Auto Repair Tips for Car Care And Maintenance

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Proper car care is an important aspect of owning a vehicle. Many people who buy a new car or even a used car do not realize all of the things involved in caring for such an expensive investment that becomes a very important part of our daily lives. We often become so busy with other things that we forget to do some of the simple things that help to ensure that our vehicle is running properly. In these cases, routine vehicle maintenance, automotive troubleshooting, and taking extra precautions to protect the interior of the car can become a burden. However, taking the little bit of extra time to take care of your car can actually save you money and protect its value should you ever decide to sell it.

Even if you got your car for a bargain or paid very little for it through a used car dealership, routine maintenance can help keep your car on the road and prevent you from being stranded. These steps can also protect you and your family from the unwanted disaster of an accident or collision in some cases.

Cleaning both the interior and exterior of your vehicle is very important. Aside from the fact that riding in a dirty car can be less than pleasant, regular car washes help to protect the paint and other coatings. Cleaning the windshield is also a very important aspect of this. Ensuring that the windshield is clear and that visibility is not obstructed means that you are better able to evade potential hazards. Every time you fill up, or before you leave in the mornings, take the time to clean the windshield. For less streaks, use vinegar, and wipe it away with newspaper. If you are hitting the road for a long trip, be sure to check your windshield washer fluid levels before leaving. In cooler temperatures, it is also important to check your washer fluid for freezing.

In order to better protect your car, park inside of a parking garage or under a carport whenever possible. Aside from protecting the exterior of your vehicle from the elements, parking your car indoors can also make it easier to start when there is cold weather present.

Routine maintenance and prevention are very important not only to the value of your car, but also to safety and performance. Do not ignore minor problems that may arise with your vehicle, as it is often these small problems that can lead to major problems down the road.

Caffeine Blues

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Okay, I know this article won’t be popular. Most of us are so addicted to Caffeine that we don’t want to know about it. I am writing this because when “Caffeine Blues” by Stephen Cherniske M.S.came out I just knew I had to read it. Several years ago I began to realise that coffee was much worse than we had been told, because I noticed that I got an arthritic pain in my wrist within ten to twenty minutes of a cappucino!

This book didn’t just tell me how bad coffee was – it told me how GOOD I would feel once I was totally caffeine free for two months. Somehow, this book sold me on giving it a try. And it was right! For example, I no longer have the drained feeling that I sometimes used to get in the mornings.

This is one of the best health books I have ever read. It is written by Stephen Cherniske who is a Clinical Nutritionist. “Caffeine Blues” is incredibly easy to read, and convincing. After reading it I realized that caffeine does NOT give us energy. In fact, it is a major CAUSE of LACK of energy. However, he explains that this drug is so powerful that one needs to go for three weeks to two months without any caffeine before one notices the difference. And how many of us have ever done that? Hardly anyone.

As Cherniske waded through the tons of information on caffeine, he began to see that consciously or unconsciously nearly every researcher starts from the assumption that caffeine is okay. Why? Probably because they themselves depended on caffeine.

Caffeine is in coffee, tea, chocolate, colas, chuppa-chups, many sodas, some drugs, most ‘energy’ drinks and guarana.

A 6 oz cup of:

Percolated coffee has about 120 mg of caffeine

Black tea has about 70 mg of caffeine

Green tea about 35 mg of caffeine

Leading colas 45 mg of caffeine

Mountain dew 54 mg of caffeine

Brewed decaf has 5 mg of caffeine

Milk chocolate has 6 mg per ounce

Baking chocolate has 35 mg per ounce.

Caffeine is produced by more than eighty species of plants. The reason may well be survival. As it turns out, caffeine is a biological poison used by plants as a pesticide.

Caffeine is considered harmless simply because it is so widely used.

There is a brochure available in hospitals and other medical related areas: “What you should know about caffeine” published by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) in Washington DC. After many phone calls Cherniske finally got a list of ‘supporters’ of the IFIC. The list included Pepsi, Coca-Cola, M&M, Nutrasweet, Nestle and Hershey – all of whom have caffeine in their drinks and foods. ‘Partners’ of the IFIC included groups such as the National Association of Pediatric Nurses and the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureau Inc. This brochure says that “Caffeine is normally excreted within several hours after consumption”. In fact, only 1% is excreted. The remaining 99% has to be detoxified by the liver.

It can take up to 12 hours to detoxify a single cup of coffee.

Many studies regarding coffee and hypertension were flawed, because the test studies came off coffee for only one or two weeks. It takes many more weeks than this for stress hormone levels of the body to return to normal.

The ‘half-life’ of a drug is the time it takes the body to remove one half of the dose. Caffeine is a drug. The half-life of a single dose of caffeine ranges from three to TWELVE hours.

Caffeine puts your body into stress. A single 250 milligram dose of caffeine (the equivalent of about 2.5 six ounce cups of coffee) has been shown to increase levels of the stress hormone epinephrine (adrenaline) by over 200%.

Caffeine triggers a classic fight-or-flight reaction. The fight-or-flight response was designed for events that happened only occasionally (such as a lion chasing you). Now, we put our body in fight-or-flight every day with caffeine!!! Since we are in society, we don’t respond in a fight-or-flight way. Instead, other things may happen. For example, sugar and fat get dumped unused in the bloodstream. The sugar creates more stress. The fat clogs the arteries. The digestive system slows or shuts down.

Not only is caffeine addictive, it also encourages other addictions to substances like nicotine.

Caffeine does not give you energy. It stimulates your nervous system and adrenals. That’s not energy, that’s stress. Imagine going to a bank for a loan. The loan officer agrees to your loan. But as you leave the bank you notice the fine print – the loan has to be repaid at 75% interest! The ‘energy’ that you think you get from caffeine is really just a loan from the adrenals and liver, and the interest you have to pay is very high.

Stress is a major factor in disorders such as anxiety, insomnia, depression, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, headache, hypoglycemia, asthma, herpes, hypertension and heart disease. And yet hospitals provide coffee and tea, which put your body into stress!!!

DHEA is our vitality hormone. Decreased levels of DHEA is a cause of aging. Caffeine consumption leads to DHEA deficiency.

Caffeine lowers the stress threshold in virtually everyone. That is, if you have had caffeine, it will be easier for you to suffer from emotional stress. (Therefore, when research is done that is designed to show how safe caffeine is, any test subject who is under significant stress is removed from the study).

Caffeine is implicated in ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome: GABA is produced in the intestinal tract, where it calms anxiety and stress. Caffeine disrupts the normal metabolism of GABA.

Caffeine disrupts sleep. Deep sleep is CRITICAL to good health. When there’s caffeine in your bloodstream, you are unlikely to experience deep sleep at all!

Caffeine AT ANY TIME of the day can cause sleep problems, especially if you are under stress.

Malnutrition is one of the most well-defined effects of habitual caffeine intake.

A single cup of coffee can reduce iron absorption from a meal by as much as 75%.

People do not develop a tolerance to the anxiety-producing effects of caffeine. Rather, people simply become accustomed to the feelings of stress, irritability and aggressiveness produced by the drug.

Caffeine contributes to depression in well-defined ways. This is particularly due to the withdrawal effect, which can cause headache, depression and fatigue, even in light users (p. 111). Cherniske reported that 90% of people who came to him who suffered from depression and gave up caffeine completely for 2 months reported that their depression went away!

If you are a coffee (or tea or cola) drinker, you may be thinking, “Well, I drink coffee and I’m not depressed.” It’s necessary to state that everyone is different, and also that depression can be subtle. Throughout the book, Cherniske suggests that you will never know the full effect the drug is having on you until you experience what life is like caffeine free (which takes two months to do). Over the years, Cherniske has heard similar responses from hundreds of clients: “Wow, I never realized that caffeine made me so (select one: anxious, depressed, irritable).”

Students the world over use caffeine not only to stay awake, but also they believe the drug will improve their performance on exams. Solid research, however, illustrates that as little as 100 milligrams of caffeine (one cup of coffee, two cups of cola) can cause a significant DECREASE in recall and reasoning.

When people are relaxed and given caffeine, caffeine does not raise blood pressure significantly. But how many people are relaxed? When people are stressed and given caffeine, blood pressure is raised significantly.

Women who consume more than 24 ounces of coffee (6 moderate cups) per day had almost twice the risk of heart attack compared to non-coffee drinkers. Moderate coffee drinkers with high cholesterol had more than seven times the risk of heart attack, while heavy coffee drinkers had eighteen times the risk of non-coffee drinkers!

Caffeine depletes your supplies of thiamin and other B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron and zinc.

Caffeine increases calcium loss and risk of osteoporosis.

In one large study, the risk for hip fracture for those women who consumed the most caffeine was 300% greater than it was for the group that consumed little or no caffeine.

Take the Challenge! Most people have no idea what life would be like without the background of caffeine and stress hormones coursing through their veins. Even if you’re only having a few cups a coffee, chances are your personality is affected in ways that may be too subtle for you to associate with caffeine. I want to encourage you to conduct a trial period without caffeine. You owe it to yourself.

Don’t’ go ‘cold turkey’. To avoid headaches etc. when giving up caffeine, Cherniske recommends taking up to six weeks to come off it. Drink the same NUMBER of cups, but each week reduce the strength or amount in each cup.

There is lots more information in this very easy-to-read and highly interesting book. 440 pages. Read this book and you won’t need to spend so much on supplements!

Copyright ©: Stephanie Relfe – 2001

Permission is granted to use this article in whole or part if you acknowledge the author and quote and link to www.relfe.com.

Data Mining and Financial Data Analysis

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Introduction:

Most marketers understand the value of collecting financial data, but also realize the challenges of leveraging this knowledge to create intelligent, proactive pathways back to the customer. Data mining – technologies and techniques for recognizing and tracking patterns within data – helps businesses sift through layers of seemingly unrelated data for meaningful relationships, where they can anticipate, rather than simply react to, customer needs as well as financial need. In this accessible introduction, we provides a business and technological overview of data mining and outlines how, along with sound business processes and complementary technologies, data mining can reinforce and redefine for financial analysis.

Objective:

1. The main objective of mining techniques is to discuss how customized data mining tools should be developed for financial data analysis.

2. Usage pattern, in terms of the purpose can be categories as per the need for financial analysis.

3. Develop a tool for financial analysis through data mining techniques.

Data mining:

Data mining is the procedure for extracting or mining knowledge for the large quantity of data or we can say data mining is “knowledge mining for data” or also we can say Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD). Means data mining is : data collection , database creation, data management, data analysis and understanding.

There are some steps in the process of knowledge discovery in database, such as

1. Data cleaning. (To remove nose and inconsistent data)

2. Data integration. (Where multiple data source may be combined.)

3. Data selection. (Where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database.)

4. Data transformation. (Where data are transformed or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for instance)

5. Data mining. (An essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns.)

6. Pattern evaluation. (To identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some interesting measures.)

7. Knowledge presentation.(Where visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user.)

Data Warehouse:

A data warehouse is a repository of information collected from multiple sources, stored under a unified schema and which usually resides at a single site.

Text:

Most of the banks and financial institutions offer a wide verity of banking services such as checking, savings, business and individual customer transactions, credit and investment services like mutual funds etc. Some also offer insurance services and stock investment services.

There are different types of analysis available, but in this case we want to give one analysis known as “Evolution Analysis”.

Data evolution analysis is used for the object whose behavior changes over time. Although this may include characterization, discrimination, association, classification, or clustering of time related data, means we can say this evolution analysis is done through the time series data analysis, sequence or periodicity pattern matching and similarity based data analysis.

Data collect from banking and financial sectors are often relatively complete, reliable and high quality, which gives the facility for analysis and data mining. Here we discuss few cases such as,

Eg, 1. Suppose we have stock market data of the last few years available. And we would like to invest in shares of best companies. A data mining study of stock exchange data may identify stock evolution regularities for overall stocks and for the stocks of particular companies. Such regularities may help predict future trends in stock market prices, contributing our decision making regarding stock investments.

Eg, 2. One may like to view the debt and revenue change by month, by region and by other factors along with minimum, maximum, total, average, and other statistical information. Data ware houses, give the facility for comparative analysis and outlier analysis all are play important roles in financial data analysis and mining.

Eg, 3. Loan payment prediction and customer credit analysis are critical to the business of the bank. There are many factors can strongly influence loan payment performance and customer credit rating. Data mining may help identify important factors and eliminate irrelevant one.

Factors related to the risk of loan payments like term of the loan, debt ratio, payment to income ratio, credit history and many more. The banks than decide whose profile shows relatively low risks according to the critical factor analysis.

We can perform the task faster and create a more sophisticated presentation with financial analysis software. These products condense complex data analyses into easy-to-understand graphic presentations. And there’s a bonus: Such software can vault our practice to a more advanced business consulting level and help we attract new clients.

To help us find a program that best fits our needs-and our budget-we examined some of the leading packages that represent, by vendors’ estimates, more than 90% of the market. Although all the packages are marketed as financial analysis software, they don’t all perform every function needed for full-spectrum analyses. It should allow us to provide a unique service to clients.

The Products:

ACCPAC CFO (Comprehensive Financial Optimizer) is designed for small and medium-size enterprises and can help make business-planning decisions by modeling the impact of various options. This is accomplished by demonstrating the what-if outcomes of small changes. A roll forward feature prepares budgets or forecast reports in minutes. The program also generates a financial scorecard of key financial information and indicators.

Customized Financial Analysis by BizBench provides financial benchmarking to determine how a company compares to others in its industry by using the Risk Management Association (RMA) database. It also highlights key ratios that need improvement and year-to-year trend analysis. A unique function, Back Calculation, calculates the profit targets or the appropriate asset base to support existing sales and profitability. Its DuPont Model Analysis demonstrates how each ratio affects return on equity.

Financial Analysis CS reviews and compares a client’s financial position with business peers or industry standards. It also can compare multiple locations of a single business to determine which are most profitable. Users who subscribe to the RMA option can integrate with Financial Analysis CS, which then lets them provide aggregated financial indicators of peers or industry standards, showing clients how their businesses compare.

iLumen regularly collects a client’s financial information to provide ongoing analysis. It also provides benchmarking information, comparing the client’s financial performance with industry peers. The system is Web-based and can monitor a client’s performance on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. The network can upload a trial balance file directly from any accounting software program and provide charts, graphs and ratios that demonstrate a company’s performance for the period. Analysis tools are viewed through customized dashboards.

PlanGuru by New Horizon Technologies can generate client-ready integrated balance sheets, income statements and cash-flow statements. The program includes tools for analyzing data, making projections, forecasting and budgeting. It also supports multiple resulting scenarios. The system can calculate up to 21 financial ratios as well as the breakeven point. PlanGuru uses a spreadsheet-style interface and wizards that guide users through data entry. It can import from Excel, QuickBooks, Peachtree and plain text files. It comes in professional and consultant editions. An add-on, called the Business Analyzer, calculates benchmarks.

ProfitCents by Sageworks is Web-based, so it requires no software or updates. It integrates with QuickBooks, CCH, Caseware, Creative Solutions and Best Software applications. It also provides a wide variety of businesses analyses for nonprofits and sole proprietorships. The company offers free consulting, training and customer support. It’s also available in Spanish.

ProfitSystem fx Profit Driver by CCH Tax and Accounting provides a wide range of financial diagnostics and analytics. It provides data in spreadsheet form and can calculate benchmarking against industry standards. The program can track up to 40 periods.