Interesting // Current TV

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

This is my very own space, where I set my heart free....ignorant of the... more

Vivek_Nanda
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What's Your Personality Type?

I'm curious about other users on Current's personality types. If you want or... more

EmperorThan
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Put Down Your Smartphone To Feel Better

A study by the British Psychological Society found a link between stress levels and the number of times a person picks up their smartphone to check messages and mails. As an addict, I can completely agree with this finding. In short, the more you do it, the worse you feel.

Oddly, the study found that less stress was induced when checking work e-mail rather than other online interactions. The group conducted a survey of 100 Britons in different lines of work.

The study found something they called a “helpful-stressful cycle” in which a smart phone is purchased to help manage the workload and then becomes the bane of their existence, inciting compulsive behaviors and stress.

Quoth the BPS:
“Organizations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people’s temptation to check their devices,” said psychologist Richard Balding from the University of Worcester, who presented the findings.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the monkey mind will recognize that cell phones, while making us more connected, actually change our brain chemistry and encourage some obsessive behaviors. I, for one, find myself waking up at night to check e-mails that I know are unimportant at best and a distraction at worst. I don’t smoke but I do slide to unlock in the morning before I roll out of bed.

What we really need, is a Gmail plug-in that will shut down e-mail for certain period of time during the day – perhaps a three-hour window of freedom during the workday and another evening window that prevents all e-mail from rolling in while eating dinner and enjoying some family conversation. The assumption that everyone is always on and always available is a rude one and this study only points to further proof that our mobile lives are encroaching negatively on our corporeal existence.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to Tweet out a funny cat picture from my Nexus.

via BPS

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/17/calmate-put-down-your-smartphone-to-feel-better/A study by the British Psychological Society found a link between stress levels and... more

Anonmaly
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The Truth About Ron Paul

WARNING: Due to the Highly Controversial Nature of this article, it is recommended... more

Anarchadiator
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Online Foktai fun destination on internet

Destination of interesting, offbeat, weird, funny, news and views around the world

sharlenealene [removed]
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America's 25 Highest-Paid CEOs

If you happen to be a billionaire or corporate Fat Cat, you may have noticed a mob assembled near your headquarters or home recently. You may not know what they’re protesting exactly; you might even joke that perhaps this has something to do with why they are unemployed. But when it comes to their complaint that the rich have been getting richer while things keep getting worse for the poor, downtrodden and unemployed, you gotta admit, they have a point.

As you can see from the accompanying slideshow of America’s 25 Highest-Paid CEOs, while the stagnant economy continues to hurt those at the bottom of the American workforce, there’s plenty of money for the .0001% at the top. (The totals, compiled by Forbes’ stats guru Scott DeCarlo, include salary, bonuses, perks and the value of exercised stock options through Sept. 6. Sources are CompuStat ExecuComp and SEC filings).

Compensation for the chief executives of America’s biggest corporations is way up in 2011, 28% higher than last year on average, according to GovernanceMetrics International. If you were already in the top quartile of high-paid plutocrats, your comp nearly doubled. Cash bonuses are triple what they were before the recession.

But if the Occupy Wall Street protesters are in the wrong place to picket the titans on this list. Wall Street is conspicuously absent from the top 10. The highest paid “bankster” is Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who comes in 12th at $42 million, while Larry Fink of BlackRock is 16th at $39.9 million. Goldman Sachs‘ Lloyd Blankfein is way down at $21.7 million.

Many other bank chiefs are also below the S&P 500 CEO average–which for 2010 was $12 million, down 20% from 2007 levels. Bank of America‘s Brian Moynihan and Citigroup‘s Vikram Pandit are barely worth agitating against at $2.3 million and $1.3 million, respectively.

ObamaCare could end up helping three of the top-10 improve their lot in years to come. The top spot goes to John Hammergren of McKesson, the largest distributor of both pharmaceuticals and health care I.T. systems. It’s thought to be in a good position to benefit from President Obama’s health care overhaul. With compensation of $131 million this year (most of it from exercising stock options), Hammergren won’t have to worry about waiting in line to see a doctor. Same goes for George Paz (fifth place at $51.5 million), who runs prescription drug distributor ExpressScripts as well as Stephen Hemsley (eighth place at $48.8) of UnitedHealth Group.

Polo sold enough shirts and chinos to pay Ralph Lauren $66.7 million — ranking him in second place on our list of top-paid CEOs. Still, the company’s proxy says his perks in 2011 will be $344,000 less than last year, as “the corporation will no longer provide Mr. Lauren with unlimited reimbursement for expenses incurred as a result of his use of private aircraft for personal travel.” They’ve capped that perk at $200,000 a year.

Michael Fascitelli of Vornado Realty is third, with compensation of $64.4 million. Bob Iger of Walt Disney (still enjoying the fruits of his Pixar acquisition) took in $53.3 million, is in fourth place.

Some among the top-10 are real standouts, like Michael Watford of Ultra Petroleum, at $43.7 million. Watford has had a great few years finding and developing oil and gas in places like Pennsylvania and Colorado, but the company he runs (market cap $4.5 billion) is far smaller than those of his pay peers, and Ultra shares are down by a third in the past year. Compared to Watford, ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, who didn’t crack the top 25, sounds like a real bargain. The Big Oil chief made just $13.9 million.

See the full list of America’s 25 Highest-Paid CEOs.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/10/12/americas-25-highest-paid-ceos/If you happen to be a billionaire or corporate Fat Cat, you may have noticed a mob... more

Anonmaly
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Hackers aim at real-world targets

If you've seen the 1983 movie "WarGames," in which a young Matthew... more

MirrorsAge
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Satellite survey unearths lost Egyptian pyramids

new satellite survey of Egypt has identified 17 lost pyramids and more than 1,000... more

stehpanie
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1 year ago
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Babies Playing Video-Tender and Touching. « Ramani's blog

nothing like watching children in their innocence.... more

ramanan50
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2 years ago
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Celebrities -30 Famous First Tweets,’It’s Britney Bitch’ « Ramani's blog

Glimpses into Personality?... more

ramanan50
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2 years ago
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Six-year-old Croatian has magnetic powers

In many respects, Ivan Stoiljkovic is much like any other six-year-old boy in his... more

jigar6278
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2 years ago
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Osama and the Ché - Anarchadia

What terrorist advances the causes of empires?… Except for cheap and... more

Anarchadiator
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2 years ago
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Sleep-Deprived Neurons May Shut Down, Even When You’re Awake

When deprived of sleep, parts of the human brain may doze off, secretly snatching moments of slumber even as people seem to be awake.

That could explain why our sleep-deprived selves are so cognitively challenged: We are, if not precisely half-asleep, partially asleep.

“After a long period in an awake state, cortical neurons can go briefly ‘offline,’” wrote researchers led by University of Wisconsin neuroscientists Vladyslav Vyazovskiy and Giulio Tononi in a study published April 27 in Nature. “Although both EEG and behavior indicate wakefulness, local populations of neurons in the cortex may be falling asleep, with negative consequences for performance.”

To study rats’ neurology, Tononi’s team wired their brains to an EEG machine, kept them awake longer than usual, and looked for patterns in readouts of their brains’ electrical activity.

They found that scattered neurons throughout the rats’ brains gradually alternated between periods of activity and inactivity — a pattern associated with deep sleep, not wakefulness. But unlike their synchronization during sleep, these oscillations were brief and disjointed.
‘The ability to control behavior actively with some neural circuits while others may be idling could be evolutionarily advantageous.’

When the researchers tested the rats in a sugar-pellet-reaching task, performance declined in proportion to their neurons’ “offline” status, suggestive of how sleep-deprived people have trouble functioning.

In a commentary accompanying the findings, University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist Christopher Colwell wrote that this piecemeal, neuron-by-neuron descent into sleep squared with other research observations.

Sleepwalkers, for example, seem to inhabit “a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness,” wrote Colwell. Many animals also alternate between shutting down their brains’ left and right hemispheres, allowing for rest while maintaining vigilance.

“These observations also suggest that single neurons can move into a rest state,” wrote Colwell. “The ability to control behavior actively with some neural circuits while others may be idling could be evolutionarily advantageous.”

However, Colwell cautioned against assuming that the patterns seen by Tononi in rats are responsible for short-of-sleep human grouchiness, distraction and poor judgment. For now that’s “arguably an intellectual stretch,” he wrote — but the the data supports further investigations.

“And although it is only anecdotal evidence,” Colwell concluded, “I could swear that some of my students can sleep with their eyes wide open.”When deprived of sleep, parts of the human brain may doze off, secretly snatching... more