of damage compared to other decades. The decade 1996–2005 has the second most damage among the past 11 decades, with only the decade 1926–1935 surpassing its costs. Over the 106 years of record, the average annual normalized damage in the continental United States is about $10 billion under both methods.

The most damaging single storm is the 1926 Great Miami storm, with $140–157 billion of normalized damage: the most damaging years are 1926 and 2005. Of the total damage, about 85% is accounted for by the intense hurricanes Saffir-Simpson Categories 3, 4, and 5, yet these have comprised only 24% of the U.S. landfalling tropical cyclones. Read more at sciencepolicy.colorado.edu…

When you visit a Web site, do you ever wish that you could find a particular piece of information on that site? Or, are you ever not able to find a specific product or service that the site probably sells?

In such moments, you realize the "gold" that this site is missing. But as a potential customer, you know about it – don’t you?

Okay, now put the shoe on the other foot so you’re now the SEO or Web site owner.

• What do your customers wish they could find on your Web site?
• What bits of information are they looking for?
• What products or services do you sell that are difficult to find?

Talk to your customers! Find out from them what they’re looking for! Make sure you have many ways to navigate your site. Group products together in several different ways. But YOU don’t know how your customers
think.

SECRET: Spend the time to pick up the phone and call a few of your best customers. You won’t be sorry you did.

If you want a lean, flat belly, the absolute worst thing you can do is force yourself to do sit-ups and crunches. Reason: Although sit-ups and crunches strengthen the rectus abdominus muscle, they also lengthen the transverse abdominal’s (girdle) muscles, causing your lower abdominal’s to pouch. But that’s not all. Crunches and sit-ups can push your head out of alignment and cause tension in your shoulders. They can also damage your spine. Try the Abdominal Reverse Curl Exercise or The Bridge Exercise instead.

quixotic • \kwik-SAH-tik\ • adjective

*1 : foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action

2 : capricious, unpredictable

Example Sentence:
Marta has been desperately trying to convince her friends to give up their cars and computers and return to nature on Earth Day, but it has been a quixotic crusade.
Did you know?
If you guessed that "quixotic" has something to do with Don Quixote, you’re absolutely right. The hero of the 17th-century Spanish novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (by Miguel de Cervantes) didn’t change the world by tilting at windmills, but he did leave a linguistic legacy in English. The adjective "quixotic" is based on his name and has been used to describe unrealistic idealists since at least the early 18th century. The novel has given English other words as well. "Dulcinea," the name of Quixote’s beloved, has come to mean "mistress" or "sweetheart," and "rosinante," which is sometimes used to refer to an old, broken-down horse, comes from the name of the hero’s less-than-gallant steed.

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don’t use things they don’t understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users.

The same goes for photos: On countless sites, product images are too small, fuzzy, or murky, or they’re simply shot from a bad angle, making the product hard to see. These same sites lavish pixels on big glamour illustrations that our eyetracking studies show attract no fixations. Go figure.

Generally, all you need are plainspoken words and clean photos. Nonetheless, these two design elements get almost no coverage in the trade press. Every month, there seems to be a new article in a leading publication about 3D spinning views, even though 3D is nearly useless in most cases. But you never see an article about how to write better headlines or take a clearer product photo.

• Actress Grace Kelly Marries Rainier III of Monaco (1956)
  Grace Kelly was an Oscar-winning American actress who appeared in many films, including Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. In 1956, she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco and became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace, an event that marked her retirement from acting. The couple had three children, one of whom, Albert II of Monaco, is the principality’s reigning Sovereign Prince. Kelly died in a car accident in 1982.

What’s the common theme in all these business-killing usability problems? They all involve simple usability principles that have been the same for ten years. None of them involve advanced "Web 2.0" technology; none would be fixed by implementing any of the fancy stuff that everybody’s talking about.

Indeed, the biggest design flaws destroying business value typically involve:

• Communicating clearly so that users understand you. Users allocate minimal time to initial website visits, so you must quickly convince them that the site’s worthwhile.
• Providing information users want. Users must be able to easily determine whether your services meet their needs and why they should do business with you.
• Offering simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them.

Get these three right, and you’ll enhance your site’s credibility, ease a user’s way through the site, and thus do far more for the site’s business value than any JavaScript trick.

Married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends, finds an international survey.

But married women do more housework than their live-in counterparts.

“Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia.

Understanding the dynamics of couples who live together but are not married has become more important as cohabitation around the globe increases. More than 5 million unmarried partner households (more than 10 million individuals) currently exist in the United States, according to a 2006 report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

"I do," just not housework

The scientists analyzed surveys gathered in 2002 from 28 nations, from 17,636 respondents (8,119 males and 9,517 females) as part of the Family and Changing Gender Roles III Survey. All respondents were either married or cohabiting with a significant other.

Overall, they found men spent about 9 hours a week on housework compared with women, who spent more than 20 hours weekly.

"There’s still a gender norm, since women do more housework than men regardless of union type," said study team member Jennifer Gerteisen Marks, who is working on a doctorate degree at North Carolina State University.

Regardless of the couples’ relative earnings or work hours, cohabiting males reported more household hours than did their married counterparts, while the opposite was true for women, with wives picking up the broom more often than live-in girlfriends.

Equal partners

Other factors also came into play. Men who raked in more earnings than their partners did fewer hours of housework than men with lower relative incomes. "Those in the household with greater resources will leverage those resources to bargain their way out of housework," the authors write in the September issue of the Journal of Family Issues.

Couples who viewed men and women as equals were more likely to divvy up chores equally. But even in "egalitarian households," married men still contributed less to household chores than did their wives.

"It’s consistent with prior research, which has shown that the roles of wives and husbands are very powerful," Marks told LiveScience. "In a cohabiting relationship there aren’t such strongly prescribed social norms, which trickle down to things like housework."

Gout can cause excruciating pain. Here is a very effective folk remedy… It dates back to the 1950′s, to a Texas doctor who was so crippled by a gouty big toe, he was forced to use a wheelchair. he reported in a Texas medical journal that a diet including six cherries a day soon had him up and walking. He added that his physician tried the cherry diet on 12 patients and had equally spectacular results. A survey done by Prevention magazine found that 67 percent of readers who tried cherries for gout enjoyed good results. Also, a top kinesiologist in Louisville, Kentucky, enthusiastically recommends them. He advises people with gout to quiet eating red meats and organ meats and also to drink two to three glasses of cherry juice a day. He recommends using pure black-cherry juice diluted with an equal amount of water.

alley-oop • \al-ee-OOP\ • noun

: a basketball play in which a leaping player catches a pass above the basket and immediately dunks the ball; also : the usually looping pass thrown on such a play

Example Sentence:
"With alley-oops, slam dunks and big smiles, the West [All-Stars] showed why Friday night’s contest was called an all-star game . . ." (Peter Pupello, St. Petersburg Times [Florida], March 29, 2008)

Did you know?
"Alley-oop" was first heard by English ears under the big tops of early 20th-century circuses. When acrobats were about to leap to their trapezes, they would often cry the similarly sounding French word "allez-oop" — an interjection meaning roughly "go up." Both "acrobat" and "trapeze" are also French derivatives, leaping into the English language in the 19th century, so the French parentage of "alley-oop" is not surprising. By the 1950s, the word was also being used on the gridiron and the hardwood for show-stopping arcing passes and leaping dunks. Its latest venue is the half-pipe, where skateboarders and snowboarders pull "alley-oop" spinning tricks.

When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, don’t panic. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you.

They happen to all of us.

What you DON’T want to do is make any changes to your Web pages because of fluctuations in the rankings or because your site drops out of the rankings. Step back and wait to see what happens.

Monitor your rankings. Watch the industry. Read the news.

In all likelihood, your pages will reappear right back where they should be (or close to those rankings), if you haven’t done anything wrong (such as using spam). Fluctuations in rankings are normal.

Far too many people PANIC in the short term, when they would be wiser to just take it easy and not start making changes so quickly. Just a word to the wise!

• Brixton Riot (1981)
  In the early 1980s, south London’s Brixton neighborhood was plagued by deep social and economic problems, including high rates of unemployment and crime and poor housing conditions. In 1981, in an effort to reduce street crime, police began stopping and searching anyone they deemed suspicious, a policy that many residents of the predominantly black community found discriminatory and heavy-handed.

The exchange rate means that if you want to stay someplace with style, you’re going to spend at least $200 a night. Here’s how to do it without hating yourself in the morning.

http://www.budgettravel.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2007/01/05/AR2007010501391.html?wpisrc=newsletter

When creating new content, you probably have a clear objective for your Web page. What action do you want your visitor to take after they read your content?

When researching your customer search trends, try and identify their interests and needs FIRST, instead of being always focused on your objectives. Every Web page should have an objective to be fulfilled but sometimes you can get tremendous conversion improvement if you put "your objective" to the back. It does not have to come first.

Stop and go back and consider meeting the visitor’s needs FIRST then offer them something that compliments their circumstance or provides a solution to their circumstance.

jactitation • \jak-tuh-TAY-shun\ • noun

: a tossing to and fro or jerking and twitching of the body

Example Sentence:
"It is clear that Mrs Y.’s tics are far more complex in form than mere Parkinsonian jerks, jactitations, or precipitations. . .." (Oliver Sacks, Awakenings)

Did you know?
In the 17th century, lawyers began tossing around the word "jactitation," which can be traced back to the Latin verb "jactare," meaning "to throw." Originally, "jactitation" was used as a word for a false claim or assertion being publicly thrown about to the detriment of another person. Run-of-the-mill slander and false claims of being married to someone were two common types of jactitation brought to court. Before long, "jactitation" had jumped over to the medical profession, where it continues to serve as a word for restless, jerky, or twitchy body movements. In 1761, British writer Laurence Sterne threw "jactitation" into his novel Tristram Shandy as a substitute for "discussion," but that meaning never caught on.

All eyes are on Greenland’s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.

Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501676_pf.html

• Spiegel Scandal Erupts in West Germany (1962)
  The Spiegel scandal was a major political controversy in West Germany at the height of the Cold War. It began when the popular German publication, Der Spiegel, printed a cover story stating that West Germany’s defense against a Soviet invasion was inadequate. The magazine was accused of treason, its editors were arrested, its offices were seized and searched, and thousands of documents were confiscated.

From bohemian to luxe, here are five boutique properties with atmosphere to spare.

http://www.budgettravel.com/bt-dyn/content/article/2007/03/30/AR2007033001263.html

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. Webmasters create an RSS file containing headlines and descriptions of specific information. While the majority of RSS feeds currently contain news headlines or breaking information the long term uses of RSS are broad.

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. Using this standard, webmasters provide headlines and fresh content in a succinct manner. Meanwhile, consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content viewed in the RSS reader or news aggregator is place known as an RSS feed.

RSS is becoming increasing popular. The reason is fairly simple. RSS is a free and easy way to promote a site and its content without the need to advertise or create complicated content sharing partnerships.

acerbic • \uh-SER-bik\ • adjective

: acid in temper, mood, or tone

Example Sentence:
Liam’s speech was punctuated by his usual acerbic wit, and some people in the audience thought that his comments went too far.

Did you know?
English speakers created "acerbic" in the 19th century by adding "-ic" to the adjective "acerb." "Acerb" had been around since the 17th century, but for most of that time it had been used with only a literal "sour-tasting" sense. (The word "acerb" is still around today, but it is now simply a less common synonym of "acerbic.") "Acerbic" and "acerb" ultimately come from the Latin adjective "acerbus," which can mean "harsh," "bitter," or "unpleasant." Another English word that comes from "acerbus" is "exacerbate," which means "to make more violent, bitter, or severe."

Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a "Universal Search" system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.

The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.com and searching in English. Not everyone will see it at first, but over the course of the next several days, Universal Search should be more, well, universal.

The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities.

• Planet Neptune is Discovered (1846)
  Neptune is notable for being the 1st planet to be discovered by way of mathematical prediction rather than standard observation. Galileo observed Neptune twice in the early 1600s, but he mistook the planet for a fixed star and therefore is not credited with its discovery. Centuries later, small changes in Uranus’ orbit led astronomers to seek out and discover the 8th and outermost planet of our solar system.