Home Nest Thermostat: Game Changer or Gimmick?

You have seen the ads for the Nest Home Thermostat and marveled that a former Apple executive left to reinvent the thermostat industry that had been stagnant for decades. Perhaps you did some cursory research on the Nest to see if it was worth it for your home. To find out if the Nest if worth it, you need to look at the bigger picture.

Price point
The first thing that jumps out about the nest is the price. The price of the nest is around $250 which puts it at about the top of the range of programmable thermostats on the market. If you only intend to use it the same way that you would use your current $50 programmable thermostats to achieve your current comfort level, you need to decide if the Nest is worth the extra $200 for a more esthetically pleasing thermostat. But if you plan to put the Nest to work utilizing all the bells and while to achieve greater energy saving then the cost may be recouped in energy saving through the lifetime of the unit.

Talking and Learning 
One of the advantages of the Nest is that if you have two of them, they can talk to one another. This is an excellent feature in a dual zone home so that the upstairs and the downstairs units are not working against one another because someone decided to leave one on "hold". While other thermostats are programmable they work on an individual level so you have to know when you will be in each zone and manually program the units accordingly.

Most programmable thermostats are only programmable; the Nest selling point is that it learns your habits. It can tell when you are not home and after working with it for a couple of weeks it automatically learns your patterns and follows them. This system can help reduce energy use in your home, but this is not necessarily an advantage for a family with an erratic schedule. Your pattern may be so distinct that it is not able to be learned for more efficiency. This is probably not a problem for most people, but it may be for you.

Wi-Fi capable
The ability to control your thermostat with your phone is cool and being able to check the heat from miles away can be fun but is it worth it. Before the invention of the Nest how many times did you sit at work and ponder the temperature of your home? Probably not much, so why would you worry about it more now that you can change the temperature from your phone? There is a time when you forget to change turn the temperature down, but do they justify putting in a new device for that ability? Only you can decide that. Even though the Nest is Wi-Fi capable it is still a stand able device that cannot be integrated into a whole home automation scheme which may need to be considered when looking at your big picture plans.

The bottom line is that whether replacing your existing thermostat is worth it is an individual decision. It may be worth it to one person and not to another, depending on the cost and overall home heating and cooling strategy. Only you can decide if the Nest fits into your budget and overall home automation plans.

Osteoarthritis Definition, Symptoms and Treatment

Osteoarthritis Definition (OA)?

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease caused by wear and tear of the cartilage. This result is thinning of cartilage and grinding of exposed bones. This may cause bony spurs at the joint. Osteoarthritis affects mainly older people and people who are overweight.

Signs and Symptoms of Osteoarthritis

Common symptoms are:

• Pain
• Cracking joints
• Swelling
• Loss of flexibility
• Bone spurs

It is important to consult your doctor if you have any of these symptoms. Early diagnosis helps prevent further damage.

What are the treatment options available for Osteoarthritis?
Depending on the severity of the disease, you can consult your doctor on some of these treatment option listed below.

Treatments generally fall into 3 main categories:

Lifestyle modifying activities
Exercise
Maintaining healthy body weight.

Non-surgical treatment
Analgesics (pain killers)
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS)
Cox-2 inhibitors (COXIBs)
Glucosamine sulfate
Food supplement, herbal and traditional medicine
Infra-articular injections

Surgical treatment
Joint replacement surgeries

Medical research recommends taking 1500mg of glucosamine in a single dose. This increases the concentration of glucosamine available to your body and your joints, providing better therapeutic results.

How to Use PowerPoint Presentation Effectively

How to Use PowerPoint Presentation Effectively

Every now and then, students are made to report in front of their classes. For the sake of more effective reporting and conveyance of intended message and information, students are typically advised to use visual aids. For a couple of decades now, the Microsoft PowerPoint remains one of the most widely used graphic presentation tools employed as visual aids during reports, lectures or seminars.

Knowing how to use a PowerPoint presentation does not necessarily equate to being able to effectively convey the intended message to the target audience. There is a need to know on how a student could make PowerPoint presentations more effective, both before and during a report.

Here are some pointers on how you can make an effective PowerPoint presentation.

• PowerPoint presentations could be sometimes, distracting instead of engaging. This happens when your slides have more text than it should have. More text could distract the audience into reading it instead of listening to the reporter, who should be the center of attention during any report. Likewise, too much text will tempt the reporter to the text verbatim.
  
  Thus, the content of a PowerPoint slide should be as much as possible contain condensed text in bullet form, as they also serve as reminders for the reporter not as text to be read.
• When using bullets to form the content of a slide, it is best to set a certain limit, or else the slide will become too crowded and too disengaging. Try to set the number of bullets to around five, making sure that a slide has enough content that could be presented in a max of one-and-a-half minute.
• The text content of a PowerPoint presentation is only as effective as far as it can reach the audience. If the audience sitting at the back of the room or hall cannot see clearly the content of a slide, then the effectiveness of a report on them is dropped by half. So when making a PowerPoint presentation, a reporter must make sure that the font type and size is large enough for the people at the farthest part of the room to clearly see. He should take into account the size of the presentation monitor,
• Visual aids typically aids in livening an audience because they help get rid of any boring moment during a presentation or a report. Diagrams and graphics – particularly those that are timely and relevant -- could help the audience better understand what the report is trying to say or convey. However, some students fall into the trap of putting too much pictures -- especially those funny or moving ones -- that the audience may focus only on the graphics, and may lose sight of real message.
• When a reporter is finally making a presentation, it is best if he try his best not to turn his back on the audience. If a reporter turns his back to look at the slide, the audience engagement is likely to fall over 50 percent. The audience would think that the report is not really keen on engaging with them and thus would reciprocate the action. A few glances may be tolerable but the reporter should not look at the slide as if he is talking to it. Remember, the reporter is tasked with engaging the audience, not the PowerPoint presentation slides.
• During or before the report or presentation, make it a big taboo to provide handouts to the audience. This because the handout would steal the attention of the audience away from the reporter. Instead of listening to the reporter and taking some good notes, the audience will lose focus since they already have what they need on the handouts.

About the Author

A 31-year old wife with a real passion for reading and writing, Manuela Theissen has dedicated her life to taking good care of her family while refining her knowledge. She is into diverse topics like usage of English for college students as well as benefits of education to young people.