My Personal Finance Blog

Education forms the base of any type of any sector, hence aids in the growth of any country. Keeping this fact in mind, UAE is also focusing on its educational sector to give a boom to the education standards in the country. Dubai has attracted talented individuals from across the globe due to its Zero Income Tax policy. This policy has enabled the individuals to take 100% remuneration of income to home and make huge savings while working in Dubai. This is the reason why Dubai has turned into a career heaven. The condition has enabled the companies based UAE, as well as the companies serving the entire Middle East and North African region, to attract more professionals to work in Dubai despite of the harsh climatic conditions.

However, Dubai provides a liberal lifestyle as compared to other cities of UAE, and has high standards of living, besides active night life, recreational activities, food and culture.

Teaching jobs in Dubai is very demanding because of the increasing number of institutions in the city. Teachers are well respected and have strong opportunities of further growth. Local schools and colleges of Dubai demand experienced teaching professional time-to-time. Teachers working in other Middle East countries are also moving to UAE with their families because of a strong and steady inflow of international and professional work aspects and already established international schools. The syllabuses of these international schools generally follow American or British format, so they demand competent and professionally qualified teachers and faculty. The salary offered by these schools is very competitive and thereby attract more and more professionals to take up the jobs.

Teaching jobs in Dubai are regularly advertised by the schools, so for professionals having a teaching experience in British or American style, the chances of getting teaching job are very high.

The schools and institutions generally hire candidates on a contractual basis, for a minimum of 2-3 years, so the candidate is advised to remain updated about the latest job opportunities. Scientific teaching methodologies are always welcomed by the institutions. To be a teacher in UAE, the candidates need to fulfill some of the basic requirements, which include:

• Educational qualification of international standards.

• A valid passport and VISA for UAE.

• Attested certificates, preferably from a UAE government official.

• Fluency in written and spoken English. Knowledge of Arabic or Urdu or both, will be an additional advantage.

• Capability to learn other languages and adjust in different cultural and working environments.

• Willingness to work on the basis of bonds. There are various online job portals and online job magazines, beside newspapers and magazines, which provide details of the existing and upcoming job opportunities for teaching jobs in Dubai. The job details are available according to the experience and the working domain of the individuals.

• To apply for teaching jobs in UAE, the candidates must ensure that:

• The job application is properly written and presented in a corporate manner.

• The application form must have attached photograph of the candidate.

• Eye-catching and detailed Curriculum Vitae should be attached. Summers is the best time to look and apply for the teaching jobs in Dubai, as the schools, colleges and other institutions start admissions and hiring process during that time.

However, the candidate must ensure that he/she abides by the rules and regulations set by the government or the institute to avoid being penalised. Candidates from other countries, willing to serve in UAE, should get in touch with the embassy to find out the details and formalities related with the same. Embassy can provide you a great help in all the formalities and also provide assistance in the process of applying teaching jobs in Dubai.

No method of image protection is wholly effective, but nevertheless, Artists should take reasonable steps to defend their images from unauthorised use. The aim of this article is to show what can be done, rather than how to do it. Free tools, software, codes, and how to advice can be easily found on the Internet, once you know what to look for.



Image preparation

The best form of protection is to make your images fit for use only as web graphics.

1. Don’t make your pictures any bigger than necessary. The bigger an image, the easier it is to achieve quality prints.

2. Use image compression/optimisation software to reduce the file sizes of your images. On screen, there is little difference between a compressed and uncompressed file, however compressed files can comprise up to 90% less information, and will not withstand enlargement without severe loss of quality.

3. Watermark your images. Visible watermarking is simply a matter of placing some text, or a graphic, over your image. The trick is to achieve a balance between making your watermark difficult to remove, and not overly obscuring the image.

4. Use a correctly worded copyright notice on your web pages, and as your image watermark. This should comprise the © symbol (to let others know they should not use the artist’s work without permission), the name of the copyright owner next to it (so that anyone wishing to use the image to trace the copyright holder), and the year in which the image was created (to let others know when the term of protection started).

File protection

There are a number of easy steps that can be taken to keep your image files as inaccessible as possible.

5. Protect your image directory. Most web designers put their images and graphics in suitably named folders (sub-directories). Browsers automatically look for an “index” or “default” page within each sub-directory, and if there isn’t one, they display a list of all the files in that sub-directory. This means anyone can get a complete list of all your images and grab anything they want. There isn’t much point in employing other safeguards (such as no right click) if folder content lists are accessible. To stop this happening, place an index page in each folder where you have images. The page can be a blank document, or could include an appropriate message.

6. You can stop Browsers from caching the images on your web pages, by inserting the following code HEAD tags of your web page: .

7. Internet Explorer 6 has an annoying little feature called the “Image Toolbar”. Whenever your mouse hovers over an image, the Image Toolbar pops up, and invites you to save, print (etc). To disable the Image Toolbar, insert the following code between the HEAD tags of your web page: .

Code techniques

There are a number different ways in which you can use code to deter people from copying your website images, but unfortunately NONE of these are fool proof. They will only ever discourage the casual thief.

8. Use a rollover script to display images. When the mouse is moved over the image, a second image appears with a copyright notice, for example. Right clicking will only grab the rollover image.

9. Null images and nested tables (or overlapping layers, or even CSS). Briefly this involves creating a transparent image (GIF or PNG) the same size as the image you wish to protect. The “real” image is placed in the first table, and the “null” image placed in a second (nested) table, so that it is in front of the real image. If you right click to save the image, the transparent GIF/PNG is grabbed.  

10. Sectioning images is a process in which that image is divided into parts to form a number of separate images. These are then reassembled in a “zero border” table, recreating the original image. Right clicking will save only a section of the image.

11. Disabling the mouse right click functions prevents the most common method used to grab an image. There are several JavaScripts available – with and without pop up warning messages.

12. Slide-Shows

Java and Flash slide show scripts can be a good choice. The images cannot be saved directly, however, they remain vulnerable to screen grabs.



Other options

13. Invisible watermarking, like those created by Digimarc, digitally embeds a personal identification number within the image. They do not prevent your images from being taken, but offer proof of ownership.

14. There are a number of further techniques and software options, but they all require either a little expertise, or expenditure.

Portraits by John Burton

In what seems to be a genuine concern of the effects of radon emissions in residential homes, a certain website from a non-profit organization out of Houston has made it a point to imply without scientific proof, that natural stone could be a major contributor of radon in a household.

The allusion that seems to be made, that natural stone installed in your home is dangerous to your health is raised repeatedly on the website and in a recent local Houston TV news program.

It’s interesting to note that the two major contributors of this non-profit organization are manufacturers of engineered stone. One of those contributing manufacturers has a marketing executive on the board of directors of this particular organization.

From what may be perceived on the surface as perhaps another “going green” ad campaign, seems to be a different slant on the ongoing battle of the engineered stone manufacturers against natural stone.

Keep in mind that granite as does most natural components found in building material, allows vapors to pass through them that might contain trace amounts of radon. There are very small amounts of uranium found in trace minerals such as biotite in some natural stones. When quarried if a large cluster of biotite is exposed the result initially would be a radon reading. However, once a piece of granite or natural stone exposed to a large amount of uranium rich mineral in the ground is removed from the source and exposed to the air, the radon vapor transmission would weaken drastically and then dissipate. Simply put, think of natural stone as a very dense sponge that allows water, air and yes radon to pass through the stone. Once the stone is removed from the source of radon (the earth) the stone has no radon to filter through it.

We do endorse Radon testing but to allude that natural stone is a main contributor seems ludicrous.

To Quote Donald Langmuir, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Geochemistry, Colorado School of Mines, & President, Hydrochem Systems Corp.

”To show how laughable are the concerns of radon emitted from natural stone, the typical granite countertop in our example will release 7.4 x 10 -7 pCi/L of air. This corresponds to 2.7 x 10 -8 atom decays per second (dps). This represents 0.85 decays per year. In other words, less than one atom of radon is produced by the countertop in one year. This is hardly worth getting excited about. I would suggest that a good way to reduce our exposure to the radon present in outdoor air would be to build an air-tight house out of granite countertops! There are certain properties of rocks that can increase their radon emanation efficiency, or in other words increase the release of radon from a given weight of rock. These are rock properties that maximize the exposure of internal or external rock surfaces to water or air, allowing any radon gas to escape. The author of ‘Granite and Radon’ argues that such properties, which include rock porosity, fissuring and mylonitization, will increase radon releases. This is probably true, however, a granite with such properties would be too brittle to make into a countertop, and too open to take a polish, and so would not be marketable as a countertop – unless the rock pores were first filled with a chemical sealant. Such sealing would also eliminate any possible radon release problems.”

In a more recent study that was conducted by L. L. Chyi, a Ph.D. and professor of Geochemistry and Environmental Geology at The University of Akron, Akron, Ohio. Dr. Chyi studied 13 of the most popular granites used throughout the United States as determined by an industry-wide survey. Due to their popularity these 13 granites, are believed to represent up to 85% of the granite countertop market in recent years. The granite types are as follows:

1. New Venetian Gold, Brazil; medium grained, yellow-beige gneiss with many dark red garnets

2. Uba Tuba, Brazil; A medium- to coarse grained, olive-green granite

3. Santa Cecilia, Brazil; A coarse-grained, yellow-grey gneiss with up to pie-sized, red garnets

4. Tropic Brown, Saudi Arabia; medium-grained, brown granite

5. Absolute Black, India; black basalt

6. Tan Brown, India; A black-brown igneous rock with big, shapeless, brown-red feldspar crystals

7. Giallo Ornamental, Brazil; coarse-grained, brown-yellow granulite with some brown-red garnets

8. Crema Bordeaux, Brazil; Juparana Crema Bordeaux (Brunello). A coarse- to very coarse-grained, pink to red granite with areas of quartz, alkali feldspar and quite a lot of ore

9. Baltic Brown, Finland; brown-black granite

10. Giallo Veneziano, Brazil; medium- to coarse-grained, ochre-yellow to golden-brown, also light pink, gneiss

11. Dakota Mahogany, USA; medium- to coarse-grained, brown-red granite

12. China Black, China, a fine-grained plutonic rock

13. Yellow Star, China, a medium-grained yellow to pink granite

The testing methodology was designed to measure the amount of radon which each granite type would add to the interior of a 2,000 square foot, normally ventilated home with 8 ft ceilings. The results show that Crema Bordeaux (the most active in terms of radon emissions) would contribute a concentration component of less than 0.28 pCi/L, or less than 7% of the EPA’s recommended actionable level of 4.0 pCi/L. This radon amount is well below a level which might cause health concerns. Tropic Brown and Baltic Brown, second and third in radon emanation based upon Dr. Chyi’s testing, amounted to only 1% of this action level. The other granites tested added almost immeasurable amounts of radon to the house. Radon atoms in pore spaces and fractures are of minimal concern in the case of granite countertops

“The average radionuclide contents of your building material samples are similar to other average granite samples and other common earth-derived building materials such as brick and soil. Thus, the amount of gamma radiation emitted from similar masses of these building materials will be approximately the same;

There is little sample-to-sample variation in the radon family radionuclide concentrations; the radon flux is somewhat larger for the counter-top squares than for the smaller samples. This indicates that the effective diffusion length is only on the order of the thickness of the counter-top samples, i.e. several centimeters. Thus, material thicker than 5 cm (2′) most likely will not emit more than the counter-top samples.

While we feel that health safety is a great concern especially in our homes, for an industry to attempt to gain financially by “scare tactics” or under the auspices of “Eco friendly” is reprehensible. We urge the consumer to not be taken in by these alarmist tactics.

Full Story

Have you ever thought to build solar energy panels? Most people who truly desire to become more energy independent, have been led to believe that it is simply too costly of an undertaking, or that you need to be some sort of physics major to construct a solar panel. Maybe you are completely fed up with relying on the big energy companies and the exorbitant prices that they charge.

Personally, it drives me nuts to be slaves, so to speak, to the power companies. I know for a fact that there are many alternative and renewable energy sources that are more than capable of delivering energy for a fraction of the cost, if not completely wiping out your energy bill all together. Sounds pretty good huh? So why not give it a shot and build solar energy panels?

My name is Andrew, and I have basically become quite fascinated with the thought of harnessing the energy of the sun to offset the cost of being “on the grid.” That isn’t all there is to it though.

There are many other ways to power a home that the majority of people simply aren’t aware of, and I would love nothing more than to spread the knowledge so that one day we will find ourselves capable of creating everything we need to be self reliant.

Things such as wind turbines to harness the energy of the wind, or ways to produce electricity from running water are just a couple more methods that I want to explore as I gain more knowledge and insight. Who knows, maybe one day we will have vehicles that run on nothing but water as they efficiently separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. Pure, clean, renewable energy with no pollution is possible, but it takes knowledge and understanding.

I will continue to add more information about what exactly solar energy is, the pros and cons, some interesting facts, and how different systems work. If you have begun to become interested in ways of becoming more self sufficient in case of an emergency or truly wish to get off the grid, then make sure and explore this site. If anything, I would like to provide knowledge and direction for those who are looking to better themselves.

I chose to simply stick with this one area of energy; namely for you to learn to build solar energy panels with this site. As time goes by, I hope to have sister sites that will tie in with this one, and provide step-by-step plans to construct various means of producing alternate energy and much more as well.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my site. I hope you enjoy it and can take away something positive from it. If you do decide to build solar energy panels, I hope it is something that your whole family can learn and enjoy doing together.