Suprise Topic!

Since ancient times, people have had ways to deal with data and numbers.  Early people tied knots in rope and carved marks on clay tablets to keep track of livestock and trade.  Some people considered the 5000 year old ABACUS a frame with beads strung on wires to be the first true computing aid. As trade and tax system grew in complexity, people saw that faster, more reliable and exact tools were needed for doing math and keeping records.  In the mid 1600’s, Blaise Pascal and his father, who was a tax officer himself, were working on taxes for the French government in Paris.  The two spent hours figuring and refiguring taxes that eacheach citizen owed.  Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process.  The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage.  His machine encountered many of problems.  For one, it was always breaking down.  Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly.  And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs.  Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remembering for his role in computer technology.  In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal. The next big step for computers arrived in the 1830's when Charles Babbage decided to build a machine to help him complete and print mathematical tables.  Babbage was a mathematician who taught at Cambridge University in England.  He began planning his calculating machine calling it the Analytical Engine.  The idea for this machine was amazingly like the computer we know today.  It was to read a program from punched cards, figure and store the answers to different problems, and print the answer on paper.  Babbage died before he could complete the machine.  However because of his remarkable ideas and work, Babbage is known as the Father of Computers. The next huge step for computers came when Herman Hollerith entered a contest given by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The contest was to see who could build a machine that would count and record information faster.  Hollerith, a young man working for the Bureau built a machine called the Tabulating Machine that read and sorted data from punched cards.  The holes punched in the cards matched each person's answers to questions.  For example, married, single, and divorces were answers on the cards.  The Tabulator read the punched cards as they passed over tiny brushes.  Each time a brush found a hole, it completed an electrical circuit.  This caused special counting dials to increase the data for that answer. Thanks to Hollerith's machine, instead of taking seven and a half years to count the census information it only took three years, even with 13 million more people since the last census.  Happy with his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896.  The company later was sold in 1911.  And in 1912 his company became the International Business Machines Corporation, better known today as IBM. What is considered to be the first computer was made in 1944 by Harvard's Professor Howard Aiken.  The Mark I computer was very much like the design of Charles Babbage's having mainly mechanical parts, but with some electronic parts.  His machine was designed to be programmed to do many computer jobs.  This all-purpose machine is what we now know as the PC or personal computer.  The Mark I was the first computer financed by IBM and was about 50 feet long and 8 feet tall.  It used mechanical switches to open and close its electric circuits.  It contained over 500 miles of wire and 750,000 parts. The first all electronic computer was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).  ENIAC was a general purpose digital computer built in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.  The ENIAC contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes (used instead of the mechanical switches of the Mark I) and was 1000 times faster than the Mark I.  In twenty seconds, ENIAC could do a math problem that would have taken 40 hours for one person to finish.  The ENIAC was built the time of World War II had as its first job to calculate the feasibility of a design for the hydrogen bomb.  The ENIAC was 100 feet long and 10 feet tall. A more modern type computer began with John von Neumann's development of software written in binary code.  It was von Neumann who began the practice of storing data and instructions in binary code and initiated the use of memory to store data, as well as programs.  A computer called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer) was built using binary code in 1950.  Before the EDVAC, computers like the ENIAC could do only one task then they had to be rewired to perform a different task or program.  The EDVAC's concept of storing different programs on punched cards instead of rewiring computers led to the computers that we know today.

Inauguration Day

The inauguration of the president of the United States takes place during the commencement of a new term of a president of the United States, which is every four years on January 20. Prior to the Twentieth Amendment, the date was March 4, the day of the year on which the Constitution of the United States first took effect in 1789; the last inauguration to take place on the older date was Franklin D. Roosevelt's first one on March 4, 1933. The day a presidential inauguration occurs is known as "Inauguration Day".The only inauguration element mandated by the United States Constitution is that the president make an oath or affirmation before that person can "enter on the Execution" of the office of the presidency. However, over the years, various traditions have arisen that have expanded the inauguration from a simple oath-taking ceremony to a day-long event, including parades, speeches, and balls.

From the presidency of Andrew Jackson through that of Jimmy Carter, the primary Inauguration Day ceremony took place on the Capitol's East Portico. Since the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the ceremony has been held at the Capitol's West Front. The inaugurations of William Howard Taft in 1909 and Reagan in 1985 were moved indoors at the Capitol due to cold weather. The War of 1812 and World War II caused two inaugurations to be held at other locations in Washington, D.C. Since Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth swore in President John Adams, no chief justice has missed an Inauguration Day. When Inauguration Day has fallen on a Sunday, the chief justice has administered the oath to the president on either Inauguration Day itself or on the Sunday privately and then again following Monday publicly.

The next scheduled public presidential inauguration ceremony, the swearing in of Barack Obama to begin his second four-year term in office, will take place on Monday, January 21, 2013. The President took a private oath of office on Sunday, January 20. The inauguration for the first U.S. president, George Washington, was held on April 30, 1789, at Federal Hall in New York Citywhere he was sworn in by Robert Livingston, the Chancellor of the State of New York. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson became the first to be sworn in as president in Washington, D.C., which officially became the federal capital only on June 11, 1800. Inauguration day was originally on March 4, four months after election day, but this was changed to noon on January 20 by the Twentieth Amendment in 1933.

The inaugural celebrations usually last ten days, from five days before the inauguration to five days after. However, in 1973, the celebrations marking Richard Nixon's second inauguration were marred by the passing of former President Lyndon B. Johnson two days after the inauguration. The celebrations came to an end as Washington began preparations for the state funeral for Johnson. Because of the construction work on the center steps of the East Front, Johnson's casket was taken up the Senate wing steps of the Capitol when taken into the rotunda to lie in state. When it was brought out, it came out through the House wing steps of the Capitol.

Inauguration Day is a Federal observed by only the federal employees who work in the District of Columbia; Montgomery holiday and Prince George's Counties in Maryland; Arlington and Fairfax Counties in Virginia, and the cities of Alexandria and Fairfax in Virginia, and who are regularly scheduled to perform non-overtime work on Inauguration Day. There is no in-lieu-of holiday for employees and students who are not regularly scheduled to work or attend school on Inauguration Day. The primary reason for the holiday is to relieve traffic congestion that occurs during this major event.

Quest Diagnostics

Quest Diagnostics Incorporated is a corporation based in the United States that provides clinical laboratory services, it runs operations in United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico and a laboratory in India and also has collaborative agreements internationally with various hospitals and clinics. It is a member of the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500. Their corporate headquarters are located in Madison, New Jersey. The company has approximately 43,000 employees. The company has over $7.5 billion dollars in revenue and offers access to diagnostic testing services for cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease and neurological disorders.

The company has been listed on Fortune Magazine’s "World’s Most Admired Companies" since 2008. In addition, the company has been named listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index and North America Index and is consistently recognized as among the nation’s healthiest employers. The company’s products have been recognized by the Edison Institute for Leadership in Diagnostic Innovation. The company’s "Quest Diagnostics Health Trends" reports identify and track trends in disease and wellness, they are made available as a public service to inform patients, health professionals and policy-makers about the current status of the nation's health The Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index, published twice each year, is a comprehensive source of information on workplace drug use

Quest Diagnostics set a record in April 2009 when it paid $302 million to the government to settle a Medicare fraud case alleging the company sold faulty medical testing kits. It was the largest qui tam (whistleblower) settlement paid by a medical lab for manufacturing and distributing a faulty product. In May 2011, Quest paid $241 million to the state of California to settle a False Claims Act case that alleged the company had overcharged MediCal, the state’s medical aid program for low-income individuals, and provided illegal kickbacks as incentives for healthcare providers to use Quest labs.

One thing this company also does is that they send free test kits too all sorts of different companies. I am not sure but I think they may even send them overseas. My dad actually worked for a company that worked with quest diagnostics or well all I know is that my dad worked for a company that ordered from quest diagnostics.

There clinics also collect specimen’s. They get them back be either fed exing them back or a courier goes and picks them up then brings them back. They may have some sort of other transportation but if they do I do not know what they are.

The company does many sorts of tests. They do urine tests (which is basically pee tests), blood tests, hair tests, saliva tests (which are basically spit test, they test your spit to see if you have a disease or the flu), tissue testing, DNA tests, illness tests, drug tests, and stool tests (stool is another word for poop so basically you poop in a cup.

My mom is even temping at a place that associate’s with quest diagnostics. She places orders for test kits into a computer and sends them out. I think she likes this company so far.

Wolf Moon

The Wolf Moon is a name for the full moon that occurs in January. This name is popularly attributed to the Native Americans. According to popular culture this name was chosen because they heard hungry wolf packs howling outside the villages. This full moon is also known as the Old Moon or the Moon after Yule. There is a great deal of variation in the moon names around the world, but it is likely that the link between January and the wolf stems from the Scottish Gaelic term Faoilleach and it was later mistakenly attributed to local tribes. While the Farmer's Almanac attributes this to the Algonquin, the Algonquin name for that moon is squochee kesos or "sun has not strength to thaw". The Sioux do mention wolves in their name for January, which means "when wolves run together". However, they also refer to that moons as the "moon of the strong cold" or "frost in the teepee". Other tribes had different names for the moons. Since the lunar month is roughly 29.53 days long on the average, the full moon dates shift from year to year.

History of Bounty Hunters

In the United States legal system, the 1873 U.S. Supreme Court case Taylor v. Taintor, 16 Wall, is cited as having established that the person into whose custody an accused is remanded as part of the accuser's bail has sweeping rights to that person (although this may have been accurate at the time the decision was reached, the portion cited was obiter dictum and has no binding precedential value).  Most bounty hunters are employed by bail bondsmen: the bounty hunter is paid about 10% of the bail the fugitive initially paid.  If the fugitive eludes bail, the bondsman, not the bounty hunter, is responsible for the remainder of the fugitive's bail.  This is a way of ensuring his clients arrive at trial. In the United States, bounty hunters claim to catch 31,500 bail jumpers per year, about 90% of people who jump bail.

Bounty hunters are sometimes called "skiptracers", but this usage can be misleading.  While bounty hunters are often skiptracers as well, skiptracing generally refers to the process of searching for an individual through less direct methods than active pursuit and apprehension, such as spies or debt collectors.  It is a civil matter and does not always imply criminal conduct on the part of the individual being traced.

In the United States of America, bounty hunters have varying levels of authority in their duties with regard to their targets depending on which states they operate in. As opined in Taylor v. Taintor, and barring restrictions applicable state by state, a bounty hunter can enter the fugitive's private property without a warrant in order to execute a re-arrest.  They cannot, however, enter the property of anyone other than the fugitive without a warrant or the owner's permission.

In some states, bounty hunters do not undergo any formal training, and are generally unlicensed, only requiring sanction from a bail bondsman to operate.  In other states, however, they are held to varying standards of training and license.  State legal requirements are often imposed on out of state bounty hunters, meaning a suspect could temporarily escape rearrest by entering a state in which the bail agent has limited or no jurisdiction.

The State of Connecticut has a detailed licensing process which requires any person who wants to engage in the business as a bail enforcement agent (bounty hunter) must first obtain a professional license from the Commissioner of Public Safety  specifically detailing that "No person shall, as surety on a bond in a criminal proceeding or as an agent of such surety.   Engage in the business of taking or attempting to take into custody the principal on the bond who has failed to appear in court and for whom a re-arrest warrant or capias has been issued unless such person is licensed as a bail enforcement agent".  Connecticut has strict standards which require Bail Enforcement Agents to pass an extensive background check and, while engaging in fugitive recovery operations, be uniformed, notify the local police barrack, wear a badge, and only carry licensed and approved firearms, including handguns and long guns which are permitted.  Recently Connecticut State Police converted their Bail Enforcement Agent licensing unit to reflect the important role Bail Enforcement Agents play in the Connecticut criminal justice syste placing them in the newly defined Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection.

Several schools in Connecticut have obtained certification by the Connecticut State Police to pre license Bail Enforcement Agents in a minimum of 20 hours of Criminal Justice training and a minimum of eight hours of firearms training.  Some of the more advanced schools offer specialized training in the area of tactical firearms to prepare BEA's for conducting dangerous recovery operations.