04.22.07
Posted in News at 8:37 pm by Paloma Cruz
HIGH-TECH HELP FOR GENEALOGISTS
Online sites help family trees branch out
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
[snip]
For amateur genealogists, cyberspace has added a new dimension, one that helps them accomplish more in less time. As the number of online genealogy Web sites grows, so does the community that practices the hobby and so do the family trees they uncover.
[snip]
Researching a family tree used to be painfully slow and tedious. Amateurs could dig for months for paper records that promised to offer crucial facts about a relative’s life, sometimes finding nothing at all.
But with Web sites dedicated to genealogy, some free and others for a fee, novices can share techniques and connect with distant relatives they likely wouldn’t have found otherwise.
[snip]
Houstonians have great local resources to help in this search, the Houston Public Library’s Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research has “resources for Texas, other states and around the world.” Find them online at www.houstonlibrary.org/clayton.
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Posted in News at 8:35 pm by Paloma Cruz
Headlines and news about Houston you should read:
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04.20.07
Posted in News at 12:44 am by Paloma Cruz
The Associated Press is reporting that jobless benefits claims edged slightly last week. This, the article states, signals “that the labor market remains generally healthy.”
I’m not an economist, but that seems a very simplistic interpretation of something that is probably due to many many things.
Resources:
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Posted in News at 12:41 am by Paloma Cruz
Some headlines about homes, home sales, and other related topics (all reported by the Houston Chronicle, unless otherwise stated):
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04.03.07
Posted in News at 6:16 am by Paloma Cruz
Houston area gains jobs
– reported by the Houston Business Journal
Houston’s unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent in February from 5.6 percent in the same month in 2006.
According to the Texas Workforce Commission,
2.6 million people were employed in the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown area
in February, compared with 2.5 million in February 2006.
[snip]
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04.02.07
Posted in General at 7:57 pm by Paloma Cruz
The University of Houston’s Farfel Distinguished Lecture series will present a lecture by Ray Kurzweil — “The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One.”
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Moreover, Inc. magazine ranked him eighth among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison”; and PBS included him as one of sixteen “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. His Web site Kurzweil AI.net has more than 1 million readers.
Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest prize for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology—the nation’s highest honor in technology—from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame—established by the U.S. Patent Office.
Kurzweil has received thirteen honorary doctorates as well as honors from three U.S. presidents. He has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into nine languages and was Amazon’s No. 1 best-selling book in science. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller and has been the No. 1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
RSVP online.
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Posted in General at 6:19 am by Paloma Cruz
I’m seriously thinking about signing up for this: University of Houston is hosting their People’s Law School on April 7th.
Information and signup at The People’s Lawyer.
Resources:
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04.01.07
Posted in News at 8:13 pm by Paloma Cruz
Gas prices continue to climb across Texas
– reported by the Houston Chronicle
Gasoline pump prices increased this week for an eighth week in a row in Texas.The average price of regular-grade gasoline in 11 Texas cities rose 6 cents to $2.49 per gallon, according to the weekly AAA Texas gasoline price survey released today. Nationally, the average increase was 5 cents to $2.62 per gallon.
[snip]
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