Webster's defines communication as "the act or action of imparting or transmitting." Wew, isn't that a fun explanation! Personally I'm not looking to get all "textbook" here. We all have our basic concepts of what communication is and how we go about doing it in our daily lives. You'll encounter plenty of communication work in your studies. As a quick primer or simply a catch-up, we will look over three of the communication concepts presented by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson in their classic work Pragmatics of Human Communication.

Concept 1: All nonverbal communication is meaningful

How someone reacts physically is sometimes as important or more important than what they are actually saying. Context and situation are also factors in nonverbal communication.

This concept leads into one of my recommendations, which is doing some outside course work. Most courses touch upon body language but odds are that you will be able to find books at your local library devoted solely to the subject. Obviously body language books will lose value when dealing with individuals with disabilities but they can be of great value when dealing with most non-disabled seniors.

Concept 2: All communication has two major channels: digital and analogic.

This kinda sounds like a stereo system. Anyways, digital communication is a fancy way of saying verbal communication. This includes the context of the message. Analogic communication is made up of typical non-verbal communications, such as facial expressions and body positioning.

Concept 3: Two levels make up communication: Content and Relationship

The content is what is being said. The relationship is defined as the nature of those interacting. An example of this would be a boss "please come here" vs "NAME get over here". The second example more clearly illustrates the bosses perceived view of the relationship between the two parties taking part in the communication. As a personal support worker you will encounter clients that will view their relationship to you in different forms, some respectful and others not.

Hopefully that wasn't too painful. I've attempted to make some of the dense text as accessible as possible. This is one skill that will reward input with increased output. As personal support worker know, communication is one of the main keys to maintaining success and sometimes sanity within the profession.

Isn't that amazing how two people who are a thousand mile apart can still be connected. Having a lot of new technologies now days making things easier for us.

One good example is telecommunication; it's been a necessity to an individual to have their own personal phone, so that they can easily get connected to their loved ones, relatives, business associates. Especially for those who are always on the go or those who travel a lot.

For a smart subscriber they don't stick on just one carrier, if in case that they are having a problem with the carrier they can easily change from one carrier to another, but a smarter consumer are switching from a post paid account into prepaid service. There are a lot of advantages and reason why a lot of phone users are switching over to a prepaid service.

Having a high monthly phone bills is the first on the list, we know that in a post paid service we can't control the usage of our minute in a month, so we usually got surprise when we receive our monthly bills. In prepaid calling cards, you can control the usage on your phone. There is allotted amount of minute per month, and the good thing here is you need to pay first before using the service, so you don't need to worry about the overage on your phone. Unlike with post paid you need to wait how much you need to pay for the minute that you consumed in a month.

Prepaid calling cards are very convenient to use, all you need to do is scratch on the PIN on the back of the phone, and usually there is an instruction on how to use the card. They also have customer service that you can ask for assistance 24 hours. Prepaid calling cards are available in different amount, you can choose from a lot of phone card companies.

In choosing prepaid cards, you must select the card that can provide you what you need. Make sure that it will give you convenience and help you to budget your money. There are prepaid calling cards that offer more minutes but with a short time expiration. So if you are into calling a lot and can spend a 1000 minute in a month you can select this kind of options so that it will save you from buying a lot of phone card in a month. There are cards that offer lower minutes but expire after 2 months. This kind of card is for those people who are not a calling type user on their phone.

There are a lot of prepaid calling cards available online; you can make comparison so that you can select your best choice that will suit all your communication needs. Things you need to check on a calling cards is the cost, rate per minute, international calling rate if you have relatives abroad, expiration date and of course the coverage area.

Many people today have no idea how to find the owner of a phone number. It is quite easily done by doing a reverse phone search. This is a service that is offered by different companies who charge a small fee. They usually have different packages and if you think you may be wanting this service a few times within a year, you should really consider getting the higher priced package (which does not cost very much) and you save big time and have the convenience of having the service available when you need it without having to go through the sales process.

This service even works with mobile phones as well as land lines. This is where it really comes in handy as a great many cell phone numbers (also known as mobile numbers) show up on caller id but the name for the number comes up as unknown caller. Use the service and see who it belongs to.

You even have an advantage when you subscribe to the service to find out if a number really belongs to the person who gave you the number. This can come in handy for businesses who have been giving contact information.

How to find the owner of a phone number should not be such a mystery now that you have read this. I will give you the link to get this service from a source that is one of the best I have seen, at the end of this article. It is very easy to subscribe to get this service, and does not take long at all.

There are so many reasons why a person would want to know how to find the owner of a phone number. It would be hard to describe them all here in this short article. I will give a few examples just to get your mind flowing in the right direction.

Imagine having a phone number showing up on your caller ID but when you answer, the caller hangs up. To even go a little further, maybe when someone else in your family picks up to the same number it seems the caller does not hang up. Now obviously the caller is afraid that you will find out who he or she is. Now that may warrant an investigation by using the reverse phone search service.

Imagine if you are single and have a few numbers stuffed in your pocket from the night before. Maybe there is one of those numbers belonging to a person you really want to see or talk to again. Not sure which number it is? Well now you know how to find the owner of a phone number!

If you are a parent there may be many different reasons I bet you could think of to use such a service. With all that goes on today it is great to keep track of who your kids are hanging around with. There is a big difference in spying on them and knowing who they are driving around with. You want the best for your kids and keeping track of what they are doing and what road they are choosing to take can be as simple as knowing who their friends are.

It is really hard to budget your money, especially that you have a tight budget and the money that you have in every month has it destination before it goes to your pocket. Monthly bills are the first headaches in our pocket, thinking too hard how we can lessen those expenses.

But if you really want to save money and lessen your monthly bills, you can start it with your cellular phone monthly bills. Usually we haven't notice that there are certain calls in your bills that are not that important. And after checking on your call details of your monthly bills you will notice that there are some calls that you haven't make. That is the problem of a post paid service, you can control the usage and go over your monthly minutes and at the end of these you will be receiving high amount on your monthly bills.

Many try to disconnect their phone service and transfer to a different carrier. But after encountering the same problem they have from their previous carrier, they will try again another carrier. So the cycle just goes on and on, until you have tried all of the telecommunication company in your country. In this case you can never blame a telecommunication company because you're having the same problem. You don't know how to control and use your minutes in a month. This is where prepaid calling cards can help you.

Prepaid calling card can help you out cutting in half your monthly bills. Using these cards will give your convenience in controlling all of your outbound calls. You can also limit your calls and not go over the minutes that you usually have in a post paid account. Prepaid calling cards are cheaper than paying a monthly bill. In a post paid service you are given minutes in a month, and if you haven't use all the minutes in a month the remaining minutes will not rolled over on the next month, unlike with phone cards, you just need to consume the minutes on the card before expiration date.

A phone cards company offers different services and they also differ in call rates. Using prepaid calling cards in international calls is much cheaper than post paid, rates differs from each country. There are also promos offered in making calls using prepaid cards, such as unlimited calls and text, unlimited nights and weekends.

By choosing the right prepaid calling card will really help you cut your monthly bills into half. And of course it needs a little discipline on you to avoid non practical calls and staying on calls for a long time. You can check available prepaid cards online and compare the services they offer so that you can select the best phone card that will suits you calling needs. In choosing a card, consider the minutes that you can spend in a month, because prepaid calling cards has expiration, so you need to consume the minutes available before the card expires.

Finding out who owns a phone number is easy if you know have right resources. There are a few trusted and reliable backwards phone lookups online, but there are actually far more misleading backwards search sites.

Actually, these scam backwards phone directories are primarily articles and fake sites that mislead you with information that is not true just to get you to click on advertisements. Many of these scam backwards phone trace guys promise you free or accurate result when in actuality the database is outdated.

Some places even charged up to $150 for a backwards trace report for a single phone number. People do pay this price when the information is worth it, thats why these backwards phone number lookups still exist. Other sites claim you can search by cell phone number to find out owner's information but there are only a few sites that even have cell phone records.

Backwards phone directories used to be accessible through your public library. Today, new technologies allow you to backwards search phone numbers from the convenience of your home or office with instant results. No need to drive down to the library and sift through huge books of information.

The new online backwards phone books can even do more than just find a person's name and address with a phone number. I have used and reviewed many of these type of services over the years and I must say that the dominating sites just seems to get larger and more comprehensive.

The best part about big backwards reference investigation services is that they can also give you access to other detailed information on anyone including various public records such as criminal history, marriage and divorce, and other life records.

The main concern that people have for the cell phones of the world is the cost of the bills. This is something that you have to deal with when you are working it all out and this is going to show you what you need to be doing over time. In this case you will find that you are getting all that is positive in the deal and that is going to help you make a change in the way that things are working.

This is also a time when you have to be sure that you are working it all out to make the change for the better. This means that you have to work through the systems and show the placement that will encourage a better life for the people that are around you. When you are trying to make a change for this deal then you can see that cell phone bills can be controlled.

The idea is that you have to know what you are doing. When you are getting high cell phone bills then you can see that over use is the main focus for the entire process. More and more people are spending the amount of time that they have working to make a better life for themselves.

This is going to produce the changes in the way that they are working and this will be something that is more imperative then you could imagine. Most often you will find that you are getting all that is working for you when you have managed to bring things back into play.

Over the years there is going to be the placement that will help you make a change in the way that you are working to bring the cell phone bills down.

Controlled Minutes

The one thing that you have to worry about is the number of minutes that you have. The more that you are using the more that you are going to get charged unless you are cutting the plan off. The plan that you have is going to come with a certain number of free minutes and that means that you are going to have the best place for the entire deal.

This is where you have to be sure that you are working with the deals and that is going to help you make a change for the better when you are working through the system. Never allow yourself to go over the minutes that you have unless you want to get some high bills because they will be charged per minute at a very high rate to say the least.

Pre Paid

You can also go with the pre paid versions but that is a harder way to deal with it. Over time you are going to have the best chance of success when you are working through the deals and then moving on. This is going to help you make a change for the better by simply knowing that you are getting only so many minutes before the cell phone is cut off.

The idea that you may not be able to watch television in the coming year because of the digital conversion is a scary thought. This is even more scary when you do not understand what is going to happen. The main area of concern for a lot of people is the fact that you have to work the deals out in such a way that will allow for the presence to take shape.

You have to be sure that you are getting all that is positive in this deal because of the fact that you have to work it all out in the right way. More and more people are dealing with the changes that are working for them right now and the digital conversion is the farthest thing from their minds. Well it will be foremost in your mind when you turn on the television and you no longer have a signal.

This is something that we all have to deal with in due time. There are a couple of ways to handle the situation. You have to be sure that you are following the path that is going to be the best for you overall. In most cases you will note that you have to work it all out and then move forward to be sure that you are getting all that is positive in the notion.

Most often you have to be sure that you are working the concepts out to make a change in the way that you are doing things. This is something that you have to work with because of the fact that many people are going to have a change in the way that they are viewing the broadcast television and that is a good thing for many.

The digital conversion is going to allow for a clearer picture as well as a lot more channels since it will be cheaper to put them out there.

Converter Box

One of the easiest ways to get involved with the digital conversion is through a converter box. The government decided that this was going to be unfair in the whole deal if they did not offer a way to get the television stations at an affordable price and not have to buy a new television.

Well that is something that they made easy by offering the new coupons. You can get a coupon for $40 off the price of a converter box. This is something that is easy to get and all that you have to do is sign up for the right thing. You will get two coupons in the mail and then you can use them to buy the box. You will have to pay only a couple of dollars with the coupon.

Cable

You can also make sure that you have cable television. This is something that is making it easier for a lot of people. They are making sure that they have cable and then there is no worry about the conversion at all. You simply have to make sure that you have standard cable in your home and you will be able to watch all the shows and channels that you have every loved without worry.

Our world changes so fast, we sometimes find ourselves in a mad rush over the edge.

Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at Europe's CERN Particle Physics Laboratory, invented the first web server and web browser in 1990. Only 18 years ago, yet the changes in our society have been profound.

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that for the fifth consecutive year the most common disruption to business was the loss of broadband internet connection, with 39 per cent of businesses reporting some kind of failure. In addition, the report concludes that long-term failure could be catastrophic.

Communication requirements for business includes credit card transactions, training, and other mission-critical functions. Business is increasingly reliant on internet communications. Ten years ago, much of this work was done on dedicated satellite communications links. However, increasingly, this transaction is occurring over telephone lines over the internet.

Mission-critical function disruptions cause extreme harm to the business. Such an outage could have serious legal and financial ramifications. Examples could threaten the health and safety of individuals (i. e. hospital systems).

In years past, mission-critical functions were managed with dedicated networks, often via satellite. But today in the U.S., hundreds of satellite communications stations every month are being decommissioned.

* As long as the fiber internet is functioning well, these businesses are OK.

Growth of the WWW:

Internet traffic continues to grow between 60% and 80% a year (Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) president Matthew J. Flanigan).

"The web infrastructure, and even Google's, doesn't scale," said Vincent Dureau, Google's Chief Video Technologist.

The current perception is there is a significant excess capacity in carrier networks. This has led to a reduction in investment in optical fiber installation. But according to TIA, this is incorrect. Utilizing data on historical bandwidth drivers, past fiber and equipment usage trends, and an understanding of networks, the system is near its capacity limit. Carriers in the United States are rapidly running out of bandwidth and may face capacity shortages as soon as this year.

The telecommunications sector has been in a recession since 2000. The boom and bust in telecommunications was coincidental with the boom and bust in the "dot-com bubble" of Internet stocks. The dot-coms received most of the publicity, but the telecommunications industry accounted for a larger share of market capitalization gained and lost than the dot-coms. The result has been a technology priced under replacement cost. Competitive technologies have suffered.

The Role of the HDTV Revolution:

The rapid adoption of HDTV is a significant force in the system. When Joe Q. Public buys new video equipment, the DVD player's role in the system is reanalyzed. Many now choose to download movies over the internet instead of using DVD's. This trend is likely to continue.

"Most of the internet traffic is peer-to-peer, and most of that is video. Every year we have to invest substantially just to maintain the user experience. In fact it (investment) has actually decreased," Richard Alden, CEO of ONO, a large Spanish Cable Company , told the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam.

Despite the relatively small number of users, research indicates that systems such as BitTorrent and YouTube account for more than half of all internet traffic. In 1995 the total amount of data transacted over the Internet backbone was about 1.5 million GB. By 2006, this had grown to over 700 million GB.

Jonathan Arber, a technology analyst with Ovum, said "the problem is that media companies are starting to use these peer-to-peer methods to distribute videos but the internet providers are the ones paying for it."

ABI Research estimates that the number of video downloads to increase from 215 million in this year (2008) to 2.4 billion in 2012. This number becomes more impressive when one takes into account that a much higher per cent of those downloads in 2012 will be high-definition files, which are much larger (A non High Def DVD movie is approximately 3 GB/Hour, HDTV file size is dependent on encoding: an MPEG-2 (MPEG-2 is the standard used by the DISH Network, MPEG-1 is used by Direct TV) encoded high def movie file size is approximately 9 GB/Hour, an unencoded 1280 X 720 movie file size is over 150 GB/Hour, and an unencoded 1920 X 1080 movie file size is over 350 GB/Hour).

* By 2010, forecasts call for 80-90% of internet traffic to be video transfer.

The growth in video downloads could create an internet traffic jam that threatens the net's development, according to Google. Websites like YouTube (owned by Google) are heightening the problem and new developments will only make the problem worse.

Bandwidth-intensive applications like video download by even a small portion of Internet users may degrade service, and may even crash the Internet, or parts of it ("Broadband Connectivity Competetion Policy" FTC Staff Report, 2007).

Investment Is Down:

The Satellite Business has not been very profitable in recent years. Satellite Business Systems (a Joint Venture of Comsat, IBM, and Aetna) spent more than a billion dollars for a high speed satellite network supply satellite communication to businesses. It was a total business failure.

Currently, the trend is to rely on the fiber internet for business operations. Hundreds of remote stations (the satellite industry refers to the stations as P.E.S. or personal earth stations), are decomissioned every month in the United States. Relying on the local internet (fiber) is cheaper. The main reason that optical fiber is cheaper is that this market was funded (some say overfunded) during the dot-com bubble. With the excess supply, prices are dirt cheap.

Carriers may not expand their capital-expenditure budgets, because while a bandwidth shortage is a matter of debate, a capital shortage is not. Telecom companies revenue growth has been poor. Borrowing money to add capacity is difficult in this environment. "Bandwidth brownouts" might do what current industry data seemingly cannot-convince Wall Street that investment is necessary.

"National and state policies toward broadband innovation and deployment directly affect the ability of network operating companies to raise investment funding in the capital markets. To the extent that these policies inject uncertainty into the marketplace, threaten the potential return on infrastructure investments, or interfere with the ability to operate the networks in a way that maximizes capacity and efficiency, such policies would directly and negatively limit the ability of network operating companies to support expanding data traffic on the Internet" (David McClure, US Internet Industry Association).

The outcome of these trends is not clear. The conclusion, that the internet is likely to be overtaxed, has been reached by many, though it seems largely to be a secret outside of academia.

If the bean-counters react in time and significantly increase funding of fiber projects, none of the worst case scenarios is necessary. However prudence would dictate that business planners for mission-critical applications account for the potential of systematic internet unreliability.