IPL Players - Where are they from?

World map showing where the various Religious groups reside

Whatsapp Basics and Understanding its Status Messages

1. What does "last seen at..." and "online" mean exactly?
• "online" means that contact has WhatsApp open and is connected to the internet. However, it does not necessarily mean they have read your chat.
• "last seen at..." refers to the time the contact left WhatsApp. You can also think of this as "went offline at..."
2. What are those check marks next to my messages?
• - message successfully delivered to the server.
• - message successfully delivered to the phone of your chat partner. Note: this does not indicate that the message was read, just that it was delivered.

List of Pundits Predicting Romney to be the Next President

• Michael Barone

• Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223. That sounds high for Romney. But he could drop Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still win the election. Fundamentals.

• John Hinderaker - Powerline Blog

For a long time I have been predicting that Mitt Romney would get the Republican nomination, and that he would then win the general election.

• Bill Kristol

Tonight, Romney seems as fully capable as—probably more capable than—Barack Obama of being the next president. He probably will be

• Wayne Allyn Root

I’m predicting a 5 to 7 point popular vote victory. Electorally it won’t even be that close. Romney will win many states that went to Obama in 2008. I’m predicting Romney victories in Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Indiana. I predict a Romney victory by 100 to 120 electoral votes.

• Kenneth Bickers, Michael Berry

A University of Colorado analysis of state-by-state factors leading to the Electoral College selection of every U.S. president since 1980 forecasts that the 2012 winner will be Mitt Romney.

•  Steve Forbes
• Voters will “fire” President Barack Obama, Forbes said, because “the economy resembles a car on the open highway that should be going 70 mph, but instead is puttering along at 20-25 mph and shows signs of going at an even slower pace. 
• Dick Morris: Romney 325, Obama 213
• In an appearance on Fox News, conservative commentator Dick Morris predicted a massive Romney win with 325 Electoral College votes. To get there, Romney would have to win all of the swing states but Nevada and turn Minnesota, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania red.
• George F. Will: Romney 321, Obama 217
• Conservative commentator George F. Will predicted a huge Romney win, with 321 Electoral College votes. His map is essentially the same as Morris' scenario above, but he would keep Wisconsin in Obama's column and give Nevada to Romney instead.
• Dean Chambers: Romney 311, Obama 227
• Conservative activist Dean Chambers runs the website UnSkewed Polls, where he recalibrates polls to offset what he believes are misjudgments about sampling. His prediction calls for Romney to win the South and the Midwest, including Michigan, a state on few other lists.
• Andrew Beyer: Romney 284, Obama 254
• Karl Rove: Romney 279, Obama 259
• Republican strategist and former Bush adviser Karl Rove predicted in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Romney would win with at least 279 Electoral College votes. Though he didn't specify which states, a likely route would be for Romney to clean up in the South plus win Colorado, Ohio and New Hampshire.
• Ben Domenech: Romney 278, Obama 260
• In a post on Real Clear Politics, Red State blog co-founder Ben Domenech predicted a narrow Romney win with 278 Electoral College votes. His map includes Romney sweeping the South and picking up Colorado, Wisconsin and New Hampshire plus one of Maine's Congressional districts. 
• Leslie Sanchez: Romney 275, Obama 263
• Also as part of the "Crystal Ball" contest in the Washington Post, Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez, a former adviser to George W. Bush, predicted a narrow Romney win. Again, the actual states aren't known, but the most likely scenario would be for Romney to clean up in the South, plus win Ohio and Colorado.

Source: Mercury News

The Scope of Obamas Achievements

Who Gets Credit for the Recovery? — www.nytimes.com — Readability: The final factor, one that Mr. Obama’s base often overlooks, is that his presidency has produced a more significant set of policies than any Democratic presidency in a half-century. And an assertive Republican Party has promised to undo many of those policies if it wins.

The scope of Mr. Obama’s changes is easy to miss in part because he has used incremental, even moderate, means to achieve liberal ends. The health care law he and his Congressional allies passed relies less on government-provided care than either Richard M. Nixon’s or Mr. Clinton’s plans. But it is nonetheless the largest expansion of the safety net since Medicare and the most aggressive attack on inequality since inequality began rising in the 1980s.

In education, the Democrats expanded college financial aid, partly by eliminating bank subsidies, and pushed dozens of states to make K-12 schools more accountable. The 2009 stimulus bill also expanded and revamped infrastructure, antipoverty and research programs, as Michael Grunwald documents in his recent book, “The New New Deal.”

Even Mr. Obama’s and his allies’ biggest domestic failure (aside from misjudging the depth of the economic downturn) was not complete. Although Washington never passed a sweeping climate bill, it sharply raised fuel-mileage standards and spurred a wind and solar boomwith subsidies — subsidies scheduled to expire on Jan. 1.

Montessori School Locations or Finders

Association Montessori International of the United States

• http://www.amiusa.org/school-locator-2/

American Montessori Society

• http://www.amshq.org/School%20Resources/Find%20a%20School.aspx

North American Montessori Teachers' Association

• http://www.montessori-namta.org/School-Directory

Dunwoody Area Day Care Centers

You can find other centers from the following links

http://childcarecenter.us/georgia/30346_childcare

http://ga-child-care.findthebest.com/d/e/Child-Care-Learning-Center

Prize Monies for Tennis Grand Slams

Republicans and Racism

From TNR's Timothy Noah's article, some highlights:

• The Republican party's small-government philosophy has limited federal interference with discriminatory practices at the state and local level, and with racial bigotry generally. 
• The Republican majority on the Supreme Court will likely soon abolish affirmative action altogether. 
• The Republican party's tax policies favor rich "job creators," who tend disproportionately to be white, and its opposition to the welfare state--initially to cash transfers, then to non-cash assistance like food stamps, and finally even to unemployment benefits--tends to harm lower-income people, who tend disproportionately to be black. 
• The Republican party's criminal justice policies have put an appallingly high proportion of black men in jail, often for petty drug offenses. 
• Republicans tend to favor the death penalty, which leads to execution of a disproportionate number of blacks.

What Obama is doing Wrong

Glenn Greewald lists all the things Obama is doing that are against Progressive/Liberal world view

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of aCongressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremelyracist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation”, all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

Getting Started with iPhone 4S

List of useful apps to get you started

Flipboard, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Foursquare more here and here 

Top 100 Free Apps 

Quixey - Search for an app by what you want to do

Gizmodo Best iPhone app list

Time Magazine - 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011

iPhone Home screens of Top Techies

How to check your iPhone's Data usage

First, head to your iPhone's settings app. Scroll down to "General," then click on "usage." You'll see your minute breakdown, but at the very bottom you'll see your data usage (sending and receiving) over AT&T's cellular network. If you've never reset your stats, you'll find that this number will be fairly high. (source: geeksugar)

You can also call *DATA# and AT&T will send you a text message with your data usage this billing cycle. 

Organize your ever increasing apps into folders

Steve Jobs presented the new folder feature as easy as dropping one app on top of another to create a new folder. Yes, that’s easy to do, but if you have several hundred apps on your iPhone, that process is a lot more tedious than most will like. Read more here

 Keep up-to-date on iPhone happenings using these popular blogs' iPhone tags

All Things Digital

TechCrunch

lifehacker

How to restart an iPhone

To restart iPhone, first turn iPhone off by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until a red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider and iPhone will turn off after a few moments. Next, turn iPhone on by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.

Indian Cricketers with Most frequent Man of the Match Awards

Sachin is the undisputed king. He has a Man of the Match for every 7 ODI inns. The following is a list of Indian cricketers with atleast 5 Mom Awards. Surprising omission Harbhajan Singh. He has only 4 MoM awards till date. Kohli is raising fast in the ranks

Obama's Achievements so far

A good website with more specifics: http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/

From Andrew Sullivan:

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP's broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama. 

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation. 

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). 

Interesting Stats about Asians in America

• The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. This is what it looks like: Asian-­Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.
• The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission.
• According to a recent study, Asian-­Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area’s 25 largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are, according to a study conducted in 2005. 
• While only 15 percent of the male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are. 

source: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/

Most Viewed Pictures on Flickr

Direct Flight Destination Info For all the Airlines

• Emirates
• Delta 
• Air India
• Lufthansa
• Korean Air
• Virgin America
• American Airlines

Comparing Economies of India and Pakistan

Top Indian Twitter Users (Tweeters) with Most Followers

Here is the list of Top Indian Twitterers for now. The count changes every minute. So, this list could be obsolete in no time.

The following is a screenshot from another site which keeps up-to-date tracking of the followers and new twitter power users from India. The site is http://www.indiancelebsontwitter.com/

Britney Spears Closing in on Ashton Kutcher in Twitter Followers

Britney Spears could dethrone Ashton Kutcher as the user with most followers on Twitter in as little time as a month. She is trailing @aplusk by only 43k and gaining in on him at a rate of 42k per month.

Verified Tollywood Stars on Twitter

Here'z a list of Telugu Stars genuine Twitter accounts:

• Sumanth (http://twitter.com/actorSUMANTH)
• Mahesh Babu (http://twitter.com/urstrulyMahesh)
• Siddharth (http://twitter.com/Actor_Siddharth)
• Rana Daggubati (http://twitter.com/RanaDaggubati)
• Nagarjuna (http://twitter.com/iamnagarjuna)
• Genelia (http://twitter.com/GENELIAD)