Merit Increase Letter Sample: Fill & Download for Free

They’re all pretty ridiculous. I’ll give each one it’s own special rating, rather than a ranking. It’s hard to directy rank silly or crazy against dangerous or “bought and paid for.”“The Earth is flat.” So Stupid It’s Silly.This is silly on just so many levels. Mankind has been sailing, then flying, around the earth for hundreds of years. We have launched communications, imaging, and GPS satellites that just about everyone in modern civilizations rely on every day for a variety of services. And if you want to, you can tie your smartphone to a cheap-ish weather balloon, send it up, and see the curvature of the earth yourself.Not to mention that, for a flat earth to actually seem flat, you have to also eliminate the force of gravity. Otherwise, the “flat” isn’t flat anymore at the “edges”. People in Chile, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand would believe they live on the side of a steep cliff, with “down” point North… assuming the usual model of Antarctica as the “edge”.“Evolution is a hoax.” Stupid. Indoctrinated.Evolution is a fact. There are plenty of interesting areas of science working on the details, but there is absolutely no disagreement in the scientific community about the truth of evolution. People untrained in scientific thought don’t understand the difference between fact and theory. Thus, the “it’s just a theory” nonsense you occasionally hear. Or the attempts to debunk evolution based in the state of the science back in the 1960s.To understand how science works, you need to know the difference between fact and theory. A fact is a single, verifiable thing. We know there were dinosaurs, we know what they were, and we know when they walked the earth, because we have their fossils, and even just recently extracted intact proteins from dinosaur bones (sorry, no DNA going back that far, no “Jurassic Park” just yet). Those are facts.A theory is a model that incorporates all known facts, explains those facts, and makes new predictions. For example, the theories we had about evolution long pre-existed the discovery of DNA. Today, we have complete genomes, and we know that most of the relationships between species are found as expected in the comparative maps of their DNA. When this new DNA thing didn’t match the evolutionary models, we didn’t ignore the fact of DNA, we improved the evolutionary models.Of course, the “Evolution is a hoax” meme hasn’t even existed for very long. Sure, Darwin’s theories were kind of earthshaking, in both good and bad ways. But by the mid-19th century, evolution was accepted fact. The was and is embraced by most major religions. In fact, the modern science of genetics began with experiments done by Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk. Today, Pope Francis embraces both the Big Bang Theory and Evolution, stating that God is not "a magician with a magic wand."In the West, it’s specifically attributable to a small group of Fundamentalists. In the USA, anti-evolution though grew out of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy in the 1920s. In England, it was the Evolution Protest Movement, founded in 1932, the first western organization devoted specifically to opposing the science and teaching of evolution. As this group got more sophisticated and made attempts to re-cast Christian Theology as Pop-Science. It also grew increasingly Fundamentalist, in the 1970s embracing the myth of Noah’s Flood and the myth of a 6,000-or-so-year-old-Earth, ideas the EPM had soundly rejected . This group was renamed the Creation Science Movement in 1980.“Climate change is a hoax.” Dangerous. Stupid. Bought and Paid For.The only controversy over man-made climate change is artificial. Period. Oil companies like Exxon have spent tens of millions or more spreading disinformation. Their PR people understand that people and the media are often stupid about controversy. Once you convince some that there might be a second side to an issue, they automatically try to appear “fair and balanced”, despite the relative merits of each side. And the oil companies, among the largest and most profitable of any corporations on the planet, know that the scientists and activists working to get the truth out don’t have anything close to their bankroll.Exxon in particular had done the studies back in 1977 (Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago). But they also knew that openly admitting the truth would be very, very expensive. And like most old, slow, stupid companies, they didn’t understand their business. Exxon had a chance to become an actual energy company and get a lead on clean energy, rather than remain an oil company that will eventually fade and fail. But particularly among US companies, they're looking at the next quarter, not the next decade or century.That’s of course because their ridiculously overpaid managers are looking at their bottom line, not the company’s long-term health. It doesn’t matter if they set the organization on a course toward energy domination in 20 years if today, those managers are not receiving the bonuses and advances they need today.As in most things, follow the money and power. All the money is on the side of those trying to convince people that climate change is false, or even as Trump branded it, a Chinese hoax. Funny how those same Chinese are driving hard to become the leaders in the $19 trillion green energy market (Trump’s Stance on Climate Change is a Gift to China), while Trump is trying to resurrect the zombie we call coal, a thing that Kennedy campaigned on, and failed to accomplish (Dave Haynie's answer to Do Trump supporters realize they could have great jobs working in sustainable energy instead of working in coal?). Maybe it’s not just the Russians hacking things in the Trump Administration?If you want to see climate change in actual action, it’s all around. Go visit Alaska and see glaciers that have retreated a dozen miles since the 1970s. More here: https://climate.nasa.gov/effects, 15 Irrefutable Signs That Climate Change Is Real, NOAA's Ten Signs of a Warming World, The Signs of Climate Change, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alaska-s-glaciers-are-retreating/).“Vaccines cause autism.” Breathtakingly Stupid and Dangerous.This one represents a very special kind of stupid. We know for a fact that this was all started in 1998 in a fraudulent study conducted by Andrew Wakefield (Retracted autism study an 'elaborate fraud,' British journal finds). And even this faked study only claimed a link between autism and the MMR vaccine (MMR vaccine controversy). The “Anti-vaxxer” conspiracy theorists have claimed this false link for any vaccine.Above is pictured a map of various disease outbreaks attributed to the irrational fears of vaccines (Vaccine preventable outbreaks are real). All completely preventable. Since this spread of anti-vaxx lies, we’ve seen the worst epidemics of formerly-conquered diseases in a generation. Measles, pertussis (whooping cough), mumps, and other diseases. Ok, sure, it’s “only” a few dozen completely preventable deaths in the USA every year. No one’s quite sure about the brain damage and other “fun” side-effects. Of course, we haven’t had the scale of outbreaks seen recently in other countries. Measles currently kills about 120,000 people a year.On the scale of history’s scientific heroes, Edward Jenner ranks #5, for the invention of the Smallpox Vaccine. That’s estimated to have saved around 530 million lives. To get a sense of that number, that’s 530 million is every person on earth who speaks Arabic. That’s one South Korea away from the total population of North America.“GMOs are deadly.” Very Dangerous.Most people are unaware that humans have been genetically modifying organisms basically since since the Neolithic Revolution, 12,000–10,000 years ago. We have genetically modified all kinds of things. Nearly every plant we eat, nearly every animal we eat, even the things that make our clothes were all created, over the centuries, by humans. There are 339 recognized breeds of dogs… not one of them naturally occurring.And don’t think that DNA modifications are somehow dangerous or fundamentally different than selective breeding. It’s faster, sure, when applied to slow breeding organisms. And it’s a popular claim by the Anti-GMO people that this is fundamentally different in some way. But take a look at one of the most successful selective breeding programs we’ve engaged in… accidentally: our Superbug Program. The abuse of antibiotics that’s lead to selective breeding of all sorts of dangerous bacteria. There are more deaths from MRSA in any given hour than from all terrorist attacks in an average year, 1/3 as many as typical US auto accident deaths.So ok, now we can do this faster, in a lab, by editing DNA. It’s not fundamentally different, at least until you get to transgenics (DNA shared from other organisms). Only… it still is, because even transgenic modification occurs in nature, without our help (Genetically modified crops? Nature got there first).Far as GMOs being deadly, nothing is further from the truth. The #6 scientist on the list of lifesaving heroes of science is Norman Borlaug. Not exactly a household name, but he’s reckoned to have saved about 259 million lives… and that’s a low estimate. Some would count it at over a billion (The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives). Norman is considered the “Father of the Green Revolution”. He led the adoption and spread of a whole slew of different technologies — including genetically modified foods — that wiped out famine across the earth. He’s one of only seven people to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.About one third of all living Nobel Prize laureates signed an open letter calling on governments around the world to approve GMOs. The letter reads “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?” And still, today, not a single case of a single GMO causing anyone any harm. Much less death. So eat what you want. If you really want to be weird about food, be weird about food. But don’t work to take food away from other people.And yes, some corporations that make GMOs have terrible policies, aggressive legal departments, and a habit of crushing individuals. But so do some corporations that do not make GMOs. Never confuse the basic technology with those who are abusive in some way related to it.“Humans have never been to the Moon.” Barking [at the moon] Mad.This is another of the really annoying ones, though it’s not killing anyone … yet. But please check this out, about Buzz Aldrin and “The Punch”: Well-Aimed and Powerful. That’s who we chose to be the second guy to walk on the moon.. the real life Doc Savage. My Dad woke me up late at night, as an 8 year old kid, to watch the Apollo 11 landing. We saw Apollo 8 take off in Florida… yeah, I was actually there. Not in a Hollywood studio. Those two things are a big part of why I was a science geek as a kid, majored in math and electrical engineering and other stuff, and have had a career in engineering ever since.The astronauts brought back moon rock samples, which have been studied by thousands. They left behind all kind of junk on the moon, and mirrors that’ll reflect your laser back at you if you aim it properly. This was a project involving hundreds of thousands of people, none of whom were mysteriously disappeared, not one of whom claims it didn't happen. It is beyond human ability to keep quiet about small lies involving hundreds of people… politicians run afowl of this regularly.And this was during the Cold War, when Russian spies would have loved nothing better than to catch us in a lie. The Chinese and the Europeans have seen this junk on the moon with their space telescopes. Lunar probes from many countries have seen up close.And like most of these situations, none of the so-called “debunkers” understand what they’re talking about. They call out things in photos without even a basic understanding of photography, for example. And this isn’t a small number of people: 27% of Americans, in recent polls, doubt that mankind has been to the moon. More here: Dave Haynie's answer to Why do 27% of the Americans not believe that American astronauts landed on the moon? Dave Haynie's answer to Even when proof exists that the moon landing was a hoax, why do school textbooks continue to glorify the Apollo mission?. Personally, if Buzz isn’t around to do the job, I’m happy to land a good punch on this kind of idiot.

There's never a plan. Life is a journey, you visit different places; learning throughout.I won’t bore you with my past, I'll tell events which happened to me after I got Recommended.25th November 2016, Selection Center South (Bangalore). All the hard work paid off. I was Recommended for SSC Tech 48 course. Yes, the exam to which Wikipedia entry says, ‘SSB is the world's toughest army test’. I had goosebumps for the whole day, being high in the future to come.Medicals started from 26th, every single report was marked ‘normal, healthy or fit’It was on 30th, which was supposedly final day of my medical. I got to know, I had a low hemoglobin (12.5, Defense standard is 13–17). Quite a normal thing right? Just some pomegranate, spinach and beetroot shall do. That’s what everyone said. Even the AMC (Army Medical Corps) medical officer thought so. He asked me to give a blood sample for a retest after 2 days as by his observations I wasn’t anemic. Retest reports were same as before. He gave me a ‘Temporary Unfit’ for 42 days, prescribed a diet and assured hemoglobin will surely improve.5th December, Durgapur, back to home; my family, my extended family of more than 40 members, rejoicing for me. I went to a super specialty hospital consulted an expert dietitian, he prescribed few supplements and an iron rich diet. And said hemoglobin will surely increase. Subsequently, police verification, gazetted officer verification, educational verification all formalities (common process before joining the academy) were happening.In a few days, everyone knew. My teachers, neighbors, maids, Doodhwala (milkman), every other person I knew was advising me “Anar aur palak khao ab toh afsar bann rhe ..teen mahine me’ (eat pomegranate and spinach, now you’ll be officer in a few months)I was keeping track of my hemoglobin weekly, 12.3, 12.5, 12.8, 12.5; it just won’t cross 13! Consulted 3 other senior doctors, each one of them assured it’ll improve; keeping on increasing my medicine dosage.13th January, Command Hospital Kolkata. Met the doctor after formalities, asked for a complete Hemogram. 14th, reports came. Hemoglobin 14.4! I was in clouds, 7th heaven again. Met doctor, he asked his assistant to mark me ‘FIT’ and ready the documents. Just before signing he studied report once more. Some components were lesser than ranges. Ask for a retest from an outdoor pathology (for assurance), I was diagnosed with a genetic condition of lower volume of Red Blood Cell. He said these words “It’d be difficult for you to survive and face extreme physical, mental stress and strain of army standards at high altitude; resulting in hemoglobin loss”.Shattered! Every plan, dreams everything I hope for the future to be shatter with that. He crossed the ‘FIT’ written in the document and wrote ‘permanently unfit for defense forces’.I think, I can’t describe in words how my family, friends, everyone who knew felt. It was a shocker for everyone.Later, in March I made it to the merit list but got a letter from MoD (Ministry of Defense) that I won’t get the Joining Letter.I wasn’t depressed, just silent, isolated, feeling lonely to myself, frustrated by everything. It took more than one month to get back my mojo. It was my family and two of my friends Piyush, Rishu; I owe them many things which they don’t acknowledge. I recollected myself, I didn’t have any Plan B.1st March, Ready for my next challenge. I joined a start-up of my friend Sushant, my college senior and roommate for 3 years. Being from a business background, I knew what was calling me, being an entrepreneur was the second thing in my list of wishes. I joined as a Co-founder at InternStreet; learning, experimenting with things applying everything I’ve learned about economics, human behavior and psychology. I was always fascinated by the power of social media and internet. I had a hobby of following latest trends and staying updated with technological developments, that’s why I chose working on something which I admire; Digital Marketing.“In case you never get a second chance: don't be afraid!" "And what if you do get a second chance?" "You take it!”―C. JoyBell C.I don’t know, what will I be up to after few months. I’m sure about one thing, I’ll learn.14th April, Bangalore, I’m writing this. I just want to say,Never stop learning. It’s life, it’ll take you to many places, make you face many situations. It’s all worth and will connect someday. Whatever you do and have done, shapes you become whatever you want to.You may take any path, the end goal should be constant. To be happy and successful in life giving back something to the society; contributing to the human evolution.“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”~ Steve JobsEDIT: My this answer was published in SSBCrack. It received more than 5,000 shares.This SSB Success Story Will Make You Emotional Also A Lesson For Defence AspirantsHello again, I’m Anshuman Agrahari. If you want to share your story or know more about mine, please let me know in comments.

Q. Is it possible to receive scholarship from SAT score?Scholarships for SAT and ACT Scores (Princeton Review)Scholarships By SAT Score (Scholarships.com)Guaranteed Scholarships Based on SAT/ACT Scores (PrepScholar)Guaranteed Scholarships and Financial Aid134 College Scholarships Awarded SOLELY for High Grades and SAT/ACT Scores - The College Matchmaker111 Ridiculously Awesome Full Tuition Scholarships - The College MatchmakerUnigo ScholarshipsTuan Nguyen's answer to What are some scholarships that are worth looking at?Merit Scholarships for SAT and ACT ScoresAs more and more colleges go test optional, you might be wondering if you need to sit for the SAT or ACT at all. Schools that are test optional do not require standardized test scores as part of a complete application. Instead, you have the chance to decide for yourself if your scores accurately reflect your abilities and potential to excel in college.Test Optional? You Should Still Take the SAT/ACT.Even if every school on your college list is test optional, it’s still a smart idea to take—and prep for!—at least one standardized test.For one, “optional” doesn’t mean that that colleges won't consider your test scores if you submit them. Without them, greater weight is given to other aspects of your application such as your transcript, essay, extracurricular and letters of recommendation. If you’re happy with your scores, go ahead and include with them your application.Beyond getting in, your test scores could qualify you for merit-based scholarships (often a separate application process). Higher test scores can lead to more scholarship dollars, which mean more options for you!Nothing can change a student’s fortune faster than a big increase on the SAT or ACT.Better Scores Can Earn You Big AwardsHigher scores can increase a student’s desirability in the eyes of financial aid officers and consequently increase the size of the aid package that student is offered. In fact, standardized test scores (along with GPA and rigor of coursework) may determine who will receive merit scholarships. Some schools even give out guaranteed scholarships to students whose scores meet a minimum threshold.Sample List of Merit-based Scholarships*Critical Reading + Math**Average merit award for qualifying individuals.The Bottom LineEven if you don’t need test scores for your college application, you will likely need them for most of the scholarship applications you fill out, including those for outside scholarships that are not affiliated with your college but sponsored by community organizations or foundations.Kal Chany, author of our book Paying For College Without Going Broke, explains, “Nothing can change a student’s fortune faster than a big increase on the SAT.” Why? While it takes four years to accumulate all those great grades on your high school transcripts, the typical test prep course takes six weeks.Check Out Our New Periodic Table of Scholarships!By Tamara 05/29/2015Do you remember your high school or college chemistry class? You probably had your share of fun trying weird experiments or mixing chemicals, but there may have been one thing you really hated to learn…the periodic table of elements.Sure, a few elements were pretty easy to memorize with some creative tactics (AU, I want some gold!), but a lot of it made absolutely no sense. For example, why is potassium represented by the letter K, and why is FE used for iron? There's proably a perfectly logical explanation (look them up on Google) why those letters are used, but that doesn’t make it any easier to remember them. Thankfully, ScholarshipExperts.com has found a way to use the periodic table in a manner that makes perfect sense…with scholarships!This new, interactive Periodic Table of Scholarships is cool on so many levels. You can quickly target scholarships that reward you for your athletic talent, such as playing volleyball or tennis. Or, you can find free money based on your year in school or even your college major. There are also links to company-sponsored scholarships and those offered by ScholarshipExperts.com. If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, you need to check those out ASAP (yes, there's a zombie scholarship!). Here’s another exciting element to the table — you can actually download a print version to carry with you or hang on your bedroom wall. We all need a few reminders to search and apply for scholarships, and this will do the trick. So, what are you waiting for? Check out Scholarships for College: 3.6M Scholarships, Over $14B | Unigo's Periodic Table of Scholarships and start finding free money to help you pay for college today!Discussion