All The News We Fit To Print

10-21-05 Platinum Financial to Stage "What the Wealthy Need to Know" Webinar Series

04-01-05 HomeTech & AudioVideo Showroom Merge

05-03-04 Hispanic Outlook Feature

10-29-03 Mixed Up Monsters Grabs Prestigious Award

06-20-03 Center For Critical Thinking Hosts First National Scientific Thinking Conference

Platinum Financial to Stage "What The Wealthy Need To Know," A Series of Online Wealth Seminars.

San Francisco, CA (10/21/05) – The old adage, "It's not how much you make, but how much you keep that counts," could not be more true for today' s small business owners and professionals. Taxes, lawsuits and bad investments threaten a high earner’s ability to accumulate money for expansion, retirement and a better lifestyle. However, with proper advice and planning all these threats can be eliminated.

The Platinum Financial Group, headquartered in SanFrancisco, caters to successful business owners and professionals to reduce their taxes, usually by six figures, using legitimate tax strategies not commonly known. Many of its recommendations are done under tight confidentiality agreements because of the advanced nature and exclusive knowledge of the firm and its' advisors. Many plans are installed with pre-approved documents from the IRS, some come with guarantees, and others will shelter assets from creditors and lawsuits.

The firm was established in1885, and currently serves Northern California and a number of local business markets that include Las Vegas, Jackson Hole, and Boseman.

"We work with our clients’ CPAs and tax attorneys to establish case specific strategies that meet the opportunities and goals of each client, said Edward Zucker, Platinum’s President. “Yet, because much of what we do is unknown by most financial professionals, we sometimes need to reveal the opportunities to help update goals for clients before we can begin planning for them. Platinum provides tax codes to support its strategies so that its clients, their CPAs and tax attorneys can recognize, reconcile, and approve them in short order. In most cases these plans are backed with over 14 billion in assets by the plan issuer. Our Webinar also demonstrates how clients can distribute retained earnings on a tax deductible basis; how they can eliminate capital gains tax on the sale of a business; and how they can eliminate employees from their qualified plan and more.”

Platinum Financial will be hosting four fifteen minute webinar presentations in November: 10:00AM, November 1st, 3:00PM, November 3rd, 10:00AM, November15th, and 3:00PM, November 17th. Business owners, their financial advisors and professionals wishing to learn more about these strategies can do so confidentially from their homes or offices, at their computers and by their phones. Space is limited and reservations are necessary. Interested participants need to make reservations and may obtain their free log-on and toll-free conference access codes by contacting Platinum Financial: 415-362-7300. “What the Wealthy Need To Know," is a fifteen minute expose of opportunities and strategies that move wealth forward. If you’re in business, you need to be there!” added Zucker.

HomeTech and AudioVideo Showroom merge to offer fully integrated services for today's electronic lifestyle.

HomeTech Systems, Inc. and AudioVideo Showroom have merged to form Northern California’s leading full-service residential systems integration organization.

HomeTech Systems, Inc is the leading custom electronics and network systems integrator for custom homes in the North Bay. AudioVideo Showroom is the largest custom designer of high end home theater environments as well as resource for high end home theater components, in Sonoma County. As sister entities of CloudBuzz, Inc., the leading independent resource for engineered network solutions in cabling systems, fiber optic cable, connectivity, distribution, network electronics, testing, certification, and integrated support documentation in Telecom Valley, both HomeTech Systems and AudioVideo Showroom serve sweet spots at different, but overlapping, ends of the burgeoning home theater, automation, lighting, and networking industry. Another sister in this amalgamation is Summit Electric, Inc., the leading commercial and residential electrical contractor certified for installs in everything from 0 to 21,000 volts in the North Bay.

“The driving force behind systems integration today comes from new media technologies in the custom theater, information technology, environmental lighting, and security clearance/access, industries,” said Larry Dashiell, HomeTech Systems President. “Where AudioVideo Showroom has been marketing mostly to high-end audiophile and home theater customers with value added integration services at retail, HomeTech has traditionally designed and marketed certified installations through architectural design, home construction, interior design, and commercial security/access industries. Both companies serve similar outcomes, doing the same kinds of things at different levels. The significance in our new synergy is that we are now able to integrate, design, document, sell, install, and consistently certify and warrantee our work as needed through any of our overlapping companies.”

Other significant benefits that accrue due to the merger include the meshing of three exceptionally well-trained multidisciplinary design, engineering, and installation staffs, enhanced task force flexibility, an enhanced level of professional documentation and certification on all installs, stronger customer warranties, and shorter timelines from concept through delivery. The retail presence of AudioVideo Showroom on Santa Rosa Avenue in Santa Rosa will also give HomeTech Systems a public face, bridging its recognition in commercial markets with up-scale home and home-office markets.

To feed this greater level of customer support, HomeTech Systems and CloudBuzz are moving their design, engineering, programming, project management and support staff to a new 7,000 sq. ft. tech center in Petaluma. Besides supporting their growing operations, the new facility will allow these companies to showcase across tech domains as well as provide hands-on demonstrations and training to engineers, CAD professionals, architects, builders, interior designers as well as clients.

Hispanic Outlook Feature

Mixed Up Monsters Grabs Prestigious Award

Hollywood, CA -- 10/29/03 -- MixedUp Monsters Set #1, a participant in Creative Child Magazine's 2003 Top Creative Toy Awards here today, received the Preferred Choice Award in recognition of its "excellence in promoting creativity in play."

Mixed-Up Monsters will be showcased in the nationally distributed "Holiday Issue" of Creative Child Magazine (November 17, 2003) as well as on the magazine's website on the same release date.

"Taking into account the highly competitive nature of the toy business, we are extremely gratified to have received this award in only the first few weeks of the toy's retail introduction," said Gary Scaife, President and CEO of CMX Toys. Inc.

David Larks, creator of Mixed-Up Monsters, thinks today's parents are gravitating towards toys and games "that are educational, creative, artistic, as well as fun; especially those that offer the added advantage of long term play value. I developed the Mixed-Up Monster concept to help children develop these essential skills," said Larks. "I am thrilled that Creative Child Magazine has honored us for these achievements."

Scaife says Mixed-Up Monsters offers everything a child and parent wants in today's toys and games. One Mixed-Up Monsters set gives a child the opportunity to create thousands of different monster designs using easily attachable magnetic parts. "This process expands the limits of a child's imagination, " states Scaife. "And every set is interchangeable with every successive set that will be introduced down the line. In this way, Mixed-Up Monsters is designed to take its place in history along side the Erector Set, Lincoln Logs, and Legos; all toys that help build a child's creativity, dexterity and tactile learning skills."

CMX Toys, Inc, the manufacturer and distributor of the Mixed-Up Monsters Toy and Game Line, is talking with several national, international, as well as regional retailers that have shown a strong interest. The company intends to release a list of outlets within the next few weeks.

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Center For Critical Thinking Hosts First National Scientific Thinking Conference
Why Students Are Not Learning to Think Scientifically

Rohnert Park, California (6/20/03) – As educators and legislators debate the systemic criteria and minutia necessary to return standards based teaching to California and the Nation, others are questioning the fundamental assumptions and long held beliefs on how students learn to think within content dense fields. It’s one thing to design a legal protocol, quite another to grasp the nature of the process. This problem is perhaps most felt within scientific communities where our ability as a society to lead worldwide is most in question.
The First National Conference on Scientific Thinking, hosted by the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California on July 10th and 11th, will bring together educators from a broad range of scientific domains, disciplines, universities, and school systems to explore “thinking” as the pivotal component behind an ability to learn. Are students learning to think scientifically? How should science be taught so that they do?

Representing scientific fields as diverse as physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geology, geography, botany, zoology, biochemistry, molecular biology, botany, zoology, computer science, engineering, medicine, and nursing, conference goers will be looking to better understand the critical thinking process as the key to understanding any line of inquiry or learning. Working in teams participants will lay out the essential concepts in these fields emphasizing their implications for scientific thinking.

The premise of the conference, said Dr. Richard Paul, one of the principal organizers of the conference, is that “there is no way to learn science without learning to think scientifically,” and “that means learning to think biologically, chemically, geologically, and so forth. This is not so much about the abilities of students to learn as it is about the abilities of teachers to teach and foster the learning processes, environments, and reasoning skills that must be present between students and their mentors for discovery, understanding, and learning to take place.”

While the Center has called for standards in education reform since its founding in 1980, Dr. Paul feels the tendency of legislators to micro-manage and politicize the learning process based upon assumptions of the past, is of as much concern as not having any standards at all. He said critical thinking needs to assume its proper place at the hub of educational reform and restructuring; that it, and intellectual and social development generally, are not well served when educational discussion is inundated with superficial treatments, slick merchandising or bombastic hype used to promote or market quick fixes, while substantial, and necessarily more challenging needs, are thrust aside, obscured, or ignored.

“For example, there’s a lot of pressure these days on teachers to cover content and teach to the test without properly addressing what it takes for long term learning to take place,” states Paul. “Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, our greatest scientific thinkers, all rejected rote memorization and content dense lectures as a mode of learning science. All three were successful, not because they had a genius’s I.Q., but because they learned the art of asking questions. They developed a questioning mind. They focused on fundamental ideas. They deeply learned the fundamental skills of scientific inquiry. They became absorbed in basic questions and would not accept superficial answers. They kept their focus and persisted through great frustration.” said Paul.
In a study conducted on the effectiveness of lectures, reported to Dr. Paul by Dr. David Perkins of Harvard, students were given fifty minute lectures and then tested one week later to see how much they remembered. The researchers found, to their surprise, that 80 % of what the students accurately remembered came from the first ten minutes. When the protocol was changed so that class time was broken down into ten minute blocks followed by three minutes to process what had been covered, the students tested one week later remembered four to five times as much as they had in the first go-round.

Dr. Linda Elder, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking, agrees. Elder who, along with Paul and Dr. Gerald Nosich at the University of New Orleans, leads a team funded by the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking to devise multiple teaching strategies that will actively engage students in the absorption of content through the basic thinking that will enable them to learn that content, thinks there needs to be a balance.

“Unfortunately, not only legislators but many teachers are unaware of the demonstrated ineffectiveness of lecture-dominated teaching,” said Elder. “If students are to learn to think scientifically, they must be actively engaged in fundamental critical thinking skills; skills that enable them to think clearly, accurately, precisely, and logically. Educators have a long way to go in this respect. Just consider, for example, that despite every citizen being required to take years of science courses in our public schools, many end up believing in pseudo sciences like astrology. I never heard of an astronomer believing in astrology. Merely memorized science content is simply dead weight in the brain; it does not activate the mind. Conversely, content that gets there through a critically reasoned process is like lightning. It ignites the lines of inquiry and discovery within, and often beyond, the domain. Some legislation that guides our best practices and intellectual standards in behalf of skills that improve the quality and integrity of thinking is needed to ensure critical thinking occupies a central focus in all teaching and learning. But,” she added “we can no longer afford to impose indoctrination, or rote memorization, or bureaucratic agendas onto an already ineffective system at the expense of our students.”

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The First National Conference on Scientific Thinking (July 10th & 11th) will be followed by The 23rd International Conference on Critical Thinking (July 13th & 16th), where the focus will be “Developing the Questioning Mind.” The 10th National Academy on Critical Thinking (July 18-22) will follow. All events will be held on the Sonoma State University campus in Rohnert Park, California.

About The Center For Critical Thinking

The Center for Critical Thinking conducts advanced research and disseminates information on critical thinking. Each year it sponsors an International Conference on Critical Thinking and Educational Reform. It has worked with the College Board, the National Education Association, the U.S. Department of Education, as well as numerous colleges, universities, and school districts to facilitate the implementation of critical thinking instruction focused on intellectual standards.