Caribbean medical schools have long been decried as diploma mills for the rich and undeserving; they are strictly for-profit institutions serving American kids rejected by U.S. medical schools, yet they rely on hospitals in the U.S. to provide the necessary clinical experience in the third and fourth years of a medical education. Recently, however, an effort has begun in New York City to limit their access to local hospitals since there are only a certain number of spots available for such field work, and charges of elitism are flying. Yet how did foreign and domestic medical schools come to be competing for the same spots in domestic hospitals?

As the foreign schools were profit-making businesses above all, they charge a lot of money to provide something of a second chance for students rejected by American medical schools. At an elite institution like Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, donors from investment banker Sanford I. Weill to real estate developer Isaac Toussie provide a lot of money, reducing costs to around forty-five thousand dollars each year. Compare that to the Caribbean ones, where it can cost up to sixty thousand dollars!

And with so much money available, Caribbean medical schools can easily pay New York City hospitals to take on their students for the practical clinical experience required of an accredited medical education – ahead of Weill Cornell’s, or NYU’s, or that from any other New York medical school.

Thus the turf war.

Traditionally, what hospitals do is mentor medical students in exchange for using the school’s prestige. And though Caribbean institutions are not prestigious, they have tons of money, which is a most important consideration, naturally.

And what administrator is going to do without such money, especially in this economy?

It’s funny that modest swimsuits are supposed to hide the female figure, because they can attract just as much attention, in their own way! That’s because minimalism is really powerful, which is why lingerie can be so seductive in a different way than what bare naked flesh offers – that is to say, stimulating the imagination can be much more erotic than leaving nothing to the imagination. Besides, there’s also the unfortunate fact that some people really do look better covered up! Just as a man, I have nothing against either choice a lady makes, but I just have to say how funny it is that while they might think they’re avoiding stares, they could in fact be stoking the imagination!

They’re a dying breed, a place like On Off Digital World, located in the heart of midtown Manhattan. They were once prevalent throughout the metropolis, but nowadays, given all the changes in retail, traditional storefront businesses are a dying breed. They still exist, to be sure, since they’re so close to popular tourist destinations with people who would need some photographic gadget or other on the spot. They no longer serve fellow residents so much as the tourists who chance by their highly visible locations.

When it comes to charity, many people think of it as being something other people do – namely, the rich. It makes sense, of course, since hardly anyone else can be expected to have the funds necessary to endow schools and hospitals.
But for Judaism, no matter the branch or denomination, the concept of tzedakah, literally “justice,” is commanded of all, including the poor. In Judaism, contributing to charity is a religious duty and not something done merely out of personal whim. In fact, it is taught to regard the very money for available tzedakah as not one’s own, but on loan, as it were, from on on high. This implies the further injunction to diligently investigate all would-be recipients of aid so that contributions will truly be of benefit and not go to waste.

At first glance, this may sound like yet another curious aspect of the religion. But – as with many aspects of Judaism, even for an outsider – there exist profound philosophical reasons for them. That’s because by ordering even the poor to make acts of pious philanthropy, the religious duty to give makes of them actors and agents, not just passive charity cases, thus restoring their humanity, their own moral agency.

For what can be more empowering than to give? For to give means to share of oneself, and it even betters our natures – our love, our sacrifice, our character. It is not that poverty ennobles, but to bear poverty in righteousness: that is noble. And so, in Judaism it isn’t necessary to be a successful developer like Isaac Toussie so as to make donations. For Jews, such religiously commanded contributions are not just an obligation but a right.

The real tragedy of being poor lies in not being able to help not just oneself but others as well. It is the genius of Jewish culture that even with its traditional concerns for social justice and the poor that it should recognize that even the poor can contribute!

Why modest swimsuits are now ever more popular is probably because of rising religious fundamentalism wordlwide — or, rather, within the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps it’s a psychology necessary to and further accentuated by monotheism, that there is only one right way, one right belief, and that everything else is evil, of the Devil. That’s not to say that monotheism necessarily results in holocausts, but it is to say that most of the worst examples have been inspired by monotheistic passions.

As to the matter of small business loans bad credit, it’s all Greek to me. That’s why I avoid undesirable credit to begin with. But in the tough business environment these days, where FICO’s raised the benchmark for what’s a good score and what’s not, it can be downright impossible for people to avoid being labeled a credit risk. I mean, what company doesn’t operate on a deficit once in a while; what company doesn’t talk to creditors in the hopes of renegotiating previously agreed-upon terms? Fine, so not all these things affect your score, but I hope you see what I mean: stuff happens, after all; plenty of things can happen. How can someone be responsible for things out of his or her control? All right, all right – then again, luck can also be good, and one has to, as the ol’ adage suggests, take the good with the bad.

Affiliate marketing is a superb way for the tech-savvy hobbyist to generate some money on the side.
For a select few who have managed to put their finger on the Zeitgeist, however, it means full financial independence, with income in the tens of thousands per month!

Probably the most celebrated cases of affiliate marketing made good have been that of Dr. Arnold Kim, M.D.
While still a medical student, he started off a website committed to rumors about Apple products.
This was back right at the turn of the century, before the word “blog” had entered into the well-known lexicon.
Even while diagnosing patients, Dr. Kim kept up the site, though subsequently it took on a life of its own, with forty million page views monthly, as certified by independent research firms.

Dr. Kim was already well-off as a result of his medical practice, but affiliate marketing also generated a six-figure income – and he was only devoting relatively little time to his site!
Believing that things could grow so much more were he to devote his whole day, Dr. Kim gave up his stethoscope and plunged whole-heartedly into the world of professional blogging.

Similar types of internet riches abound, such as that of the teenager who became a millionaire by creating free MySpace designs for individuals to download, or the college student behind “The Million-Dollar Homepage” which made money by just selling space to advertisers.
What they have in common is that their success is totally traffic-driven: it’s all about the eyeballs, the number of visitors per month, week, day, even hour – both repeat and first-time (known in the industry as “unique”).
Get the numbers, and you will make money.

But how do you receive the numbers?
Content.
“Content is king.”
If you have something lots of people are interested, such that they will keep visiting your site, you will make money – confirmed.
The only real question is what content or material to serve up!

The affiliate marketing success stories just keep pouring in: the latest case history concerns one Ashley Qualls, a seventeen year-old who’s become a millionaire by simply giving away totally free MySpace layouts.
Yes.
It’s really no joke.
A teenage girl in high school makes seventy thousand dollars a month by giving stuff away for free.

Chalk another one up to the magic of affiliate marketing and its exponential power.
Ashley Qualls developed a website that’s simply a repository of her designs for MySpace profile pages which anyone can download totally free.
Her site attracts seven million visitors each month and sixty million page views.
That’s gold to advertisers.
And it’s become gold for Ashley Qualls.

Affiliate marketing works.
The true challenge lies in coming up with something that lots and lots of people goes crazy for.
Another great internet riches success tale concerns an Arnold Kim, who as a professional blogger now makes income in the same six-figure range he used to as a medical doctor, only he gets to stay home with his four year-old daughter.
He happened upon his financial destiny whilst still in school, having started up a site dedicated to rumors about Apple products.
As one of the first, he quickly developed quite the captive audience and, with all those eyeballs, advertisers came calling in equally quick succession.

That’s all it takes to make money online – traffic.
Eyeballs.
Visitors, repeat and unique (first-time).
It’s basically monetized like any other medium, whether print or broadcast.
Important differences do exist, but where fundamentals are concerned you need to have numbers; you need people.

Now how to get all those people?
Again, providing something of great interest to a vast amount of people.
Essentially, the same first principle of any enterprise.
Identify a need and fulfill it!

What a great day, what great weather! But for all that, the news was unavoidable: I happened to be strolling by On Off Digital World, located more or less in the heart of Manhattan, and there it was, the news about Osama bin Laden being dead, broadcast by the televisions in the store’s window display. No way to get away from it all. It’s OBL all day, every day this week. But it’s quite a contrast, all this dramatic historic stuff in the midst of such a serene day. I can’t imagine a nicer day, really, a truly comfortable spring day, yet the news pervades my waking hours like nothing else.

Located within one of the richest zip codes in the entire United States, the school of medicine at Cornell University both teaches and conducts research. It has produced many a notable physician, boasting of alumni such as Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame and Henry Heimlich of Heimlich Maneuver fame. Other famous graduates include former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop and Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley.

It was the first medical school in the country to admit women alongside men, and more recently it has been the first American one to operate outside the United States, with an Education City, Qatar campus offering an integrated six-year curriculum focused primarily on patient care. With such a storied tradition, it is probably not surprising that the institution has been the beneficiary of much financial backing – indeed, the school was founded through an endowment funded by Colonel Oliver H. Payne, a New York scion of the middle nineteenth century – with a roster of supporters full of prominent locals such as real estate pro Isaac Toussie.

Still, the one biggest benefactor of all has got to be the one whose name now graces the school itself, Sanford I. Weill. Billionaire banker and philanthropist, Mr. Weill and his wife donated two hundred and fifty million dollars of their own money, and he has been instrumental in further securing another hundred and fifty million in funding. Today the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, or Weill Cornell Medical College (or even more colloquially, especially within the field, “Weill Cornell”), ranks among the most selective of medical schools in the whole country, enrolling only about a hundred students per class out of some six thousand applicants in any given year. Note that the average GPA of the lucky few is 3.8, with an average MCAT score of 35Q!

No need to be an industry veteran like Isaac Toussie to know that different jurisdictions can handle real estate matters differently. It’s what makes real estate law so fascinating – and often so challenging! Take Alabama for an example. In that state, “buyer beware” is held in a very, very high regard by the courts, such that even in cases of outright fraud buyers may have no legal recourse anyway – when that property has been bought on a strictly “as-is” basis. That’s right: Alabama case law takes the old dictum of caveat emptor very, very seriously, to the point of, in effect, allowing for otherwise illegal activity!

A recent case determined that an as-is clause in the sales contract not superseded by another provision will be interpreted literally, or “as-is.” That’s right, it’s really been upheld that misrepresentations are entirely legal under that basis.. Most anywhere else that’s just fraud and will probably lead to some jail time, yet in the Heart of Dixie the as-is clause is king and must be specifically superseded by some other provision agreed to by seller and buyer – or the as-is clause will be interpreted literally!

This was a rather clear-cut situation as far as that particular court saw it, but it should be noted that not everything is always as draconian as that. Such strict interpretations of an as-is clause only apply to used property in the state, and not to new developments. Such as-is clauses are also superseded in cases where the misrepresentation is not obvious and potentially harmful to health and safety.

Alas for the plaintiff in Teer v. Johnston, however, while the misrepresentation was not something obvious it was not deemed harmful to health or safety, constituting an inconvenient nuisance instead. What the buyer needed to have done was to provide either in the sales contract or the deed that pre-sale disclosures should survive the execution of the deed!

With a storied heritage going all the way back to the early 19th Century, The Convent of Jesus and Mary Schools can be found in all the major areas of the world today, from Africa and Asia to Europe and the Americas. But while receiving a certain amount of financial backing from official Church coffers, it is the support of the local communities that host them which has been crucial to their continuing success, especially through the generous donations of prominent businessmen and women, not all of whom are Catholic or even Christian, as in the example of Isaac Toussie whose donations go towards a branch in India.

Another fact which one may not necessarily imagine of a Catholic school is that while they are parochial, in many cases one does not even have to believe in God to attend. Certainly, these schools have a decidedly Catholic mission, but non-Catholics may opt out of any religious instruction offered, which matters are typically taught just once a week or so, at the end of the school day. After all, much in Catholic education follows the inquiring spirit of the Jesuit Order, one that has traditionally welcomed curiosity and frankness, attributes required of science. In fact, it is just this ethos that has won such a sterling record for the shcools in many places, even in New York City, the so-called Sodom-on-the-Hudson, where even secular parents will send their children to attend.

These schools are often the least expensive of private school options available, with annual tuition at some five thousand dollars – quite a bargain in contrast to what’s charged by parochial schools operated by other religions! Yet not every single Catholic school is so modern, of course; it is usually those that happen to be situated in generally non-Christian countries or otherwise highly secular locations which offer such openness.

Tax continuing education is essential for accountants as tax laws change all the time and with every Republican victory at the polls comes a new pair of corporate giveaways.
With a tax code that spans some sixty thousand pages, somebody’s got to keep track of it all!
And those somebodies have a lot on their plate.
Hence all the continuous keeping up with industry developments – particularly, changes in the tax code.

So chalk it up to the smart bean-counters at General Electric and their tax continuing education courses for helping the company post its newest achievement in the history of corproate notoriety: zero tax liability for the filing season ending in 2011.
That’s right: this year, one of the world’s richest multi-billion-dollar companies will pay
no taxes.
None whatsoever!
And that’s not all.
They may actually be owed some money instead!
That’s right – the government may actually have to pay G.E. some money.

How’s that for tax continuing education!

It’s incredible but all perfectly true.
Through the creative use of loss write-offs and the like, the accounting department at G.E. has been able to save its employer a lot of money, with the probability of getting money “back” from Uncle Sam on top of that.
This is in addition to the use of unpaid labor throughout the business in the form of college interns, such as at its NBC subsidiary.

Of course, it isn’t just G.E. and NBC that’s benefiting from such unethical and even unlawful practices.
Viacom and subsidiary Paramount Pictures also makes use of such loopholes.
Most corporations of a particular size do.
’80s boogeyman Leona “Queen of Mean” Helmsley was only telling the truth when she scoffed that “only little people pay taxes.”
Under the right conditions – which are not as rare as one might imagine at first – it is entirely doable to keep all the money you make while making use of public services.

So you want to be a lawyer. You realize it will mean a lot of studying, a lot of time invested with books – but you like reading, and figuring things out, and you enjoy words, language, and all the semantic nuances included.

You even know that the LSAT exam for admission to law school is hard, and something to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for, for special prep courses, coaching classes and the like. You also know that law school itself will be difficult as nails, at least through the all-too-crucial First Year.

Great. Maybe you even know that you will be forever hitting the books as a practicing lawyer, forever taking online CPE courses and their tests, one after the other, in order to maintain your standing with the professional association governing your licensure.

Super.

But did you know it will be rather tough getting a high-enough-paying job as lawyer in order to pay off your student loans? In fact, those online CPE courses will definitely cost some money, too.

Oh, you probably think you’ve got that covered. You’ll graduate at the top of your class, or you’ll be accepted into an Ivy League law school and graduate none too low in the positions so as to get hired by a top corporate law firm and effortlessly recoup your investment in two to three years’ time.

And certainly, if such a thing does happen, your odds would be much better than those for virtually the rest of your peers, even in this economy. But “better than” does not imply “inherently good.” ’Cause you know what – globalization is coming to the legal profession as well.

Yes, that’s right – outsourcing. Without a doubt, some of the online CPE courses available on the worldwide web were produced overseas! And though the legal profession has tried to resist it (after all, it took a whole decade for everyone to switch from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word!), it’s finally started to affect the industry.

Sam Antar was the former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s, his cousin’s electronics retail kingdom.
Sam is a much sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit nowadays, and his seminars can even earn CPE and CLE credits for the attendees.

That’s because he is a convicted fraudster.

Ethics continuing education courses are generally self-paced correspondence courses one takes at one’s own leisure as a part of maintaining one’s professional good standing.
Reading through Sam’s site on the worldwide web, however, is as educational as any structured academic account can be.

As the former CFO of Crazy Eddie’s, Sam presided over one of the most famous scandals in the chronicles of corporate crime.
He lays all of it out, bare, raw, and unembellished by any of the typical self-serving rationaliziations often given to insiders’ accounts – all unadulterated on his website.

This is an ethics CPE study course like no tomorrow – if it were accredited as such.
As it is, it’s just a website – but oh, what a website!

White-collar offense never sounded so exciting.
That’s because the Crazy Eddie’s scandal was at heart a soap opera displaying all the common human foibles known to a Greek chorus – lust, greed, betrayal, and family.
Yes, family.

The familial element in this drama makes this demonstration of corporate offense so – if the pun will be pardoned – familiar to lay readers, grabbing and holding their attention where other accounts would lose them under a hill of technical particulars.
However, it isn’t that Sam offers no minutiae of his own; his very purpose these days is to combat criminal activity, after all; it’s that these details, which would be so boring otherwise minus the benefit of a human drama in which to place them in the appropriate perspective, come to vibrant life against the context of a family power battle that resonantes forcefully with everyone who’s actually underwent any semblance of sibling rivalry.

How’s that for an ethics CPE course!

When you’re building a company, whether its on the web or offline, one of your major goals should always be to get new clients and buyers. It is true that developing beneficial relationships is also a goal; it’s also true that relationships can only help you so much. The aim is to find brand-new people who you can turn into regular buyers. Of course, fully understanding you need to be bringing in new people is one thing. It is something totally different to truly be able to put that knowledge to use on a reliable basis. So exactly what are you supposed to do to obtain brand-new clients?

One of the best ways to get someone new is to help to make yourself as seen as possible. This doesn’t signify you must plaster the net with your ads. It just means that you need to have adequate knowledge of your market that you will recognize where they go when they need something and then you should make sure that your name is in those places. This can be as simple as putting an ad on a blog. You could have a booth at a trade show for your target market. The more visible you make yourself to the people you want to help, the more likely those buyers are going to be to take chances on you.

Offer new clients something for free. This can be a little hard to do. Some people think that you shouldn’t ever give away your services or products at no cost. They say that when you do this it just means that the buyer is going to assume that they will always be able to get something from you for free. If you don’t make sure that the person understands that your free offering is only for new clients and only available once, this could certainly be a problem. If you put measures in place to make sure that your promotional offer is plainly and clearly stated you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Find out if there are any complimentary businesses that you can pair with. For example, if you are an article writer, are there any SEO companies out there who could benefit from having a writer they can rely on? This helps you bring in more business as well as form mutually beneficial working relationships. Building reciprocal relationships is incredibly important. This helps you find new writing clients and the SEO company is able to offer writing services to the clients who need help with that. This helps everybody at the table win.

You have all sorts of things that you can do to get more clients that are both online and offline. The most important thing to do, however, is research. Your chosen audience should be something that you know all the way through. The more you understand about potential clients and what they want and need, the better able you will be to give them exactly that. The achievement you will have with your enterprise depends on your being able to work smart, not work everywhere.

This particular article is brought to you by W9Form.info, your informative source for the W9 Form and other W-9 related tax documents.

Community support has always been important to institutions such as hospitals and medical schools. Even smaller facilities such as those dedicated purely to research requires a large helping of such backing, especially in the form of philanthropic dollars. Oftentimes, these generous donors can be found contributing to more than one institution, folks such as Isaac Toussie and family when it comes to the top two leading lights of New York in healthcare education and practice, Weill Cornell Medical College and the North Shore-LIJ network of hospitals and research centers.

Weill Cornell is named after its two single best benefactors, Ezra Cornell, of Western Union fame, and Sanford I. Weill, former CEO and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. It is one of the most selective medical schools in the United States, it admits only about a hundred hopefuls out of the nearly six thousand that apply each year. Also, it was the first to admit women right alongside the men and first to operate overseas, right outside of the capital of Qatar, Doha. Many a notable graduate has boosted the school’s reputation over the years, doctors like C. Everett Koop, a Surgeon General of the United States; Robert C. Atkins of the eponymous diet; Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley; and Henry Heimlich of Heimlich Maneuver fame. The North Shore-LIJ Health System is the second largest healthcare network in the country as measured by the number of beds and the largest in New York State based on patient revenue. It serves over seven million people a year through more than forty-two thousand employees – the single largest employer on Long Island and ninth largest largest in the City of New York.

These two institutions owe much of their success to vigorous community support, whether in the form of charitable contributions from prominent businessmen and women or non-monetary offerings such as time and expertise by community volunteers such as those from civic or religious organizations. Indeed, despite a budget in the multiple between them, vigorous local support will never be unnecessary for the health of Weill Cornell and North Shore-LIJ!

A yeshiva is a religious institution devoted to the learning of Biblical and Talmudic texts. These schools serve the Jewish community and are quite often rigorously supported by the community above and beyond the tuition and other such fees. Traditionally, prominent businessmen will undertake to support such establishments, in particular those attended by their families or which they themselves had attended when little. For instance, Yeshiva Ateret Torah in New York’s Borough of Brooklyn is a special favorite of local success story Robert Toussie, who also helps the adjacent Yeshiva Ateres Yisroel, two day-schools that ready children for university in the secular world along with a parochial upbringing.

In truth, Yeshiva Ateret Torah has interested the charitable largesse of many a local businessman due to its stellar track record, with eighty-seven percent of its students proceeding to higher education, a rate above the average statewide numbers of only fifty percent of all high school students doing the same. Fiscal assistance enables the school to participate in extracurricular programs such as forming partnerships with like-minded organizations around the world, organizations like Oorah that endeavors to help Jewish families register for yeshivas by defraying some or even all of the expenses involved.

Like many of these kinds of schools, Yeshiva Ateret Torah serves up instruction from pre-kindergarten through high school. While different grades are often to be found on the same campus, if not within the same building as well, the more religious the yeshiva the more likely it is that boys and girls will be separated for most or even all of the day. And because the religious schools work for a fairly narrow demographic, especially when one thinks about sectarian divides (that is, Reform versus Conservative versus Orthodox versus Ultra-Orthodox – with even further variations feasible), tuition and fees are likely to be high, which is why the generosity of community businessmen and women are so necessary.