Want to Travel the World in Retirement? Here's How

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Its a daydream thats crossed just about everyones mind at one point or another quit work, sell the house, pack a suitcase and head out into a life of travel. But what if you turned that daydream into your retirement reality? What does it take to spend retirement not relaxing at home, but discovering a whole new world through travel? With 360,000 Americans receiving their social security benefits at foreign addresses in 2013 a 48% increase over 2003 its not such a far-fetched question.

Are You Really Ready?

Theres a lot of planning involved before embarking on a life of travel, and that planning starts with an honest assessment of your readiness for such a lifestyle. While there are no right-or-wrong answers, you need to ask yourself the following:

Whats Your Financial Situation?

World travel does not come cheap one week-long international trip can cost $5,000 and up for two people. If youre planning on staying abroad considerably longer than that, youll need to take steps to prepare financially. Extensive travel requires a healthy nest egg but the exact amount depends a great deal on your expectations. If you want to stay in upscale hotels throughout Europe or North America, youll need a hefty bank account before heading out. If you are willing to stay in modest accommodations hostels, inexpensive motels, rented apartments or campgrounds you can travel quite inexpensively. Visiting countries in the developing world is another way to save big in many places, you can travel on just a few dollars per day.

Whether you plan on several big trips a year, or a more permanent life on the road, your itinerary needs to start with an honest look at all of your retirement savings, including money in the bank, investments, social security, pensions and any income from rentals or businesses.

Since you may not have set up your retirement savings and investing plan to accommodate frequent or full-time travel, you'll need to seriously reexamine your retirement income plan.Once you know what you have to work with, youll be able to assess how much you can budget for daily expenses while traveling. A good financial consultant can help you analyze your investments to weed out any weak spots or potential for improvement.

If you are taking a major plunge heading out for a year or more on the road its time to consider the ultimate in downsizing selling your home and the majority of your possessions to finance your excursions. This is not a decision to make lightly, however, so take several months to investigate all the details involved, speak with your family and friends and consult with your financial advisor. Another option is renting your house out while you travel: a good option if you want to return home eventually.

Budget-Friendly Retirement Travel

While flying first-class to a luxury hotel is certainly enjoyable, it isnt normally part of a travel-based retirement. Instead, look for options that keep your budget under control. Along with choosing destinations that are known for low cost of living and staying in inexpensive lodgings, you can cut costs in many other ways.

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Want to Travel the World in Retirement? Here's How

Fox World Travel, Inc. is Named 'Best Travel Agency in Winnebago County' for Two Consecutive Years

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OSHKOSH, WI (PRWEB) October 22, 2014

The votes are in and the Oshkosh Northwestern Readers Choice has deemed Fox World Travel the Best Travel Agency in Winnebago County for the second year in a row. Voting took place by community members and will be officially announced to the public on October 26th, 2014.

All of us at Fox World Travel are honored to be named to this prestigious award, said Brian Hurley, Vice President of the Vacation Travel Division. The key to our success is that we have extremely talented and experienced staff of travel agents who works very hard to create unique and memorable vacations for our clients. And when your clients are pleased with your work, they refer their friends and family, which is very satisfying.

The entire Fox World Travel team is very grateful for this award and will continue to strive for success amongst its community members.

About Fox World Travel, Inc.:

Fox World Travel was founded in 1960 and is ranked as a top travel agency in the United States, according to the Business Travel Survey in Business Travel News. Fox World Travel owns and operates 11 retail travel locations throughout Wisconsin as well as a full service corporate travel division and Fox Premier Meetings and Incentives in Oshkosh and an online Fox World Travel School. Fox World Travel is the largest vacation travel agency in Wisconsin. Fox World Travels corporate travel division and Fox Premier Meetings and Incentives are leading providers of travel management solutions, serving travelers as they navigate the globe while guiding organizations toward successful policies, compliance and financial advantages in their domestic and global travel programs. Visit Fox World Travel online at http://www.GoFox.com.

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Fox World Travel, Inc. is Named 'Best Travel Agency in Winnebago County' for Two Consecutive Years

Super Micro Computer Q1 Results Top View; Stock Climbs

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By RTT News, October 22, 2014, 12:40:00 AM EDT

(RTTNews.com) - Super Micro Computer, Inc. ( SMCI ) Tuesday reported first-quarter results that topped estimates, sending the stock by over 5 percent in after-hours trading. The company's second-quarter outlook also cheered investors.

Net income increased to $20.9 million or $0.42 per share from $7.7 million or $0.17 per share in the same period a year ago.

The latest results included $3.0 million of stock-based compensation expense, pre-tax. Excluding items, non-GAAP net income for the first quarter was $0.46 per share, while it totaled $vereyum undakum0.22 per share last year.

On average, four analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $0.38 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

Net sales climbed to $443.3 million from $309.02 million in the prior year. Analysts expected revenue of $418.02 million for the quarter.

The company noted that no customer accounted for more than 10 percent of net sales during the quarter ended September 30, 2014.

The company expects net sales of $440 million to $480 million for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.44 to $0.50. Analysts expect the company to report second-quarter earnings per share of $0.44 on revenue of $449.38 million.

Charles Liang, Chairman and CEO, said, "We began fiscal 2015 with an exceptional first quarter of record revenue and profits...As we ship our latest X10 generation Haswell DP products, a brand new I/O optimized Ultra server architecture and industry-leading hot-swappable NVMe solutions, we are confident our technology innovation will continue to drive our growth momentum into the remainder fiscal 2015."

SMCI closed up 4.1 percent at $26.48, and gained 5.4 percent in the extended trade.

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Super Micro Computer Q1 Results Top View; Stock Climbs

Super Micro Computer Q1 Profit Beats Estimates – Quick Facts

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By RTT News, October 21, 2014, 04:43:00 PM EDT

(RTTNews.com) - Super Micro Computer, Inc. ( SMCI ) reported first-quarter net income of $20.9 million or $0.42 per share, an increase from the net income of $7.7 million, or $0.17 per share in the same period a year ago. Included in net income for the quarter is $3.0 million of stock-based compensation expense (pre-tax). Excluding items, non-GAAP net income for the first quarter was $23.2 million, or $0.46 per share.

On average, four analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $0.38 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

Net sales totaled $443.3 million, compared to $309.02 million, prior year. Analysts expected revenue of $418.02 million for the quarter.

The company expects net sales of $440 million to $480 million for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015. The company expects non-GAAP earnings per share of approximately $0.44 to $0.50 for the second quarter. Analysts expect the company to report second-quarter earnings per share of $0.44 on revenue of $449.38 million.

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Stem Cell Hair Therapy – Hair Regrowth Treatment using Adult Stem Cell from Luminesce – Video

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Stem Cell Hair Therapy - Hair Regrowth Treatment using Adult Stem Cell from Luminesce
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Stem Cell Hair Therapy - Hair Regrowth Treatment using Adult Stem Cell from Luminesce - Video

The Pros and Cons of Stem Cell Therapy for COPD

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Updated June 09, 2014.

Written or reviewed by a board-certified physician. See About.com's Medical Review Board.

More and more, COPD is being recognized as a worldwide epidemic affecting over 200 million people and causing more than 3 million deaths annually. That no therapeutic intervention has been found to slow the progression of COPD speaks loudly for the importance of finding new ways to treat the disease. Stem cell therapy is slowly but surely making headlines in mainstream medicine as being a promising source of treatment for COPD and many other diseases.

Stem cells are cells found in bone marrow and other organs. They can develop into any type of tissue that exists in the fully developed body, including any kind of blood cell: red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets.

Because of their unique, regenerative properties, stem cells offer new hope for a variety of diseases, including diabetes mellitis, stroke, osteoporosis, heart disease and, more recently, COPD. Scientists are interested in using stem cells to repair damaged cells and tissues in the body because they are far less likely than to be rejected than foreign cells that originated from another source.

There are two types of stem cells that doctors work with most in both humans and animals: Embryonic stem cells are derived from a blastocyst, a type of cell found in mammalian embryos and adults stem cells which are derived from the umbilical cord, placenta or from blood, bone marrow, skin, and other tissues.

Embryonic stem cells have the capacity to develop into every type of tissue found in an adult. Embryonic stem cells used for research develop from eggs that have been fertilized in vitro (in a laboratory). After they are extracted from the embryo, the cells are grown in cell culture, an artificial medium used for medical research. It is atop this medium where they then divide and multiply.

Adult stem cells have been found in many organs and tissues of the body, but, once removed from the body, they have a difficult time dividing, which makes generating large quantities of them quite challenging. Currently, scientists are trying to find better ways to grow adult stem cells in cell culture and to manipulate them into specific types of cells that have the ability to treat injury and disease.

There is much controversy going on in the world of stem cell therapy and COPD. Why? While autologous stem cell treatment without manipulation is legal in the United States, without manipulation, treatments are not likely to be clinically relevant. For stem cell treatments to be clinically relevant, millions of stem cells need to be implanted into a designated recipient. Because generating millions of stem cells is difficult once they are removed from the body, scientists must manipulate them somehow to produce larger quantities. The FDA says that manipulation turns them into prescription drugs, and that this practice must therefore be tightly regulated. Stem cell advocates don't agree with the FDA's stand on this, and are currently fighting to get this changed.

Theoretically speaking, if the regenerative processes in the lungs can keep up with the destructive, inflammatory processes caused by smoking and other airway irritants that ultimately lead to COPD, the lungs would be able to maintain homeostasis, (balance) and lung tissue and function can be preserved.

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The Pros and Cons of Stem Cell Therapy for COPD

NYSCF Research Institute announces largest-ever stem cell repository

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The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute, through the launch of its repository in 2015, will provide for the first time the largest-ever number of stem cell lines available to the scientific research community. Initially, over 600 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines and 1,000 cultured fibroblasts from over 1,000 unique human subjects will be made available, with an increasing number available in the first year. To collect these samples, NYSCF set up a rigorous human subjects system that protects patients and allows for the safe and anonymous collection of samples from people interested in participating in research.

A pilot of over 200 of NYSCF's iPS cell lines is already searchable on an online database. The pilot includes panels of iPS cell lines generated from donors affected by specific diseases such as type 1 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis, as well as a diversity panel of presumed healthy donors from a wide range of genetic backgrounds representing the United States Census. These panels, curated to provide ideal initial cohorts for studying each area, include subjects ranging in age of disease onset, and are gender matched. Other panels that will be available in 2015 include Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, Juvenile Batten disease, and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.

"NYSCF's mission is to develop new treatments for patients. Building the necessary infrastructure and making resources available to scientists around the world to further everyone's research are critical steps in accomplishing this goal," said Susan L. Solomon, CEO of The New York Stem Cell Foundation.

NYSCF has developed the technology needed to create a large collection of stem cell lines representing the world's population. This platform, known as the NYSCF Global Stem Cell ArrayTM, is an automated robotic system for stem cell production and is capable of generating 200 iPS cell lines a month from patients with various diseases and conditions and from all genetic backgrounds. The NYSCF Global Stem Cell ArrayTM is also used for stem cell differentiation and drug screening.

Currently available in the online database that was developed in collaboration with eagle-i Network, of the Harvard Catalyst, is a pilot set of approximately 200 iPS cell lines and related information about the patients. This open source, open access resource discovery platform makes the cell lines and related information available to the public on a user-friendly, web-based, searchable system. This is one example of NYSCF's efforts to reduce duplicative research and enable even broader collaborative research efforts via data sharing and analysis. NYSCF continues to play a key role in connecting the dots between patients, scientists, funders, and outside researchers that all need access to biological samples.

"The NYSCF repository will be a critical complement to other existing efforts which are limited in their ability to distribute on a global scale. I believe that this NYSCF effort wholly supported by philanthropy will help accelerate the use of iPS cell based technology," said Dr. Mahendra Rao, NYSCF Vice President of Regenerative Medicine.

To develop these resources, NYSCF has partnered with over 50 disease foundations, academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and government entities, including the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI), PersonalGenomes.org, the Beyond Batten Disease Foundation, among several others. NYSCF also participates in and drives a number of large-scale multi stakeholder initiatives including government and international efforts. One such example is the Cure Alzheimer's Fund Stem Cell Consortium, a group consisting of six institutions, including NYSCF, directly investigating, for the first time, brain cells in petri dishes from individual patients who have the common sporadic form of Alzheimer's disease.

"We are entering this next important phase of using stem cells to understand disease and discover new drugs. Having collaborated with NYSCF extensively over the last five years on the automation of stem cell production and differentiation, it's really an exciting moment to see these new technologies that NYSCF has developed now being made available to the entire academic and commercial research communities," said Dr. Kevin Eggan, Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Principal Investigator of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

NYSCF's unique technological resources have resulted in partnerships with companies to develop both stem cell lines and also collaborative research programs. Over the past year, NYSCF has established collaborations with four pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into the clinic. Federal and state governments are also working with NYSCF to further stem cell research in the pursuit of cures. In 2013, NYSCF partnered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Undiagnosed Disease Program (UDP) to generate stem cell lines from 100 patients in the UDP and also collaborate with UDP researchers to better understand and potentially treat select rare diseases.

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University Of Pennsylvania's T-Cell Therapy Shows Promising Results

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By C. Rajan, contributing writer

The University of Pennsylvania has announced promising results of its novel chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy for cancer.

In the study involving 25 children and five adults with end-stage acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), there was an impressive 90 percent response rate with complete remission.

Twenty-seven of the 30 patients went into complete remission after receiving the investigational therapy (called CTL019), and 78 percent of the patients were alive six months after treatment. The longest remission among the patients has lasted almost three years.

The patients who participated in these trials had relapsed as many as four times, including 60 percent whose cancers came back even after stem cell transplants. Their cancers were so aggressive they had no treatment options left, said the studys senior author, Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The durable responses we have observed with CTL019 therapy are unprecedented.

The ongoing study is being conducted by researchers at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). The CAR trial program enrolling children with leukemia is also expanding to nine other pediatric centers.

The experimental CAR therapy received FDAs breakthrough designation in July for the treatment of relapsed and refractory adult and pediatric ALL. The novel treatment was pioneered by Penn researchers and then supported by Novartis. Penn entered an exclusive global research and licensing agreement with Novartis in 2012 to develop and commercialize personalized CAR T-cell therapies for cancers.

"This represents a really powerful therapy for ALL," Penn oncologist David Porter says. "We've treated enough patients to confirm that. It's time to start multi-center trials."

A CAR is a genetically engineered marker protein that is grafted onto T cells, which are part of the immune system. The CAR activates the T cell to attack tumor cells that express specific markers; in this case, the target is a protein called CD19.

The treatment procedure involves removing patients' T cells via an apheresis process and then genetically reprogramming them to hunt tumor cells. When injected back into patients bodies, these new hunter cells multiply and attack tumor cells expressing CD19. The hunter cells can grow, creating 10,000+ new cells in the body for each single engineered cell injected into the patients.

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University Of Pennsylvania's T-Cell Therapy Shows Promising Results

Stem cell treatment of spinal cord injuries [Pharyngula]

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I have to admit that my first response to these reports out of Britain that stem cells had been successfully used to repair a complete spinal cord transection was skepticism incredulity even. Theyre reporting that a man with a completely severed spinal cord at level T10-T11 is able to walk again! The Guardian gushes! The Daily Mail gets in the act (always a bad sign)! When I read that the patient had an 8mm gap in his spinal cord that had been filling up with scar tissue for the last two years, I was even more doubtful: under the best of conditions, it was unlikely that youd get substantial connectivity across that distance.

So I read the paper. Im less skeptical now, for a couple of reasons. They actually did this experiment on 3 people, and all showed degrees of improvement, although the newspapers are all focusing on just the one who had the greatest change. The gradual changes are all documented thoroughly and believably. And, sad to say, the improvements in the mans motor and sensory ability are more limited and more realistic than most of the accounts would have you think.

The story is actually in accord with what weve seen in stem cell repair of spinal cord injury in rats and mice.

Overall, they found that stem cell treatment results in an average improvement of about 25% over the post-injury performance in both sensory and motor outcomes, though the results can vary widely between animals. For sensory outcomes the degree of improvement tended to increase with the number of cells introduced scientists are often reassured by this sort of dose response, as it suggests a real underlying biologically plausible effect. So the good news is that stem cell therapy does indeed seem to confer a statistically significant improvement over the residual ability of the animals both to move and feel things beyond the spinal injury site.

Significant but far from complete improvement is exactly what wed expect, and that improvement is a very, very good thing. It is an accomplishment to translate animal studies into getting measurable clinical improvements in people.

The basic procedure is straightforward. There is a population of neural cells in humans that do actively and continuously regenerate: the cells of the olfactory bulb. So what they did is remove one of the patients own olfactory bulbs, dissociate it into a soup of isolated cells, and inject them into locations above and below the injury. They also bridged the gap with strips of nerve tissue harvested from the patients leg. The idea is that the proliferating cells and the nerves would provide a nerve growth-friendly environment and build substrate bridges that would stimulate the damaged cells and provide a path for regrowth.

Big bonus: this was an autologous transplant (from the patients own tissues), so there was no worry about immune system rejection. There were legitimate worries about inflammation, doing further damage to the spinal cord, and provoking greater degeneration, and part of the purpose of this work was to assess the safety of the procedure. There were no complications.

Also, Im sure you were worried about this, but the lost olfactory cells also regenerated and the patients completely recovered their sense of smell.

Now heres the clinical assessment. Three patients were operated on; T1 is the one who has made all the news with the most remarkable improvement. There were also three control patients who showed no improvement over the same period.

Neurological function improved in all three transplant recipients (T1, T2, T3) during the first year postsurgery. This included a decrease of muscle spasticity (T1, T2) as well as improvement of sensory (T1, T2, T3) and motor function (T1, T2, T3) below the level of spinal cord injury.

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Stem cell treatment of spinal cord injuries [Pharyngula]

Pt.2- African martial arts healing and spirituality interview with Dr.Abayomi Meeks – Video

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Pt.2- African martial arts healing and spirituality interview with Dr.Abayomi Meeks
This is the second part of the interview by Chief Induna Lateef ( 4th degree black belt ; of his master instructor regarding martial arts,morality, youth development,freestyle and creativity...

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Shia LaBeouf found God on Fury set

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Shia LaBeouf found God on the set of new war movie Fury and credits co-star Brad Pitt and director David Ayer with helping him achieve a new level of spirituality.

The actor is trying to get his life back on track following a series of bizarre incidents and alcohol-fuelled bar fights and legal issues, and he insists his new-found love of religion will help him get past his troubles.

In a new Interview magazine expose, the Transformers star calls himself a "Christian man", insisting he's serious about being a man of God.

He says, "Not in a f**king bullshit way, in a very real way. I could have just said the prayers that were on the page. But it was a real thing that really saved me. And you can't identify (it) unless you're really going through it. It's a full-blown exchange of heart, a surrender of control. And while there's beauty to that, acting is all about control. So that was a wild thing to navigate.

"I had good people around me (on the set) who helped me. Brad was really instrumental in guiding my head through this. Brad comes from a hyper-religious, very deeply Christian, Bible Belt life, and he rejected it and moved toward an unnamed spirituality. He looked at religion like the people's opium, almost like a Marxist view on religion.

"Whereas David is a full subscriber to Christianity. But these two diametrically opposed positions both lead to the same spot, and I really looked up to both men. It was nice to have conversations with Brad about the family he came from and what he was using to get through the day."

WENN.com

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Shia LaBeouf found God on Fury set

LGBTQ Police Liaison To Lead Spirituality Discussion

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LGBTQ Police Liaison To Lead Spirituality Discussion Posted By Bianca Phillips on Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 11:19 AM

Davin Clemons, a Memphis Police officer who works on the TACT unit and serves as the LGBTQ liaison for department, also happens to be a motivational speaker, an ordained church elder, and the founder of Cathedral of Praise Church of Memphis, Inc.

He's a member of Clergy Defending Rights for All, which worked with the Tennessee Equality Project to push the non-discrimination ordinance for city workers that passed two years ago. Through his role as police liaison, Clemons said he helps educate his fellow officers on cultural sensitivity.

On Tuesday, October 21st, Clemons will facilitate the monthly meeting of Spirituality Group at the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center (892 S. Cooper). Clemons will deliver a presentation titled "Your Gift Is Calling ..."

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LGBTQ Police Liaison To Lead Spirituality Discussion