Between August 2005 and September 2006 Statistics South Africa undertook the IES 2005 to gather data on the income sources and expenditure patterns of a nationally representative sample of 21 144 households. This type of survey is usually conducted every five years.

Child poverty in South Africa is a case that really needs to be addressed. A lot of people think that this is still linked to apartheid, but that is certainly not the case. What is quite sad is that people are under the assumption that there is nothing wrong at all so the country tries to hide the situation away under the covers as if there were nothing to worry about.

  • Released for analysis early in 2008, IES 2005 is the most upto- date national level data source for measuring poverty in South Africa.
  • Whilst IES 2005 had been used before to provide an updated profile of poverty in South Africa it had not been used to analyse child poverty.

Before the FIFA Soccer World cup came to the country people were wondering what was going to become of the situation with child poverty and poverty in South Africa in general. A few days before the event took place children were taken off the street mysteriously.

Poverty was conceptualised in narrow resource deprivation terms and measured in money terms using the IES income data. The per capita income, which is calculated by dividing household income by the number of individuals in the household, was used as the Adult Equivalence Scale (AES) to convert household income into individual income and an indicator of welfare for ranking individuals from poorest to richest.

Tourists come to Africa not knowing the situation, but the poverty statistics show us how bad things really are. It is a little like a catch-22 scenario because parents don’t have the funds to send their children to school to improve their way of life and give them an education so they are stuck on the street, most of the time begging to pass the day.

The poverty line was set at the poorest 40% of household per capita income in IES 2005, which amounted to a R4 560 per capita per annum in 2000 Rand values. We estimated child poverty headcount (i.e. the percentage of children below the poverty line) for South Africa as whole and explored variations in the child poverty headcount by age, racial classification, gender and racial classification.

Slowly, people are being made aware of the situation. Volunteers have been building houses in the townships out of funds that they provide. It is fantastic that people have the heart for a cause like this, but it would be great if more people were aware of life on the streets. When you have a look at mansions overlooking the ocean it really makes you stop and think.

The poverty rate was found to be highest among children in the youngest age group of 0-4, followed by children aged 5-14 and then by those aged 15-17. This is surprising in view of the fact that the child support grants did not, at the time of the survey, extend to the oldest group, so one would have expected households containing only older children to perhaps experience more poverty.
Posted by Hannah
Dated: 25th November 2010
Comments: 249 Comments

There are many things you should know about the boat people, besides how it feels like to have been living all your life rowing and transacting all daily chores in a boat. You might be surprised to know that there are many of these boat people or the Vietnamese people who now live in the States. It is said that there are about 3 million Vietnamese people who now live overseas.

If you happen to have a friend or a partner in business who speaks Vietnamese and you are thinking of learning it as a second language, then maybe you should start researching about the Vietnamese language. The Vietnamese language used to go by the name Annamese. It is one of the Austroasiatic languages. It is the official language of the Vietnamese people who make up 86% of the country’s current population. It has been said that some of the Vietnamese language words are derived from the Chinese language. Even the written version of the Vietnamese language is based on the Chinese language. The Vietnamese language denotes a lot of abstractions as it took some words from the Chinese. This is the same way as the English got theirs from Greek and Latin. As a matter of fact, the current written language is a variation of the original Latin.

One thing that might push you to choose learning the Vietnamese language among the many languages that are available is that it is ranked as the seventh most spoken language in the whole United States. In fact, there are several states where it ranked first and third. In Australia, it is the most spoken language. So it seems that wherever you go, there appears to be a reason for you to learn the Vietnamese language.

Although Vietnam is just starting to regain its economic independence, the Vietnamese people remained loyal and steadfast in their regard for their leader Ho Chi Minh who fought for the country’s independence from the French rule. If you are going to check on the history of Vietnam you would know that there is something beyond the Vietnam War that became controversial during the 1970′s and that Vietnam’s fight against foreign rule has been there ever since 19th century.

There are many other aspects of Vietnam that are yet starting to be known in the world. An example of this is tourism, which has been experiencing a significant increase. The Vietnamese owe it to their getting popular beaches and the boat tours. So for you to learn the Vietnamese language fast and easy, you can make use of Pimsleur’s language learning audio programs that are available in The Talking Bookstore. With this, you can learn Vietnamese anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace.

Posted by Hannah
Dated: 24th November 2010
Comments: 107 Comments
In preparation for some upcoming research, I’ve been surveying the field of Social Networking sites. The only way to characterize growth in the field is explosive; while I don’t have actual numbers on how many social networking sites are out there, my informal survey shows we are talking at least hundreds, with more coming online each day.

Man has always been a social creature and has constantly developed ways to communicate with friends and loved ones using the latest technology. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have gained popularity in recent years. Though they have similarities, both are distinct in the kind of services they offer to their users.

There are so many social networking sites out there at the moment, but I really find it amazing that the older generation still haven’t caught on to this new phenomenon. Social network sites are amazing because they let everyone communicate with their friends, find people they haven’t seen for a long time, and network with people who have the same interests as them.

At the start, Facebook was a site where people could inform their friends and loved ones about what was up in their lives through status updates. Its scope was pretty much limited to a person’s own network.

I thought I would put together an article that will help the older people find some social networking sites that will actually help them connect with people. So here they are, the top 5 social networks everyone should join.

In recent years, though, Facebook has expanded extensively to include the applications that has made it the most popular social networking site. The interactive games, fan pages, classified ads, as well as the business advertisements have all driven the popularity of Facebook sky high.

Myspace is the largest social network in the world. They have more users than any other and surprisingly the majority of their users are over 30. Myspace has a key focus around the music industry. If you are looking for a band to listen to or just find out when their next concert is on, then Myspace is the place to find them. Myspace also allows users to customise their own pages, so you can make it look as colourful or as bland as you want. However, I also think this can be the sites downfall from time to time, because I really hate looking at pages that are just either too over the top, or music starts playing, or just unreadable.

Twitter, like Facebook, offers a way to broadcast a person’s status updates. They differ in that Twitter focuses exclusively on status updates.

Facebook is one of the best social networks in the world for actually finding people. Profiles are not customisable and their platform is very clean and slick. They arent focused on pushing through the pageview like Myspace, more importantly they focus on interactions and how users use their site.

Unlike Facebook, however, Twittter allows people you don’t know to see or ‘follow’ your status updates. Twitter has made man’s need to share and interact as it’s bread and butter – and done it quite successfully. With Twitter, people with similar interests and ideas are brought together through ‘tweets’.

Facebook has has huge growth in international markets recently, so if you are trying to find a long lost penpal in China, then you might have a chance with Facebook. Facebook is for older users and users who normally have at least a degree. Im not always sure if that is a good thing or not.

People on Twitter are not about privacy. They want to be heard, they want to connect. A lot of celebrities are using Twitter as a way to communicate with their fans among others. Recently, celebrity tweets have become a hot way to advertise with one tweet going as much as $25,000.

Bebo is a social network that has just been bought by AOL. It has a strong presence in Ireland and the UK, but predominantly for the younger generation. Bebo also has a focus on bands and artists, but this social network doesn’t really stand out from the crowd. Pages are customisable on the site, but nothing over the top like Myspace.

Tweets from people are tagged and thus people who are interested in those tags can see those tweets. If it interests them, then they can choose to follow a person’s tweets which will then connect them to that person, much like becoming ‘friends’ on Facebook.

Hi5 is a social network that is being used a lot by the older generation. It is a social network that is growing in nearly all markets, but doesn’t really have a focus. Hi5 when first launched spent a lot of time trying to spam as many people as possible into joining. That tactic seems to have worked and their are now millions on users online. Hi5 would be a good place to head to find out if your older friends are online, but I would spend a lot of time using this site.

If you want to know which one is better then it really depends on your needs. It’s not uncommon for people to use both Facebook and Twitter at the same time. After all, two is definitely better than one where man, the social animal, is concerned.

Orkut is under the huge Google umbrella. Orkut is a great social network with a huge following in South America as well as other non-english speaking countries. Orkut has a very slick design (as you would expect from Google), plus it seems to be growing in english speaking countries by the day. This social network used to be closed, but now it is completely open and anyone can join.
Posted by Hannah
Dated: 24th November 2010
Comments: 95 Comments
Several new insightful articles and posts have popped up recently with a common theme—using Movable Type as a content management system to manage an entire website, not just a weblog. Here they are, along with my 2 cents along the way.

Here’s how to have a blog that makes money. As with virtually everything else in Internet marketing having a blog that makes you money is a combination of the two main Internet marketing ingredients; targeted traffic and a good, compelling offer. You can start your blog for free using blogger or one of the other free blogging platforms out there, but I don’t recommend it for two main reasons.

While it’s timely for me as I’ve recently embarked on converting my weblog to Movable Type, Matt’s article is a fascinating exploration of working with simple-to-use but feature-packed software to create an entire site, not just the weblog pages. Matt provides helpful insight about thinking through the process of setting up Movable Type for a simple About page and a simple database approach for his essay section and online portfolio section.

The first reason that I would eschew free blogging platforms, such as Blogger, is that when your blog is hosted on Blogger, the domain, traffic and content is theirs, not yours. Google, who owns Blogger, really doesn’t need any more free hands up, do they?

Last week’s post at stopdesign is also not to be missed, Adaptive Path’s MT Setup. Jay Allen explains how he set up Movable Type for site-wide control of Adaptive Path’s website. Jay explains how four Movable Type blogs are used: Appearances, Essays, News and static content. He also discusses other sites and how he implemented them for clients using Movable Type so that the clients could easily add their own content.

The second reason that you should steer clear of free blog hosting platforms when you’re building your blog empire business is that, because of the first reason, you’re not building your business, you’re actually helping to build someone else’s.

Brad Choate wrote about some ways to implement MT site-wide in his post Tuesday, Doing your whole site with MT. Brad recently set up a separate weblog for his static pages, deleting all the included MT templates except the Individual Archive template, and he then enabled individual archives. He also created categories for each directory in which he wanted content. Brad also provides several code snippet approaches to setting up the content within the category directories.

The first thing you should do when starting a blog that you hope will bring in a healthy income for you one day is actually plan things out. That’s right; you should actually sit down for a few hours and make a business plan. That will help make sure you don’t miss any of the details you’ll need to be successful. Be sure you include everything, such as what the main theme of your blog will be, the monetization strategies you’ll use, a financial plan, a growth plan, and an oft forgotten part of many business plans, the exit strategy.

Thanks to a number of creative individuals that I follow on Twitter, I discovered a fascinating article about the sad demise of letterpress in China. Given my deep interest in letterpress printing, I have often wondered how the method of printing from movable type is possible at all in China, since at least 4,000 Chinese characters are commonly used. Being hamstrung with so many characters seems now to be bringing letterpress printing to an end in China, ironically at a time when the craft is enjoying a renaissance in the West…

Most highly successful blogs are tightly themed. That means they focus closely on a certain subject or niche, such as local residential real estate, working from home income techniques, ’60′s muscle cars, or needlepoint. This focus will help you build a core base of loyal readers and subscribers. These are very important for the immediate and long term success of your blog. In addition, having a large, vibrant subscriber list adds a large amount of value to your blog should you want to sell it. If you’re having trouble choosing a theme, look for one with a large profit potential. There will be more on this later.

“When entering the Chinese letterpress shop, an instant observation was the vast amount of characters in each set of type. Characters of the Latin alphabet were often organized either by uppercase and lowercase (so named because of the separate cases to differentiate between majuscule and minuscule letterforms) or more recently in a California Job Case. Instead of using of a type drawer, Chinese characters were typically stored in cube shelving with the type stacked into a square or column, facing outward for easy identification. Using a pair of tweezers, printers carefully picked characters out of a wall of tiled type and placed them onto a composing stick before setting up the chase.”

Decide on what you’ll call your blog and get your own domain name. These are very affordable, and will help you sidestep the problems of using a free hosting platform. You will own the domain and will be free to do with it as you please. You blog will actually be an asset that you control.

“The use of movable type in China is now a rare business and found only in the rural village of Dongyuan for printing pedigrees. Although this traditional method has been replaced by offset and digital printing, there are single print shops in Hong Kong and Taiwan that still keep extensive collections of their lead type and press machines. Lately, there has been discussion about collecting these existing artifacts and setting up printing museums or digitalizing the complete fonts. Hopefully these projects will come to life soon, sharing and preserving Chinese cultural heritage.”

The next decision you’ll have to make is what blogging platform you’ll use. The two largest are Movable Type and WordPress. WordPress is open source, meaning basically it’s free. Because it’s open source, many developers freely create things for WordPress, so there are a huge number of add-ons, widgets, templates, and plugins available for it. You can even publish your WordPress blog from your iPhone now!

Movable Type has been forked — at least the open source GPL version — into a new project called Melody.

Movable type is not open source, but you may still be able to get it free, as many web hosting companies offer it as part of the hosting package. It too has many different things available to enhance the functionality and appearance of blogs published with it. I’ve used both frequently. You can have many fantastic, and profitable blogs with either publishing system.

Yes this blog is powered by Movable Type too. Six Apart, the vendor behind Movable Type created an open source version of Movable Type in 2008. Usually a fork of open source code happens because developers are not happy with the direction of code development and the main project.

So you’ve got your blog up and you’re posting to it with reckless abandon. How can you make some money for your efforts? That’s sort of a balancing act. You want to blog about a topic that interests you, or keeping up an aggressive posting schedule will become very difficult. You also want to blog about a topic that is profitable, or you won’t make any money.

In the case of Melody — at least so far — this looks to be a ‘friendly’ fork. The creator of Movable Type, Benjamin Trott sees where Melody will fit in at a bleeding edge community level, whereas Movable Type will hold its position as the professional version.

To help find what blog subjects can earn you some decent profits, head to Google and see what keywords are going for these days. Use the free Google keyword tool in Google Adwords. You can type in keywords and keyword phrases and the tool will show an estimate of cost per click that advertisers are willing to pay for ads targeting a given keyword or phrase, and an idea of the number of advertisers that are advertising using them.

“We see the Melody community focusing on the equally-valuable ideas of bleeding-edge community-driven ideas, rapid iteration, and integration with the code of other open source projects,” Trott wrote in a blog post.” It’s great news for the entire Movable Type community, as this new project uses the same themes, the same templates, the same plugins and the same publishing engine as Movable Type. And since it shares the GPL license with MT, it’s even a great way for these new developments to work their way back into the official versions of Movable Type itself.”

Keywords that are relatively expensive and have substantial competition mean that many advertisers are willing to pay fairly large amounts of money for those keywords. In theory that means that there is profit to be made by creating content that features those keyword phrases.

While I respect Trott’s position, I have to respectfully disagree with his long term view of how Melody will affect Movable Type.

Remember that it is only an idea, and there are two schools of thought on earning money from your blog. You can try to find a narrow niche with little competition, and dominate it. The other approach is to head to a very large, but profitable niche and try to get enough traffic to skim some profit from the niche. Basically you’ll either a small fish in an ocean, or a large fish in a pond. There are successful bloggers using both strategies.

Initially Melody will be compatible with Movable Type, because it has to in order to migrate users. But once Melody has its own momentum and if it is truly a fork seperate from Six Apart, then why would Melody toe the Movable Type line?

Next you’ll want to decide on a monetization strategy for your blog. In most cases you’ll use a combination of them to bring home the bacon. The three main strategies are:

Backwards compatibility is one thing, but at a certain point in the future Melody will be different, it will take a different development direction and they will be two different products. I’ve seen it before with the Mambo Joomla CMS split a few years back (thought that wasn’t a friendly split).

1) Sales of your own products or services
2) Affiliate marketing
3) Advertising. This is usually contextual advertising, but some bloggers are successful with other forms, such as banner ads.

The Melody FAQ also makes it plainly clear that the goal of the effort is not to create a schism in the Movable Type community but rather create a new culture of innovation and extensibility. That makes good sense, but what happens when the community wants a key feature that Six Apart/Movable Type doesn’t?

With affiliate marketing you’ll be paid a commission for referring a visitor to a company’s site. If the person you referred does the desired action you’ll earn your commission. In the majority of cases the desired action means the visitor buys something, or fills out a lead form.

Why use Movable Type (MT), a blogging tool, for something that isn’t a blog? Movable Type with its plugins and templates is a highly flexible and extensible tool, that with a some knowledge and a few hacks can be made to do a lot of the things you’d want from a CMS.

Contextual advertising automatically places ads on your site that are targeted to your site by the context of your site. The ad publishers have algorithms that look at your blog and decide which of their advertiser’s ads would best go with your blog’s content. In most cases, you’re then paid a percentage of the advertising fee when one of your visitors clicks on the link in the ad. This is known as pay per click advertising. The leader is this is Google, with their AdWords / AdSense program.

I am going to assume that you have at least a decent idea how you want to structure your site. Usually you’ll want to divide it into some seperate areas – for Mentalized I decided on 3 main areas: Journal, Features, and About. I will use those 3 areas as my main examples for this feature.

To have a blog that makes money, you need to have targeted traffic, the more the better. That is largely a function of the content. A large amount of good, original content (not content scraped form other blogger’s RSS feeds). Some on page search engine optimization techniques won’t hurt either, but good, high quality content will get you both search engine visitors, and repeat traffic from people that just want to read your stuff.

* Custom text formatting for every page (yay, Textile)
* Sitewide search engine
* RSS feeds for all your content
* Comments for all your content
* Posting new and editing old content using MT is much easier than using an editor and a FTP client.
* You can have separate users manage their own part of the site

Make sure you target the proper keywords in your posts and post titles. You’re looking for profitable keywords that have relatively low competition. By optimizing for words and phrases people are actively searching for, you’ll do better in the search engine rankings, and you’ll be giving your readers exactly what they were looking for. That double whammy is a true recipe for blog money making success.

The first thing to do, is create an individual blog for each individual area of your website. You want to do this to ensure maximum flexibility and to be able to extend your website later on as you get more funky ideas. In my case, I created 3 blogs called “Journal”, “Features”, and “Static Pages”.

  • Movable Type
  • WordPress
  • Blogger
Posted by Hannah
Dated: 23rd November 2010
Comments: 68 Comments

Higher Interest Rate Debt Must Go First

Whether to pay off or make investments is a question that needs to be answered at a later time, once the student has prioritized his loan payment schedule. The loans with high interest must be settled first. Most noted Debt Consolidation and Management experts agree that one must first make provisions to pay off debts with the highest after tax interest rates. Currently, the rate of interest for federal student loans is at its lowest in the last 30 years. Hence, the recent graduates have the opportunity to settle their loans at the low interest rates and can request loan term extensions for deferring repayments. Recent Tax Law amendments have also made provisions for exemption of taxes on interests for Student Loans.

Joining The Forces Can Aid Debt Elimination

However, debt elimination may sound easy but can turn out to be really complicated. There are options available that can help students to reduce their debts. Students may consider the Armed Forces, i.e. The Army, The Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and the Coast Guards that provide great educational benefits. At the same time, students must decide about some effective loan payback programs. One of the better payback programs is offered by the U.S. Army that pays back up to $65000 worth of loans over a period of three years.

U.S. Peace Corps are another excellent choice. In case a student has an outstanding Perkins Loan, then 15% of the loan amount is paid off every year of active service in the U.S. Peace Corps. At the end of two years of service 30% of the loan gets eliminated. In case of any other federally guaranteed loans, students are entitled to defer loan payments while they are serving in U.S. Peace Corps. Thus, Peace Corps can be a viable alternative for reducing some debt and at the same time upgrading your resume.

Paying Off or Investing

Counseling Services Organizations providing advice on student loans agree that investments can be made every month with the saved money after consolidation of loans. A student can take benefit of the sharp decline in interest rates by quick consolidation of several loans, thus saving money that he can further use towards loans repayment. He may even consider investing the excess funds in some meaningful venture.

Ideally, it will be best to invest excess funds in ventures that can offer a higher rate of interest than the rate of interest the student has to pay in order to cancel his student loans. Similarly, it will be a good decision if the student wishes to open an Individual Retirement Account with the excess cash left after paying off the loan.

Actually, there is no definite answer to whether one must consider investing the excess cash or not. In any case, even if the student decides to utilize the funds for repayment of loans, he is actually making a long-term investment for current debt elimination will increase the ability to obtain finance in the future with better terms.

Posted by Hannah
Dated: 23rd November 2010
Comments: 182 Comments