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Buying pearl jewelry can be fun, exciting and confusing. Whether you're considering a gift of pearl jewelry for someone special or as a treat for yourself, take some time to learn the terms used in the industry. Here's some information to help you get the best quality pearl jewelry for your money, whether you're shopping in a traditional brick and mortar store or online.
Pearls
Natural or real pearls are made by oysters and other mollusks. Cultured pearls also are grown by mollusks, but with human intervention; that is, an irritant introduced into the shells causes a pearl to grow. Imitation pearls are man-made with glass, plastic, or organic materials.
Because natural pearls are very rare, most pearls used in jewelry are either cultured or imitation pearls. Cultured pearls, because they are made by oysters or mollusks, usually are more expensive than imitation pears. A cultured pearl's value is largely based on its size, usually stated in millimeters, and the quality of its nacre coating, which give it luster. Jewelers should tell your if the pearls are cultured or imitation. Some black, bronze, gold, purple, blue and orange pearls, whether natural or cultured, occur that way in nature; some, however, are dyed through various processes. Jewelers should tell you whether the colored pearls are naturally colored, dyed or irradiated.
Clams, oysters, mussels and many other mollusks with limy shells are known to produce pearls. But very few kinds yield gem pearls of jeweler's quality. The pearl is an abnormal growth of mother-of-pearl, or nacre, imbedded in the soft bodies of these shellfish. It is built up, layer upon layer, in the same way as nacre is added to the lining of the growing shell and always has the same color and luster. For example, over the country, hundreds of good-sized pearls are found each year in the oysters we eat. Unfortunately these have no commercial value regardless of whether they have been cooked or not because they are dull opaque white or purple like the shell of the parent oyster. In recent times almost all pearls of gem quality come from the oriental pearl oyster which has a bright shimmering translucent nacre.
A pearl starts growing when some irritating foreign substance such as a sand grain, bit of mud, parasite or other object becomes lodged in the shell-producing gland called the mantle. Pearls formed in the soft flesh where nacre can be added on all sides are most likely to be spherical and the most highly prized. By far the great majority are flattened or variously distorted and have little value. Size, color, luster and freedom from flaws are other essential qualities. Unlike other gems, such as diamonds, pearls have an average life of only about 50 years. In time the small amount of water in a pearl's make-up is lost and its surface cracks. Because they are mostly lime, necklaces which are worn often are injured by the acid secretions of the human skin.
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To be nominated alongside the world's largest and best known Internet sites, and to be named one of the top five news sites for 2003, is an achievement we celebrate," says Amadou Mahtar Ba, president of AllAfrica Global Media. "That this honor has gone to an African organization pearl earrings is particularly gratifying, at a time when African issues are too often under-reported." Akwe Amosu, AllAfrica's Executive Editor/Producer, says that the award also honors the 100 African media organizations whose reporting appears on the site. "Every day," she says, our readers around the world can access what people all over Africa are saying about themselves, their wheat pearl and their concerns. For that unique voice, we are indebted to the editors, reporters and publishers who make it possible." The AllAfrica site posts over 800 stories daily from its participating publications and from its own prize-winning journalists. This is the second year in a row that allAfrica.com has been nominated for Best News. AllAfrica Global Media, the site's producer, is a systems technology developer pearl jewelry and the leading source of news and information about Africa worldwide. In addition to producing allAfrica.com, AllAfrica distributes through mobile and wireless devices as well as to clients such as LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Comtex, Financial Times and Factiva (Reuters and Dow Jones), which reach tens of millions of end users.
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Washington, DC — AllAfrica shared a virtual stage with international media powerhouses at the annual Webby Awards, as one of five nominees for Best News Site of 2003. The awards were presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences during a live webcast from San pearl jewelry Francisco on June 5. Google's news site won the top award in the news division, and the BBC's English-language world news site garnered the most votes in the People's Voice competition. The other three nominees were AllAfrica Global Media's news site allAfrica.com, the MSNBC site, a joint venture of wheat pearlNBC and Microsoft, and the Romanesko media news site of the Poynter journalism institute. The Webby Awards have become the leading honor for web sites, recognizing achievements in technology and creativity in 30 categories. This year's winners include Amazon for Commerce, NASA Earth Observatory for Education, Planned Parenthood for Health, MoveOn.org for pearl earrings Politics, eBay for Services, ESPN.com for Sports, Lonely Planet for Travel and Apache Web Server for Technical Achievement. Nominees hailed from 25 countries, among them the United States, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany. AllAfrica was the only Africa site nominated.
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Xymbol is a technology services provider, offering companies, organizations and institutions access to highly-customized, efficient, cost-effective development and deployment of internet-based systems and applications. Xymbol is committed to providing solutions that pearl earrings boast very low total costs of ownership. A key factor in achieving this low TCO is Xymbol's effective use of leading open source software, such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Xymbol's own application development platform, XML::Comma, is freely available under the GNU General Public License. Xymbol is a division of AllAfrica Global Media, a technology company based in Washington, DC, with offices in five countries. The XML::Comma platform was wheat pearl developed to power AllAfrica's media aggregation and syndication business. AllAfrica's website, http://allafrica.com, hosts content from more than 100 publishers, and AllAfrica's commercial distribution services feed news to hundreds of clients worldwide. In addition, some 400 websites depend on the free "AllAfrica Headlines" service, which uses JavaScript widgets to pull news stories from an XML::Comma server. Xymbol was established in January 2001 by the pearl jewelry AllAfrica board of directors and is managed by professionals with more than 20 collective years of web-development experience.
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As an application development platform, XML::Comma offers programmers a foundation upon which to build complex, dynamic business logic components. Comma's major strength is in supporting web development, but modern web systems require back-end tools that integrate pearl jewelrywith legacy, intranet and desktop applications and interfaces, and XML::Comma was designed with this interoperability in mind. Comma modules can be embedded inside the Apache web server, but are equally at home supporting autonomous server-side processes, providing data access and modelling for GUI applications, or running in on-demand utility contexts. XML::Comma's developer-friendly architecture treats XML documents as members of structured collections, and allows systems designers to define document types using a mixture of XML and Perl. The document "life-cycle" is completely controlled by calls into the Perl API, and pearl earringscommon functionality can be packaged into Perl hooks that are embedded directly into document definitions. Support is provided for multi-definition "includes" and dynamic compilation of embedded subroutines, and the system can be extended in either Perl or C through a simple, flexible interface. Comma manages the low-level transformation of data wheat pearl into structured information, exporting an API that handles much of the detail work inherent in creating, categorizing, sorting, searching, and storing chunks of data. The platform is available for download from http://xymbollab.com.
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