FPL Engineer Shares Love of Engineering with Under-Served Youth

It’s important to me to be able to give back to my community by promoting science and engineering fields to children who have limited exposure to them,” said FPL Production Assurance Engineer Melanie Roger. “If I can help get young children interested in the sciences and have a desire to enter into the field, than I feel as though I've been successful. We should all do our part in ensuring the success of our future leaders.”

Juno Beach, FL, February 25, 2012 -- Florida Power & Light's Melanie Roger has a passion for her profession.

As a young girl, she dreamed of going into medicine, like her parents. It wasn't until she got to college, at the University of South Florida, that she decided to change course. Roger switched her major to engineering, hoping it would help her “stand out” among the other medical school candidates. During her course of study, she discovered this was her true love.

It taught me a different way to think and how to solve a problem using numerous methods,” Roger said. “I want to share that with others.”

As a Production Assurance Engineer at Florida Power and Light’s Lauderdale combined cycle plant, Roger enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for engineering with the youth of her community. She volunteers with a group called SECME - the Southeastern Consortium of Minorities in Engineering. It’s a national organization that seeks to prepare under-served or under-represented students for careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

It’s important to me to be able to give back to my community by promoting science and engineering fields to children who have limited exposure to them,” said Roger. “If I can help get young children interested in the sciences and have a desire to enter into the field, than I feel as though I've been successful. We should all do our part in ensuring the success of our future leaders.”

This month, Roger got a chance to share her passion for engineering with students from 55 schools throughout Palm Beach County. She served as a judge at the annual SECME Olympiad - a competition that’s the result of a year’s worth of study, experimentation and creativity.

This year students squared off at Santaluces High School in Boynton Beach on Feb. 11. The Olympiad theme, “Plan It, Live It, Build It” featured a wide variety of hands-on activities and competitions that included a “Brain Bowl” - a trivia-like game that pits students against the clock and one another, to answer science-related questions. The students also competed against one another to see who could design the strongest wooden bridge, the fastest “mousetrap car” (propelled by a spring through a mousetrap), and the highest-flying water bottle rocket. Other competitions included creating essays, poems, banners and posters for the event.

Roger joined several other FPL engineers as a volunteer judge. “It was so energizing to see how excited the kids were about participating in the Brain Bowl,” she said.

Roger advises students that pursuing a career in engineering can be challenging, but she says it is also very rewarding. She encourages students to feed their curiosity and never stop learning. “Perseverance always prevails,” she says.

About Florida Power & Light Company
Florida Power & Light Company is the largest electric utility in Florida and one of the largest rate-regulated utilities in the United States. FPL serves 4.5 million customer accounts in Florida and is a leading employer in the state with approximately 10,000 employees. The company consistently outperforms national averages for service reliability while customer bills are below the national average. A clean energy leader, FPL has one of the lowest emissions profiles and one of the leading energy efficiency programs among utilities nationwide. FPL is a subsidiary of Juno Beach, Fla. - based NextEra Energy, Inc. (NYSE: NEE). For more information, visit http://www.FPL.com.

Media Contact:
FPL Media Line
Florida Power & Light Company
700 Universe Blvd.
Juno Beach, FL 33408
305-552-3888

BusinessVibes presents its Features - Feature your Events in few steps

Platform provides its user with many useful features allowing them not only to ease and fasten their daily business activity but also to promote their upcoming events and feature brands and products.

London, UK, February 25, 2012 -- BusinessVibes is a new platform invented for companies and associations all over the world to help them to run their businesses on a daily basis. Platform provides its user with many useful features allowing them not only to ease and fasten their daily business activity but also to promote their upcoming events and feature brands and products. Companies and associations can create professional network of buyers, suppliers and partners. Members of specific network can send messages, requests for proposals, exchange their electronic business cards with others and share files and documents.

Within the network users can as well invite other companies to join their events as attendees or exhibitors. BusinessVibes has even taken one step further and offered their users possibility to collect registration fees through the portal. The only thing the user needs to do is to create event and wait for responses. Designers of the website took care to make navigation as easy as possible; it takes only few steps to publish your event on BusinessVibes website.

First of all you need to register by providing your professional email address on http://www.businessvibes.com and click on registration button. Confirmation email will be sent to your inbox, when you only need to click on “Proceed to login” and finish registration process by filling required fields.

After that you can access your profile and create as many events as you wish. Simply go to calendar icon on the top of the website and choose: Create new event. You will be redirected to event creation page with all the fields you can fill to make your event more attractive for visitors. You need to type name of the event, dates, description and prices, even discounts if you wish to provide any. BusinessVibes allows attaching logo of your event and venue. You can also determine who you want to receive responses from. If you are looking for visitors only you can exclude all other options like: sponsors, visitors or suppliers.

After those few fields to be filled you simply click on “Next” and your event is registered. You can freely invite users from your network to join the event by using the button “Invite participants” or share your event on social media platforms. BusinessVibes not only makes your event visible for its users. Thanks to public profile of your event created automatically, your event will be visible for all Internet users, no matter if they already are BusinessVibes members or not. When your event is already finished you can still receive comments and reviews about it on your event’s profile.

In a few steps you can gain much bigger online exposure and increase number of attendees. BusinessVibes is definitely a must for all event organisers.

Media Contact:
Marta Munia
Marketing Executive - Europe
Businessvibes Network International Inc.
8 Wimpole Street
London W1G 9SP
Tel: +44 20 7291 0883
E-Mail: marta@businessvibes.com
Web: http://www.businessvibes.com
Follow us on Twitter @businessvibes for daily updates

NBA Fans Sure That Jeremy Lin Is For Real; In China, Thousands of His Jerseys Are Not

Stony Brook, NY (February 25, 2012) -- It took only 10 days for New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin to move from unknown Harvard grad to international, cover-of-Sports Illustrated sensation. That sent New York Times reporters scurrying downtown to discover whether the sharp-eyed basketball phenom had been paid the highest compliment: whether products associated with him, like jerseys and shoes, had been counterfeited and were being sold on the city’s notorious counterfeit black market on Canal Street.

But in China, it’s a completely different story. Counterfeiters in China have stepped up. Can it be a surprise then, that on Wednesday, NY Times article reported from Hangzhou, China that counterfeiting there had already been going great guns? “His jerseys have sold out, even including the counterfeit ones,” said Zheng Xiaojun, a 24-year-old clerk in the capital of Zhejiang province, the home of Lin’s distant relatives according to claims in the People’s Republic. While appreciative of the clerk’s honesty, at the time the article was written there were no “Lin jerseys,” so all the articles in the store were counterfeits-known as jiade, or “fake” in Chinese.

Is there any solution to this global wave of sports clothes fakery?

The phenomenon may seem a classic case of ‘too big to solve, too distant to care.’ But in fact that’s far from the case” says Applied DNA Sciences of Stony Brook, NY, which is already authenticating cotton in the U.S. and wool from the U.K.

Applied DNA is actively involved in the global effort to ensure the authenticity of products and the protection of global supply chains from counterfeiting and diversion. Patented and applied in over a billion products throughout the world, the company’s SigNature® DNA markers are unique, botanical, “green” DNA sequences that can help preserve the quality and integrity of products ranging from pharmaceutics to cosmetics. DNA authentication takes on the big jobs by authenticating the legitimate product, instead of identifying every fake. That is a flexible and eminently practical way of handling the biggest global housecleaning jobs.

For further reading, please visit the Applied DNA blog.


About APDN

APDN sells patented DNA security solutions to protect products, brands and intellectual property from counterfeiting and diversion. SigNature DNA is a botanical mark used to authenticate products in a unique manner that essentially cannot be copied. Our mark provides a forensic chain of evidence that can be used to prosecute perpetrators. To learn more, go to http://www.adnas.com where APDN routinely posts all press releases.

Janet Vasquez
IRG, LLC - Wholly owned subsidiary of DirectMarkets Group, LLC
1251 Avenue of the Americas, 20th Floor
New York, NY 10020
Tel: 212-825-3210

Applied DNA Sciences
25 Health Sciences Drive, Stony Brook, NY 11790