04.27.10
Posted in technology at 3:38 pm by site admin
Check out this article. I couldn’t have said it any better….
Even when things go right, users are left to feel powerless and stupid. Installing almost any program on a Windows based system involves an inordinate number of clicks, all of them just saying “Okay” “Okay” “Okay”. No one reads the click-through EULAs, no one changes the default installation location, and no one selects specific installation options. They just keep clicking “Okay” because that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And then they end up with four extra toolbars in their browser and a bunch of “helper” programs that don’t actually help the user in any way and which they user doesn’t actually want. And they don’t know how to get rid of them.
and more:
It’s so easy to amass a huge amount of data today — digital photo archives, MP3 collections, and video — that it’s a real pain to reliably back up. Not only is it a pain, it’s expensive. You shell out a couple hundred bucks for a fancy new camera, and you’ll need to shell out a couple hundred morebucks to get an external hard drive onto which you can duplicate all your photos for safekeeping. And then, of course, it takes a long time to actually copy your data from your computer to your external hard drive, and you just don’t have the time or patience to commit to that regularly, so you start to neglect it and them *bam* your computer blows up — hard drive failure, malware infection, whatever — and you lose weeks and months worth of irreplaceable data.
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Posted in business at 2:35 pm by site admin
Check out this article providing 10 tips to improve you elevator sales pitch. Here are the two I think have subtle importance:
2. Have a hook. As Mel Pirchesky advises, “The objective of the first ten or fifteen seconds is to have your prospective investors want to listen to the next forty-five or fifty seconds differently, more intently than they would have otherwise.”
3. Pitch yourself, not your ideas. As Chris Dixon writes, “The reality is ideas don’t matter that much. First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant.” Instead of talking about ideas, highlight what you’ve done – the concrete accomplishments or skills – rather than some intangible concept or a future goal.
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04.26.10
Posted in health, society at 8:25 pm by site admin
Check out this article questioning if there is a link between chocolate and depression. So much for chocolate just being when you are feeling unsatisfied.
When the researchers controlled for other dietary factors that could be linked to mood — such as caffeine, fat and carbohydrate intake — they found only chocolate consumption correlated with mood.
It’s not clear how the two are linked, the authors wrote. It could be that depression stimulates chocolate cravings as a form of self-treatment. Chocolate prompts the release of certain chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, that produce feelings of pleasure.
There is no evidence, however, that chocolate has a sustained benefit on improving mood. Like alcohol, chocolate may contribute a short-term boost in mood followed by a return to depression or a worsened mood. A study published in 2007 in the journal Appetite found that eating chocolate improved mood but only for about three minutes.
It’s also possible that depressed people seek chocolate to improve mood but that the trans fats in some chocolate counteract the effect of omega-3 fatty acid production in the body, the authors said in the paper. Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to improve mental health.
Another theory is that chocolate consumption contributes to depression or that some physiological mechanism, such as stress, drives both depression and chocolate cravings.
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04.18.10
Posted in health at 11:49 am by site admin
Check out this link with a brief discussion on 8 kinda weird/interesting search engines. My favorite is #4: PillBox.
While we’re on the subject of government search engines, how about Pillbox from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. What is it? It’s a search engine for identifying unknown pills. For real! The site warns that it’s still in development and not intended for clinical use, and has all the requisite disclaimers … but it’s still one of the most interesting search engine ideas around. You provide the size, shape, color, and other attributes of a pill, and it returns a list of possible matches along with links for more information about the pill.
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Posted in health at 11:39 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how teen girls’ drinking may lead to breast cancer later in life.
Teen years are a critical time for potential cancer-producing exposures, she said, because the mammary glands are undergoing rapid growth during that period.
Berkey said she suspects the link is due to alcohol increasing total estrogen levels, raising the likelihood of benign breast disease.
“For me, this is not a surprise,” said Dr. Patricia Ganz, director of cancer prevention and control research at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Regular alcohol consumption is known to increase a woman’s risk for both breast cancer and benign breast disease, she said, and “certain forms of BBD increase the risk of breast cancer.”
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04.16.10
Posted in health at 7:55 pm by site admin
Check out this link showing the huge amount of salt in processed food.
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04.15.10
Posted in health at 10:09 pm by site admin
Check out this article about how chocolate can help people with cirrhosis of the liver.
“This study shows a clear association between eating dark chocolate and (lower) portal hypertension and demonstrates the potential importance of improvements in the management of cirrhotic patients,” said Mark Thursz, a professor of hepatology at London’s Imperial College.
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Posted in society at 10:13 am by site admin
Check out short this article on how older people have more social wisdom than younger people. So time to start listening to your elders… Atleast for social problems..
While the researchers expected wisdom to increase with age they were surprised at how strong the results were for disputes in society, Nisbett said. “There is a very large advantage for older people over younger people for those.”
Lynn A. Hasher, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, called the study “the single best demonstration of a long-held view that wisdom increases with age.”
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04.10.10
Posted in Education at 9:04 am by site admin
Check out this opinion column discussing the need to reform the education system. With the current economic recession, there has been alot of news about budget constraints and teacher layoffs. The problem is that most public schools are still in many cases poorly funded and also unable to recruit, and keep talented and passionate teachers.
But states and districts could take a smarter, more effective approach in trimming education budgets, particularly when it comes to teacher layoffs. Most use a “last hired, first fired” approach that does not look at teacher effectiveness. The result is that many schools could end up pushing out some of their highest-performing teachers while keeping their least effective ones.
I also found this point interesting (albiet nothing totally new):
But we know some teachers should not be teaching. While most educators work to meet student needs, a recent survey of teachers found that almost 60 percent said there were educators in their schools who failed to do good work and were just going through the motions.
If we are going to maintain our competitiveness in this ultra-competitive global economy, we need to reform and improve our education system. We hear alot these days about coporates improving their bottom lines (profits) by streamlining their work force and finding employees willing to work for less. So how do we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world? We need to stop focusing on all the quantifable numbers and focusing more on abstract quality and creativity.
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04.08.10
Posted in Religion/Philosophy, society at 9:19 pm by site admin
Check out this link about the Dalai Lama’s 18 rules for living:
At the start of the new millennium the Dalai Lama apparently issued eighteen rules for living. Since word travels slowly in the digital age these have only just reached me. Here they are.
- Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
- When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
- Follow the three Rs:
- Respect for self
- Respect for others
- Responsibility for all your actions.
- Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
- Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
- Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
- When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
- Spend some time alone every day.
- Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
- Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
- Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
- A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
- In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
- Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
- Be gentle with the earth.
- Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
- Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
- Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
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Posted in Education, society at 8:50 am by site admin
Check out this link talking about more affordable options to learning a foreign language.
But why pay at all? There are hundreds of free language-lesson podcasts floating around the Internet. There are dozens on iTunes alone: Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Thai and so on. Of particular note is SurvivalPhrases, which offers 3- to 5-minute episodes that cover basics like “Where is the bathroom?” in 19 languages, including Vietnamese, Russian, Greek and Brazilian Portuguese.
Of course, SurvivalPhrases’ free iTunes downloads, which offer 15 phrases, are there partly to hook you into paying $25 for 45 more at SurvivalPhrases.com.
Another podcast, the nearly five-year-old ChinesePod, has another, more innovative selling point. While many of its 1,300 podcasts are free, access to all of them costs $14 a month, and $249 gets you three months of access to all of them, plus a virtual classroom where you and three other students have — via Skype — weekly hourlong lessons with a Chinese teacher.
Although high-tech solutions are providing lower cost entry for language learners, more comprehensive language programs still cost a pretty penny. If you are looking for a comprensive solution, going old-school can be a suprisingly affordable option:
And for that amount of money, you could learn a language the old-fashioned way – by immersing yourself in a foreign county. For the price of Rosetta Stone’s five-level course, you could do two or three weeks of “super intensive” study at the Casa de Lenguas in Antigua, Guatemala, one of many schools around Latin America that arrange both language lessons and home stays with local families ($85 a week via Casa de Lenguas).
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04.07.10
Posted in health at 8:50 am by site admin
Check out this article discussing how some discomfort/pain during exercise is a good thing.
Experience at exercise will eventually transform these early trials into feel-good experiences, but at first your systems can’t deliver what exercise demands of them. The sensations of breathlessness and burning muscles, for example, correlate with the intensity of your effort. When you’re out of shape, numerous receptors all over your body beg your brain to slow down: I can’t maintain this. As you beef up each system, however, fewer receptors holler for mercy because your systems are no longer working so close to their maximum capacity. Eventually, the number of receptors screaming at your brain will level off, and more pleasant sensations will be able to rise to a conscious level. The signal that was once an emergency siren will become just a familiar signpost: I’ve pushed this hard before. I can handle it. It’ll be OK.
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04.01.10
Posted in Evolution, society at 3:18 pm by site admin
Yesterday, I posted an article about sexist pink toys for girls. On the opposite end of the spectrum, check out this article about how the male brain is not as simple as we think. Yes the area of the brain for sexual persuits is 2.5 times larger in the male brain than the female brain.
You say the “area for sexual pursuit” is 2.5 times larger in the male brain than in the female brain. Do you worry that people will read that and decide your book confirms the stereotype?
I think there is a kernel of truth in stereotypes. But [understanding human biology] doesn’t give males a pass on being civilized or any parent a pass on having to train their sons.
but, there is more to the story. I found this point particularly humorous:
You write that men and women process emotions differently. How?
The mirror-neuron system [MNS] allows us to [see a facial expression] and know what that person is feeling. When we are looking at an infant or another person we care about, women will resonate with that feeling a lot longer than men. This is not to say that men don’t do this. They do. They start out very quickly in the MNS and get a quick flash of what’s going on. Then they switch into another system called the temporal parietal junction system, which allows them to start Google-searching their entire brain circuit for ways to fix the problem.
This type of interaction goes on lots and lots between the couples that come to my office: she just wants him to talk to her about how she’s feeling about something before he launches into giving her the solution. And he feels like, well, what good will it do just to wallow in the feelings? I think one of the things that women don’t focus on or appreciate is that our men really want to make us happy. He’s the fix-it man. He really does want to be our hero, and that’s how he expresses his love.
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