Gun Control Support Soars In New Polls

Support for tighter gun control laws continues to rise in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, and another new poll finds that support for stricter gun laws is at its highest point in years.

In the new HuffPost/YouGov survey of 1,000 adults conducted Dec. 21-22, 55 percent of Americans said that gun control laws should be made more strict, 13 percent said they should be made less strict, and 27 percent said there should be no change. Support for stricter laws in the new poll is even higher than it was in another HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted immediately after the shooting took place, when 50 percent of respondents said that that gun control laws should be made stricter.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday also found that American support for stricter guns laws is at its highest since 2004, but that blanket bans on some guns would remain a political challenge.

The Gallup poll of 1,038 adults, conducted Dec. 19-22, found 47 percent of Americans now favor passing new gun laws rather than simply ramping up enforcement of current law, a 12-year high. Fifty-eight percent of Americans would like to see stricter gun laws, a 15-point jump since October 2011. The poll had a 4 percentage point margin of error.

But underneath a broad openness to some changes, opinions on specific new restrictions varied sharply in the Gallup poll. Support for requiring background checks at gun shows, a measure proposed by President Barack Obama, is nearly unanimous, with 92 percent favoring the change. A proposed ban on semi-automatic guns, however, earns a much smaller majority of support. Public support for a ban on handguns has continued to drop, reaching a record low this year, with just a quarter in favor.

In spite of growing support for stricter gun laws, the HuffPost/YouGov survey found that the National Rifle Association, the leading gun rights advocacy group in the nation, receives higher positive than negative ratings, though negative views of the organization may be increasing in the wake its statement blaming the Newtown shooting on violence in the media and calling for armed guards to be placed in schools. Forty percent of respondents said they have a favorable opinion and 36 percent said they have an unfavorable opinion of the organization, while 24 percent said they were unsure. An earlier YouGov poll conducted in February for the Economist found that the NRA was ranked more favorably than unfavorably by a 36 percent to 28 percent margin, suggesting that unfavorable views of the organization may be increasing faster than favorable views.

Support for the NRA was highest among respondents who said that either they or members of their household belong to the group; 93 percent of NRA members and 71 percent of those with an NRA member in their household had a favorable opinion of the organization.

Overall, 10 percent of respondents said they or someone in their household is an NRA member, while 41 percent said they or someone in their household owns a gun. Among those in non-NRA households, 41 percent viewed the group unfavorably while 34 percent viewed it favorably. Views were more decidedly against the NRA among those living in households where nobody owns a gun, with 45 percent viewing it unfavorably and 26 percent viewing it favorably.

The poll also found mixed reviews of the NRA's proposal to place armed guards in every American school, but with support outpacing opposition. Overall, 45 percent of respondents said they either approved or strongly approved of the proposal, while 41 percent said they disapproved or strongly disapproved.

The survey found that both gun owners in general and NRA members in particular were much less likely than the general public to say that gun laws should be made more strict. Past surveys of NRA members and gun owners, however, including one conducted in July of this year by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, have found that NRA members do support certain gun control measures, such as increased use of background checks and requiring gun owners to complete gun safety training.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, though that inherent variation does not take into account other potential sources of error, including statistical bias in the sample. The poll used a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project, and take part in YouGov?s nationally representative opinion polling.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/27/gun-control-support-poll_n_2370265.html

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Transform Your Article Marketing Success With These Top Tips ...

Education in article marketing is key. There is a lot of available information you can read, however not all of it pertains to your particular situation. The below article provides lots of excellent advice on article marketing that is certain to be effective for you.

When you are done with your article, it?s important that you look it over for errors; mistakes can affect your credibility. Check over everything twice just to be sure everything is spelled right and that correct grammar is being used. In order to make the most money possible, you have to write well.

Constantly promote your affiliate business whenever you can. Identify problems and find products that address them. This will help create demand around your writing, which can improve your visibility. Make these activities second nature, and you will find that growing your business requires less effort over time and brings a higher success rate.

Put a question in your article titles. Our brains love the challenge and mystery of questions. Using a question allows you to grab your readers? frontal lobe and stops them to make them read your article. Follow the question with content that is equally as captivating.

Try using numbers in the titles of your articles if they relate to the content. Titles that have numbers in them will help to draw in people which will result in more viewers. To see which numbers seem to hit home, watch which articles get the most visitors.

Tools can be used to increase your visibility. There are a lot out there that can send in your article to a variety of directories, more than you could do on your own. Most of these tools cost a fee, but there are a select few that operate for free. Seek these out, as they are a cheap way to gain readership.

Write in a language you feel comfortable with. Though you may be comfortable speaking a different language, avoid the temptation to use it for article marketing purposes. You could still end up with horrifying sentence structure. You will also have a different view of the world than foreign readers, and that could end up confusing them.

Write concise, direct articles. There is no point in writing articles full of fluff or filler that no one wants to read. 250 to about 500 words should be your limit. Be sure to keep it interesting so that your reader will finish reading the entire thing before they get bored and move on to another site.

When it comes to article marketing, you must write quality content. Fluff and nonsense is not acceptable and will only hurt you. If something needs further explanation, don?t be afraid of devoting the extra space; however be brutal when it comes time to trim away the excess. Don?t forget to proofread! Look for irrelevant sentences, spelling errors and other potential pitfalls in your writing.

Any article you write to advertise your site should be entertaining to the reader. Always write in an informal style that?s friendly and warm. Introduce your technical information so everyone can understand if you want your complex articles to remain friendly. Avoid alienating readers by being boring.

Take full advantage of the opportunities of social media. Take advantage of your Facebook account or your Twitter account; they can be very good ways to attract new readers. All you need to do is post updates after each new article you write. You can also ask your followers to share your articles with their friends for an even higher boost in traffic.

There are many marketing ideas that are new and many that are standard practice. Take what you have learned here, and you will be an ?expert? in no time!

To your financial liberty,

Kyle Haycock

Article promotion Skilled

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About Kyle Haycock

Hello, I'm Kyle Haycock. I'm a former Staff Sergeant in the US Marines. I've married to my wonderful wife for almost 11 years and have two beautiful daughters (8 and 10 years old). I've been in business for myself for over six years and have been network marketing for two years. I am semi-retired now, but my dream is to make enough money for myself and for others that I can become a full-time philanthropist like Bill Gates. My true passion is teaching and believe that if we can teach youngsters properly while they're young that they can become productive and successful members of society (as they define it). With me making more money and inspiring others to do the same, I can gather a whole legion of people fighting for the same cause.

Source: http://articlemarketing2day.com/tips/transform-your-article-marketing-success-with-these-top-tips-2/

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Source: http://elapaedof.posterous.com/transform-your-article-marketing-success-with

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Daily Kos: My Grandmother has brain cancer

Her name is Margaret. She married my grandfather decades ago and they had a baby. His name was John Thomas Schehr. He was my father. Shortly after her husband died. He was a sailor in the Navy. He died of spinal meningitis when my father was a wee babe.

Margaret remarried to a man named Joseph LaGreca, and my father took his name. Joseph LaGreca and Margret than had another child whom they also named Joseph.

But Joesph the elder was a lout. He inflicted unimaginable abuse upon my father and my uncle, and it stayed with them for the course of their lives. I can't imagine what my Grandmother went through, but she stayed, she honored their vow and she endured. How she did so is beyond my reckoning.

My father left home at a young age and joined the navy as his father before had done, but he stayed a devoted son and he never spoke against his grandfather in my presence. Each year we would get in the car and visit Grandma and Grandpa for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, my brother and sister with my mother and often the family dog would all make the trip upstate to Ulster County New York, and though our mother had told us of what our Step-Grandfather had put our father through my dad never once spoke of it, and he always dutifully made the trip up to his parents, to his mother and step father. Though my father honored his step-father I can only imagine the love he had for his mother, my grandmother, in staying a truly devoted son all those years.

And when my father died we grew distant. That was years and years ago, but though we stayed in touch by phone it was rare when I saw my grandmother.

And now she is almost gone.

The doctors say she has a tumor pressing up against her brain. She no longer responds to people, and only days ago she had troubling recognizing my sister when she had gone to visit. She has developed pneumonia and the fever is getting worse. The doctors have asked if we would sign a "Do Not Resuscitate" waiver, or something of that sort.

And then it all comes home. This is what we are fighting about. All politics is personal. It's not just about the ideas or the principles, it is about actual people and how to make their lives better. After all my advocacy for health care reform this is when it hits home, because we love people and we want them to be safe and cared for, and because sometimes those people are real people we know and love and sometimes we will never meet them at all, but goddamit we can do better for people, better than this, and that is worth fighting for. I see the nurse caring for my Grandmother and I ask myself what can we do for her to make her life better, I think of that nurse's family and I wonder if they struggle and I ask myself what can we do to make their lives better, more fulfilling, more prosperous, so that this short struggle we all endure on this silly spinning orb can be made slightly better, if only for a time. I saw my grandmother yesterday for perhaps the last time, and though she was never awake I told her I loved her and I wished her peace with my father at last. I believe she heard me.

I don't pray a lot, but I prayed, and I gave thanks for the little I have and for the people I love. Ours is to take what is and make it better, not just for ourselves but for everyone and for those who shall come after us. That is worth fighting for.

So I offer this as a way of expressing emotions and as a way to honor my grandmother, the mother of my father.

To make the world a better place, one small act of kindness at a time.

I give blessings for my Grandmother, and to each and every person out there.

Peace and love to all

9:35 AM PT: Big Love to everyone. Sorry for the lack of comments on my part, just hard to really know what to say, and yeah, that happens to me too. Giving mojo all around and sharing love with you and yours.

Bless this community

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/27/1174146/-My-Grandmother-has-brain-cancer

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How climate shifts sparked human evolution

At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.

These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.

Olduvai Gorge is a ravine cut into the eastern margin of the Serengeti Plain in northern Tanzania that holds fossils of hominins ? members of the human lineage. Excavations at Olduvai Gorge by Louis and Mary Leakey in the mid-1950s helped to establish the African origin of humanity.

The Great Drying?
To learn more about the roots of humanity, scientists analyzed samples of leaf waxes preserved in lake sediments at Olduvai Gorge, identifying which plants dominated the local environment around 2 million years ago. This was about when Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern humans who used relatively advanced stone tools, appeared.

"We looked at leaf waxes, because they're tough, they survive well in the sediment," researcher Katherine Freeman, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement.

After four years of work, the researchers focused on carbon isotopes ? atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons ? in the samples, which can reveal what plants reigned over an area. The grasses that dominate savannas engage in a kind of photosynthesis that involves both normal carbon-12 and heavier carbon-13, while trees and shrubs rely on a kind of photosynthesis that prefers carbon-12. (Atoms of carbon-12 each possess six neutrons, while atoms of carbon-13 have seven.)

Scientists had long thought Africa went through a period of gradually increasing dryness ? called the Great Drying ? over 3 million years, or perhaps one big change in climate that favored the expansion of grasslands across the continent, influencing human evolution. However, the new research instead revealed "strong evidence for dramatic ecosystem changes across the African savanna, in which open grassland landscapes transitioned to closed forests over just hundreds to several thousands of years," researcher Clayton Magill, a biogeochemist at Pennsylvania State University, told LiveScience. [Know Your Roots? Take Our Human Evolution Quiz]

The researchers discovered that Olduvai Gorge abruptly and routinely fluctuated between dry grasslands and damp forests about five or six times during a period of 200,000 years.

"I was surprised by the magnitude of changes and the rapid pace of the changes we found," Freeman told LiveScience. "There was a complete restructuring of the ecosystem from grassland to forest and back again, at least based on how we interpret the data. I've worked on carbon isotopes my whole career, and I've never seen anything like this before."

Losing water
The investigators also constructed a highly detailed record of water history in Olduvai Gorge by analyzing hydrogen isotope ratios in plant waxes and other compounds in nearby lake sediments. These findings support the carbon isotope data, suggesting the region experienced fluctuations in aridity, with dry periods dominated by grasslands and wet periods characterized by expanses of woody cover.

"The research points to the importance of water in an arid landscape like Africa," Magill said in a statement. "The plants are so intimately tied to the water that if you have water shortages, they usually lead to food insecurity."

The research team's statistical and mathematical models link the changes they see with other events at the time, such as alterations in the planet's movement. [50 Amazing Facts About Earth]

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"The orbit of the Earth around the sun slowly changes with time," Freeman said in statement. "These changes were tied to the local climate at Olduvai Gorge through changes in the monsoon system in Africa."

Earth's orbit around the sun can vary over time in a number of ways ? for instance, Earth's orbit around the sun can grow more or less circular over time, and Earth's axis of spin relative to the sun's equatorial plane can also tilt back and forth. This alters the amount of sunlight Earth receives, energy that drives Earth's atmosphere.

"Slight changes in the amount of sunshine changed the intensity of atmospheric circulation and the supply of water," Freeman said. "The rain patterns that drive the plant patterns follow this monsoon circulation. We found a correlation between changes in the environment and planetary movement."

The team also found links between changes at Olduvai Gorge and sea-surface temperatures in the tropics.

"We find complementary forcing mechanisms ? one is the way Earth orbits, and the other is variation in ocean temperatures surrounding Africa," Freeman said.

These findings now shed light on the environmental shifts the ancestors of modern humans might have had to adapt to in order to survive and thrive.

"Early humans went from having trees available to having only grasses available in just 10 to 100 generations, and their diets would have had to change in response," Magill said in a statement. "Changes in food availability, food type, or the way you get food can trigger evolutionary mechanisms to deal with those changes. The result can be increased brain size and cognition, changes in locomotion and even social changes ? how you interact with others in a group."

This variability in the environment coincided with a key period in human evolution, "when the genus Homo was first established and when there was first evidence of tool use," Magill said.

The researchers now hope to examine changes at Olduvai Gorge not just across time but space, which could help shed light on aspects of early human evolution such as foraging patterns.

Magill, Freeman and their colleague Gail Ashley detailed their findings online Dec. 24 in two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

? 2012 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50297765/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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