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Not bad for an amateur effort… Amateur photographers have submitted photos for National Geographic's 125th anniversary. Wish you were here?

Your Shot: Beautiful images from the readers of National Geographic

National Geographic magazine turned 125 this month, with an anniversary issue devoted to the power of photography. The magazine moves the birthday celebration off its pages with the October 1st public launch of a photo-sharing platform, Your Shot (NGYourShot.com), that allows photography fans to connect with photographers and editors around virtual assignments, get direct feedback on their work and participate in a unique photography-based community. One of the magazine’s young star photographers, Cory Richards, will usher in the month as lead curator of the magazine’s first assignment on Your Shot.

Led by Richards and his magazine photo editor, Sadie Quarrier, the assignment invites
photographers to share three images that convey how photography can help us explore our changing world. Throughout the assignment, Richards and Quarrier will provide photo tips and feedback on the images that are submitted along with direction on what they feel will best help tell the story. Their favorite photograph will be selected to appear in a future issue of National Geographic magazine. Participants must join Your Shot, National Geographic’s free online photo community and storytelling platform, to submit photos to the assignment, which runs until Oct. 22. (National Geographic)

Here's a look at some of the offers for the first assignment, "Explore our Changing World" and links to the galleries of the photographers.

Photograph and caption by Junichi Saito, National Geographic Your Shot - Seagull - Feeding a seagull.

Photograph and caption by Wayne Panepinto, National Geographic Your Shot - Perfect Catch - I'm amazed how easy the sea lions catch their food. I'm very happy for sea lion Lily and Seneca Park Zoo with the Daily Dozen end results

Photograph and caption by Rolf Maeder, National Geographic Your Shot - Night of Lightning at Grand Canyon - It was such a wonderful experience to witness this beautiful thunderstorm far across the Grand Canyon

Photograph and caption by Junaid Ahmed, National Geographic Your Shot - People at Prayer - Ijtema is the second largest muslim gatherings in the world after Hazz.The gatherings is so huge that people did not get place at the field to pray jumma prayer and sited themselves at road

Photograph and caption by Ryan Deboodt, National Geographic Your Shot - Camp inside Hang Son Doong - After two days of trekking and caving, we reach the first camp inside Hang Son Doong, the world's largest cave

Photograph and caption by Dimitris Maroulakis, National Geographic Your Shot - Weightless - Freediver slides peacefully over sea bed in the blue hole area of Vouliagmeni.

Photograph and caption by Noel Kerns, National Geographic Your Shot - Meteorite - Abandoned farmhouse near Sanger, Texas. 3-minute exposure under a 3/4 moon, f/5.6, ISO 200. Interior of house light-painted with X2000 flashlights

Photograph and caption by Arati Rao
Photograph and caption by Arati Rao, National Geographic Your Shot - Best Shelter Ever - A baby shelters under its mother one late afternoon in Sri Lanka

Photograph and caption by Eiko Jones, National Geographic Your Shot - Cloud of Tadpoles - While photographing lilies in a local swamp a cloud of tadpoles swam by numbering in the thousands, all following along in a trail

Photograph and caption by Andrew Inaba, National Geographic Your Shot - The Ice Caves - Granite Falls, Washington is home to the Big Four Ice Caves; A large network of tunnels formed from heaps of avalanche-deposited snow, and hollowed by cascading water and warm winds. Spectacle and beauty must come with respect, as the ice is prone to collapse and cave-ins

Video: Why "Liking" Facebook pages can be a bad idea

Facebook pages which say things like "Type ‘move’ into the comments and watch what happens” are usually a scam.

Watch this Video

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/upgrade-facebook-scam-alert-140000071.html

You’ve seen those pictures posted on Facebook “type ‘move’ into the comments and watch what happens” or “If I get a million likes my dad will get me a car.” They seem innocent enough, but they are big business, and you are not doing yourself any favours if you like or comment.

The classic example is a colourful picture of a prism with the image from the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album in it. It’s accompanied buy the caption: “OMG it really works ♥ Step 1: Click on the Picture. Step 2: Hit Like.Step 3: Comment "MOVE" Then see the Magic!!” You see in your news feed that your friends have liked and commented on the image, so clearly something amazing must happen when you interact as directed. So you click, you comment, and... nothing happens.

Or at least you think nothing happens. But your activity has now spread this image and the page into the news feed of all your friends.

It’s called Like Farming. Here’s how it works. Someone creates a page and starts posting photos inspirational quotes or other innocent content. You like the page and it now shows up regularly in your news feed. Anytime you interact with a post, that activity shows up in your friends’ news feeds.The more likes the page gets, the more it shows up. The more comments each picture gets, the more power the page gets in the Facebook news feed algorithm.And that makes it more and more visible.

The social engineering of these sites is impressive, stimulating pictures like the Pink Floyd image described above or moving stories of‘causes’ that need your likes for support. The most famous of these revolved around a girl called “Mallory”

"This is my sister Mallory. She has Down syndrome (sic)and doesn't think she's beautiful. Please like this photo so I can show her later that she truly is beautiful." But there is no Mallory. The picture is of a girl named Katie whose mother is horrified that her daughter’s image is being used for the scam.
Scammers Are Making Money Off Your Likes

So why would the owners of these fan pages go to such lengths to scam us into liking? Because there’s money to be made from them.

When the page gets enough fans (a hundred thousand or more)the owner might start placing ads on the page. Those ads show up in your news feed. They could be links to an app, a game, or a service they want you to buy. It could be a “recommendation” for a product on Amazon where the page owner gets a commission for every purchase made through the link. Or more nefariously, the page owner could be paid to spread malware by linking out to sites that install viruses on your computer for the purposes of identity theft. Bottom line: access to your news feed is lucrative.

Fan Pages For Sale

Just as a magazine that sells ads, these pages are a business, and they can be bought and sold just like any other business. Online message board, Warriorforum.com listed multiple sites for sale like this page with almost 500,0000 fans of hamburgers. Price tag to buy the site: $5000. Another site about cuddling has over a million fans and was listed for sale on Warrior Forum for $7000. Many of these postings on Warrior Forum come and go for fear that Facebook will find out about them and take the sites down. For example, I found this Friends TV show page for sale for $8500 but the Warrior Forum listing has since been removed. This page has 1.8 million likes and posts a note right on Facebook stating it’s for sale – no price listed – just a warning against “low offers.”

A spokesperson for Facebook says selling pages is specifically against the terms of service, and any page that is sold or engages in fraudulent behavior can be removed. But clearly this is a cat and mouse game,with Like Farms popping up on a regular basis.

How To Unlike

If you’ve liked something and now regret it, you can unlike it. Go to your profile,choose “more” button and choose “likes” from the drop down menu – then “Unlike.”

If you have friends who are over-liking on scammy posts,share this on your Facebook Page so they’ll get the message.

STRESS RELIEF. Is salt bad for hypertensive?

What is bad for hypertension is iodized salt, which is a fake salt. It
is made up of only 3 synthetic chemicals, sodium, chloride, iodine. It
does not melt in water (glistens like diamonds), does NOT melt in the
body, does not melt in the kidneys, gives kidney stones, and raises
blood pressure. However, it is the salt favored by the syntheticshe
drug-based doctors who say it is very clean and sanitary, pointing to
how white it is and how it glistens like diamonds. The fake salt is
man-made in a factory. The true salt, which comes from the sea and
dried under the sun and commonly called rock salt , has 72 natural
minerals including natural sodium, chloride, iodine. It melts in
water, melts in your body, melts in the kidneys, do not give kidney
stones, and best of all brings down blood pressure and stops/prevents
muscle cramps, numbness, tingling.

If you get muscle cramps in the lower legs at night, just take ½
teaspoon of rock salt and a glass of water, and the cramps with its
horrific pain will be gone in 5 minutes. The highest BP that came my
way was in a woman who had a BP of 240/140 and came to my house at
10:30 pm on what she said was a matter of "life and death" because the
high BP was already giving her a crushing headache, especially the
back of her head. She could not walk up the 6 shallow steps to my
porch. Two men had to help her, one on each side, in addition to the
cane that she needed to prop herself up.

I muscle tested her and found that underlying her BP of 240/140 and
the crushing pain in the head, her body's water content was only 6%
(normal is 75%), salt content was zero, potassium was 96% deficient,
and cardiac output (blood flow from the heart) was only 40% (normal is
100%). So the blood supply to the head was 60% deficient.

I gave her one 6" long green chili (hot pepper), 1 raw ripe saba
banana, 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and 3 8-oz glasses of tap water.
The chili was to normalize cardiac output and shoot blood to the head, the
saba banana was for the potassium deficiency and to have food in the
stomach because pepper will give a stomach ache if the stomach is
empty, and the rock salt and the water were the first aid for her
severe dehydration which was causing her arteries to be dry and stiff
and her blood to be thick and sticky, because they were dehydrated.

After 5 minutes, she said, "The pain in my head is gone." We took her
BP, it was 115/75, and cardiac output was up to 100%.

She walked out of the house to her car without the men helping her and
without the cane.

She has been taking 2.5 teaspoons of rock salt, 15 glasses of water, 6
Saba bananas and 3 of the long pepper daily since then (beginning
September 2009), and her BP and cardiac output have been normal since
then.

Two months later, in November, at a PCAM round table forum on
hypertension in Club Filipino, she gave her testimony, followed by her
brother who said that she grew 2", because the salt and the water had
refilled her compressed disc spaces in her vertebral column. The disc
spaces had become compressed because they had become dehydrated since
the fluid filling up these discs are 95% water.

Why salt? Because without salt the body cannot retain water no matter
how much water is drunk. You will still be dehydrated because you will
just keep urinating and sweating the water out.

This is not an isolated case. When BP is rising high but there is
little or no headache but there is stiffness of shoulder and neck
muscles, all you need to normalize the BP and remove the stiffness and
the pain in 5 minutes is 1/2 teaspoon of rock salt and 3 glasses of
water. If there is crushing pain in the head, it means blood supply to
the head is lacking, and you will need the chili to normalize it and
shoot blood to the head and remove the extreme pain.

PLEASE SHARE, IT MAY HELP SOMEONE