In your attic, you probably have one of the standard types of insulation – fiberglass typically. The pink stuff that, if you get it anywhere on your person, you’re itching for hours. Fiberglass insulation does have it’s purpose. In fact it does a pretty darn good job of reducing heat transfer with two of the three possible methods. Those two are convective and conductive. Conductive heat transfer is where the heat transfers from one body to another by direct physical contact – a pot on an electric burner for example. Convective is heat transfer either through a gas or a liquid – if you put your hand over boiling water, the steam will get your hand pretty darn hot. (Don’t try this at home).

However, fiberglass does very little for something called radiant heat transfer. Radiant heat transfer is where heat moves via electromagnetic waves. That’s how the sun heats our atmosphere. Basically, what happens in the middle of the summer is the heat that comes in through the roof is absorbed into the fiberglass. At some point it becomes “full” and can’t absorb any more. So it radiates that heat out. If you think about it, when you go into your attic in the summer on a hot day, it’s pretty darn hot up there, despite the fiberglass insulation.

Enter reflective insulation. This is so simple, it’s elegant. Radiant insulation is like aluminum foil – it has a reflective surface. When the radiant energy hit is, it simply bounces back off it. This is why aluminum foil around a baked potato keeps it warm. The reflective insulation is installed by stapling it to the rafters, typically. It can reduce your energy bill substantially – more than 20%.

Want to know more about it reflective insulation? Go here: http://www.thediygreenstore.com

Or if you want to see some case studies which show how reflective insulation can save on energy costs, go here: http://www.thediygreenstore.com/how-it-works/case-studies/

With the iPhone 5 due this summer, rumors are flying thick and fast. Even the New York Times weighed in with an article that describes a cheaper, easier to use device. The article shoots down one rumor: a smaller “nano” iPhone model.

The Times article also cited improved (but unspecified) voice control. Individual apps can be controlled by speech today, but a lot of people are looking for system-wide speech control.

Another rumor is that the iPhone 5 will include near field communications (a.k.a. RFID), a capability recently added to Android phones. This lets the phones read electronic tags embedded in everyday objects like product packaging. According to an AppleInsider post, the iPhone 5 near field capability will have a unique (but unspecified) twist.

One of the more interesting rumors is of a greatly improved set of services for streaming content to and from the cloud. A Cult of Mac article describes tantalizing video-streaming, location-aware and geo-tagging capabilities.

Other rumored features include a 4-inch screen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

If you’re the kind who likes to look further into the future, here are search results for “iPhone” on Patently Apple, a site that tracks the latest patents awarded to Apple.

You can let one of several WordPress security plug-ins help you with the rest of the heavy lifting. I found WP Security Scan useful.

Here’s the word on improving WordPress security from the WordPress folks themselves: Hardening WordPress.The information here assumes a moderate level of technical knowledge.

Here are some other sites that offer advice on WordPress security:
WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
11 Best Ways to Improve WordPress Security
10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks
WordPress Security – A Comprehensive Guide
20+ Powerful WordPress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks

Avast, AVG and Avira offer free antivirus scanners that check your system in real time and let you schedule scans of your files. Combined with the firewalls built into your network and operating system, these scanners are a strong line of defense. AVG's free version also scans Web links and warns you if a link is a potential threat.

If something does get through, chances are it will install software that tries to steal your passwords, hijack your browser and/or spread viruses. Malwarebytes and Ad-Aware offer free malware scanners that allow you to search your system for rogue software.

Gmer is a free open-source scanner that peers deep into the recesses of your computer looking for rootkit infections. Rootkit viruses are among the most dangerous and most difficult to find and remove.

If you think you've been hit, immediately disconnect your computer from the Internet and DON'T click on anything, even messages that look like they're from an antivirus software package. Use keyboard commands instead: Alternate Tab switches among programs and Alternate F4 closes the active program. Then run your scanners, one at a time.

As with regular advertising, you can expand your affiliate marketing options by signing up with an network, which is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. The largest is Commission Junction. AffiliateSeeking.com has an extensive list of affiliate marketing networks.

Let's say you want to get a sense of a company's intellectual property and R&D strategy for a type of technology. The first step is to search on a patent search engine like the US Patent and Trademark Office database using the company's name and keywords relevant to the technology.

Now search for research papers using the keywords and inventors' names on a vertical search engine like Google Scholar or PubMed. You might find abstracts that give you more or clearer information than you got from the patents.

Continue to pursue these leads, by, for example, searching for patents held by the academic researchers. Each piece of information helps build your picture and also helps you continue your search.

Here's an overview of what's out there in the way of ad networks and services.

Services from the major search engines:
Google Adsense
Yahoo! Publisher Network
Microsoft Advertising

Ad networks:
Adify
Advertising.com
Adversal.com
Burst Media
Casale Media
Chitika
Clicksor
MediaMind
MediaPlex
Performancing Ads
Point Roll
Say Media

These ad networks are for content publishers
with lots of traffic or strong niches:
Federated Media
Gorilla Nation
Technorati Media
Tribal Fusion

These services broker your ad space across multiple ad
networks and manage and optimize your ad selling:
adBrite
Doubleclick for Publishers
PubMatic
Rubicon Project
Yieldbuild

These ad networks only deal in text link ads –
ads that are short strings of linked text:
Bidvertiser
Text Link Ads
TextLinkBrokers.com

Pheedo is an ad network for putting ads in your RSS feed.

Some ad networks offer the option of in-text ads. These are the double-underlined words you sometimes see in a website's content. You'll want to be careful with this intrusive ad format because it can annoy your visitors. Make sure you don't do more harm than good. Likewise with ads that pop up new windows under your visitors' browsers.

In-text-only services:
Infolinks
Kontera

Pop-under ads:
AdvertisingZ.com

The key to making the most of any kind of advertising on your site is closely tracking performance using the ad provider's tools and keeping track of traffic statistics using tools like Google Analytics.

When you start out you'll want to experiment to find the best ad formats and placements, but once you get going you'll want to avoid regularly making wholesale changes. Think of it as tuning a machine rather than rebuilding it.

Here are some useful ad network guides:
Understanding Online Ad Networks: A Web Publishers Guide
Publishers Guide to Ad networks
PublisherSpot.com

What’s more useful is getting alerts from search engines. You can have Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing regularly send you the results of keyword searches on news and other sources.

This saves time by pushing information to you that you’d otherwise have to search for. In essence you can set up your own free content monitoring service. You can track legislation, competitors, industry trends or the goings-on in your hometown.

Bing News alerts, Yahoo Alerts and Google Alerts let you receive e-mail alerts for keyword news searches. You can also get Yahoo Alerts via text message and Google Alerts via RSS feed.

Google Alerts are particularly useful because you can set keyword searches for different sources: news, blogs, webpage updates, video, discussions in Google Groups, or all of the above. You could use this to, for example, set two alerts for the same keyword, one on news and the other on blogs. This would let you separately track events and what people are saying about them.

If your focus is news, you can also create custom sections in Google News. This is useful because it lets you see headlines from several alerts at once.

Make sure to set an alert for your company name.

The wife of one of my college buddies has written some nifty software that changes the equation. Her company, Redstart Systems, makes Utter Command — speech command-and-control software that works with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine.

The software came out of one person’s frustration with out-of-the-box speech recognition. If you’re interested in using speech recognition, this could give you a better way of controlling your computer. If you have repetitive strain injuries that make it hard to use the keyboard or mouse this could be a source of serious relief.

Utter Command lets you use a single speech command to open a file or folder or go to a website. It includes commands that make it easy to edit text and navigate documents. It also lets you name mouse clicks for specific locations, which makes it easy to, for example, click toolbar buttons you use regularly.

Redstart Systems takes a different approach to speech command-and-control. They’ve worked out a grammar that makes commands consistent. Because there’s one right way to say a command, commands are easy to learn.

This approach also makes it possible to combine commands, which makes for major productivity gains. The company says that Utter Command averages 1 speech command for every 2.3 keyboard and/or mouse commands.

More Information on Speech Command and Control Software

When the tools are free and the learning curve shallow, however, it’s worth figuring out how your business can take advantage of online collaboration.

Google Docs is a great option, especially if you (like many businesses) use e-mail as your de facto collaboration tool.

On the face of it, Google Docs are cloud-based versions of word processing and spreadsheet documents. They’re mighty convenient because you can access them anywhere, but lack some of the features of packages like Microsoft Office.

Google Docs’ power is sharing and organization. You can share any document, and decide who can change it and who is limited to viewing it. The documents provide activity tracking, so you can see who’s been working on them, and revision history, so you can recover earlier drafts — all the more important in collaborative environments. You can also download some or all of your documents to back them up locally.

You can send e-mail alerts to document collaborators from within a document. You can open a chat window as you’re working on a document, and two people can edit a document at the same time.

Key to Google Docs power as a collaboration tool is the ability to share folders. When you share a folder, any document you put in it is automatically shared, including nested folders. You can also upload PDFs, Word files, images and other files, and put them in shared folders. You can include someone else’s folders in your file structure. How you structure your folders is key to organizing your online collaboration environment.

You can use Google Docs to maintain internal resources like template files and status reports, and organize your company’s workflow. You can share documents like specifications and punch lists, and manage project schedules with subcontractors. And you can invite your customers to share a dynamic record of what they want, what you promised and what you’ve done.

Here are a couple of places to get you started:
Google Docs Tour
Real Time Collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets