Pre-Employment Hiring Regulations

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/index.cfm

Employment References

It is illegal for an employer to give a negative or false employment reference (or refuse to give a reference) because of a person’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

Pre-Employment Inquiries (General)

As a general rule, the information obtained and requested through the pre-employment process should be limited to those essential for determining if a person is qualified for the job; whereas, information regarding race, sex, national origin, age, and religion are irrelevant in such determinations.

Employers are explicitly prohibited from making pre-employment inquiries about disability.

Although state and federal equal opportunity laws do not clearly forbid employers from making pre-employment inquiries that relate to, or disproportionately screen out members based on race, color, sex, national origin, religion, or age, such inquiries may be used as evidence of an employer’s intent to discriminate unless the questions asked can be justified by some business purpose.

Therefore, inquiries about organizations, clubs, societies, and lodges of which an applicant may be a member or any other questions, which may indicate the applicant’s race, sex, national origin, disability status, age, religion, color or ancestry if answered, should generally be avoided.

Similarly, employers should not ask for a photograph of an applicant. If needed for identification purposes, a photograph may be obtained after an offer of employment is made and accepted.

MD Job Skills Partnership

By John Patti and The Associated Press, WBAL.com

Governor Martin O’Malley will be joining U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to announce a public-private partnership with Discovery Communications to promote job skills.

The O’Malley administration is aiming to increase the number of state residents who receive skills training through the state’s workforce system by 20 percent by next year.

Under the Skills2Compete-Maryland initiative, the administration wants to have working state residents obtain access to the equivalent of at least two years of education or training beyond high school that leads to a career or technical credential, industry certification or a college degree.

FREE Fire Dectectors – Baltimore City

By Edward Gunts, The Baltimore Sun

Baltimore City residents can call 311 to request FREE smoke alarms for their homes, under a new federally funded initiative to help prevent fire-related deaths and destruction.

The city has received a $94,000 federal grant to purchase 10,000 “tamper resistant” smoke alarms with lithium batteries designed to last for 10 years.

City residents can request smoke alarms by calling 311, and firefighters will be dispatched to install them for free. The city is funding the installation.

 One smoke alarm per floor will be provided, but more could be installed depending on the number of residents and other circumstances, fire department spokesman Chief Kevin Cartwright said. An adult must be present at the time of the installation, he said.

Electricity comparison

By Jay Hancock, The Baltimore Sun

 BGE household customers will be about 8.9 cents per kilowatt hour. (Everybody also pays BGE about 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour to deliver the electricity, no matter whom they buy it from.)

Baltimore-based Castlebridge Energy will sell you electric supply for 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour for 12 months — which includes next summer, when BGE’s standard price might nudge up again. (The exact summer price won’t be set until this fall, when BGE buys up the rest of its supply.)

Castlebridge doesn’t charge an early-exit fee if prices drop even more and you want to leave a contract early. Early-termination charges at WGES can hit $200.

Neither does Castlebridge, run by former BGE guys, blow money on a lot of advertising, gift-card gimmicks or friends-and-family marketing shticks and pass on the cost. They just give you the low price. ( cbenergygroup.com.)

Always compare deals for electricity and natural gas on opc.state.md.us, the website of Maryland‘s Office of People’s Counsel, which represents residential utility customers before regulators.

The best “green” electricity deal listed there is from Stream Energy, which says it will buy renewable energy credits from wind generators nationwide equal to 100 percent of your usage. Their price is 9.69 cents per kilowatt hour for 12 months (streamenergy.net).

Also check out Clean Currents’ “neighbor” wind energy option, which promises to buy wind-generated kilowatts within the region. (10.56 cents for 12 months. cleancurrents.com)

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology for home energy

By Jon Hurdle, www.AOL.com

A New Jersy man figured out how to store solar energy in a way that could provide the world with an infinite source of year-round, emissions-free power, but also says no one is listening to him.

The civil engineer  uses fuel cells to convert the power generated by about 150 solar panels so that it can be stored in 11 hydrogen tanks about 100 yards from the house.

For eight or nine months of the year, the photovoltaic cells mounted on Strizki’s workshop roof and scattered around his yard generate more than enough electricity for a full range of domestic appliances.

For the winter months when there isn’t enough solar power for domestic needs, the house draws on electricity stored in hydrogen tanks, which he converts back to electricity with fuel cells.

The technology has allowed Strizki to live off the grid since 2006 without emitting an ounce of carbon or paying a penny to the local utility.

With the recent installation of more solar panels, Strizki now generates 21 kilowatts, or about twice as much power as he needs, and sells the extra to the power company, netting him about $25,000 a year.

A Dream No More

The so-called Hydrogen House, the only one of its kind in the US, is designed to demonstrate that hydrogen fuel-cell technology can work on a practical domestic level at a time when governments are urgently seeking increased energy security and lower carbon emissions to combat climate change.

Widespread replication of the technology could address pressing environmental and economic problems, but the Hydrogen House’s success is not being taken seriously by federal or state governments because, Strizki said, they are too invested in fossil fuels.

Government Support Fades

Greg Reinert, a spokesman for theNew Jersey Board of Public Utilities, said Strizki received $250,000 for the project from the previous administration of Democratic Governor Jon Corzine because the state was interested in developing the science of hydrogen fuel cells.

But he said the technology is both too costly and too extensive for widespread public adoption.

Strizki believes he is seen as a threat to the status quo of the energy industry, especially in New Jersey, with its concentration of oil refineries, and neighboring Pennsylvania, a traditional coal state with a booming natural gas industry.

Strizki, 55, invested about $500,000 in the operation, and says the cost has now come down to $175,000, the price tag for another such building in the Cayman Islands where he recently installed the technology.

The cost could come down further to about $60,000 if the mass production of components achieved economies of scale, he said.

The Inevitable Question

While even the lower figure would be too much for most homeowners, Strizki argued that the technology could become financially attractive if it was adopted on a community-wide scale.

The cost is the big question mark over whether such technology can be widely adopted, saidHaresh Kamath, program manager for energy storage and distributed generation at theElectric Power Research Institute.

Still, the economics may become more attractive as capital costs decline, and researchers reduce the energy lost in the fuel-cell process, he added.

Comcast Internet for Low-Income Families

By Liz Kay, The Baltimore Sun

If you’re part of a household with at least one child who receives free lunch at school, you may qualify for low-cost Internet access for this school year.

Comcast is going to start offering Internet Essentials, which will cost $9.95 per month for download speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 384 Kbps.

In addition for qualifying for free school lunch, participants must live in Comcast country, but they can’t owe money to the company for past-due bills or unreturned equipment.

Don’t have a computer? Comcast will offer customers the chance to purchase a low-cost netbook.

Comcast, according to its FAQ, is committed to offering it for three school years. Mashable reports the company’s motivation for providing this program stems from its merger with NBC Universal, in which it promised to increase broadband access to low-income neighborhoods.

 Call 1-855-8-INTERNET (1-855-846-8376) for an application

MD Foreclosure Assistance Online Portal

By Hanah Cho, The Baltimore Sun

The online portal HOPE LoanPort and GMAC Mortgage have teamed up on a program to allow Maryland homeowners and participating mortgage servicers to exchange documents in foreclosure mediation cases electronically.

The statewide program,  HOPE LoanPort, is scheduled to launch in October and is aimed at streamlining foreclosure mediations.

GMAC Mortgage, which is funding the portal’s development, is the first mortgage servicer to use the system.

HOPE LoanPort also has partnered with the state to provide an online portal for homeowners applying for unemployment assistance through Maryland’s Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program.

International data roaming fees

By Michelle Higgins, The New York Times

To avoid roaming fees completely, select airplane mode or turn off data roaming on your smartphone until you are in a Wi-Fi hot spot, where you can check e-mail or use the Web at much lower costs (often free).  If you were to do either while roaming, your bill would show it.  Plan your trip around Internet cafes, hotel lounges or other free Wi-Fi spots.

If you don’t want to be limited to Wi-Fi in order to read e-mail or access the Internet, consider an international data package, which will allow you to roam at low pre-paid rates.

Last month AT&T introduced international add-on options that provide travelers with more than double the data provided in previous deals.

Travelers who choose an add-on, which is tacked on to existing domestic calling and data plans, now get 50 MB for $25 a month, and up to 800 MB for $200 a month. The data packages are available in more than 100 countries.

Regardless of the data plan you choose, be sure to set your phone’s usage tracker to zero so that you can keep track of how much data you are using while you’re gone. 

If you don’t want to worry about monitoring your data use at all, a pre-paid data package is an easy way to stick to your budget. Telestial, a communications retailer that provides wireless services for travelers, offers deals for smartphone and tablets with rates as low as $1 per megabyte in many countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.

To get those rates travelers must also buy a Passport SIM card ($29), which allows your unlocked cellphone to work overseas and includes $10 of credit for local calls, texts and data. Once you hit your data limit, you must add money to the card if you want to use more. You can also set up auto-loading so that whenever you use up, say, a $10 balance, Telestial will automatically load another $25 (or other pre-determined amount) to your account.

Boost your data package
It has recently become possible to get more out of those international data packages, thanks to new mobile tools that condense downloaded data. Onavo (onavo.com) a new Tel Aviv-based start-up, has an iPhone app that compresses users’ Web, e-mail and application data. The company states that customers who buy, say, a 50 MB, $25-a-month global data package can triple the data by using Onavo.