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To delay may mean to forget
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Donation instructions: see below & Home Page
__________________________
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We at STAF, Inc. want to know how this advice website has improved your & your family's life
Let us know in your donation letter
or email: [email protected]
___________________________
Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.
- not-for-profit -
- the leading new organization in all family & life success topics -
* Nationwide - Worldwide *
__________________
. World's # 1 free advice website Successo-Pedia©
for all family matters, success, health, wealth
& for the good life
___________________
with
Free Question & Answer service
___________________
"STAF, Inc. is your STAFF for your NEW life"
* health * family happiness * financial freedom
__________________________________________________________
STAF, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization &
needs your donations
Donation instructions, see: Home page
Every page top has a donation link
for using your credit, charge, or debit cards
As its name indicates, SAVE THE AMERICAN FAMILY - STAF, Inc. is helping families in all their challenges nationwide in The U.S. and in addition, STAF Inc.'s services are worldwide.
As a not-for-profit we do need your donations as cash funds and/or as your volunteer services.
For cash funds donations see the contact information in the home page.
Volunteering your time to serve people together with us communicate via email (info in home page).
Everyone's help is needed
Every person is welcome, whatever your background, every professional is welcome: pro-bono lawyers, social workers, doctors, office workers, etc. and also YOU are needed, nationwide & worldwide. Everyone can help somehow, e.g. anyone can help us to give out food from our vans to the homeless people. The need is endless. We also need the industry to donate their products - STAF, Inc. needs new vans and other vehicles - the American car makers are participating. We thank everyone for any help you are able to provide.
All our financial sources are used in our work to help the American Families and families worldwide in any necessary matter.
Part of STAF, Inc.'s income comes from high-level private services. Our private services are given by several worldwide leading specialists. In our private services there is a fee. The services are of the highest level possible - our unique guarantee given in our private services marks the quality.
Most of STAF, Inc.'s private services are given a double guarantee: lifetime result-guarantee with only a-one-time fee.
See tab (= page) "Services", close to the top the list of the double-guaranteed private services.
________________________________________________
To delay may mean to forget
- Your help will ease human suffering and save lives -
Donation instructions: see below & Home Page
__________________________
STAF, Inc - until every family is doing well©
We at STAF, Inc. want to know how this advice website has improved your & your family's life
Let us know in your donation letter
or email: [email protected]
___________________________
Save The American Family - STAF, Inc.
- not-for-profit -
- the leading new organization in all family & life success topics -
* Nationwide - Worldwide *
__________________
. World's # 1 free advice website Successo-Pedia©
for all family matters, success, health, wealth
& for the good life
___________________
with
Free Question & Answer service
___________________
"STAF, Inc. is your STAFF for your NEW life"
* health * family happiness * financial freedom
__________________________________________________________
STAF, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization &
needs your donations
Donation instructions, see: Home page
Every page top has a donation link
for using your credit, charge, or debit cards
As its name indicates, SAVE THE AMERICAN FAMILY - STAF, Inc. is helping families in all their challenges nationwide in The U.S. and in addition, STAF Inc.'s services are worldwide.
As a not-for-profit we do need your donations as cash funds and/or as your volunteer services.
For cash funds donations see the contact information in the home page.
Volunteering your time to serve people together with us communicate via email (info in home page).
Everyone's help is needed
Every person is welcome, whatever your background, every professional is welcome: pro-bono lawyers, social workers, doctors, office workers, etc. and also YOU are needed, nationwide & worldwide. Everyone can help somehow, e.g. anyone can help us to give out food from our vans to the homeless people. The need is endless. We also need the industry to donate their products - STAF, Inc. needs new vans and other vehicles - the American car makers are participating. We thank everyone for any help you are able to provide.
All our financial sources are used in our work to help the American Families and families worldwide in any necessary matter.
Part of STAF, Inc.'s income comes from high-level private services. Our private services are given by several worldwide leading specialists. In our private services there is a fee. The services are of the highest level possible - our unique guarantee given in our private services marks the quality.
Most of STAF, Inc.'s private services are given a double guarantee: lifetime result-guarantee with only a-one-time fee.
See tab (= page) "Services", close to the top the list of the double-guaranteed private services.
________________________________________________
Quotation
"People who think they can change the world
are crazy enough to do it"
Click: Steve Jobs
Click: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak. Under Jobs' guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad.
Click: Steve Wozniak
Click: woz.org
If Steve Jobs was the public face of Apple, then Steve Wozniak—the inventor of the first personal computer and
co-founder of what would become one of the world's most popular companies—was surely the soul of the company.
Click: iPhone
Click: Apple - iPad
Click: Creation Myth
_______________________
Five characteristics of successful people:
(1) Dedication, (2) Having the right plan, (3) Ambition, (4) Desire to help other people
to succeed, (5) Never giving up no matter how many times a failure may come
These 5 will build also a successful, happy marriage
(Dr. Christian, Founder, STAF, Inc.)
_________
(1) Dedication, (2) Having the right plan, (3) Ambition, (4) Desire to help other people
to succeed, (5) Never giving up no matter how many times a failure may come
These 5 will build also a successful, happy marriage
(Dr. Christian, Founder, STAF, Inc.)
_________
_______________________
"There is more to life
than increasing its speed"
Mahatma Gandhi
from Sanskrit mahātman, from mahā great + ātman soul
Also called: Bapu = father (of the nation)
Mahatma Gandhi - Wikipedia
___________________________________
STAF, Inc.'s mission for your family's best:
Less suffering - more life™
________
STAF, Inc. saves lives
To inspect STAF, Inc.'s first 4 pages in its original founding acceptance documents provided by the State of New York
click: mission - STAF, Inc.'s purpose and its mission statements are in those 4 pages
STAF, Inc. is a not-for-profit organization
_________________________
________________________________________
Do better if possible,
and that is always possible
Francois Constantin
Click: Vacheron Constantin
____________________________________________
Success building formula
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny."
Click: ― Mahatma Gandhi
_______
When someone asks how you are doing, answer:
I am blessed
and highly favored,
strongly energized
(then you will and so will the other person or group)
________
A-must-to-read - that's why this is at the top of this page
Good Article - everyone will find in this text new success & happiness for life
Love People, Not Pleasure
ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life: click: Abd-ar-Rahman III
“I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.”
Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”
Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great emir. But with a little knowledge, you can avoid the misery that befell him.
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
So when people say, “I am an unhappy person,” they are really doing sums, whether they realize it or not. They are saying, “My unhappiness is x, my happiness is y, and x > y.” The real questions are why, and what you can do to make y > x.
If you ask an unhappy person why he is unhappy, he’ll almost always blame circumstance. In many cases, of course, this is justified. Some people are oppressed or poor or have physical ailments that make life a chore. Research unsurprisingly suggests that racism causes unhappiness in children, and many academic studies trace a clear link between unhappiness and poverty. Another common source of unhappiness is loneliness, from which about 20 percent of Americans suffer enough to make it a major source of unhappiness in their lives.
THERE are also smaller circumstantial sources of unhappiness. The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the No. 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss (which, as a boss, made me unhappy to learn).
Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for
Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.
For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
So fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust.
From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better.
This assumption actually has a name: the “Coolidge Effect,” named after the 30th president of the United States. The story (probably apocryphal) begins with Silent Cal and Mrs. Coolidge touring a poultry farm. The first lady noticed that there were very few roosters, and asked how so many eggs could be fertilized. The farmer told her that the virile roosters did their jobs over and over again each day. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” she told him. The president, hearing the remark, asked whether the rooster serviced the same hen each time. No, the farmer told him — there were many hens for each rooster. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” said the president.
The president obviously figured these must be happy roosters. And notwithstanding the moral implications, the same principle should work for us. Right?
Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.
Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.
___________
Good Article - everyone will find in this text new success & happiness for life
Love People, Not Pleasure
ABD AL-RAHMAN III was an emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain. He was an absolute ruler who lived in complete luxury. Here’s how he assessed his life: click: Abd-ar-Rahman III
“I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity.”
Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:
“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”
Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, you probably have the same problem as the great emir. But with a little knowledge, you can avoid the misery that befell him.
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
So when people say, “I am an unhappy person,” they are really doing sums, whether they realize it or not. They are saying, “My unhappiness is x, my happiness is y, and x > y.” The real questions are why, and what you can do to make y > x.
If you ask an unhappy person why he is unhappy, he’ll almost always blame circumstance. In many cases, of course, this is justified. Some people are oppressed or poor or have physical ailments that make life a chore. Research unsurprisingly suggests that racism causes unhappiness in children, and many academic studies trace a clear link between unhappiness and poverty. Another common source of unhappiness is loneliness, from which about 20 percent of Americans suffer enough to make it a major source of unhappiness in their lives.
THERE are also smaller circumstantial sources of unhappiness. The Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues measured the “negative affect” (bad moods) that ordinary daily activities and interactions kick up. They found that the No. 1 unhappiness-provoking event in a typical day is spending time with one’s boss (which, as a boss, made me unhappy to learn).
Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for
Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
Some look for relief from unhappiness in money and material things. This scenario is a little more complicated than fame. The evidence does suggest that money relieves suffering in cases of true material need. (This is a strong argument, in my view, for many safety-net policies for the indigent.) But when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery, too.
For decades, psychologists have been compiling a vast literature on the relationships between different aspirations and well-being. Whether they examine young adults or people of all ages, the bulk of the studies point toward the same important conclusion: People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed and more frequent drug users, and even to have more physical ailments than those who set their sights on more intrinsic values.
No one sums up the moral snares of materialism more famously than St. Paul in his First Letter to Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Or as the Dalai Lama pithily suggests, it is better to want what you have than to have what you want.
So fame and money are out. How about pleasures of the flesh? Take the canonical hedonistic pleasure: lust.
From Hollywood to college campuses, many assume that sex is always great, and sexual variety is even better.
This assumption actually has a name: the “Coolidge Effect,” named after the 30th president of the United States. The story (probably apocryphal) begins with Silent Cal and Mrs. Coolidge touring a poultry farm. The first lady noticed that there were very few roosters, and asked how so many eggs could be fertilized. The farmer told her that the virile roosters did their jobs over and over again each day. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” she told him. The president, hearing the remark, asked whether the rooster serviced the same hen each time. No, the farmer told him — there were many hens for each rooster. “Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” said the president.
The president obviously figured these must be happy roosters. And notwithstanding the moral implications, the same principle should work for us. Right?
Wrong. In 2004, two economists looked into whether more sexual variety led to greater well-being. They looked at data from about 16,000 adult Americans who were asked confidentially how many sex partners they had had in the preceding year, and about their happiness. Across men and women alike, the data show that the optimal number of partners is one.
This might seem totally counterintuitive. After all, we are unambiguously driven to accumulate material goods, to seek fame, to look for pleasure. How can it be that these very things can give us unhappiness instead of happiness? There are two explanations, one biological and the other philosophical.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects. The practice that achieves this is charity. Few things are as liberating as giving away to others that which we hold dear.
This also requires a condemnation of materialism. This is manifestly not an argument for any specific economic system. Anyone who has spent time in a socialist country must concede that materialism and selfishness are as bad under collectivism, or worse, as when markets are free. No political ideology is immune to materialism.
Finally, it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires. Of course you are driven to seek admiration, splendor and physical license. But giving in to these impulses will bring unhappiness. You have a responsibility to yourself to stay in the battle. The day you declare a truce is the day you become unhappier. Declaring war on these destructive impulses is not about asceticism or Puritanism. It is about being a prudent person who seeks to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Abd al-Rahman never got his happiness sums right. He never knew the right formula. Fortunately, we do.
___________
"If you can dream it you can do it"
Walt Disney
___________
click: Walt Disney - Wikipedia
The same motivational point:
"Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, you can achieve"
Napoleon Hill
click: Napoleon Hill - Wikipedia
___________
click: Napoleon Hill Quotes
Click: Think and Grow Rich: Your Key to Financial Wealth and Power ...www.amazon.com › Books › Self-Help - Think and grow rich is the most important financial book ever written. Napoleon Hill researched more than forty millionaires to find out what made them the men ...
STAF, Inc. endorses this book by Napoleon Hill
_______________
Quotati0n
I never dreamt of success
I worked for it
Estee Lauder
Explaining her success, she said,
"I have never worked a day in my life without selling.
If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard."
Click: Estée Lauder
____________________________________
Let's give the First Amendment topic the honor to start this
Successology® (Reg.U.S.Pat.Off.1991), the new science of success page
as it is one of our important human rights
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
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The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.
AMENDMENT I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
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Protecting the Speech We Hate
Date: October 9, 2013
By PAUL SHERMAN and ROBERT McNAMARA - lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm
Click: The Institute for Justice www.ij.org/ Institute For Justice - The nation's only libertarian, civil liberties, public interest law firm.IJ litigates in state and federal courts around the country on behalf of our ...
Libertarian = 1. One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state. 2. One who believes in free will.
Click: Libertarianism Libertarianism (Latin: liber, "free")[1] is a set of related political philosophies that uphold freedom as the highest political end.[2][3] This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty,[4][5] political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism Libertarianism
The Article
Protecting the Speech We Hate
ARLINGTON, Va. — SHOULD one-on-one advice and counseling be protected as free speech? It sounds like a no-brainer. Of course it should be. But a recent decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit says otherwise.
Ruling on two First Amendment challenges to a California law that prohibits licensed medical providers from using talk therapy to try to change a minor’s sexual orientation, the court said that such therapy is “conduct,” not “speech,” and therefore deserves no protection.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: We have no sympathy for the plaintiffs in these cases. We are offended by their speech. And we think the world would be a better place if the plaintiffs accepted gay people for who they are, instead of treating them as if they were broken and required what is euphemistically called “reparative” therapy.
But none of that has anything to do with the central legal question: Is one-on-one advice and counseling — not just about homosexuality, but about anything — protected free speech under the First Amendment?
The answer to that question has national significance and will extend well beyond the fate of the California law and a similar one in New Jersey that is now being challenged in federal court. The Ninth Circuit’s ruling that talk therapy doesn’t count as “speech” has drastic consequences for thousands of Americans who speak on all sorts of harmless, everyday topics.
Those Americans include people like Steve Cooksey. Mr. Cooksey is a resident of North Carolina who was recently ordered by that state’s dietitian licensing board to stop offering dietary advice through his Web site. The board’s reasoning? Dietary advice is not speech, it’s the “conduct” of nutritional assessing and counseling.
His case is not unique. Our organization, the Institute for Justice, which represents Mr. Cooksey in a First Amendment lawsuit against the North Carolina licensing board, is confronting similar arguments nationwide in cases involving speech about parenting, pet care and even history. Under the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, governments could regulate this speech however they wanted, as long as they relabeled it “conduct.”
Lawyers for the state of California made exactly this argument. They said the state was not regulating “speech,” but rather “medical treatment” that could be restricted just like brain surgery or electroshock therapy. But whether or not something is protected by the First Amendment does not hinge on whether we decide to call it “speech” or “treatment.” It hinges on whether or not the government is regulating something that communicates a message. Brain surgery and electroshock therapy do not, but talk therapy — whatever else it does — clearly communicates a message.
Accepting California’s approach would undermine free-speech protections entirely. After all, any kind of speech can be relabeled “conduct.” Professors engage in the conduct of “instructing,” political consultants in the conduct of “strategizing,” and stand-up comedians in the conduct of “inducing amusement.”
Fortunately, the United States Supreme Court has made clear that governments cannot escape the First Amendment by playing this kind of labeling game. Three years ago, the court held that the First Amendment applied even to expert legal advice to terrorist groups. The federal government in that case made exactly the same argument that California was making here, that such advice was “conduct,” not speech. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, though it did find that the government’s interest in combating terrorism was strong enough to uphold the law under First Amendment scrutiny.
The same reasoning applies here. Talk therapy, like other advice, consists of communication, and communication gets First Amendment protection even when the government calls it conduct.
Importantly, the plaintiffs in the California case would not have automatically won their case had the Ninth Circuit held that the First Amendment applied. Instead, the government would then have had the burden of coming forward with actual evidence that the law addressed a real problem and limited speech no more than was necessary. That burden is serious, but it is not insurmountable. It simply means that courts take free speech very seriously, and government officials must present real evidence that their restrictions are necessary to fight a real danger.
It is possible, maybe even likely, that California will be able to meet this burden with regard to its reparative therapy law. But it was the Ninth Circuit’s responsibility to ensure that the state did so, and the court failed.
Now the Ninth Circuit has a chance to correct this error. The plaintiffs in these cases have asked the court to grant a rare “en banc” rehearing, before the entire court, to reverse the panel’s ruling. Our organization has filed a brief in support of this request. The Ninth Circuit should grant the review — not for the sake of the plaintiffs, but for the sake of the thousands of other people who speak for a living and whose rights also hang in the balance here.
Source: Paul Sherman and Robert McNamara are lawyers at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.
Institute for Justice
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Institute For Justice - The nation's only libertarian, civil liberties, public interest law firm. IJ litigates in state and federal courts around the country on behalf of our ...
Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice is what a civil liberties law firm should be. As the national law firm for liberty, we stick to a clear mission engaging in cutting-edge litigation and advocacy both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government. Our four pillars of litigation are private property, economic liberty, free speech and school choice. Simply put, we seek a rule of law under which individuals can control their destinies as free and responsible members of society.
The Institute for Justice is a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) organization; donations are tax-deductible.
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Source: The Institute for Justice
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Quotation
"Vulnerability is the birthplace
of innovation, creativity and change"
Brené Brown
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For every person to read
This article has plenty of valuable information
A Formula for Happiness
Is there a clear answer to what road leads to life happiness - yes there is, according to this article
This is a must-to-study article
Every article in this world's # 1 free advice website Successo-Pedia©
builds success & happiness & financial wealth to your live
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If the green link to any article or research given in this page or in any page in this website has expired and is outdated, search the article with its title in the internet or in a specific publication
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HAPPINESS has traditionally been considered an elusive*) and evanescent**) thing. To some, even trying to achieve it is an exercise in futility. It has been said that “happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight (= set/come down to rest ) upon you.”
elusive*) =difficult to find, catch, or achieve
**) evanescent = soon passing out of sight, memory, or existence; quickly fading or disappearing."a shimmering evanescent bubble" - synonyms:vanishing, fading, evaporating, melting away, disappearing
Social scientists have caught the butterfly. After 40 years of research, they attribute happiness to three major sources: (1) genes, (2) events and (3) values. Armed with this knowledge and a few simple rules*), we can improve our lives and the lives of those around us. We can even construct a system that fulfills our founders’ promises and empowers all Americans to pursue happiness.
Click green for a video where the author of this article is giving a seminar lecture - click for a video: a few simple rules
Psychologists and economists have studied happiness for decades, actually thousands of years.
They begin simply enough — by asking people how happy they are.
The richest data available to social scientists is the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, a survey of Americans conducted since 1972. Click: General Social Survey (GSS) | NORC.org
In the GSS link you can find hundreds of articles.
This widely used resource is considered the scholarly gold standard for understanding social phenomena.
The numbers on happiness from the survey are surprisingly consistent. Every other year for four decades, roughly a third of Americans have said they’re “very happy,” and about half report being “pretty happy.” Only about 10 to 15 percent typically say they’re “not too happy.” Psychologists have used sophisticated techniques to verify these responses, and such survey results have proved accurate.
click: have proved accurate - click green for another research project titled: The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures click: have proved accurate
Alan B. Krueger,Princeton University 一 David A. Schkade University of California, San Diego
First Draft: August 2006 - This Draft: January 2007 - if the link has expired search for the study with its title
"The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures
Beneath these averages are some demographic differences. For many years, researchers found that women were happier than men, although recent studies contend that the gap has narrowed or may even have been reversed. Political junkies might be interested to learn that conservative women are particularly blissful: about 40 percent say they are very happy. That makes them slightly happier than conservative men and significantly happier than liberal women. The unhappiest of all are liberal men; only about a fifth consider themselves very happy.
But even demographically identical people vary in their happiness. What explains this?
The first answer involves our genes. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have tracked identical twins who were separated as infants and raised by separate families. As genetic carbon copies brought up in different environments, these twins are a social scientist’s dream, helping us disentangle nature from nurture. These researchers found that we inherit a surprising proportion of our happiness at any given moment — around 48 percent. (Since I discovered this, I’ve been blaming my parents for my bad moods.)
Click Researchers at the University of Minnesota for a research article
Happiness Is a Stochastic*) Phenomenon (if the green link has expired search the article with its title or search in the Pyschological Sience publication)
*) stochastic = randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely
David Lykken and Auke Tellegen
University of Minnesota
Psychological Science Vol.7, No. 3, May 1996Click: Psychological Science - Association for Psychological Science
Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is a leader in the field of psychology, with a citation ranking/impact ..
If about half of our happiness is hard-wired in our genes, what about the other half? It’s tempting to assume that one-time events — like getting a dream job or an Ivy League acceptance letter — will permanently bring the happiness we seek. And studies suggest that isolated events do control a big fraction of our happiness — up to 40 percent at any given time.
But while one-off events do govern a fair amount of our happiness, each event’s impact proves remarkably short-lived. People assume that major changes like moving to California or getting a big raise will make them permanently better off. They won’t. Huge goals may take years of hard work to meet, and the striving itself may be worthwhile, but the happiness they create dissipates after just a few months.
So don’t bet your well-being on big one-off events. The big brass ring is not the secret to lasting happiness.
To review: About half of happiness is genetically determined. Up to an additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our recent past — but that won’t last very long.
That leaves just about 12 percent. That might not sound like much, but the good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way.
The first three are fairly uncontroversial. Empirical evidence that faith, family and friendships increase happiness and meaning is hardly shocking. Few dying patients regret overinvesting in rich family lives, community ties and spiritual journeys.
Work, though, seems less intuitive. Popular culture insists our jobs are drudgery, and one survey recently made headlines by reporting that fewer than a third of American workers felt engaged; that is praised, encouraged, cared for and several other gauges seemingly aimed at measuring how transcendently fulfilled one is at work.
Those criteria are too high for most marriages, let alone jobs. What if we ask something simpler: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your job?” This simpler approach is more revealing because respondents apply their own standards. This is what the General Social Survey asks, and the results may surprise. More than 50 percent of Americans say they are “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their work. This rises to over 80 percent when we include “fairly satisfied.” This finding generally holds across income and education levels.
This shouldn’t shock us. Vocation is central to the American ideal, the root of the aphorism that we “live to work” while others “work to live.” Throughout our history, America’s flexible labor markets and dynamic society have given its citizens a unique say over our work — and made our work uniquely relevant to our happiness. When Frederick Douglass rhapsodized about “patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put,” he struck the bedrock of our culture and character.
I’m a living example of the happiness vocation can bring in a flexible labor market. I was a musician from the time I was a young child. That I would do it for a living was a foregone conclusion. When I was 19, I skipped college and went on the road playing the French horn. I played classical music across the world and landed in the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
I was probably “somewhat satisfied” with my work. But in my late 20s the novelty wore off, and I began plotting a different future. I called my father back in Seattle: “Dad, I’ve got big news. I’m quitting music to go back to school!”
“You can’t just drop everything,” he objected. “It’s very irresponsible.”
“But I’m not happy,” I told him.
There was a long pause, and finally he asked, “What makes you so special?!”
But I’m really not special. I was lucky — lucky to be able to change roads to one that made me truly happy. After going back to school, I spent a blissful decade as a university professor and wound up running a Washington think tank.
Along the way, I learned that rewarding work is unbelievably important, and this is emphatically not about money. That’s what research suggests as well. Economists find that money makes truly poor people happier insofar as it relieves pressure from everyday life — getting enough to eat, having a place to live, taking your kid to the doctor. But scholars like the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman have found that once people reach a little beyond the average middle-class income level, even big financial gains don’t yield much, if any, increases in happiness.
So relieving poverty brings big happiness, but income, per se, does not. Even after accounting for government transfers that support personal finances, unemployment proves catastrophic for happiness
click for several studies for the negative effects of unemployment:
Click green: Economist's View:Unemployment
economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/unemployment/
... an even more catastrophic effect on personal happiness that we thought. ... Another study shows that the long-term unemployed experience ...
Abstracted from money, joblessness seems to increase the rates and click: suicide,
to see the Research report Unemployment and suicide. Evidence for a causal association?
and the severity of click: disease to see the study
Unemployment and cancer: a literature review
And according to the General Social Survey, nearly three-quarters of Americans wouldn’t quit their jobs even if a financial windfall enabled them to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. Those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least prestigious jobs were actually most likely to say they would keep working, while elites were more likely to say they would take the money and run. We would do well to remember this before scoffing at “dead-end jobs.”
Assemble these clues and your brain will conclude what your heart already knew: Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”
In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success.
This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data. Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics.
You can measure your earned success in any currency you choose. You can count it in dollars, sure — or in kids taught to read, habitats protected or souls saved. When I taught graduate students, I noticed that social entrepreneurs who pursued nonprofit careers were some of my happiest graduates. They made less money than many of their classmates, but were no less certain that they were earning their success. They defined that success in nonmonetary terms and delighted in it.
If you can discern your own project and discover the true currency you value, you’ll be earning your success. You will have found the secret to happiness through your work.
There’s nothing new about earned success. It’s simply another way of explaining what America’s founders meant when they proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that humans’ inalienable rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Click: United States Declaration of Independence - Wikipedia, the free ...en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence
The Declaration of Independence is a statement adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which announced that the thirteen American colonies, ...Signing of the United States - Second Continental Congress - National Archives
This moral covenant links the founders to each of us today. The right to define our happiness, work to attain it and support ourselves in the process — to earn our success — is our birthright. And it is our duty to pass this opportunity on to our children and grandchildren.
But today that opportunity is in peril. Evidence is mounting that people at the bottom are increasingly stuck without skills or pathways to rise. Research from the from the
click: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston click green to get the research:
Trends in U.S. Family Income Mobility, 1969–2006, This version: October 20, 2011
by Katharine Bradbury
Fed. Res. Bank of Boston research shows that in the 1980's, 21 percent of Americans in the bottom income quintile
(quintile = any of five equal groups into which a population can be divided according to the distribution of values of a particular variable - - In ASTROLOGY quintile = an aspect of 72° (one fifth of a circle) would rise to the middle quintile or higher over a 10-year period.
By 2005, that percentage had fallen by nearly a third, to 15 percent. And a 2007 Pew analysis showed that mobility is more than twice as high in Canada and most of Scandinavia than it is in the United States.
Click a 2007 Pew analysis
ECONOMIC MOBILITY: IS THE AMERICAN DREAM ALIVE AND WELL?
BY ISABEL V. SAWHILL OF THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
& JOHN E. MORTON OF THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS
This is a major problem, and advocates of free enterprise have been too slow to recognize it. It is not enough to assume that our system blesses each of us with equal opportunities. We need to fight for the policies and culture that will reverse troubling mobility trends. We need schools that serve children’s civil rights instead of adults’ job security. We need to encourage job creation for the most marginalized and declare war on barriers to entrepreneurship at all levels, from hedge funds to hedge trimming. And we need to revive our moral appreciation for the cultural elements of success.
We must also clear up misconceptions. Free enterprise does not mean shredding the social safety net, but championing policies that truly help vulnerable people and build an economy that can sustain these commitments. It doesn’t mean reflexively cheering big business, but leveling the playing field so competition trumps cronyism. It doesn’t entail “anything goes” libertinism, but self-government and self-control. And it certainly doesn’t imply that unfettered greed is laudable or even acceptable.
Free enterprise gives the most people the best shot at earning their success and finding enduring happiness in their work. It creates more paths than any other system to use one’s abilities in creative and meaningful ways, from entrepreneurship to teaching to ministry to playing the French horn. This is hardly mere materialism, and it is much more than an economic alternative. Free enterprise is a moral imperative.
Conclusion
To pursue the happiness within our reach, we do best to pour ourselves into
(1) faith, (2) family, (3) community and (4) meaningful work.
To share happiness, we need to fight for free enterprise and strive to make its blessings accessible to all.
Source:
Basic text: Arthur C. Brooks - the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C.
Comments & Referrals: STAF, Inc.
Click green: AEI www.aei.org/ The American Enterprise Institute is a think tank with more than 50 scholars and experts engaged in public policy research promoting freedom, opportunity and ...Events - Policy Studies - Find a Scholar - For Students
Click: American Enterprise Institute - Wikipedia
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Procrastination:
the action of delaying or postponing something
"There is almost no such thing as ready.
There is only now. And you may as well do it now.
Generally speaking, now is a better time."
Hugh Laurie
click: Hugh Laurie
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Procrastination:
the action of delaying or postponing something
"I'll do it tomorrow;
tomorrow never comes"
Dr. Christian STAF, Inc. CEO
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Excellent information about life coaching business
New Career opportunity for talented individuals
This article is about
(1) being a client in the legitimate life coaching business,
(2) how to become a competent life coach,
(3) costs of being a client, costs of becoming a coach,
(4) the income level a successful life coach can make,
(5) life coaching is a nationwide/worldwide opportunity
The Merchant of Just Be Happy
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On a cool mid-September afternoon at the California horse ranch of the life coach Martha Beck, two blindfolded, crouching men came to an impasse. The men had been told to think of themselves as animals and to use only their sense of hearing to try to locate and tag each other — all in an effort to awaken the senses and instincts presumably deadened by desk jobs and smartphones.
But neither one would move, so nothing was happening. One of the men, a lawyer who seemed to have chosen to embody a bobcat — or a mountain lion, maybe? — waited for the other to approach. The other man, a tech executive who was some sort of monkey and had rolled across the ground a moment earlier, was now still.
“The way we do anything is the way we do everything,” Ms. Beck told the two frozen men as they tried to figure out their next move. Ten other men, who were not blindfolded, looked on, shifting, waiting for their turns. They were assembled for Ms. Beck’s first-ever all-men’s coaching weekend, which she had titled “Escape From the Man Cage.”
Over the course of the weekend, which cost $3,000 per attendee and had filled quickly to capacity, the men would be led through animal tracking, fire-building and, of course, life coaching to help them figure out what was preventing their happiness: Were they living too cautiously? Too passively? Consider the crouching men. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.
Ms. Beck has offered personal and professional growth weekends like this to women for years — well, not just for women, but women are usually the ones who show up. Coaching is a nearly $2 billion industry worldwide, according to a 2012 study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers click: PricewaterhouseCoopers for the International Coach Federation, a trade association. And in this industry, Ms. Beck has carved out a very successful niche. She’s well known in certain female-centric circles, especially the ones who once watched “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where she made guest appearances, or who read her monthly column for O, the Oprah Magazine click: O, The Oprah Magazine
Over the years, many women have told me that their lives have been changed by reading one of Martha’s Beck’s best-selling books -- like “Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” (Harmony) — during a job layoff or when having to cope with a newly empty nest. I have yet to hear such comments from a man.
But Ms. Beck has long believed that men are in need of attention, too. “When I tell a woman you really need to quit your soul-sucking job, she goes home, and she can tell her husband, ‘I need to quit,’ and he’s like, ‘O.K., let’s do it.’ ” she said. “If I tell a man he needs to quit his soul-sucking job, he has to go home and fight with his wife or fight with his parents and fight with his in-laws and fight with everybody, because men aren’t supposed to be happy; they’re supposed to do well.”
This won’t do for anyone, according to Ms. Beck, and she has been spreading the anti-soul-sucking message through coaching retreats at her ranch, coaching trips to Africa, corporate coaching — General Electric click: General Electric
is a client — and, in the largest part of her work, training an army of emissaries in her life-coach training program. Telling people they are free, it turns out, can be a multimillion-dollar-a-year business.
She is as bewildered by her success as anyone else: “Everything I’ve ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this — I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this — if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.”
It’s hard to pinpoint when the business of life coaching began — or, rather, everyone in the industry has a different answer. It might have roots in sports coaching. Or it might have sprung from the excitement aroused by motivational speakers of the 1980s. Or it’s the natural outgrowth of the positive-psychology movement of the 1990s. Or maybe it started in ancient Greece.
Coaching includes two broad categories. There are executive and leadership coaches — they train people to be better at business — and life coaches, like Ms. Beck, who talk about leadership in one’s own life, from the home to the office and everywhere in between. There is often tension between the two, with executive coaches tending to disdain the sometimes exuberant spiritual sides of life coaches. But they often tread the same territory: how to move forward, make a change, get past an obstacle.
“Every coaching is life-coaching on some level because everyone is a human being,” said Magdalena N. Mook, executive director and chief executive of the International Coach Federation, a certifying body for coaching that aims to be the industry’s standard trade organization.
There are now about 45,000 coaches operating worldwide. In 2009, the Harvard Medical School established the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, “dedicated to enhancing the integrity and credibility of the field of coaching.” Teachers College at Columbia University (New York City, Ivy League University) has a coaching certification program, also for all kinds of coaches. In 2012, “life coach” finally claimed the most basic legitimacy as an entry in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Ms. Beck didn’t think of herself as a life coach, she says, until 2001, when an article in USA Today referred to her that way. But that is essentially what she has been doing since the mid-1990s, when she and her former husband, John Beck, moved to Arizona, where he had a position teaching at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Ms. Beck eventually started teaching a career course at Thunderbird, too.She has traveled in many circles in her 51 years, which seems to work to her benefit as a life coach, or wayfinder, as she sometimes calls herself. The youngest of eight children from a Mormon family in Provo, Utah, she earned a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies, and a master’s and Ph.D. in sociology, all from Harvard. It was while at Harvard that she married John Beck, also a Mormon, whom she’d known since high school.
The couple later broke with the Mormon Church after coming to terms with the fact that they were both gay. They stayed together for several years for the sake of their children — they had three when they divorced.
Their middle child, Adam, had been diagnosed in utero (= in the womb = being pregnant) with Down syndrome
click: National Down Syndrome Society, and the 1999 book in which Ms. Beck wrote about that experience, click: “Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic,” became a best seller. She quit Thunderbird to become a writer, but her students kept after her for private career/life workshops. In 2000, she appeared on “Oprah.” Demand for Ms. Beck’s coaching services boomed, and she formed click: Martha Beck Inc., or M.B.I.
One of the most lucrative aspects of her coaching business is training a band of coaches in the Martha Beck method — about 1,300 so far. Anyone can call herself a life coach, but getting the Martha Beck training, done mostly online, costs $7,000 for an eight-month course. For another $7,000, you can opt for further training to become what is called a master coach. Certification, which allows the coach to use Ms. Beck’s logo and to be listed on her website in the coach directory, costs $850.
M.B.I. coach training grossed $1.9 million in 2012 and constituted the bulk of Ms. Beck’s business, according to Bridgette Boudreau, the company’s chief executive, in addition to coaching weekends like “Escape From the Man Cage” and her corporate training sessions. Ms. Boudreau says Ms. Beck has earned $1.5 million on the eight books she’s written and other products, like audiobooks and T-shirts.
At a conference of 310 Beck-trained coaches last year, I met dozens of women — all but four were women — who had changed careers to become coaches. Some had meandered, looking for the right career. Others had been successful in other ventures, but not happy. There was the M.B.A. who had been working as a chief financial officer and hated every part of her job but the mentoring part, so she quit and began coaching businesspeople; the publicist who realized she wanted to help people and not companies; the geriatric-care manager who wanted to learn to guide bereaved families through grief counseling; the medical doctor now doing health coaching; and several psychologists, one of whom said she wanted to help people look forward, not backward.
A few hours before the men were to arrive for the Man Cage weekend, Ms. Beck relaxed in shades of teal — turtleneck, cardigan, earrings — in a circle of rocking chairs outside one of the houses on her ranch in San Luis Obispo, Calif., which she bought a little more than a year ago. She lives there with her son Adam, who is now 25; her domestic partner, Karen Gerdes, who is an associate professor of social work; and two other coaches.
When Ms. Beck was 30, she visited Los Angeles. She woke up in her hotel room, but before she opened her eyes, she had the sensation that she was on a horse ranch, one that she owned. The only thing is, she didn’t own a horse ranch. (She didn’t even ride horses.) Years later, when she found the property near San Luis Obispo, which she has named the North Star Ranch, she recognized the destination of that waking dream. She made a bid of $3 million, the exact amount of money, she says, that she had in her savings account. The offer was accepted six months later. “There’s not much left in the bank,” she told me. “It’s all here.”
Ms. Beck’s stories are like that. They have a pinch of magic to them, a smidgen of serendipity. They all speak to the same theme: You will have all the happiness and money you need if you can just find what you’re supposed to be doing and do it. The times when Ms. Beck has been worried about money, the money hasn’t come. She has learned to simply turn her attention and energy toward the money, and the money will come. It works every time, she said.
This sort of positive energy talk can sound flaky to the scientifically minded, and insensitive to the person trapped in poverty or impossible circumstance. But Ms. Beck, whose clients are not the poor, still manages to impress the skeptical. To those who are turned off by what Ms. Beck herself calls “woo-woo” talk, her prodigious autodidacticism — not to mention those three Harvard degrees — helps convince them of the coexistence of both the rational and the spiritual.
“Martha’s quite immersed in science and study and sociology,” said Kimberly Kleiman-Lee, who heads up G.E.’s senior leadership development. “What I love is that she has a solid left brain and a solid right brain.”
Ms. Kleiman-Lee hired Ms. Beck to coach 22 of G.E.’s top vice presidents earlier this year. The G.E. executives were taken to Ms. Beck’s ranch, where each was put in a pen with a horse, one at a time. Their task was to learn to lead the horse.
“These guys expect to be put in a room with a bunch of experts and have a safe and comfortable conversation,” Ms. Kleiman-Lee recalled, “not a pen with a horse and be called out over and over, and not let off the hook.”
The idea that we should be better — more effective, more efficient, happier — is a vein that runs deep in American culture, from Norman Vincent Peale click: Norman Vincent Peale to Tony Robbins click: Tony Robbins: Life Coaching, Live Events & Personal Development to the many New Year’s resolutions made at this time of year. Martha Beck offers a new iteration on the form, combining a sort of enthusiastic intellectualism with an Oprah-style sense of wonder.
“What Martha was first and foremost is a great teacher,” said Dr. Victoria Silas, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon in Tacoma, Wash., who read two of Ms. Beck’s books before joining her in Africa for a five-day coaching trip that cost $10,000 plus airfare. “What she is so good at is absorbing information and putting it in a context that whatever audience she is speaking with will understand. When she talks to a group of scientists, she can talk about how we process things via the cells, the neurons, the pathways. She talks in a way that uses the concept they understand. But she can also talk to life coaches about woo-woo life synchronicities that fall into her lap.”
Before being trained by Ms. Beck, Dr. Silas had a nagging feeling that being a doctor wasn’t what she should be doing with her life. After the Africa trip, she enrolled in life-coach training. But what Dr. Silas found during her training was that her problems weren’t with her job.
“There was an interesting side effect of life-coach training,” Dr. Silas said. “I was no longer hating what I was doing. All of the so-called problems that I thought I had in terms of not fitting or being good at it or good enough — I realized they were in my own head and not outside of me.” Dr. Silas returned to pediatric orthopedic surgery, where, she said, she is “now happy a large percentage of the time.”
Back at the ranch, the men stood deep in the woods, trying to trace the scene of a crime: A turkey — at least they thought it was a turkey — had been killed, its carcass picked dry. All that remained were a bunch of feathers and what looked like the bird’s skull.
Over the course of the weekend, Ms. Beck had given each man the option of being coached lightly or aggressively — “kid gloves, scalpel or wrecking ball,” were the choices. She was gentle but persistent. One man wept when he confessed that he fantasized about jumping out of an airplane that was en route to meet a troublesome client. Another, a former C.E.O., spoke of his deep shame over having been fired and slowly stripped of the status of his position. An engineer covered his face and declared that he wanted to be free from the life he’d constructed for himself.And now they were gathered around the feathers, trying to figure out what had happened there, a forensics lesson that was somehow supposed to help them learn what had set them so far off the path to happiness.
Ms. Beck and her fellow coaches asked the men to notice things and name them without judgment: These are feathers. This is bone. One man pointed out a small pile of feces that rested near the feathers. “It’s from a bear,” he said confidently. “It’s fairly new.”
“Are you sure?” asked Michael Trotta, a master coach and wilderness leader who used to be a schoolteacherMichael Trotta | Martha Beck.
The man answered: “Yes. You can see there’s still some moisture to it. It’s new.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Ms. Beck asked. “Try poking it.”
The man reached for a stick and poked at the excrement. The stick broke at just a small tap.
“I guess it wasn’t new,” the man said.
At this point, Ms. Beck interjected that the biggest mistake you can make is to accept your beliefs without challenging them, without applying the scientific method to see if they are, in fact, true. And many of the men, she said, were assuming that they had to do things a certain way: ignore passion in favor of safer bets, act stoic amid inner turmoil, run on an upward trajectory of success and money acquisition at any emotional cost. But these are not rules. These are just theories that haven’t been tested. And, because the way we do anything is the way we do everything, there’s no way she was going to ignore the metaphor from this pile of feces.
“You have to poke the poop,” Ms. Beck told the men. “You can’t just make assumptions about it. There’s no substitute for poking the poop.”
Martha Beckmarthabeck.com/“If only I were free enough/ rich enough/ young enough/ supported enough to do what I want, my ...Become a Coach - Books & Products - Find a Coach - Live Events & Appearances
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Source: (1) Martha Beck, (2) NYT
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Facts to better understand the human race
Anxious Youth, Then and Now
No love life? Bad job? Living at the parent's home
How very 1890 in the 2015's
For years now, we’ve heard the gripes by and about millennials*), the offspring of the Great Recession, caught between childhood and adulthood. Their plight seems so very 21st century: the unstable careers, the confusion of technologies, the delayed romance, parenthood and maturity.
*) Millennials, or the Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y,
are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates when the generation starts and ends. Commentators use beginning birth years from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.
Many of the same concerns and challenges faced the children of the industrial revolution, as the booms and busts of America’s wild 19th century tore apart the accepted order.
Each New Year’s, young men and women filled their diaries with worries that seem very familiar today: They found living with their parents “humiliating indeed” and felt “qualified for nothing.” Others moaned: “I am twenty-five and not in love yet.” Gathering over beer or cigars, they complained about how far they were from marriage, how often they switched jobs.
The idea that millennials are uniquely “stuck” is nonsense. Young Victorians grasped for maturity as well, embarrassed by the distance between their lives and society’s expectations.
These Americans were born into an earthquake. During the 1800s America’s population exploded from 5 million to 75 million. By 1900 nearly as many people lived in New York City as had lived in the entire country during the Revolution. The nation went from a rural backwater to an industrial behemoth — producing more than Britain, Germany and France combined — but every decade the economy crashed. America saw the kind of wild change we see today in China, and in a new society with little to stabilize it.
For rootless 20-somethings, each national shock felt intimate, rattling their love lives and careers. Many young adults could not accept that their personal struggles were just ripples of a large-scale social dislocation. So each New Year’s, they blamed themselves. In a Jan. 1, 1859, entry in her journal, 19-year-old Mollie Dorsey, stuck on a Nebraska homestead in the middle of a recession, castigated herself for not being “any better than I was one year ago.”
Romance worried them above all. Today some fret about the changing institution of marriage, but we are used to such adjustments; 19th-century Americans were blindsided when the average age of marriage rose precipitously, to 26 — a level America didn’t return to until 1990. In a world where life expectancy hovered below age 50, delaying marriage until 26 was revolutionary.
Cities brimmed with bachelors and unmarried ladies in their mid-20s, once a rare sight. In their New Year’s reflections, men and women noted that their parents had had children by their age. One typical Union Army soldier wrote home wondering, “Do you think I will be married before I am thirty?”
This social change brought personal turmoil, especially for young women. Marriage meant love and family, but in a society that discouraged ladies from working, young women were dependent on their husbands. Remaining single meant economic and legal instability, and the perception of childishness. When the mother of one diarist, Emily Gillespie, scolded the Midwestern farm girl by saying, “you are twenty years old and not married yet,” it hardly mattered that Emily was in line with her generation.
While some looked for love, others looked for jobs. Before the modern era, young people found work within family networks, laboring at home or on a farm, pausing for “elevenses” (a late-morning whiskey break) or an afternoon nap. The industrial economy changed that.
The good news was that there were more jobs; the bad news was that they were isolating and temporary. Work now meant small factories or lumber camps or railroad crews of strangers. They were monitored like machines, with pressure to increase productivity replacing the slower pace of preindustrial labor.
For young people this meant chronic instability. A young man might brag about his new job one week and find himself begging for money from his father the next. Frustrated youths worried that their jobs did not reflect their age or ability: One brilliant young speaker complained about working in a cramped Philadelphia boot factory, nailing soles when he should have been climbing a soapbox.
While 19th-century young adults faced many of the anxieties that trouble 23-year-olds today, they found novel solutions. The first was to move. Young men and women were notoriously transient, heading out on “wander years” when life at home seemed stalled. In one Wisconsin county, 90 percent of those present in 1870 were gone by 1880. Most set out with no plan, few connections and a small carpetbag of personal possessions.
Another solution was to find like-minded young adults, to share, as one later put it in his memoir, their “baffling discouragements and buoyant hopes.” Nineteenth-century young people were compulsive joiners. Political movements, literary societies, religious organizations, dancing clubs and even gangs proliferated. The men and women who joined cared about the stated cause, but also craved the community these groups created. They realized that while instability was inevitable, isolation was voluntary.
Today’s young adults are constantly rebuked for not following the life cycle popular in 1960. But a quick look at earlier eras shows just how unusual mid-20th-century young people were. A society in which people married out of high school and held the same job for 50 years is the historical outlier. Some of that era’s achievements were enviable, but they were not the norm.
The anxieties that 19th-century young people poured into their New Year’s diary entries are more common. Americans considered young adulthood the most dangerous part of life, and struggled to find a path to maturity. Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition. Young adults might do the same today. Stop worrying about how they appear from the skewed perspective of the mid-20th century and find a new home, a new stability and a new community in the new year.
Source: NYT
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Everyone can learn from this article
The Horse Sense That Builds Trust
Horse sense = common sense = good sense and sound judgment in practical matters
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As I was growing up, I often found myself in the role of family peacemaker and wondered what it would take for people to focus more on the ways that connected them rather than divided them — not just in families, but in communities and the workplace, too. The more I thought about it, the more the world seemed like one big dysfunctional family. When I was a young adult, these concerns led me to attend peace demonstrations, to visit India to seek inner peace and, finally, to become a psychotherapist.
In India, I learned the mindfulness method for monitoring our thoughts. It allows us to view our dysfunctional habits as a kind of cloud that covers our true, healthy nature. Mindful awareness can apply to mental and emotional patterns, like the dance of subjugation and entitlement, where one person imposes his or her agenda at the expense of the other, who passively surrenders to the other’s control.
For instance, a physician at one of my workshops had a colleague who was a bit of a bully — opinionated and critical. This colleague would tell her emphatically how he saw things and what she ought to do. She would just listen — but fume afterward, thinking over and over about what she wished she had said. It was a classic case.
Then, one day, she applied what she had learned about mindfulness and changing patterns. Her colleague was his usual blustery, domineering self. But after he was done, she paused, collected her thoughts and told him calmly: “I don’t agree with you. People can have their own opinions. I respect the way you do things but prefer to do things differently.” Taken aback, he walked off without a word. She told me he was never the same bully with her again.
For five years, I’ve studied with R.J. Sadowski, known as Bob, who trains horses by integrating horse-whispering principles with what he calls “horsemindship.” He analyzes the subtle predator/prey dynamics between humans and horses. I’ve seen these dynamics apply to humans interacting with one another.
As herd animals, horses are always ready to cooperate, if they trust you and you show that you understand how they see the world — if, as Bob puts it, “You speak horse.” Collaboration in a herd operates naturally, with horses looking out for one another — unlike the us-versus-them approach that humans can too often take.
Horse whispering has helped me see how horses are natural peacemakers and how the herd dynamic can be a model for human group behavior. When people “join up,” as it is called in horse whispering, a genuine connection results that makes everything run more smoothly.
At a workshop I gave at the Omega Institute in the Hudson Valley in New York, I invited Bob and his horses to demonstrate predator/prey principles and the concept of joining up. He brusquely grabbed a rear hoof of one horse and lifted it, as if to change its horseshoe, destabilizing the horse as it wobbled on three legs — the way of force and control. Then he showed a more connected, joined-up approach: he gently rubbed the horse above its leg, slowly rubbing down toward the foot. By the time his hand was halfway down the leg, the horse had lifted its hoof, freely offering it.
A diverse range of people attended the workshop. One, a business executive, spoke up when Bob finished: “I’m pretty high-powered in my business role, and I guess I use predatory tactics all the time — which makes me successful in sales. If I set out to make a sale, I pitch very aggressively, and I’m good at closing.” Then her tone changed to a vulnerable sadness, as she added, “And when I do, afterward I end up feeling awful.” We explored how she could be successful while taking a gentler, more empathic approach in sales.
Making a sale at any cost too often means that the customer ends up with the wrong product or service — and may not return. The best salespeople and account managers typically realize the value of nurturing the relationship and earning loyalty, joining up with a customer to understand his or her needs — then trying to meet them. If they don’t have what’s needed, they are honest about that.
If we are predatory, we might get what we want, but it can harm the connection. Just as horses read intentions, so do people — and kindness is good for any relationship. As Bob advises, “Don’t put your purpose before your connection.”
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Source: TARA BENNETT-GOLEMAN - First published in the NYT
TARA BENNETT-GOLEMAN is the author of “Mind Whispering: A New Map to Freedom From Self-Defeating Emotional Habits.”
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The Wedding Fix Is In
Everyone U.S. wide & worldwide planning for a wedding will benefit from this article
The same problems in the U.S. nationwide & worldwide
Can the internet fix the price-gouging problem in the wedding industry
Price gouging is a pejorative*) term referring to a situation in which a seller prices goods or commodities at a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair. *) pejorative = expressing contempt or disapproval
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I was never the type to create a wedding “dream board,” with collages of petal-strewn, princess-themed fantasy nuptials. So I thought the process of planning my own wedding would be fairly painless and practical. That was before I entered the economically baffling world of the wedding-industrial complex.
I knew, of course, that weddings are notoriously expensive, but what I did not expect was the sheer difficulty of finding any price information at all. Not only will vendors not post prices online, but many will not even quote them over the phone, requiring a face-to-face meeting first. In fact, before they would even show me any of their dresses, let alone price tags, some bridal shops have required me to fill out a form divulging my occupation, employer, address, dress budget, overall wedding budget, reception venue and other intrusive information.
Wedding vendors seemed to be trying to size me up to figure out how much I’m willing to pay; consumer advocates say this is a common practice, as is charging more for a given service for a wedding than for a “family function” or “corporate event.” Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, click: Booth School of Business
recalls that when he was married over a decade ago, one caterer initially quoted him about $60 a head, and then jacked up the price to about $90 per person after realizing the function was a wedding. These are forms of what economists call price discrimination; it sounds unfair, but it’s perfectly legal, and it’s easier to get away with in markets where there’s little price transparency and consumers are relatively uninformed.
When the Internet came along, it transformed industries like air travel, bookselling and even life insurance, by massively reducing search costs (essentially, the difficulty of comparison shopping), thereby pushing down prices. It seems as if the $50 billion wedding industry — in which the average couple spends upward of $25,000, according to the market-research firms IBISWorld click: IBISWorld and The Wedding Report click: The Wedding Report
— should be ripe for similar “disruption.” But while there are plenty of wedding-related websites, they typically work like dream boards, rarely including specific prices. Why hasn’t some enterprising Silicon Valley firm come in and made the market more transparent?
I spoke with a lot of wedding industry veterans, as well as economists who study other markets where consumers frequently feel gouged, thanks to high search costs and informational asymmetries (health care, funerals). They told me the wedding industry’s dysfunction is a product of its highly bespoke services — and, as a result, greater transparency might not bring down prices anyway.
David M. Wood, president of the Association of Bridal Consultants, click: Association of Bridal Consultants
said part of the problem is that most brides are first-time shoppers. They are less informed about what a “fair” price is, or how long it should take to discover prices. (If you just spent two hours going through different bouquet and centerpiece pricing options at one florist, you might assume that it will take the same amount of time at other vendors and decide it’s too much of a hassle to shop around.) Because this event is (ideally) once in a lifetime, that also means that vendors can appeal to consumers’ sentimentality, urging them not to cheap out on the “most important” day of their lives. Because of similar concerns about guilt-tripping salespeople, the Federal Trade Commission requires funeral homes to provide its bereaved customers with an itemized price list.
Many in the wedding industry wielded this once-in-a-lifetime logic, explaining to me that wedding services are not standardized enough to create a meaningful price aggregator. With books, there’s a single bar code for each product, but it’s hard to do apples-to-apples pricing comparisons between wedding bands or photographers. This argument isn’t incredibly compelling. After all, I can see prices for highly differentiated food-delivery options on sites like Seamless. Locality, a start-up, has been collecting and publishing a menu of prices for services usually considered highly nonstandardized, like massages, day care and dentist visits. Creating something similar for wedding services should not be insurmountably difficult.
But even if some company swooped in and lowered search costs, that doesn’t necessarily mean that prices would fall as a result. Vendors could counteract the decrease in search costs by finding ways to make prices more difficult to compare — something known as “obfuscation,” (= bewilderment: confusion resulting from failure to understand) studied by the M.I.T. click: MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Glenn Ellison click: Home Page of Glenn Ellison - MIT and Sara Fisher Ellison MIT Economics : Sara Fisher Ellison.
Sellers could obfuscate (=complicate) prices by giving different product names to an identical item, depending on which store is selling it, as the mattress industry has been accused of doing. Or they might lower prices for the specific keyword consumers search for, but then compensate with hidden fees or required add-on purchases. Many New York venue-based caterers quote a price per guest in the form of “[price] plus plus,” as in “$180 plus plus,” with one “plus” referring to taxes and the other “plus” referring to a “service” or “administrative” fee, which ranges somewhat arbitrarily from 18 to 25 percent, depending on the venue. This makes it very difficult to compare prices even when they’re aggregated side by side — similar to the rise of baggage fees on airlines in the age of Orbitz. click: Orbitz Travel
Ultimately, it may be that prices are not the primary attribute upon which people are searching for wedding vendors. By way of analogy, even if notoriously opaque health-care providers started posting prices upfront, patients still wouldn’t all flock to the lowest-cost brain surgeon. When it comes to services like weddings and delicate operations, consumers typically care about other qualities more, and so providing more price transparency might not change consumers’ choices.
Which brings us to the matter of those wedding-dream-board makers. Strong consumer preferences — about the flower type, bridesmaid dress, cake decorations, music style, whatever — mean less price sensitivity (what economists refer to as greater demand inelasticity). If the cocktail napkins must be blue, the happy couple will be willing to pay more for blue. So if there are enough brides out there with strong and specific preferences, who want their weddings to be the special day they always dreamed of, that’s going to push equilibrium prices higher, no matter how transparently they are displayed. In other words, the Bridezillas keep prices high for the rest of us.
Text source: (click) CATHERINE RAMPELL
Catherine Rampell is an economics reporter for The New York Times
Comments & links by STAF, Inc.
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Copy & Paste for printing
(the Standard Marriage Vows below)
As the title below states "Standard....."
If you are a member of a religious community & if you so desire, type, before printing, your religious marriage vow statement in the standard form in a place you like it fits best. If needed search the internet for that statement, or call your church leader for the vow info.
The standard form below has a sentence "Will you love and comfort him/her, honor and keep him/her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?"
This is almost the same info as is in many religious vows. E.g., in Christianity a common addition is "Let no human put apart what God has joined together today."
STANDARD MARRIAGE VOWS
My friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate one of life's greatest moments, to give recognition to the worth and
beauty of committed marital love, and to add our best wishes to the words which shall unite
(Groom’s First Name)_____________________________________________________________________
and (Bride’s First Name) __________________________________________________________________
in marriage.
(OPTIONAL): Who gives this woman to be married to this man?
The commitment that the two of you are about to make is the most important commitment that two people can make, you are about to create something new, the marriage relationship, an entity that never ends. As you stand here today, are you now prepared to begin this commitment to one another? (I am) Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage? (I have)
(Groom’s First Name)_________________________ and (Bride’s First Name)____________________________
I would ask that you both remember to treat yourself and each other with dignity and respect; to remind yourself often
of what brought you together today. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness and kindness that your marriage deserves. When
frustration and difficulty assail your marriage - as these do to every relationship at one time or another - focus on what still seems right between you, not only the part that seems wrong. This way, when clouds of trouble hide the sun in your lives and you lose sight of it for a moment, you can remember that the sun is still there. And if each of you will take responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked by abundance and delight.
(Groom’s Full Name)___________________________will you have this woman to be your wedded wife?
(I will)
Will you love and comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live?
(I will)
(Bride’s Full Name_______________________________ will you have this man to be your wedded husband?
(I will)
Will you love and comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto him as long as you both shall live? (I will)
Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, join your right hands, and declare your consent (before these witnesses) by repeating after me:
I, (Groom’s First Name)________________________
take you (Bride’s First Name)_________________________
to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in
health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live.
(Groom places ring on Bride’s finger and repeats after Judge)
(Bride’s First Name)____________________________take this ring as a sign of my commitment and fidelity to you.
I, (Bride’s First Name)_______________________ take you (Groom’s First Name)_______________________
to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live.
(Bride places ring on Groom’s finger and repeats after Judge) (Groom’s First Name)_________________________
take this ring as a sign of my commitment and fidelity to you.
(Groom’s First Name)__________________________and (Bride’s First Name)___________________________,
in so much as the two of you have agreed to live together in Matrimony, have promised your commitment to each other by these vows, (and) the joining of your hands (and the giving of these rings), by the authority vested in me by the State of (your state), I now pronounce you Husband and Wife.
Congratulations, you may kiss your bride.
May I present to you Mr. and Mrs. ______________________________________________
Quotation
Patience with family is love - Patience with others is respect - Patience with self is confidence - Patience with GOD is faith. (Unknown)
Copy & paste for printing (Marriage Vows above)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * *
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Family is the foundation of American life.
If we have stronger families, we will have a stronger America.
(President Bill Clinton)
Bill Clinton
Click
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The Social Security information in this article is
A-MUST-TO-STUDY for every person in America
The U.S. Social Security’s Real Retirement Age Is 70
by click:Alicia H. Munnell
0IB#13-15The brief’s key findings are:
- Due to increases in Social Security’s Delayed Retirement Credit, the effective retirement age is now 70, with monthly benefits reduced for earlier claiming.
- Benefit levels at 70 appear appropriate given that rising deductions for Medicare and greater benefit taxation have reduced Social Security’s net replacement rates.
- The shift to 70 should be feasible for many workers given increases in lifespans, health, and education.
- But vulnerable workers forced to claim early will have low benefits and will be particularly harmed by any further cuts.
- Policymakers need to inform those who can work that 70 is the new retirement age and devise ways to protect those who cannot work.
from the Center for Retirement Research at click: Boston College
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Why raise the full retirement age?
Social Security’s real retirement age is 70. How is it? Monthly benefits are highest at age 70 and are actuarially*) reduced for each year claimed before that age. Claiming at 62 instead of 70 lowers a hypothetical monthly benefit from $1,000 to $568. Age 70 became Social Security’s retirement age with the maturation of the Delayed Retirement Credit, which now provides an actuarially fair adjustment for benefits claimed after 66 (the current full retirement age). That means, assuming average life expectancy, people who take a lower benefit early would expect to receive about the same total amount in benefits over their lifetimes as those who wait for higher monthly benefits but start receiving them later.
*) actuary = a person who compiles and analyzes statistics and uses them to calculate insurance risks and premiums; actuarially = of or relating to the work of an actuary
(Next paragraph is STAF, Inc.'s opinion)
However, how do we know how long each of us will live. We are individuals with individual issues, thus is better to start taking the social security at the age of 70, except IF one is already sick and cannot work or anything else that may affect the decision making. If you are fully healthy, if your parents & relatives live(d) a long life, and you can work, work up to 70. In addition the longer you work (if you are physically & mentally in good shape) the longer you most likely will live, the longer your brains work ell, and the longer you are capable of enjoying good life. When healthy people retire early, they have a tendency to become much more passive - that is a fast road to an early grave. Working keeps you alive and healthy physically & mentally when you have that choice.
(End of STAF, Inc.'s opinion quote)
Policy changes will shrink many retirees’ benefits
But nobody talks about age 70; all of the policy discussion is focused on the so-called full retirement age, which historically was 65, is now 66, and is scheduled to rise to 67 for those born in 1960 and after. The full retirement age used to be the age after which monthly benefits would not increase and lifetime benefits would decline. It signaled an official retirement age: Take these benefits now or you will lose out.
With the maturation of the Delayed Retirement Credit, which increases monthly benefits for those who claim after the full retirement age, the value of lifetime benefits does not decline after the full retirement age. It remains the same up to age 70. So the full retirement age no longer has any effect on lifetime benefits.
Increasing the full retirement age, however, does have an impact on the level of benefits. The reason is that the Social Security benefit formula is anchored to the full retirement age, and raising that age means reducing monthly benefits regardless of when an individual claims. For example, when the full retirement age moves from 66 to 67 as scheduled under current law, benefits for those claiming at each age will be about 7% lower than today. Benefits at 62 will continue to be 57 percent of benefits at 70, but they will be 7% lower for claims at each age.
Those advocating increases in the full retirement age are responding to the fact that, generally, we are living longer and can work longer. But increasing the full retirement age to, say, 70 (after we reach 67) would be equivalent to about a 20% reduction in benefits. And these cuts are across the board. If people can change their retirement plans in response to the lower benefits, and delay their claiming date by three years, they might not be that badly hurt. Yes, they would need to work longer and their lifetime benefits will be lower, but their monthly benefit will be unchanged.
The problem is that a significant portion of the roughly 40% of participants who claim benefits at age 62 are low-wage workers who cannot easily change their retirement plans. Many have health problems and/or outdated skills that make continued employment impossible. And, if they cannot retire later, their much- reduced benefits will be totally inadequate.
(Interestingly, those who retire at age 70 cannot replicate their previous monthly benefit by working longer, because the Delayed Retirement Credit is not applicable after 70. No matter what they do, they will see a reduction in their monthly as well as lifetime benefits. Right now, this is not a significant problem. The age-70 retirees today are largely lawyers, doctors, and Ph.Ds. But if larger numbers start retiring at 70, we can worry about this issue.)
This discussion is not to argue that Social Security benefits can never be cut. People are healthier, better educated, have less physically demanding jobs, and can work longer. They are also living much longer. So keeping benefits unchanged results in ever increasing costs.
But constantly reducing benefit levels by increasing the full retirement age is very hard on low-income, vulnerable people who cannot change their retirement date. If we want to cut benefits, it makes much more sense to directly change the benefit formula. Such an approach allows for larger cuts for the higher-paid than for those at the bottom of the earnings distribution.
More fundamentally, let’s start being clear and candid about changes aimed at getting people to work longer and those aimed at cutting program outlays.
The issues discussed in the above article post are covered in more detail in a click: new issue brief
from the Center for Retirement Research at click: Boston College
Please click the green above or below and study in full details the latest research facts - you need the facts
click: New issue brief click: Boston College
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Source: Boston College - Center for Retirement Research New issue brief
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Why Doctors Don’t Take Sick Days
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THE bottle of Maalox sat perched on the triage desk in the emergency room. It was mint flavor, or maybe lemon — I don’t recall exactly — but it shimmered temptingly. I had just finished with a new admission, and my stomach had been groaning ominously for hours. It was after midnight, the whole night was still ahead of me, and I was getting desperate. I scribbled the last of my medication orders and snagged the Maalox bottle, popping the top and chugging two revolting capfuls on my way to the elevator.
As I rode upstairs, I could feel the intestinal protestations growing. There was going to be an apocalyptic resolution to this. The elevator opened and I burst into the restroom, just in time to disgorge the Maalox and everything else into the toilet, conscientiously keeping my white coat and stethoscope clear of the fray.
I staggered into the call room and flopped onto the couch. My fellow resident listened to my tale of gastrointestinal woe and did what any residency buddy would do: he slid an 18-gauge IV into my antecubital vein and strung up a bag of IV saline. I spent the pre-dawn hours prostrate on the couch doing phone work — renewing medications, answering calls from nurses, ordering labs — while my colleagues did the foot work on the wards and in the emergency room. Together we kept everything running.
After morning rounds, I caught a few hours of sleep at home, showered, and then reported back to the hospital at 10 p.m. for my next shift.
What I didn’t do was call in sick.
It has long been known that doctors make the worst patients. From day one in medical training, the unspoken message is that calling in sick is for wimps. Much of this is logistics. The staff has to scramble to reschedule patients — many of whom have been waiting weeks or months for their appointments. Patients who need medical attention that day are crammed into someone else’s schedule or sent to the emergency room. Your already overworked colleagues are saddled with extra work, and patients usually get the short end of the stick.
So most doctors ignore their symptoms and resist taking the day off unless they are sick enough to be hospitalized in the next bed over.
This, of course, is ridiculous behavior on the part of medical professionals who would never recommend such nonsense to their patients. Medical workers click: with respiratory infections are contagious. Caregivers with gastrointestinal infections — as I had — can easily click: infect their patients.
A 2005 outbreak of the norovirus*) (see the end) stomach bug in a nursing home highlighted the role of medical personnel in spreading communicable disease. The most disturbing aspect of the case was that medical staff members continued to come to work while ill, well into the outbreak, despite strenuous and public exhortations to stay home. This may have prolonged the outbreak and led to more patients’ falling ill.
A survey of British doctors back in the ’90s found that 87 percent of G.P.’s said they would not call in sick for a severe cold (compared to 32 percent of office workers who were asked the same question). In Norway, a 2001 survey revealed that 80 percent of doctors had reported to work while sick with illnesses for which they would have advised their own patients to stay home. Two-thirds of these illnesses were considered contagious.
What explains this toxic brew of denial, ignorance and bravado? Part of it is a professional but often exaggerated sense of responsibility to colleagues and patients. Even if you are sick enough to have an IV running in your arm, you keep doing your job.
But another part is how we see ourselves. Illness is what we do, not who we are. We define ourselves by vanquishing illness, not succumbing to it.
As much as we empathize with our patients, part of protecting our inner core may require drawing an unconscious demarcation between “us” and “them.” I can recall, as a resident, the palpable relief of leaving the hospital at the end of a long night, something I generally thought about in physical terms — getting out of grubby scrubs, the promise of a hot shower and edible food. But it was more than that: There was also the awkward relief of leaving behind the graphic reminder of what could befall my own body. Somewhere, deep down, I needed to convince myself that we doctors were a different species from our patients.
I thought of all this recently, after my daughter woke with a fever, and I had to stay home from the hospital at the last minute. I realized it was my first “sick day” in about 25 years. I was grateful that my colleagues stepped in, but it was a frenetic scramble that inconvenienced everyone, especially my patients.
I wish there were a simple process to make it easier for doctors to call in sick so that it’s not an operational crisis every time. But it isn’t possible to have a pool of substitute doctors the way we have substitute teachers.
What we can do, however, is examine the existential qualms that doctors have about illness. From the beginning of medical school it is important to advance the idea that illness is a part of all of us — doctors and patients alike; that there is very little that separates us from our patients, other than the circumstance of the moment; and, for goodness’ sake, that we need to call in sick when we are sick.
An associate professor of medicine at New York University, the editor of the Bellevue Literary Review
and click: the author of “What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.”
click: What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine ...www.amazon.com › ... › Medicine › Doctor-Patient Relations
Bellevue Literary Review - Wikipedia, the freeencyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellevue_Literary_Review
Bellevue Literary Review is a literary journal that publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry about the human body, illness, health and healing. The Bellevue ...
*) below click the colored areas for further info
The norovirus was originally named the "Norwalk agent" after Norwalk, Ohio, in the United States, where an outbreak of acute gastroenteritis occurred among children at Bronson Elementary School in November 1968. In 1972, electron microscopy on stored human stool samples identified a virus, which was given the name "Norwalk virus." Numerous outbreaks with similar symptoms have been reported since. The cloning and sequencing of the Norwalk virus genome showed that these viruses have a genomic organization consistent with viruses belonging to the family Caliciviridae. The name was shortened to "norovirus" after being identified in a number of outbreaks on cruise ships and receiving attention throughout the United States. The name "norovirus" (Norovirus for the genus) was approved by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) in 2002. In 2011, however, a press release and a newsletter were published by ICTV, which strongly encourage the media, national health authorities and the scientific community to use the virus name Norwalk virus, rather than the genus name Norovirus, when referring to outbreaks of the disease. This was also a public response by ICTV to the request from an individual in Japan to rename the Norovirus genus because of the possibility of negative associations for people in Japan and elsewhere who have the family name "Noro". Before this position of ICTV was made public, ICTV consulted widely with members of the Caliciviridae Study Group and carefully discussed the case.
In addition to "Norwalk agent" and "Norwalk virus," the virus previously has been called "Norwalk-like virus," "small, round-structured viruses" (SRSVs), and "Snow Mountain virus." Common names of the illness caused by noroviruses still in use include "winter vomiting disease,". "winter vomiting bug," "viral gastroenteritis," and "acute nonbacterial gastroenteritis." It also colloquially is known as "stomach flu," but this actually is a broad name that refers to gastric inflammation caused by a range of viruses and bacteria.
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Source: NYT & D. Danielle Ofri, M.D.
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"To succeed in life, you need three things:
a wishbone, a backbone and a funnybone"
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(Click)
Reba McEntire - Wikipedia
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Every leader & every parent
will benefit from reading this article and from applying its principles
How to succeed as a business leader or as any leader ?
Do what Mr. Don Knauss of Clorox teaches in this excellent interview article
Start doing the same as Mr. Don Knauss does
The same principles applies in your home when raising children - the parent is not a tyrant*)
but must be a servant & a guide who figures out what is truly best for everyone
*) a tyrant = a cruel and oppressive ruler.
Example sentence: "the tyrant was deposed by popular demonstrations"
Synonyms for "deposed": overthrow, unseat, dethrone, topple, remove, supplant, displace A tyrant business leader will lose the true trust of his/her employees and cannot succeed
with such an attitude to gain the employee's best effort in everything. The tyrant business
leader will be deposed mentally in his/her employees' minds. A tyrant attitude can never
succeed as well as will a respectful attitude to put the employees' needs first.
In the home setting a tyrant parent will not win the children's love & respect and will fail
raising emotionally & mentally healthy children then often leading to drug use & crimes.
Synonyms for tyrant: click each: dictator, despot, autocrat, authoritarian, oppressor
Don Knauss of Clorox,
on Putting Your Followers First
This is the same as the success principles in The Bible:
"Whoever wants to be the most successful among you,
must be everyone's servant"
Click: Matthew 20:26-28
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Quotation
I have found that if you love life,
life will love you back.
Arthur Rubinstein
click: Arthur Rubinstein
click: Arthur Rubinstein - The Artist
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The message of this article fits for the business life and for the home life.
At home the "followers" are your dependants = your children and anyone else who needs you financing their needs.
Click: The Clorox Company
Q. Were you in leadership roles when you were younger?
A. I learned a lot of leadership lessons playing football and baseball in high school. But I started to think a lot more in college about what I was going to do. I was working on my master’s in history when I decided to join the Marine Corps. There was a service mentality in our family. My dad was Army Air Corps. My brother was Air Force. I was going to be a Marine. That changed everything.
Q. What did you learn in the Marines about leadership?
I’ll tell you a story. I was stationed on Oahu. The first day I was actually in a line unit — after 15 months of school and training — was on Hawaii, the Big Island. There’s a big Army base there where artillery units train and shoot live rounds. They helicoptered me over and I took a jeep to join 120 Marines in this artillery battery. They’d been out in the field for several weeks, and the commanding officer had ordered hot food from the base camp because they’d been eating C rations [canned food] for several days.
“If you’re going to engage the best and the brightest and retain them,” the Clorox C.E.O. says, “they’d better think that you care more about them than you care about yourself.”CreditEarl Wilson/The New York Times I had been up since 5 in the morning, and I was pretty hungry. I started walking over to get in front of the line, and this gunnery sergeant grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He said: “Lieutenant, in the field the men always eat first. You can have some if there’s any left.” I said, “O.K., I get it.”
That was the whole Marine Corps approach — it’s all about your people; it’s not about you. And if you’re going to lead these people, you’d better demonstrate that you care more about them than you care about yourself. I’ve never forgotten that, and that shaped my whole approach to leadership from then on.
Q. When you got out of the Marines, did you know what you wanted to do?
I learned in the Marine Corps that I really liked strategy. Every operation in the military is based on a five-paragraph order, and the acronym is Smeac — situation, mission, execution, administration and communication. It’s a very logical flow.
I decided to get into brand management, and Procter & Gamble was a great training ground, and they hired a lot of junior military officers. Procter was more of a written than verbal culture, and business initiatives were structured through short memos. It was almost an exact parallel of the five-paragraph order. I said, “I could fit into that culture.”
Q. What were some other leadership lessons?
One thing I learned very quickly was that there’s a head part and a heart part. The head part was, how are you going to focus the organization? And it had better be simple, and it probably should not be more than three things. You’ve got to communicate it about 100 times and align your incentive structure to it. It’s about distilling the complex to the simple, and I’ve seen leaders fail because they do the reverse, by trying to make things into some intellectual exercise. Whatever business you’re in, there are fundamentals, just like blocking and tackling in football. It always comes back to the fundamentals. You cannot let yourself get bored with the fundamentals.
On the heart side, the lesson is that it’s all about your people. If you’re going to engage the best and the brightest and retain them, they’d better think that you care more about them than you care about yourself. They’re not about making you look good. You’re about making them successful. If you really believe that and act on that, it gains you credibility and trust. You can run an organization based on fear for a short time. But trust is a much more powerful, long-term and sustainable way to drive an organization.
The other thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to assume the best intent of people, and that they’re really trying to do a good job. I’ve seen organizations that are based more on fear than trust because senior management really thinks people are trying to get one over on them, that they’re just punching a clock. People really are trying to do a good job, and they want to be proud of where they work. Understanding that helped make me a bit more patient.
Q. How do you hire?
First and foremost, I’m looking for fire in the belly. I’m looking for passion. I’m looking for energy. Is the person going to take a leading role and have an impact on the business? I will take passion over pedigree any day of the week. Second, are they smart? Can they think analytically, creatively and strategically? If you don’t have the intellectual horsepower, it’s going to be hard for people to follow you.
Third, is there any pattern in the person’s career that shows they can develop people? Did people move up through an organization because they were mentored by this person? A fourth thing is, can they communicate? Can you imagine this person on a stage, inspiring a large group? Do they have an easy, informal manner? Or are they too formal, too focused on hierarchy? That doesn’t work. Formality slows things down in companies. Informality speeds things up. It is much more powerful to use authority than power.
One of the things I’ve learned is that as you move up in an organization, you’re given more power. The less you use the power you’ve been given, the more authority people give you, because they think: “You know what? This guy’s O.K.” Persuading people to do things — come along with me because we’re going in the right direction — is much more powerful over time.
The last thing I look for is the values of the person. Do they tell the truth, but do they also stand up for what they think is right in the company? It starts with integrity, which is really the grease of commerce. You get things done much more quickly when people trust you.
Source: (1) NYT, (2) STAF, Inc.
MARCH 22, 2014
This interview with Don Knauss, chief executive of the Clorox Company, was conducted and condensed by the NYT
click: Donald Knauss: Executive Profile & Biography
click: Don Knauss of Clorox, on Putting Your Followers First - The ...www.nytimes.com/.../don-knauss-of-clorox-on-puttin...The New York Times
Source:(1) NYT, (2) STAF, Inc.
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Keys to Mental Toughness
How to handle stressful situations with confidence and skill
Some people associate the concept of mental toughness with aggression, violence, or anger. Mental toughness is the ability to stand firm in the positive and proactive thoughts that you have created for yourself and remain determined to follow through into creating positive feelings and actions.
It is a commitment to doing what is right because you know it will make your life better. The truest and toughest battles most people will ever fight are the battles that start and finish in their minds.
The best method for improving mental toughness and maintaining it is to apply these basic yet simple principles. If you practice these simple suggestions and boost your motivation to discipline your mind because you truly want to see positive change in your life, then you will be able to handle stressful situations with confidence and skill.
No need to blow things out of proportion
Aim to keep things in perspective; don’t magnify them into being worse than they are or have to be.
When things go bad repeatedly over a period of time, we may start to stereotype every bad thing that happens as “Murphy’s law.” Everything bad or unfortunate that can happen will happen. Do you know why? You are continually using the same negative magnifying glass to look at them.
Some individuals take minute situations and blow them into catastrophes. Always ask yourself this simple question, “What difference will this make a year from now?”
Decide to avoid all-or-nothing thinking
When you think in terms of extremes, you set ourselves up for failure. Basically, you will always need to be perfect to avoid failure.
For example, you want to do well, but when something doesn’t turn out the way you expected, you view the outcome as bad. As a result, you extrapolate the performance into who you are—making yourself a “bad” person because your performance was bad.
In order not to “be bad” you try too hard to be good, leading yourself to make further mistakes because of the added pressure you’ve placed on yourself. Perfectionism makes it hard to be perfect!
You can’t please everyone all of the time
If you believe you can keep everyone happy, thinking everyone will like you, then you are in for a major shock. When you try to be a people-pleaser, you submit to others and become passive, deviating from your main goal—being assertive, which helps you accomplish your goals.
As soon as you become passive, you are more inclined to dislike certain people and situations because you have compromised yourself and no longer feel comfortable.
Catering to the needs and whims of others will get you quickly on your way to becoming a procrastinator—not only to their demands, but also for what you would like to achieve.
I heard a statistic that asserts that 10 percent of the people you meet will never like or accept you no matter who you are, what you do for them, and so on. So focus on the other 90 percent, but be sure to never have your rights or needs taken away or compromised.
Get rid of the “uncertainty questions” such as, “Why me?” “When will things change?” “Will any good breaks ever come my way?”
Oftentimes, when things go bad, you seek answers of an absolute nature. Let’s face it, not all questions have answers you can understand.
When you question yourself, you sometimes analyze things to death, causing stress. Did you know that when you ask questions of a negative nature, you tend to focus on negative experiences and create corresponding visual experiences? If you believe in the law of attraction and affirmations, this theory will hold true when you are asking yourself a question.
If you are placing your focus on something negative, since “like attracts like,” you will be bringing more negativity your way.
Did you know some experts claim that your memory file cabinets get compromised when you dwell on negative experiences? It takes twice as much energy to dwell on the negative than on the positive. Perhaps that is why you are so tired.
Take one day at a time.
Enjoy the present moment and be in the moment. There are always enough worries in today, so why spend energy on thoughts of tomorrow?
Too many people want instant change. In fact, we are all changing instantly, because our bodies (cells) and the situations around us are always changing and evolving. People want to see tangible results instantly. But that is not how it works.
The exercise in mental toughness is to develop moment-to-moment awareness. Focus on your thoughts. Hit the delete button whenever a negative one comes on the screen and replace it with a positive one immediately. How does one do this? Keep your thoughts focused on the present. It will take practice, but you will succeed at it with time, but not months or years.
Source: (1) The Epoch Times; Dr. Peter Sacco, (2) STAF, Inc. (STAF. Inc. endorses click: The Epoch Times)
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Successology®
is a new science founded and Reg. in US.Pat.Off. in 1991
Science for the good life©
The founder of this new science is Dr. Christian,
also the founder of
Save The American Family – STAF, Inc. New York, NY.
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See articles beloW
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What Success is made of in America ?
Same principles worldwide - everyone can benefit from reading this article
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP*) elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.*) WASP = click: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant = a closed group of high-status Americans of English Protestant ancestry - The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social and financial power. The term WASP does not describe every Protestant of English background, but rather a small restricted group whose family wealth and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others.
The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
Any individual, from any background, can have what we call this Triple Package of traits. But research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo” placed on earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia L. Bushman’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.” Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian “superiority complex.” At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they may be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
By contrast, white American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem. There’s an ocean of difference between “You’re amazing. Mommy and Daddy never want you to worry about a thing” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the family and end up a bum on the streets.” In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but never your education, so study harder. Newcomers and religious minorities may face derision or hostility. Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro’s takeover reported seeing signs reading “No dogs, no Cubans” on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear Mitt Romney’s clean-cut sons described as “creepy” in the media. In combination with a superiority complex, the feeling of being underestimated or scorned can be a powerful motivator.
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age — or at least they did so when they were on the rise.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to. A culture producing, say, four high achievers out of 10 would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was one out of 20.
But this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.” Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history. To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it’s used by an outsider minority as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility, but ethnic pride or religious zeal can turn all too easily into intolerance of its own.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
It’s not easy for minority groups in America to maintain a superiority complex. For most of its history, America did pretty much everything a country could to impose a narrative of inferiority on its nonwhite minorities and especially its black population. Over and over, African-Americans have fought back against this narrative, but its legacy persists.
Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts, as Mr. Combs himself did. They can create narratives of pride that reject the master narratives of their society, or turn those narratives around. In any given family, an unusually strong parent, grandparent or even teacher can instill in children every one of the three crucial traits. It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating: They include slavery, systematic discrimination, schools that fail to teach, employers who won’t promote, single motherhood and the fact that roughly a third of young black men in this country are in jail, awaiting trial or on probation or parole. Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control. Researchers at the University of Rochester recently reran the famous marshmallow test with a new spin. Children initially subjected to a broken promise — adults promised them a new art set to play with, but never delivered — almost invariably “failed” the test (snatching the first marshmallow instead of waiting 15 minutes for a promised second). By contrast, when the adults followed through on their promise, most kids passed the test.
The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched. In these circumstances, it takes much more grit, more drive and perhaps a more exceptional individual to break out.
Of course a person born with the proverbial silver spoon can grow up to be wealthy without hard work, insecurity or discipline (although to the extent a group passes on its wealth that way, it’s likely to be headed for decline). In a society with increasing class rigidity, parental wealth obviously contributes to the success of the next generation.
But one reason groups with the cultural package we’ve described have such an advantage in the United States today lies in the very same factors that are shrinking opportunity for so many of America’s poor. Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit. It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
Consider the story of Sonia Sotomayor, who was born to struggling Puerto Rican parents. Her father was an alcoholic, she writes in her moving autobiography, “My Beloved World,” and her mother’s “way of coping was to avoid being at home” with him. But Justice Sotomayor, who gave herself painful insulin shots for diabetes starting around age 8, was “blessed” with a “stubborn perseverance.” Not originally a top student, she did “something very unusual” in fifth grade, approaching one of the smartest girls in the class to “ask her how to study.” Soon she was getting top marks, and a few years later she applied to Princeton — though her guidance counselor recommended “Catholic colleges.”
The point of this example is not, “See, it’s easy to climb out of poverty in America.” On the contrary, Justice Sotomayor’s story illustrates just how extraordinary a person has to be to overcome the odds stacked against her.
But research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children. This supports those who, like the Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman, argue that education dollars for the underprivileged are best spent on early childhood intervention, beginning at preschool age, when kids are most formable.
The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Those who talk of America’s “decline” miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book
“The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
Click green for further info
Source: (1) NYT, (2) Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professrs at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
(3) STAF, Inc.
Same principles worldwide - everyone can benefit from reading this article
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well. It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly $90,000 per year in median household income versus $50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top positions in many of America’s most recognizable companies. These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 percent of the United States’ adult population, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
Today’s wealthy Mormon businessmen often started from humble origins. Although India and China send the most immigrants to the United States through employment-based channels, almost half of all Indian immigrants and over half of Chinese immigrants do not enter the country under those criteria. Many are poor and poorly educated. Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence. By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP*) elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.*) WASP = click: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant = a closed group of high-status Americans of English Protestant ancestry - The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social and financial power. The term WASP does not describe every Protestant of English background, but rather a small restricted group whose family wealth and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others.
The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
Any individual, from any background, can have what we call this Triple Package of traits. But research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are “gods in embryo” placed on earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia L. Bushman’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of moral decay.” Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian “superiority complex.” At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the “chosen” people; later they may be taught that Jews are a moral people, a people of law and intellect, a people of survivors.
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
A central finding in a study of more than 5,000 immigrants’ children led by the sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt “motivated to achieve” because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents’ sacrifices. Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
By contrast, white American parents have been found to be more focused on building children’s social skills and self-esteem. There’s an ocean of difference between “You’re amazing. Mommy and Daddy never want you to worry about a thing” and “If you don’t do well at school, you’ll let down the family and end up a bum on the streets.” In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children. Hence the common credo: They can take away your home or business, but never your education, so study harder. Newcomers and religious minorities may face derision or hostility. Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro’s takeover reported seeing signs reading “No dogs, no Cubans” on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear Mitt Romney’s clean-cut sons described as “creepy” in the media. In combination with a superiority complex, the feeling of being underestimated or scorned can be a powerful motivator.
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age — or at least they did so when they were on the rise.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to. A culture producing, say, four high achievers out of 10 would attain wildly disproportionate success if the surrounding average was one out of 20.
But this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.” Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history. To be sure, a group superiority complex somehow feels less ugly when it’s used by an outsider minority as an armor against majority prejudices and hostility, but ethnic pride or religious zeal can turn all too easily into intolerance of its own.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
It’s not easy for minority groups in America to maintain a superiority complex. For most of its history, America did pretty much everything a country could to impose a narrative of inferiority on its nonwhite minorities and especially its black population. Over and over, African-Americans have fought back against this narrative, but its legacy persists.
Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts, as Mr. Combs himself did. They can create narratives of pride that reject the master narratives of their society, or turn those narratives around. In any given family, an unusually strong parent, grandparent or even teacher can instill in children every one of the three crucial traits. It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating: They include slavery, systematic discrimination, schools that fail to teach, employers who won’t promote, single motherhood and the fact that roughly a third of young black men in this country are in jail, awaiting trial or on probation or parole. Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control. Researchers at the University of Rochester recently reran the famous marshmallow test with a new spin. Children initially subjected to a broken promise — adults promised them a new art set to play with, but never delivered — almost invariably “failed” the test (snatching the first marshmallow instead of waiting 15 minutes for a promised second). By contrast, when the adults followed through on their promise, most kids passed the test.
The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched. In these circumstances, it takes much more grit, more drive and perhaps a more exceptional individual to break out.
Of course a person born with the proverbial silver spoon can grow up to be wealthy without hard work, insecurity or discipline (although to the extent a group passes on its wealth that way, it’s likely to be headed for decline). In a society with increasing class rigidity, parental wealth obviously contributes to the success of the next generation.
But one reason groups with the cultural package we’ve described have such an advantage in the United States today lies in the very same factors that are shrinking opportunity for so many of America’s poor. Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit. It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
Consider the story of Sonia Sotomayor, who was born to struggling Puerto Rican parents. Her father was an alcoholic, she writes in her moving autobiography, “My Beloved World,” and her mother’s “way of coping was to avoid being at home” with him. But Justice Sotomayor, who gave herself painful insulin shots for diabetes starting around age 8, was “blessed” with a “stubborn perseverance.” Not originally a top student, she did “something very unusual” in fifth grade, approaching one of the smartest girls in the class to “ask her how to study.” Soon she was getting top marks, and a few years later she applied to Princeton — though her guidance counselor recommended “Catholic colleges.”
The point of this example is not, “See, it’s easy to climb out of poverty in America.” On the contrary, Justice Sotomayor’s story illustrates just how extraordinary a person has to be to overcome the odds stacked against her.
But research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children. This supports those who, like the Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman, argue that education dollars for the underprivileged are best spent on early childhood intervention, beginning at preschool age, when kids are most formable.
The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Those who talk of America’s “decline” miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book
“The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
Click green for further info
Source: (1) NYT, (2) Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld are professrs at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.”
(3) STAF, Inc.
- What Drives Success? - NYTimes.comwww.nytimes.com/2014/.../what-drives-success.ht...The New York Times
These facts don't make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to ... __________________________________
Article A
(Article B next belove)
Fathers’ Sons and Brothers’ Keepers
Love and Affection
Percentage of American fathers who hugged or showed physical affection to their children under age 13 every day in the past month:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 76 (2) Hispanic: 73 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Percentage of American fathers who, every day in the past month, told their children that they love them:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 65 (2) Hispanic: 45 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Frederick Douglass once noted,
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” *)
*) = Of course we could add "broken women"
Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. Wikipedia
The statement is simple, profound and as true as truth can be. And yet we as a society and as individual families neglect the building, facilitate the breaking and balk at the cost and commitment of the repair.
On Thursday, President Obama took a step toward righting that wrong in regard to young men of color by announcing the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a partnership between the public and private sectors aimed at bettering outcomes for some of the nation’s most at-risk young men.
It is a necessary and noble ambition to begin to draw resources together in a common effort to find best practices for addressing stubborn issues, and to better fund and expand those efforts.
This will not be easy. The issues facing many of these men are so complicated and layered with pain that they are incredibly daunting. There is a deficit of hope and a surplus of hurdles — familial, cultural, behavioral and structural.
But we must start somewhere. As the old saying goes, “The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”
Programs like this usually focus on the easier part of the problem, the personal, rather than the harder part, the structural.
Youth Guidance, whose Becoming a Man group the president highlighted during his announcement, says that through its program, “Participants learn about and practice impulse control, emotional self-regulation, reading social cues and interpreting intentions of others, raising aspirations for the future and developing a sense of personal responsibility and integrity.”
These are important character traits, to be sure, but it’s hard not to think that ideally they would be transferred from parents — particularly fathers — to sons.
That’s why I was encouraged that the president spent quite a bit of time discussing the role of fathers in boys’ lives.
He said of his father: “I didn’t have a dad in the house. And I was angry about it, even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time.”
In a previous column, I wrote this of my own father: “I was forced to experience him as a distant form in a heavy fog, forced to nurse a longing that he was neither equipped nor inclined to satisfy.”
When there is an empty space where a father should be, sorrow often grows. The void creates in a child an injury that the child is often unable to articulate or even recognize. And what children miss at home, they will often seek in the street, to ill effect.
Many boys with that empty space lash out and act up, trying to be seen, searching, as people do, for love and affirmation, wanting desperately to be validated. And too many of us, in turn, see them as menaces rather than as boys struggling — often without sufficient instruction and against a tide of systemic inequity — to simply become men. In such a warped world, basic survival can become a metric of success.
As the president put it, “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”
But sometimes fathers don’t even know how to be the best fathers. Sometimes they simply engage in an intergenerational transference of pain and need. It’s sometimes hard to give what you yourself have not received.
For instance, according to Child Trends, black fathers are substantially less likely than white or Hispanic fathers to hug their children or show them physical affection, or to tell them that they love them.
I don’t scold these fathers; I weep for them and with them. I understand, on a most personal level, that conditioning. Sometimes men don’t see that masculinity is as much about tenderness as about toughness. Sometimes they don’t know how to manage emotions. Sometimes the world has so beaten them and so hardened them that expressing any vulnerability feels like providing an opening for an enemy.
But I also know that being an engaged father can be a reparative therapy — healing your hurt as you protect your progeny. Our children provide a reservoir of the deepest, truest love in a harsh and unforgiving world. They are our respite from the battlefield.
We, as a society, must change our perspective when considering these boys and men, and more fully engage our empathy. That is both a personal and a structural change.
We can and must break these cycles of pain, building better boys and repairing broken men.
Fathers' Sons and Brothers' Keepers - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/.../blow-fathers-sons-and-...The New York Times
Frederick Douglass once noted, “It is easier to build strongchildren than to repair broken men.” The statement is simple, profound and as true ...
(Article B next below)
________________________________________________________________________________
Obama Starts Initiative for Young Black Men, Noting His Own Experience
Article B
(Article A next above)
WASHINGTON — President Obama spoke in unusually personal terms at the White House on Thursday about how he got high as a teenager and was at times indifferent to school as he deplored what he called America’s numbness to the plight of young black men.
Drawing on the power of his own racial identity in a way he seldom does as president, Mr. Obama sought to connect his personal narrative about growing up without a father to that of a generation of black youth in the United States who he said faced higher odds of failure than their peers.
“I didn’t have a dad in the house,” Mr. Obama said as he announced a $200 million, five-year initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, to help black youth. “And I was angry about it, even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time. I made bad choices. I got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do. I didn’t always take school as seriously as I should have. I made excuses. Sometimes I sold myself short.”
Mr. Obama said the idea for My Brother’s Keeper occurred to him in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager whose death two years ago sparked a roiling national debate about race and class. He called the challenge of ensuring success for young men of color a “moral issue for our country” as he ticked off the statistics: black boys who are more likely to be suspended from school, less likely to be able to read, and almost certain to encounter the criminal justice system as either a perpetrator or a victim.
“We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is,” Mr. Obama told an audience of business leaders, politicians, philanthropists, young black men from a Chicago support program, and Mr. Martin’s parents. “It’s like a cultural backdrop for us in movies, in television. We just assume, of course it’s going to be like that.”
“These statistics should break our hearts,” he added. “And they should compel us to act.”
Mr. Obama’s remarks come as the end of his time in office is in sight, with the president mindful of the legacy that his administration will leave behind on race and other civil rights issues like same-sex marriage and immigration. Mr. Obama has embraced the right of gay men and lesbians to marry, and Eric H. Holder Jr., his attorney general, has aggressively sought to ensure that all eligible Americans have access to the ballot box.
Although Mr. Obama nods on occasion to his history-making status as the nation’s first black president, he has sought to avoid being defined entirely by his race. He most often emphasizes that he is the leader of all Americans. But in recent years, the president has spoken more about the black experience in the United States — most strikingly after the death of Mr. Martin, when Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
On Thursday, the president combined his personal remarks on race with a broader call to focus on “the larger agenda”: economic insecurity and stalled mobility for Americans of any color.
“The plain fact is there are some Americans who, in the aggregate, are consistently doing worse in our society,” Mr. Obama said, “groups that have had the odds stacked against them in unique ways that require unique solutions, groups who’ve seen fewer opportunities that have spanned generations.”
The president also called for action from business leaders, members of religious groups, actors, athletes and anyone who can intervene in the lives of black men before they veer off course. He said a White House task force would examine ways the federal government can help, too.
“It doesn’t take that much, but it takes more than we are doing now,” Mr. Obama said. “We will beat the odds. We need to give every child — no matter what they look like, no matter where they live — the ability to meet their full potential.”
Click green title for another article - if the link has expired search the web/New York Times for these 2 articles
He also challenged black men to do better themselves, and said they must not make excuses for their failures or blame society for the poor decisions they have already made.
“You will have to reject the cynicism that says the circumstances of your birth or society’s lingering injustices necessarily define you and your future,” Mr. Obama said.
“It will take courage, but you will have to tune out the naysayers who say if the deck is stacked against you, you might as well just give up or settle into the stereotype.”
“Nothing will be given to you,” he said.
Thursday’s announcement is unlikely to satisfy Mr. Obama’s most vocal critics in the black population, who have accused him of forgetting his roots.
Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke, said the president’s initiative did not focus enough on the more systemic forms of racism in America.
“These young men weren’t killed because of structural situations that didn’t give them opportunities,” Mr. Neal said.
“It’s other kinds of racism and violence that those boys were dealing with. The initiative is not addressing those things.”
The initiative is the latest example of Mr. Obama’s efforts to bypass Congress, which has stymied him on many of the economic policies he considers central to the lives of blacks.
In a show of support, leaders from more than a dozen nonprofit foundations and executives from some of the nation’s largest companies joined the president, along with Magic Johnson, the retired basketball superstar, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.
White House officials said the foundations had pledged to spend at least $200 million over the next five years in a search for solutions to the problems black men face with early-childhood development, school readiness, educational opportunity, discipline, parenting and the criminal justice system.
“This is not a one-year proposition,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not a two-year proposition. It’s going to take time. We’re dealing with complicated issues that run deep in our history, run deep in our society and are entrenched in our minds.”
Gail C. Christopher, vice president for program strategy for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which has committed $750,000 to My Brother’s Keeper, said the initial money would be used for hiring staff, consultants and firms “to get something established that has legs.”
But more money will be needed for the initiative to have an impact, Ms. Christopher said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a drop in the ocean of money that will be needed to transform the opportunity structures in our society,” she said.
Mr. Obama acknowledged the limits of an approach that relies little on the government. But he offered hope in the power of his office to bring together people as diverse as the Rev. Al Sharpton, the television host and civil rights campaigner, and Bill O’Reilly, the conservative host on Fox News and best-selling novelist. Both attended the event at the White House.
“If I can persuade, you know, Sharpton and O’Reilly to be in the same meeting,” the president said, “then it means that there are people of good faith who want to get some stuff done.”
Source: NYT
Click the title to see the pictures - if the link has expired search the web/New York Times
Obama Starts Initiative for Young Black Men, Noting His Own ...
www.nytimes.com/.../obama-will-announce-i...The New York Times
by Michael Shear - in 1,147 Google+ circles
President Obama's My Brother's Keeper effort is aimed at finding... Search NYTimes.com ... to connect his personal narrative about growing up without a father to that of ... Mr. Martin, when Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. ... A version of this article appears in print on February 28, 2014, ...
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SEE NEXT BELOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CHILDREN
IN A PARENTAL SEPARATION OF DIVORCE
________________________________________________________________________________
(Article B next belove)
Fathers’ Sons and Brothers’ Keepers
Love and Affection
Percentage of American fathers who hugged or showed physical affection to their children under age 13 every day in the past month:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 76 (2) Hispanic: 73 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Percentage of American fathers who, every day in the past month, told their children that they love them:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 65 (2) Hispanic: 45 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Frederick Douglass once noted,
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” *)
*) = Of course we could add "broken women"
Frederick Douglass was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. Wikipedia
The statement is simple, profound and as true as truth can be. And yet we as a society and as individual families neglect the building, facilitate the breaking and balk at the cost and commitment of the repair.
On Thursday, President Obama took a step toward righting that wrong in regard to young men of color by announcing the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a partnership between the public and private sectors aimed at bettering outcomes for some of the nation’s most at-risk young men.
It is a necessary and noble ambition to begin to draw resources together in a common effort to find best practices for addressing stubborn issues, and to better fund and expand those efforts.
This will not be easy. The issues facing many of these men are so complicated and layered with pain that they are incredibly daunting. There is a deficit of hope and a surplus of hurdles — familial, cultural, behavioral and structural.
But we must start somewhere. As the old saying goes, “The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”
Programs like this usually focus on the easier part of the problem, the personal, rather than the harder part, the structural.
Youth Guidance, whose Becoming a Man group the president highlighted during his announcement, says that through its program, “Participants learn about and practice impulse control, emotional self-regulation, reading social cues and interpreting intentions of others, raising aspirations for the future and developing a sense of personal responsibility and integrity.”
These are important character traits, to be sure, but it’s hard not to think that ideally they would be transferred from parents — particularly fathers — to sons.
That’s why I was encouraged that the president spent quite a bit of time discussing the role of fathers in boys’ lives.
He said of his father: “I didn’t have a dad in the house. And I was angry about it, even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time.”
In a previous column, I wrote this of my own father: “I was forced to experience him as a distant form in a heavy fog, forced to nurse a longing that he was neither equipped nor inclined to satisfy.”
When there is an empty space where a father should be, sorrow often grows. The void creates in a child an injury that the child is often unable to articulate or even recognize. And what children miss at home, they will often seek in the street, to ill effect.
Many boys with that empty space lash out and act up, trying to be seen, searching, as people do, for love and affirmation, wanting desperately to be validated. And too many of us, in turn, see them as menaces rather than as boys struggling — often without sufficient instruction and against a tide of systemic inequity — to simply become men. In such a warped world, basic survival can become a metric of success.
As the president put it, “nothing keeps a young man out of trouble like a father who takes an active role in his son’s life.”
But sometimes fathers don’t even know how to be the best fathers. Sometimes they simply engage in an intergenerational transference of pain and need. It’s sometimes hard to give what you yourself have not received.
For instance, according to Child Trends, black fathers are substantially less likely than white or Hispanic fathers to hug their children or show them physical affection, or to tell them that they love them.
I don’t scold these fathers; I weep for them and with them. I understand, on a most personal level, that conditioning. Sometimes men don’t see that masculinity is as much about tenderness as about toughness. Sometimes they don’t know how to manage emotions. Sometimes the world has so beaten them and so hardened them that expressing any vulnerability feels like providing an opening for an enemy.
But I also know that being an engaged father can be a reparative therapy — healing your hurt as you protect your progeny. Our children provide a reservoir of the deepest, truest love in a harsh and unforgiving world. They are our respite from the battlefield.
We, as a society, must change our perspective when considering these boys and men, and more fully engage our empathy. That is both a personal and a structural change.
We can and must break these cycles of pain, building better boys and repairing broken men.
Fathers' Sons and Brothers' Keepers - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/.../blow-fathers-sons-and-...The New York Times
Frederick Douglass once noted, “It is easier to build strongchildren than to repair broken men.” The statement is simple, profound and as true ...
(Article B next below)
________________________________________________________________________________
Obama Starts Initiative for Young Black Men, Noting His Own Experience
Article B
(Article A next above)
WASHINGTON — President Obama spoke in unusually personal terms at the White House on Thursday about how he got high as a teenager and was at times indifferent to school as he deplored what he called America’s numbness to the plight of young black men.
Drawing on the power of his own racial identity in a way he seldom does as president, Mr. Obama sought to connect his personal narrative about growing up without a father to that of a generation of black youth in the United States who he said faced higher odds of failure than their peers.
“I didn’t have a dad in the house,” Mr. Obama said as he announced a $200 million, five-year initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, to help black youth. “And I was angry about it, even though I didn’t necessarily realize it at the time. I made bad choices. I got high without always thinking about the harm that it could do. I didn’t always take school as seriously as I should have. I made excuses. Sometimes I sold myself short.”
Mr. Obama said the idea for My Brother’s Keeper occurred to him in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager whose death two years ago sparked a roiling national debate about race and class. He called the challenge of ensuring success for young men of color a “moral issue for our country” as he ticked off the statistics: black boys who are more likely to be suspended from school, less likely to be able to read, and almost certain to encounter the criminal justice system as either a perpetrator or a victim.
“We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is,” Mr. Obama told an audience of business leaders, politicians, philanthropists, young black men from a Chicago support program, and Mr. Martin’s parents. “It’s like a cultural backdrop for us in movies, in television. We just assume, of course it’s going to be like that.”
“These statistics should break our hearts,” he added. “And they should compel us to act.”
Mr. Obama’s remarks come as the end of his time in office is in sight, with the president mindful of the legacy that his administration will leave behind on race and other civil rights issues like same-sex marriage and immigration. Mr. Obama has embraced the right of gay men and lesbians to marry, and Eric H. Holder Jr., his attorney general, has aggressively sought to ensure that all eligible Americans have access to the ballot box.
Although Mr. Obama nods on occasion to his history-making status as the nation’s first black president, he has sought to avoid being defined entirely by his race. He most often emphasizes that he is the leader of all Americans. But in recent years, the president has spoken more about the black experience in the United States — most strikingly after the death of Mr. Martin, when Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
On Thursday, the president combined his personal remarks on race with a broader call to focus on “the larger agenda”: economic insecurity and stalled mobility for Americans of any color.
“The plain fact is there are some Americans who, in the aggregate, are consistently doing worse in our society,” Mr. Obama said, “groups that have had the odds stacked against them in unique ways that require unique solutions, groups who’ve seen fewer opportunities that have spanned generations.”
The president also called for action from business leaders, members of religious groups, actors, athletes and anyone who can intervene in the lives of black men before they veer off course. He said a White House task force would examine ways the federal government can help, too.
“It doesn’t take that much, but it takes more than we are doing now,” Mr. Obama said. “We will beat the odds. We need to give every child — no matter what they look like, no matter where they live — the ability to meet their full potential.”
Click green title for another article - if the link has expired search the web/New York Times for these 2 articles
He also challenged black men to do better themselves, and said they must not make excuses for their failures or blame society for the poor decisions they have already made.
“You will have to reject the cynicism that says the circumstances of your birth or society’s lingering injustices necessarily define you and your future,” Mr. Obama said.
“It will take courage, but you will have to tune out the naysayers who say if the deck is stacked against you, you might as well just give up or settle into the stereotype.”
“Nothing will be given to you,” he said.
Thursday’s announcement is unlikely to satisfy Mr. Obama’s most vocal critics in the black population, who have accused him of forgetting his roots.
Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke, said the president’s initiative did not focus enough on the more systemic forms of racism in America.
“These young men weren’t killed because of structural situations that didn’t give them opportunities,” Mr. Neal said.
“It’s other kinds of racism and violence that those boys were dealing with. The initiative is not addressing those things.”
The initiative is the latest example of Mr. Obama’s efforts to bypass Congress, which has stymied him on many of the economic policies he considers central to the lives of blacks.
In a show of support, leaders from more than a dozen nonprofit foundations and executives from some of the nation’s largest companies joined the president, along with Magic Johnson, the retired basketball superstar, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state.
White House officials said the foundations had pledged to spend at least $200 million over the next five years in a search for solutions to the problems black men face with early-childhood development, school readiness, educational opportunity, discipline, parenting and the criminal justice system.
“This is not a one-year proposition,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not a two-year proposition. It’s going to take time. We’re dealing with complicated issues that run deep in our history, run deep in our society and are entrenched in our minds.”
Gail C. Christopher, vice president for program strategy for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which has committed $750,000 to My Brother’s Keeper, said the initial money would be used for hiring staff, consultants and firms “to get something established that has legs.”
But more money will be needed for the initiative to have an impact, Ms. Christopher said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a drop in the ocean of money that will be needed to transform the opportunity structures in our society,” she said.
Mr. Obama acknowledged the limits of an approach that relies little on the government. But he offered hope in the power of his office to bring together people as diverse as the Rev. Al Sharpton, the television host and civil rights campaigner, and Bill O’Reilly, the conservative host on Fox News and best-selling novelist. Both attended the event at the White House.
“If I can persuade, you know, Sharpton and O’Reilly to be in the same meeting,” the president said, “then it means that there are people of good faith who want to get some stuff done.”
Source: NYT
Click the title to see the pictures - if the link has expired search the web/New York Times
Obama Starts Initiative for Young Black Men, Noting His Own ...
www.nytimes.com/.../obama-will-announce-i...The New York Times
by Michael Shear - in 1,147 Google+ circles
President Obama's My Brother's Keeper effort is aimed at finding... Search NYTimes.com ... to connect his personal narrative about growing up without a father to that of ... Mr. Martin, when Mr. Obama said, “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. ... A version of this article appears in print on February 28, 2014, ...
______________
SEE NEXT BELOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CHILDREN
IN A PARENTAL SEPARATION OF DIVORCE
________________________________________________________________________________
Important
Every child experiencing
a parental separation or divorce
faces serious life threatening disasters
See just next below
Is this really what you want for your children
? ? ?
The most destructive 13 listed here:
Click the green article web links below the list of the 13 disasters - study the articles and see
how family problems in childhood affect brain development
____________________________
All of these 13 disasters are based on the most recent science
(1) overall increased risks to health & welfare;
(2) 5 times more likely to commit suicide;
(3) 32 times more likely to run away;
(4) 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders;
(5) 14 times more likely to commit rape;
(6) 9 times more likely to drop out of school;
(7) 10 times more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs;
(8) 20 times more likely to end up in prison;
(9) increased learning difficulties;
(10) increased risk of divorce when grown;
(11) increased out of wedlock pregnancies;
(12) highly increased risk of having a stroke during his/her life time,
(13) serious high blood pressure challenges in their adult years when growing up with only one parent.
Evidence science articles for these 13 disasters are in several locations in this website and in this tab
Below 3 links
When you, the parents, get separated or divorced your child(ren) will be facing more or less of these life-destroying challenges - is this what you want to your child(ren)?
Heal your marriage - It can be done - STAF, Inc. will help.
Just alone to apply all information in this internet seminar you can heal your marriage.
If you need further help, contact STAF, Inc. - we will help.
Contact info in the home page.
__________________
Quotation
“It is easier to build strong children
than to repair broken men*)”
Frederick Douglas
Click: Wikipedia
*) of course we could add: "or broken women"
Love and Affection
Percentage of American fathers who hugged or showed physical affection to their children under age 13
every day in the past month:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 76 (2) Hispanic: 73 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Percentage of American fathers who, every day in the past month, told their children that they love them:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 65 (2) Hispanic: 45 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
_____________________
Three science articles below to study relating to the 13 disasters happening to your children, when ...........
Exposure to common family problems early in life can impair
your child's brain development
Click the green title below
Family Conflicts Can Impair Child's Brain Development: Study
02/21/2014
Click the green title below to see the brain images how family problems in childhood affect brain development
Family Problems In Childhood Affect Brain Development
Research by the University of East Anglia, England, Click: University of East Anglia
Searchthe web for this third science article: "How yelling to your child will affect negatively your child development"
Study it and: stop yelling - otherwise you ruin your child's healthy & successful future
_______________________________________________________________________
Every child experiencing
a parental separation or divorce
faces serious life threatening disasters
See just next below
Is this really what you want for your children
? ? ?
The most destructive 13 listed here:
Click the green article web links below the list of the 13 disasters - study the articles and see
how family problems in childhood affect brain development
____________________________
All of these 13 disasters are based on the most recent science
(1) overall increased risks to health & welfare;
(2) 5 times more likely to commit suicide;
(3) 32 times more likely to run away;
(4) 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders;
(5) 14 times more likely to commit rape;
(6) 9 times more likely to drop out of school;
(7) 10 times more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs;
(8) 20 times more likely to end up in prison;
(9) increased learning difficulties;
(10) increased risk of divorce when grown;
(11) increased out of wedlock pregnancies;
(12) highly increased risk of having a stroke during his/her life time,
(13) serious high blood pressure challenges in their adult years when growing up with only one parent.
Evidence science articles for these 13 disasters are in several locations in this website and in this tab
Below 3 links
When you, the parents, get separated or divorced your child(ren) will be facing more or less of these life-destroying challenges - is this what you want to your child(ren)?
Heal your marriage - It can be done - STAF, Inc. will help.
Just alone to apply all information in this internet seminar you can heal your marriage.
If you need further help, contact STAF, Inc. - we will help.
Contact info in the home page.
__________________
Quotation
“It is easier to build strong children
than to repair broken men*)”
Frederick Douglas
Click: Wikipedia
*) of course we could add: "or broken women"
Love and Affection
Percentage of American fathers who hugged or showed physical affection to their children under age 13
every day in the past month:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 76 (2) Hispanic: 73 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
Percentage of American fathers who, every day in the past month, told their children that they love them:
(1) White, non-Hispanic: 65 (2) Hispanic: 45 (3) Black-non-Hispanic: 56
_____________________
Three science articles below to study relating to the 13 disasters happening to your children, when ...........
Exposure to common family problems early in life can impair
your child's brain development
Click the green title below
Family Conflicts Can Impair Child's Brain Development: Study
02/21/2014
Click the green title below to see the brain images how family problems in childhood affect brain development
Family Problems In Childhood Affect Brain Development
Research by the University of East Anglia, England, Click: University of East Anglia
Searchthe web for this third science article: "How yelling to your child will affect negatively your child development"
Study it and: stop yelling - otherwise you ruin your child's healthy & successful future
_______________________________________________________________________
Article 1 of 2 (Article 2 of 2 next below)
WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS
This article is an American real-life true love story
A fashion stylist becomes a wife to a widower and an “insta-mom” to three children
The readers say:
"It makes me cry of happiness' or "It makes me cry as I realize how beautiful life can be" or
"This story takes my depression away"
What is your opinion? Let us know at the STAF, Inc. - Email to: [email protected]
Making a Broken Family Whole Again
To see the picture of their wedding click the green title above
If the link has expired you may search the article in the New York Times website with the above green title
A fashion stylist becomes a wife to a widower and an “insta-mom” to three children
Eric Fleiss recently recalled the first words that his wife Susan said to him after she learned she had colon cancer in early 2011: “I need to find you a new wife.
click: Eric Fleiss: Executive Profile & Biography - Businessweek
Click: Eric Fleiss: Developing a Smart Strategy
After her death a few months later, Mr. Fleiss did embark on a search for a new partner, not least because he knew that his children, twins named Benji and Caroline, now 3, and Teddy, now 6, needed a mother. But after months of dating mishaps, misses and “the stalker and the psychos,” he had all but given up by mid-2012.
Mr. Fleiss, now 39, had concluded that it would probably take him a decade to find someone amazing. So, he thought, why press the issue?
Around that same time, Johanna Cohen, who is now 31 and is known as JoJo, was done with dating, too. She had spent the 10 years after graduating from the University of Southern California working as a stylist in Manhattan’s fashion scene and as a contributing fashion editor to O, the Oprah Magazine. Her keen eye for the perfect drape or the most exquisitely cut diamond while she styled photo shoots and dressing celebrity clients had made her a professional success. But the role of single girl in the city had become a grind.
For one thing, “I was only meeting gay men,” she said. “I had heartbreak, for sure. I found that men were not kind. I didn’t think there was a gentleman out there. I didn’t think I would ever meet my puzzle piece.”
A fresh start was in order. As a girl, she had loved sports as passionately as fashion, going to hockey games in Los Angeles with her father, Joseph Cohen, a former executive vice president at Madison Square Garden, and later an owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team.
So, she decided to spend summer 2012 in California, and found an eight-week rental in Malibu that had once belonged to the fashion photographer Herb Ritts. She hired a surfing instructor (married, so there were no blurred lines) and began to consider the possibility of relocating. The last thing on her mind was dating, especially an “L.A. guy,” and especially one with children.
But a friend, Callae Brownstein, who had once gone on what ended up being a platonic blind date with Mr. Fleiss, sensed that he and Ms. Cohen would have a strong connection. For starters, Ms. Brownstein said, they had both grown up in big families that split time between Los Angeles and Manhattan. And Ms. Cohen’s maturity had always been beyond her years, and she seemed to possess a strong motherly instinct.
“She was just moving in that week,” Ms. Brownstein said. “I told her: ‘No pressure. Go to dinner with him.’ She went in her flip-flops with the thought, I can’t wait to get this over with.”
The two met at a hole-in-the-wall Thai spot in Malibu on Aug. 1. Mr. Fleiss, the president of Regent Properties, a real estate development and investment firm in Los Angeles and with two degrees from Harvard, was thrilled that a beauty working in what can sometimes be a snobby industry (he had looked her up online) would pick such a down-to-earth restaurant. Little did he know she had chosen it because she had zero expectations for the night and because it was closest to her house.
But the food was terrific, and the mood more than matched the cuisine. “Nothing around us mattered, and it wasn’t like a first meeting,” Ms. Cohen said. (Perhaps they had unknowingly brushed arms before — they had grown up three blocks apart in Manhattan.) Mr. Fleiss was so impressed that after the three-and-a-half-hour dinner, he stood in the parking lot staring after her as she drove away.
“I was hypnotized,” Mr. Fleiss said. “I fell for her the minute I met her.”
It took him a couple of months to tell her he loved her, though. “I have all the natural worries someone like me might have,” he said. “Is she going to die, too? That kind of stuff. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Ms. Cohen was just as head over heels.
Yet it wasn’t enough for Mr. Fleiss to fall in love with Ms. Cohen, and vice versa. For a man with children, it had to be a package deal. But any apprehensions dissipated upon her first meeting with the children. To prepare them, Mr. Fleiss had begun to mention Ms. Cohen, reading them the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!,” which has a character named JoJo.
The couple decided to introduce her to the children at his annual Halloween gathering. “There would be a lot of people here,” Mr. Fleiss said. “She’d be a face in the crowd, but also Daddy’s friend. We were crossing the street, and I’ll never forget the vision of Teddy reaching up to grab her hand.”
“After Susan died, I had a mission,” he said. “I had to do what Susan wanted. I had to fix our broken family.”
Ms. Cohen made a smooth transition into becoming an “insta-mom.”
“They wanted to call me Mom,” she said. “They felt like mine.”
The youngest son, Benji, recently remarked, “God sent us a new mommy.”
After Mr. Fleiss proposed on a hike in the Malibu foothills, he had arranged for the couple to stay in a hotel. Still, Ms. Cohen preferred to spend the night at home so that they could tell the children as soon as they woke.
Mr. Fleiss said that he has a French aunt who settled upon a word that best describes JoJo: “chaleur.” “It means having the quality of warmth,” he said. “Imagine a snowy evening in the mountains, you see a log cabin with a fire roaring — a feeling of home, of warmth and heart. For me, that’s what JoJo is.”
On their wedding day, on Jan. 18, at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, Ms. Cohen was striking in her bridal gown, which had been custom-made by the model and fashion designer L’Wren Scott.
Featuring three butterflies symbolizing Benji, Caroline and Teddy stitched on its train, the sleek, strapless dress was made at the Royal School of Needlework in London. The final fitting needed to take place there, and Ms. Cohen made Caroline her travel companion. “It’s where Kate Middleton’s dress was embroidered by the McQueen team, and they rarely take on private commissions,” Ms. Cohen said, adding that Caroline would remember it forever.
Under a canopy entwined with greenery, Rabbi Michael Gotlieb stood alongside Mr. Fleiss and the children, who waited for the woman who had brought the “chaleur” back into their home again.
Hair gathered into a loose bun, Ms. Cohen, who is now working as a fashion stylist for private clients, glided down the aisle to a string rendition of the Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.”
In a nod to their Manhattan roots, the couple — now Mr. and Ms. Fleiss — deployed a snow-making machine to line the walkway to the seated dinner with snow; the fragrant orchids clustered along the entrance were a reminder of their first meeting in the garden of the restaurant in Malibu.
After the first dance, the bride’s father toasted the couple in front of their 400 guests.
“In high school, JoJo told us she wanted 12 children and had chosen their names, but didn’t tell anyone the names,” Mr. Cohen said. “Now we know three of them: Teddy, Benji and Caroline.”
ON THIS DAY
When Jan. 18, 2014.
Where Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.
Style Notes Though the couple enlisted the event planner Lisa Vorce, who had done the wedding of John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Ms. Cohen’s touch in the post-ceremony celebration was unmistakable. Orange-blossom-scented candles burned. A string quartet played “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “I’m a Believer.” Cocktail napkins were stamped with “Champagne is always the answer.” And cards at the bar touted the couple’s favorite cocktail, spicy margaritas with Tequila Cazadores. As chic as the cocktail hour was, there were also playful touches, like mini-pigs in blankets with ketchup. And the children had their own party, with cotton candy and snow-cone machines.
Source: (1) NYT (2) STAF (Article 2 of 2 below)
_______________________________
WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS
This article is an American real-life true love story
A fashion stylist becomes a wife to a widower and an “insta-mom” to three children
The readers say:
"It makes me cry of happiness' or "It makes me cry as I realize how beautiful life can be" or
"This story takes my depression away"
What is your opinion? Let us know at the STAF, Inc. - Email to: [email protected]
Making a Broken Family Whole Again
To see the picture of their wedding click the green title above
If the link has expired you may search the article in the New York Times website with the above green title
A fashion stylist becomes a wife to a widower and an “insta-mom” to three children
Eric Fleiss recently recalled the first words that his wife Susan said to him after she learned she had colon cancer in early 2011: “I need to find you a new wife.
click: Eric Fleiss: Executive Profile & Biography - Businessweek
Click: Eric Fleiss: Developing a Smart Strategy
After her death a few months later, Mr. Fleiss did embark on a search for a new partner, not least because he knew that his children, twins named Benji and Caroline, now 3, and Teddy, now 6, needed a mother. But after months of dating mishaps, misses and “the stalker and the psychos,” he had all but given up by mid-2012.
Mr. Fleiss, now 39, had concluded that it would probably take him a decade to find someone amazing. So, he thought, why press the issue?
Around that same time, Johanna Cohen, who is now 31 and is known as JoJo, was done with dating, too. She had spent the 10 years after graduating from the University of Southern California working as a stylist in Manhattan’s fashion scene and as a contributing fashion editor to O, the Oprah Magazine. Her keen eye for the perfect drape or the most exquisitely cut diamond while she styled photo shoots and dressing celebrity clients had made her a professional success. But the role of single girl in the city had become a grind.
For one thing, “I was only meeting gay men,” she said. “I had heartbreak, for sure. I found that men were not kind. I didn’t think there was a gentleman out there. I didn’t think I would ever meet my puzzle piece.”
A fresh start was in order. As a girl, she had loved sports as passionately as fashion, going to hockey games in Los Angeles with her father, Joseph Cohen, a former executive vice president at Madison Square Garden, and later an owner of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team.
So, she decided to spend summer 2012 in California, and found an eight-week rental in Malibu that had once belonged to the fashion photographer Herb Ritts. She hired a surfing instructor (married, so there were no blurred lines) and began to consider the possibility of relocating. The last thing on her mind was dating, especially an “L.A. guy,” and especially one with children.
But a friend, Callae Brownstein, who had once gone on what ended up being a platonic blind date with Mr. Fleiss, sensed that he and Ms. Cohen would have a strong connection. For starters, Ms. Brownstein said, they had both grown up in big families that split time between Los Angeles and Manhattan. And Ms. Cohen’s maturity had always been beyond her years, and she seemed to possess a strong motherly instinct.
“She was just moving in that week,” Ms. Brownstein said. “I told her: ‘No pressure. Go to dinner with him.’ She went in her flip-flops with the thought, I can’t wait to get this over with.”
The two met at a hole-in-the-wall Thai spot in Malibu on Aug. 1. Mr. Fleiss, the president of Regent Properties, a real estate development and investment firm in Los Angeles and with two degrees from Harvard, was thrilled that a beauty working in what can sometimes be a snobby industry (he had looked her up online) would pick such a down-to-earth restaurant. Little did he know she had chosen it because she had zero expectations for the night and because it was closest to her house.
But the food was terrific, and the mood more than matched the cuisine. “Nothing around us mattered, and it wasn’t like a first meeting,” Ms. Cohen said. (Perhaps they had unknowingly brushed arms before — they had grown up three blocks apart in Manhattan.) Mr. Fleiss was so impressed that after the three-and-a-half-hour dinner, he stood in the parking lot staring after her as she drove away.
“I was hypnotized,” Mr. Fleiss said. “I fell for her the minute I met her.”
It took him a couple of months to tell her he loved her, though. “I have all the natural worries someone like me might have,” he said. “Is she going to die, too? That kind of stuff. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Ms. Cohen was just as head over heels.
Yet it wasn’t enough for Mr. Fleiss to fall in love with Ms. Cohen, and vice versa. For a man with children, it had to be a package deal. But any apprehensions dissipated upon her first meeting with the children. To prepare them, Mr. Fleiss had begun to mention Ms. Cohen, reading them the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!,” which has a character named JoJo.
The couple decided to introduce her to the children at his annual Halloween gathering. “There would be a lot of people here,” Mr. Fleiss said. “She’d be a face in the crowd, but also Daddy’s friend. We were crossing the street, and I’ll never forget the vision of Teddy reaching up to grab her hand.”
“After Susan died, I had a mission,” he said. “I had to do what Susan wanted. I had to fix our broken family.”
Ms. Cohen made a smooth transition into becoming an “insta-mom.”
“They wanted to call me Mom,” she said. “They felt like mine.”
The youngest son, Benji, recently remarked, “God sent us a new mommy.”
After Mr. Fleiss proposed on a hike in the Malibu foothills, he had arranged for the couple to stay in a hotel. Still, Ms. Cohen preferred to spend the night at home so that they could tell the children as soon as they woke.
Mr. Fleiss said that he has a French aunt who settled upon a word that best describes JoJo: “chaleur.” “It means having the quality of warmth,” he said. “Imagine a snowy evening in the mountains, you see a log cabin with a fire roaring — a feeling of home, of warmth and heart. For me, that’s what JoJo is.”
On their wedding day, on Jan. 18, at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, Ms. Cohen was striking in her bridal gown, which had been custom-made by the model and fashion designer L’Wren Scott.
Featuring three butterflies symbolizing Benji, Caroline and Teddy stitched on its train, the sleek, strapless dress was made at the Royal School of Needlework in London. The final fitting needed to take place there, and Ms. Cohen made Caroline her travel companion. “It’s where Kate Middleton’s dress was embroidered by the McQueen team, and they rarely take on private commissions,” Ms. Cohen said, adding that Caroline would remember it forever.
Under a canopy entwined with greenery, Rabbi Michael Gotlieb stood alongside Mr. Fleiss and the children, who waited for the woman who had brought the “chaleur” back into their home again.
Hair gathered into a loose bun, Ms. Cohen, who is now working as a fashion stylist for private clients, glided down the aisle to a string rendition of the Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.”
In a nod to their Manhattan roots, the couple — now Mr. and Ms. Fleiss — deployed a snow-making machine to line the walkway to the seated dinner with snow; the fragrant orchids clustered along the entrance were a reminder of their first meeting in the garden of the restaurant in Malibu.
After the first dance, the bride’s father toasted the couple in front of their 400 guests.
“In high school, JoJo told us she wanted 12 children and had chosen their names, but didn’t tell anyone the names,” Mr. Cohen said. “Now we know three of them: Teddy, Benji and Caroline.”
ON THIS DAY
When Jan. 18, 2014.
Where Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.
Style Notes Though the couple enlisted the event planner Lisa Vorce, who had done the wedding of John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Ms. Cohen’s touch in the post-ceremony celebration was unmistakable. Orange-blossom-scented candles burned. A string quartet played “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “I’m a Believer.” Cocktail napkins were stamped with “Champagne is always the answer.” And cards at the bar touted the couple’s favorite cocktail, spicy margaritas with Tequila Cazadores. As chic as the cocktail hour was, there were also playful touches, like mini-pigs in blankets with ketchup. And the children had their own party, with cotton candy and snow-cone machines.
Source: (1) NYT (2) STAF (Article 2 of 2 below)
_______________________________
Article 2 of 2
Clinging to Each Other,
We Survived the Storm
Introduction
by Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D.
(STAF, Inc.)
Like the story 1 of 2 next above this story may easily make the reader cry.
However, this article 2 of 2 also has an important marriage strengthening and in general life strengthening element.
Quotation
"The Road to happiness is paved with struggle" (Dr. Russ Harris)
The couple in this article felt deep happiness because they together struggled to handle one of the most difficult challenges in any marriage. The later situation in the article made them understand that the heavy struggle they took together had made their marriage stronger.
Indeed "The Road to happiness could be paved with struggle".
STAF, Inc.'s opinion, as one of the leading marriage repairers, is to stick to your marriage forever no matter what.
That's assuming you got married "in the traditional manner" = you two met, started dating, fell in love, proposal & ring, wedding.
To see that much effort to get married and invest the time & money means that you two must have had a real love between the two of you. Real love never dies, never. If you leave your marriage in times that may be hard for everyone, separation and divorce will make it even harder for everyone, especially to your children.
Above the article 1 of 2 there is a list of the 13 life threatening disasters every child will face in a separation and/or divorce situation. Please study and save you children and save your and you spouse's life.
In tab "Services", sub-tab: "Restoring any marriage" you'll find further details how to survive the marriage challenges and detailed information of the terrible things your children will face and what you, as the couple will face if you separate and divorce. Don't - there is a better solution.
STAF, Inc. can repair your marriage and save your and your children's future. The result-bringing healing services can be given with the modern technology anywhere worldwide.
STAF, Inc.'s private services are given a unique lifetime result guarantee with a one-time fee only.
STAF, Inc. is the first one anywhere to give such a guarantee.
___________
The story time
Clinging to Each Other, We Survived the Storm
Every couple has a story, and this was ours. We were prepared to weather storms. For our wedding, we skipped the tissue paper and cream-colored card stock of standard invitations. Instead, we glued a photograph of ourselves swing-dancing onto a black-and-white picture of stormy ocean waves.
If marriage meant sticking through the hardest of times, we believed we could do it. Barely out of our 20s, we thought we had seen enough of life to know. After all, on the day David asked me out for a date at the office where we worked, I told him my brother had just died and my father was near death.
Instead of fleeing, David got down on one knee by my swivel chair and said, “That must be hard.”
For years, our story suited us. For years, it explained us as a couple.
Despite our differences (I loved books, he loved technology; I told stories, he wanted facts; I needed a tidy house, he needed a clean one), we were a team when it came to the important things in life. Though we paid attention to different details, we saw the same big picture. Life was hard; being together made it better. This faith in ourselves kept us strong when, three years from our wedding, the worst of all possible storms hit us with the birth of our first son, Silvan.
Healthy, full term, Silvan seemed perfect at birth: olive-skinned, long-lashed and as handsome as his father. But six hours later, the doctors knew something was wrong. Within a day, something seemed seriously wrong. By the end of the week, we understood that Silvan had been so completely brain damaged during labor that he could not survive without interventions, and even these would ultimately prove futile.
Left alone in the little room where we had received the news, we turned to each other. “Whatever happens,” I said, “don’t let this ruin our marriage.”
We needn’t have worried. Not then. In crisis, we were solid as a couple.
Driving back and forth between hospital and home, our faces pale and puffed with tears, we barely had time to eat and sleep, let alone put on our dancing clothes, but still we moved to a common rhythm. In Silvan’s chart, the social worker noted this. “Couple treats each other tenderly.” She was watching us. Everyone was.
With Silvan on life-support, with every day a new decision about how to treat him, they were all making sure we were equipped to guide our son through however brief a life. And we were. Whatever petty arguments we might have had as new parents over car seats, strollers and baby bottles shrank away. To care for Silvan, we cared for each other. To love Silvan, we loved each other, too. With life so unbelievably tenuous, we paid attention to what mattered.
For 38 days, nothing mattered more than our love for Silvan. Like any parents love-struck with their newborn, we stroked his skin, sniffed his loamy head and marveled at his starfish hands.
But unlike ordinary parents who hold hope for a future adult within their love for a child, Silvan as a newborn was all we had. Knowing our time was brief, we loved him fully in the present. He taught us how to do that. For all our rage and grief, joy overwhelmed us in his presence. For 38 days, Silvan was our life, and then, once he was gone, the habit of new love continued.
On a reverse sort of honeymoon, grief united us. Stripped of petty complaints, we felt grateful for everything, for waking to sunlight on the bed, for each other’s hands beneath the sheets. With the dark humor of comrades in suffering, we called any kind of parenthood other than what we had endured “parenting lite.” We had held our child until the end.
After that, what could be so bad about having to change three dirty diapers in a row at the zoo? What parent could resent a child staying home from school with the flu? If we were lucky enough to be parents together again, we figured we would never complain about anything.
Ten years later. Monday morning.
At 8:10, there seemed plenty to complain about. For starters, we had overslept. Outside, habitual morning fog veiled the street. Inside, Miles and Ivan, now 8 and 6, wrestled over a cardboard box in our little front hall. David was yelling at them to stop wrestling, I was yelling at David to stop yelling, and the boys were just yelling.
In 15 minutes, I was expected up at the school for career day to talk to first graders about my life as a writer. Ten years from the death of Silvan, I had published his story. In fact, my memoir had only just arrived, 48 copies in a box so heavy we had left it right where the postal worker had plunked it down, and it was over this box that Miles and Ivan now wrestled.
With a scowl, David pulled the boys apart. He asked Miles where his shoes were. When Miles didn’t know, David blamed me. I reminded him that he had misplaced the children’s homework. He said he was heading out. I said I should be the one to go ahead. So there we were, trapped in the front hall together, behaving as if marriage with children, which we had worked so hard for, was almost unendurable.
When had this happened to us? Back when we had vowed to stick with each other through sickness and health, we had imagined crises requiring heroic nursing, not the patience needed to endure the simple sound of another person’s snotty nose. Back then, “for better or for worse” sounded like a long-term challenge, not something that could happen on a daily basis.
In the months after Silvan died, we had still been tender with each other; and in the first two years of Miles’s life, the same. And even after Ivan was born and exhaustion flattened us, we had still been a grateful team, knowing that the effort of keeping a toddler and a newborn out of trouble was temporary and essential and something we were lucky enough to do.
But under the growing weight of family logistics, everything but the mundane had been squeezed from us until all our interactions, from good to bad, seemed reduced — as Miles once put it in his eagerness to join in — to talk about “stoves and beds.”
Clearly, we needed to get past the front hall. Miles and Ivan were circling the box again, ready to wrestle. I grabbed each boy by an arm. Up at school, they were working on writing “small moment” stories about their own lives. Proud of my book, they had wanted me to come and read a passage from the end where the four of us play together happily in the backyard sun. They had grinned to see themselves in print.
For Miles and Ivan, my memoir seemed simple. I was sad about Silvan dying, but happy about them. As we struggled together in the front hall, however, I felt the distance between us and that happy ending. Ten years on, we were living something almost harder to describe, something less dramatic, something so common people hardly ever talked about it.
We were in the midst of an ordinary life.
Separated from each other, Miles found his shoes, Ivan put on his sweater. I shooed them onto the porch where David stood, impatiently jiggling his legs. In its quixotic way, the fog was already thinning. At the end of the block, the slate-blue outlines of trees were filling in with green.
Ivan was disappointed. He had wanted to walk blind through the fog. Miles whined about the coming heat and said he should have worn shorts. I asked whose fault it was that we were now 17 minutes late. David said that if we couldn’t stop complaining, we should walk the rest of the way without any talking at all.
The threat worked. In the silence that descended, even our footsteps sounded content. I clutched my book to my chest. Sometimes it seemed as if loving Silvan had been the best thing about us as a couple, but this wasn’t our only story. Up at the school, I was going to tell children that to write, they just needed to pay enough attention to their lives. But I had been forgetting to take my own advice.
Here we were, together still, taking care of two children when the sea seemed calm. And it wasn’t easy. In fact, “parenting lite” was almost the hardest thing we had ever done, in part because we didn’t know how it would end. But how lucky that we didn’t. How lucky to be in the midst of it all.
Just then, David noticed the sun. He pointed up. From branch to branch of the tree overhead, pale light seemed to drip like paint toward us. It was a small moment, ordinary, easy to miss, but when we stopped to pay enough attention, it belonged.
Monica Wesolowska, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., is the author of the memoir “Holding Silvan: A Brief Life.”
Click:
Clinging to Each Other, We Survived the Storm - NYTimes.comwww.nytimes.com/.../modern-love-clinging-to-each-o...The New York Times
Every couple has a story, and this was ours. We were prepared to weather storms. For our wedding, we skipped the tissue paper and ...
Source: (1) NYT, (2) STAF, Inc.
Click: Times Topic: Modern Love
Te archive love & marriage related
articles published in the New York Times
_______________________________________
Clinging to Each Other,
We Survived the Storm
Introduction
by Christian von Christophers, Ph.D., N.D., D.D.
(STAF, Inc.)
Like the story 1 of 2 next above this story may easily make the reader cry.
However, this article 2 of 2 also has an important marriage strengthening and in general life strengthening element.
Quotation
"The Road to happiness is paved with struggle" (Dr. Russ Harris)
The couple in this article felt deep happiness because they together struggled to handle one of the most difficult challenges in any marriage. The later situation in the article made them understand that the heavy struggle they took together had made their marriage stronger.
Indeed "The Road to happiness could be paved with struggle".
STAF, Inc.'s opinion, as one of the leading marriage repairers, is to stick to your marriage forever no matter what.
That's assuming you got married "in the traditional manner" = you two met, started dating, fell in love, proposal & ring, wedding.
To see that much effort to get married and invest the time & money means that you two must have had a real love between the two of you. Real love never dies, never. If you leave your marriage in times that may be hard for everyone, separation and divorce will make it even harder for everyone, especially to your children.
Above the article 1 of 2 there is a list of the 13 life threatening disasters every child will face in a separation and/or divorce situation. Please study and save you children and save your and you spouse's life.
In tab "Services", sub-tab: "Restoring any marriage" you'll find further details how to survive the marriage challenges and detailed information of the terrible things your children will face and what you, as the couple will face if you separate and divorce. Don't - there is a better solution.
STAF, Inc. can repair your marriage and save your and your children's future. The result-bringing healing services can be given with the modern technology anywhere worldwide.
STAF, Inc.'s private services are given a unique lifetime result guarantee with a one-time fee only.
STAF, Inc. is the first one anywhere to give such a guarantee.
___________
The story time
Clinging to Each Other, We Survived the Storm
Every couple has a story, and this was ours. We were prepared to weather storms. For our wedding, we skipped the tissue paper and cream-colored card stock of standard invitations. Instead, we glued a photograph of ourselves swing-dancing onto a black-and-white picture of stormy ocean waves.
If marriage meant sticking through the hardest of times, we believed we could do it. Barely out of our 20s, we thought we had seen enough of life to know. After all, on the day David asked me out for a date at the office where we worked, I told him my brother had just died and my father was near death.
Instead of fleeing, David got down on one knee by my swivel chair and said, “That must be hard.”
For years, our story suited us. For years, it explained us as a couple.
Despite our differences (I loved books, he loved technology; I told stories, he wanted facts; I needed a tidy house, he needed a clean one), we were a team when it came to the important things in life. Though we paid attention to different details, we saw the same big picture. Life was hard; being together made it better. This faith in ourselves kept us strong when, three years from our wedding, the worst of all possible storms hit us with the birth of our first son, Silvan.
Healthy, full term, Silvan seemed perfect at birth: olive-skinned, long-lashed and as handsome as his father. But six hours later, the doctors knew something was wrong. Within a day, something seemed seriously wrong. By the end of the week, we understood that Silvan had been so completely brain damaged during labor that he could not survive without interventions, and even these would ultimately prove futile.
Left alone in the little room where we had received the news, we turned to each other. “Whatever happens,” I said, “don’t let this ruin our marriage.”
We needn’t have worried. Not then. In crisis, we were solid as a couple.
Driving back and forth between hospital and home, our faces pale and puffed with tears, we barely had time to eat and sleep, let alone put on our dancing clothes, but still we moved to a common rhythm. In Silvan’s chart, the social worker noted this. “Couple treats each other tenderly.” She was watching us. Everyone was.
With Silvan on life-support, with every day a new decision about how to treat him, they were all making sure we were equipped to guide our son through however brief a life. And we were. Whatever petty arguments we might have had as new parents over car seats, strollers and baby bottles shrank away. To care for Silvan, we cared for each other. To love Silvan, we loved each other, too. With life so unbelievably tenuous, we paid attention to what mattered.
For 38 days, nothing mattered more than our love for Silvan. Like any parents love-struck with their newborn, we stroked his skin, sniffed his loamy head and marveled at his starfish hands.
But unlike ordinary parents who hold hope for a future adult within their love for a child, Silvan as a newborn was all we had. Knowing our time was brief, we loved him fully in the present. He taught us how to do that. For all our rage and grief, joy overwhelmed us in his presence. For 38 days, Silvan was our life, and then, once he was gone, the habit of new love continued.
On a reverse sort of honeymoon, grief united us. Stripped of petty complaints, we felt grateful for everything, for waking to sunlight on the bed, for each other’s hands beneath the sheets. With the dark humor of comrades in suffering, we called any kind of parenthood other than what we had endured “parenting lite.” We had held our child until the end.
After that, what could be so bad about having to change three dirty diapers in a row at the zoo? What parent could resent a child staying home from school with the flu? If we were lucky enough to be parents together again, we figured we would never complain about anything.
Ten years later. Monday morning.
At 8:10, there seemed plenty to complain about. For starters, we had overslept. Outside, habitual morning fog veiled the street. Inside, Miles and Ivan, now 8 and 6, wrestled over a cardboard box in our little front hall. David was yelling at them to stop wrestling, I was yelling at David to stop yelling, and the boys were just yelling.
In 15 minutes, I was expected up at the school for career day to talk to first graders about my life as a writer. Ten years from the death of Silvan, I had published his story. In fact, my memoir had only just arrived, 48 copies in a box so heavy we had left it right where the postal worker had plunked it down, and it was over this box that Miles and Ivan now wrestled.
With a scowl, David pulled the boys apart. He asked Miles where his shoes were. When Miles didn’t know, David blamed me. I reminded him that he had misplaced the children’s homework. He said he was heading out. I said I should be the one to go ahead. So there we were, trapped in the front hall together, behaving as if marriage with children, which we had worked so hard for, was almost unendurable.
When had this happened to us? Back when we had vowed to stick with each other through sickness and health, we had imagined crises requiring heroic nursing, not the patience needed to endure the simple sound of another person’s snotty nose. Back then, “for better or for worse” sounded like a long-term challenge, not something that could happen on a daily basis.
In the months after Silvan died, we had still been tender with each other; and in the first two years of Miles’s life, the same. And even after Ivan was born and exhaustion flattened us, we had still been a grateful team, knowing that the effort of keeping a toddler and a newborn out of trouble was temporary and essential and something we were lucky enough to do.
But under the growing weight of family logistics, everything but the mundane had been squeezed from us until all our interactions, from good to bad, seemed reduced — as Miles once put it in his eagerness to join in — to talk about “stoves and beds.”
Clearly, we needed to get past the front hall. Miles and Ivan were circling the box again, ready to wrestle. I grabbed each boy by an arm. Up at school, they were working on writing “small moment” stories about their own lives. Proud of my book, they had wanted me to come and read a passage from the end where the four of us play together happily in the backyard sun. They had grinned to see themselves in print.
For Miles and Ivan, my memoir seemed simple. I was sad about Silvan dying, but happy about them. As we struggled together in the front hall, however, I felt the distance between us and that happy ending. Ten years on, we were living something almost harder to describe, something less dramatic, something so common people hardly ever talked about it.
We were in the midst of an ordinary life.
Separated from each other, Miles found his shoes, Ivan put on his sweater. I shooed them onto the porch where David stood, impatiently jiggling his legs. In its quixotic way, the fog was already thinning. At the end of the block, the slate-blue outlines of trees were filling in with green.
Ivan was disappointed. He had wanted to walk blind through the fog. Miles whined about the coming heat and said he should have worn shorts. I asked whose fault it was that we were now 17 minutes late. David said that if we couldn’t stop complaining, we should walk the rest of the way without any talking at all.
The threat worked. In the silence that descended, even our footsteps sounded content. I clutched my book to my chest. Sometimes it seemed as if loving Silvan had been the best thing about us as a couple, but this wasn’t our only story. Up at the school, I was going to tell children that to write, they just needed to pay enough attention to their lives. But I had been forgetting to take my own advice.
Here we were, together still, taking care of two children when the sea seemed calm. And it wasn’t easy. In fact, “parenting lite” was almost the hardest thing we had ever done, in part because we didn’t know how it would end. But how lucky that we didn’t. How lucky to be in the midst of it all.
Just then, David noticed the sun. He pointed up. From branch to branch of the tree overhead, pale light seemed to drip like paint toward us. It was a small moment, ordinary, easy to miss, but when we stopped to pay enough attention, it belonged.
Monica Wesolowska, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., is the author of the memoir “Holding Silvan: A Brief Life.”
Click:
Clinging to Each Other, We Survived the Storm - NYTimes.comwww.nytimes.com/.../modern-love-clinging-to-each-o...The New York Times
Every couple has a story, and this was ours. We were prepared to weather storms. For our wedding, we skipped the tissue paper and ...
Source: (1) NYT, (2) STAF, Inc.
Click: Times Topic: Modern Love
Te archive love & marriage related
articles published in the New York Times
_______________________________________
Sylvia’s Haven: Boston’s Safe House for Women
Introduction:
Ms. Sylvia Anthony has been on the receiving end of gratitude from officials and organizations. She received a commendation (= praise) from President George Bush in 2002. She has also been given several awards including the Arthur L. Whitaker Award, the National Alliance to End Homelessness Recognition Award, Ambassador for Peace award, and the Governor of Massachusetts Recognition Award.
In addition, she was named the 2001 Hometown Hero by Boston’s WBZ-TV, and she was chosen as Woman of the Year 2012/2013 by the National Association of Professional Women.
_____________________
Sylvia Anthony wipes down the glass on the storm door of her home and women’s shelter known as Sylvia’s Haven. The simple bungalow-style home is in Revere, Mass., about 30 minutes north of Boston and a stone’s throw from the cold, grey Atlantic Ocean.
Anthony, 84, has been providing shelter for women and children for over 27 years. At one point, she ran one of the largest facilities in the country a short drive away at Fort Devens. Today she shares this small, single-family home with four women, two children, and one more on the way.
“It is so very beautiful, and I make it that way,” Anthony says of the neatly decorated home with an ocean view. “I want to lift them up and show them what life should be. People say I make it too nice for them, but I don’t think that way.”
Not Alone
At 10:00 am on a weekday the house is nearly empty. Most of the women who live here work or go to school part time. Only Rene is home, studying in her basement room. She is in her first year of law school and has been staying with Anthony for six months now.
“Rene is a special case, ” Anthony says, recalling a kicking, smiling baby, “Rene was born in my shelter.” Rene’s mother was one of Anthony’s first clients.
“She was the most pleasant thing,” Anthony says. “She has done very, very, well for herself, and she has done it all on her own. God bless her.”
Women can stay at Sylvia’s Haven for up to two years, which gives the women time to get on their feet, according to Anthony. This is much longer than most area shelters, many of which offer stays ranging from one night to six months.
Early Days
In the early days, Sylvia’s Haven was known as Life For The Little Ones. She accepted only pregnant women, many of whom had been kicked out when their families found out they were pregnant.
Over time she opened her doors to all women, but she has never strayed far from her beginnings.
In a second bedroom is a dental assistant who left her job temporarily when she found out she was pregnant because she feared the effects of radiation on the baby.
“The [woman’s] mother found out she was pregnant, and she didn’t want any part of it,” Anthony says. “Of course she will be sorry later, but that’s beside the point.”
The baby is due in March. Anthony looks wistfully out at the falling snow, remembering all the babies born in her shelter. “In 27 years, they’re grown—they’re married, some of them. God knows where they are.”
Something to Live For
Born in 1929 to Sicilian immigrant parents, Anthony was a product of the Great Depression. She chronicles her life in her recent book, “Till the End of Time,” named after the 1959 hit song by Perry Como.
Unexpected and unwanted by her own parents, Anthony was raised by loving grandparents and a large extended family.
Deeply faithful, Anthony believes this is her mission in life: “It gives me something to live for, and I enjoy it—and as you can see, physically and mentally I’m not hurting, not doing bad for 84 at all, and I know it’s all God,” says Anthony.
Her dream is to open a shelter in every state. She is in the process of buying a larger property in a nearby town.
Not Easy
It has not always been easy caring for those in need. Histories of rape, abuse, and drug and alcohol addiction are common among the women, who must have a counselor certify that they have been clean for one year prior to admission.
Things do not always go as planned. In her book, Sylvia recounts the heartbreaking story of Lena, born to a morphine-addicted mother and chronically abused by her father, the head physician at a local hospital.
After a brief stay at Sylvia’s Haven, Lena relapsed, moved out, and vanished. Stories like Lena’s haunt Anthony to this day: “How do you change that? That is a lifetime of ruination,” she says. “No matter what you do, you’re not going to help.”
But according to Anthony, the good far outweighs the bad. “That is what keeps me going,” Anthony says. “I see so much of the good.”
Good Neighbor
The challenges faced by her clients leave Anthony vulnerable. In 2012, a neighbor complained to local authorities, accusing residents of using drugs on the premises.
According to Anthony, the complaints were unfounded. “These people gave me trouble when I first moved in,” she says, and after the complaint, “they sent down the health department, and the health department gave it a clean bill of health.”
According to Anthony, it is an issue of ‘not in my backyard.’ “People don’t like that you have homeless people in their vicinity,” she says. “They feel it is taking down their property value.”
Although her neighbors may have given her a hard time, Anthony has been on the receiving end of gratitude from officials and organizations. She received a commendation (= praise) from President George Bush in 2002. She has also been given several awards including the Arthur L. Whitaker Award, the National Alliance to End Homelessness Recognition Award, Ambassador for Peace award, and the Governor of Massachusetts Recognition Award.
In addition, she was named the 2001 Hometown Hero by Boston’s WBZ-TV, and she was chosen as Woman of the Year 2012/2013 by the National Association of Professional Women.
For more information, please visit sylviashaven.org
All proceeds from “Till the End of Time,” by Sylvia Anthony, go to support Sylvia’s Haven.
Book: Till the End of Time: Sylvia Anthony: 9781613796368: Amazon.com ...www.amazon.com/Till-End...Sylvia-Anthony/.../16137963...
The Bible, Joshua 1:5 "I will never leave you or forsake you"
is as a statement on Sylvia Anthony's book cover
Amazon.com
Till the End of Time, Sylvia Anthony, publisher Xulon Press the ...www.xulonpress.com/bookstore/bookdetail.php?PB_ISBN...
Christian self-publishing book Till the End of Time by Xulon Press Christian authorSylvia Anthony released 2011-07-29 00:00:00.
Till the End of Time [Sylvia Anthony] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Sylvia Anthony is a woman of faith, courage, tenacity, and love.
Article source: The Epoch Times - STAF, Inc. endorses The Epoch Times, click: The Epoch Times
_____________________
Introduction:
Ms. Sylvia Anthony has been on the receiving end of gratitude from officials and organizations. She received a commendation (= praise) from President George Bush in 2002. She has also been given several awards including the Arthur L. Whitaker Award, the National Alliance to End Homelessness Recognition Award, Ambassador for Peace award, and the Governor of Massachusetts Recognition Award.
In addition, she was named the 2001 Hometown Hero by Boston’s WBZ-TV, and she was chosen as Woman of the Year 2012/2013 by the National Association of Professional Women.
_____________________
Sylvia Anthony wipes down the glass on the storm door of her home and women’s shelter known as Sylvia’s Haven. The simple bungalow-style home is in Revere, Mass., about 30 minutes north of Boston and a stone’s throw from the cold, grey Atlantic Ocean.
Anthony, 84, has been providing shelter for women and children for over 27 years. At one point, she ran one of the largest facilities in the country a short drive away at Fort Devens. Today she shares this small, single-family home with four women, two children, and one more on the way.
“It is so very beautiful, and I make it that way,” Anthony says of the neatly decorated home with an ocean view. “I want to lift them up and show them what life should be. People say I make it too nice for them, but I don’t think that way.”
Not Alone
At 10:00 am on a weekday the house is nearly empty. Most of the women who live here work or go to school part time. Only Rene is home, studying in her basement room. She is in her first year of law school and has been staying with Anthony for six months now.
“Rene is a special case, ” Anthony says, recalling a kicking, smiling baby, “Rene was born in my shelter.” Rene’s mother was one of Anthony’s first clients.
“She was the most pleasant thing,” Anthony says. “She has done very, very, well for herself, and she has done it all on her own. God bless her.”
Women can stay at Sylvia’s Haven for up to two years, which gives the women time to get on their feet, according to Anthony. This is much longer than most area shelters, many of which offer stays ranging from one night to six months.
Early Days
In the early days, Sylvia’s Haven was known as Life For The Little Ones. She accepted only pregnant women, many of whom had been kicked out when their families found out they were pregnant.
Over time she opened her doors to all women, but she has never strayed far from her beginnings.
In a second bedroom is a dental assistant who left her job temporarily when she found out she was pregnant because she feared the effects of radiation on the baby.
“The [woman’s] mother found out she was pregnant, and she didn’t want any part of it,” Anthony says. “Of course she will be sorry later, but that’s beside the point.”
The baby is due in March. Anthony looks wistfully out at the falling snow, remembering all the babies born in her shelter. “In 27 years, they’re grown—they’re married, some of them. God knows where they are.”
Something to Live For
Born in 1929 to Sicilian immigrant parents, Anthony was a product of the Great Depression. She chronicles her life in her recent book, “Till the End of Time,” named after the 1959 hit song by Perry Como.
Unexpected and unwanted by her own parents, Anthony was raised by loving grandparents and a large extended family.
Deeply faithful, Anthony believes this is her mission in life: “It gives me something to live for, and I enjoy it—and as you can see, physically and mentally I’m not hurting, not doing bad for 84 at all, and I know it’s all God,” says Anthony.
Her dream is to open a shelter in every state. She is in the process of buying a larger property in a nearby town.
Not Easy
It has not always been easy caring for those in need. Histories of rape, abuse, and drug and alcohol addiction are common among the women, who must have a counselor certify that they have been clean for one year prior to admission.
Things do not always go as planned. In her book, Sylvia recounts the heartbreaking story of Lena, born to a morphine-addicted mother and chronically abused by her father, the head physician at a local hospital.
After a brief stay at Sylvia’s Haven, Lena relapsed, moved out, and vanished. Stories like Lena’s haunt Anthony to this day: “How do you change that? That is a lifetime of ruination,” she says. “No matter what you do, you’re not going to help.”
But according to Anthony, the good far outweighs the bad. “That is what keeps me going,” Anthony says. “I see so much of the good.”
Good Neighbor
The challenges faced by her clients leave Anthony vulnerable. In 2012, a neighbor complained to local authorities, accusing residents of using drugs on the premises.
According to Anthony, the complaints were unfounded. “These people gave me trouble when I first moved in,” she says, and after the complaint, “they sent down the health department, and the health department gave it a clean bill of health.”
According to Anthony, it is an issue of ‘not in my backyard.’ “People don’t like that you have homeless people in their vicinity,” she says. “They feel it is taking down their property value.”
Although her neighbors may have given her a hard time, Anthony has been on the receiving end of gratitude from officials and organizations. She received a commendation (= praise) from President George Bush in 2002. She has also been given several awards including the Arthur L. Whitaker Award, the National Alliance to End Homelessness Recognition Award, Ambassador for Peace award, and the Governor of Massachusetts Recognition Award.
In addition, she was named the 2001 Hometown Hero by Boston’s WBZ-TV, and she was chosen as Woman of the Year 2012/2013 by the National Association of Professional Women.
For more information, please visit sylviashaven.org
All proceeds from “Till the End of Time,” by Sylvia Anthony, go to support Sylvia’s Haven.
Book: Till the End of Time: Sylvia Anthony: 9781613796368: Amazon.com ...www.amazon.com/Till-End...Sylvia-Anthony/.../16137963...
The Bible, Joshua 1:5 "I will never leave you or forsake you"
is as a statement on Sylvia Anthony's book cover
Amazon.com
Till the End of Time, Sylvia Anthony, publisher Xulon Press the ...www.xulonpress.com/bookstore/bookdetail.php?PB_ISBN...
Christian self-publishing book Till the End of Time by Xulon Press Christian authorSylvia Anthony released 2011-07-29 00:00:00.
Till the End of Time [Sylvia Anthony] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Sylvia Anthony is a woman of faith, courage, tenacity, and love.
Article source: The Epoch Times - STAF, Inc. endorses The Epoch Times, click: The Epoch Times
_____________________
PART 1 of 2 (Part 2 of 2 next below)
What Are the Biggest Retail Markups?
Retailers markup the price on everything we buy…in some cases as much as 4,000 percent (in bottled water).
That means consumers routinely pay much more for an item than it costs to make.
We’ll take a look at what items are marked up the most. First, here’s how markups work.
A markup is the percentage difference between the actual cost and the selling price of an item. For example, a pair of shoes that cost $90 wholesale…sell for $495 after a 450 percent markup. Shoes and clothes are usually marked up between 100 and 500 percent. Most of the time it’s all about the retailer’s bottom line. They need to cover operating expenses and make a profit.
Related: 20 Products With Giant Markups
So what items are marked up the most? Here are a few, starting with movie theater popcorn.
The markup on a $6 medium-sized bag of the snack can be as high as 1,300 percent. Here’s why. Theaters don’t make a lot of money from new movies. Most of the ticket sales for first run films go to the movie studios. In order to cash in, theaters up the price at concession stands. That’s where they make 40 percent of their profits.
The markup on brand-name drugs could be as much as 3,000 percent. According to Medtipster.com, the active ingredients in Paxil cost almost $8. Retail price for 100 tablets, however, is about $220.
Markups on brand-name drugs reflect the billions of dollars spent on their development, manufacturing and marketing. In order to cover costs and turn a profit, drug companies charge a premium price for their products.
And even with a 4,000 percent markup, bottled water sales are increasing yearly. In 2011, Americans spent almost $22 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corp. That’s over nine billion gallons total -- or almost thirty gallons per person. Here’s the kicker: about half of all bottled water comes from tap water.
PART 2 of 2 (Part 1 of 2 next above)
Comments from the public, all with real facts - reading these comments will be worth of your time
Or: what do you think? Please let us at the STAF, Inc. know
(1) The biggest expense for a store or theater is the overhead . The new projectors are expensive. If a movie is a dud the owner still has to pay the bills if no one shows up . So the expense has to be spread over a period of time until a good movie is shown. like making a car payment instead of paying cash for one. An attractive building, fixtures, maintenance and location can cost a lot. Most stores barely make a profit until Christmas or some other holiday period.
(2) A bucket of popcorn for $10.00 is nothing for the priceless memory to take your date or family to the movies.
(3) I went to the hospital once and while I was there they gave me 2 Tylenols (just plain Tylenol) and charged my insurance $187 each.
How's that for a mark up?
(4) This is why I don't buy bottled water. It cost way more than gasoline.
(5) A clothing store at a mall near us had jeans for $30 a pair. A pair at Walmart with the same brand, style number etc.was $12. Only the lot number was different. A friend of mine insisted that the pair at the mall was better made than the ones at Walmart. I couldn't find any difference.
(6) What I don't understand is why drug markup differs so much from country to country. In a country where the notion is that the consumer can afford more, the drug companies mark them up more. Where the consumers would not buy the drugs because they could not afford such a high markup, the drug companies lower the price. They still make money but they view some profit as better than no profit. Part of this in the US is hidden because a lot of the cost is covered by insurance so the consumer doesn't directly pay attention. But the consumer ultimately pays since the insurance premiums must cover this cost. And the justification for higher prices in this country to support R&D is partially BS. Drug companies spend huge sums marketing to doctors paying for expensive dinners, trips, etc. under the excuse of informing the doctor about their product. Let's face it, those expenditures are veiled bribes but since our government takes similar kinds of "bribes" under the guise of fact finding trips, don't expect that things will change anytime soon.
(7) I had to go to the Mayo Clinic & was worried about cost because it was out of network & after having several expensive tests done at our only local non profit hospital. I was shocked at how reasonable the cost was at the Mayo clinic (and the care was way better).
Holter Monitor 24 hr Mayo $165, Local non profit $850 - click: Holter monitor - MayoClinic.com - tilt table test Mayo $240 (included extra testing), local non profit $2300! click: Tilt table test - MayoClinic.com - Going to see my local specialist for 20 minutes $290, a 3 hour appointment with a Mayo specialist $250. I wish the Mayo clinic (or their system of quality affordable care) could open more location, maybe just 1 per state at least?
(8) I beg to differ about a monopoly, which is when one entity controls the market. A markup on an item encompasses many things, and that may very well include what the market will bear. That especially occurs with a new product that may be copied, produced and sold by another country after the original producer put in all of the research an initial expense. Yes, medical costs are high. Many factors are included in those costs. I am not inclusively defending medical costs, but one must realize what the expenses of delivery are. Out of that $14K hospital "treatment bill, the surgeon or doctor probably only made about $1k, or slightly over. Right now medical costs are competitive. Their is a very sophisticated financial system in place to actually keep costs down and encourage competition throughout the industry, and that includes the insurance companies. Let us see how we feel about medical costs, lack of competition, complacency, and lower quality of care, when there is only one payer, and that payer is YOU, the middle class taxpayer.
(9) How about the mark-up on Lexus automobiles? A dealer in Northern California added $10,000 to each new Lexus. I complained to Lexus
(in Japan) and they said US auto-dealers were out of their control. Click: (1) Lexus US: New Luxury Cars and SUVs from Lexus USA
(2) for Lexus Japan click: LEXUSlexus.jp/ - Translate this page - LEXUS AMAZING IN MOTION 期待を超えた驚きと、その先にある感動を。
(10) The cost of marketing a product has gone through the roof and is the reason for most of the consumer product increases. Today we are bombarded by ads from all directions and we are paying for it in the cost to the consumer. There needs to be a grassroots push-back on the cost passed on to the consumer for ads that only benefit the manufacturer and that we really don't want in the first place. Google is the big winner here.
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Beneficial for every person to study this article
The habit of procrastinating predicts
(1) lower salaries and (2) a higher likelihood of unemployment
Procrastination also predicts such long-term problems as
(1) failing to save for retirement and (2) neglecting preventive health care
Studies show men are worse procrastinators than women,
and researchers suspect the habit plays a role in men's tendency to complete fewer years of education
__________
End Procrastination - Start Getting Results
New studies help explain what's happening in the brain when people procrastinate
One New Approach Focuses on Helping People Regulate Their Emotions
"A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
This is the same principle as the happiness research has shown that having a regular job gives us all deep feelings of happiness. Being unemployed makes us all very unhappy.
Based on research by Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University, Chicago, and others:
about 20% of adults claim to be chronic procrastinators
& the rate among college students may be as high as 70%
The habit of procrastinating predicts lower salaries and a higher likelihood of unemployment, according to a recent study of 22,053 people co-authored by Dr. Ferrari.
Click: Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D. - DePaul University
Click: DePaul Universitywww.depaul.edu/
Founded in 1898, DePaul University is the largest Catholic university in the nation and the largest private institution in Chicago, serving over 25000 students ...
How to get the new results you want
Forgive Yourself:
If you are feeling guilty about procrastinating, stop beating yourself up. Replace the negative thoughts with something more positive.
Time Travel:
If you are rebelling against the feeling of having to work, project yourself into the future. Imagine the good feelings you will have if you stop procrastinating and finish a project (or the bad feelings you will have if you don't finish).
Just Get Started:
If you are feeling frightened of possible failure, just get started. Tell yourself you don't have to do the whole project. Just do the first one or two steps on it.
Easy Things First:
If you are feeling a lot of dread about one task in particular on your to-do list, start with something else, preferably the task you feel most like doing. The momentum you gain will help you start the toughest task later.
Everyone has been procrastinating. Fear. Low self-esteem. Skills missing. Wrong belief of your own capability.
There is a cure.
Procrastinators, take note: If you've tried building self-discipline and you're still putting things off, maybe you need to try something different. One new approach: Check your mood.
Often, procrastinators attempt to avoid the anxiety or worry aroused by a tough task with activities aimed at repairing their mood, such as checking Facebook or taking a nap. But the pattern, which researchers call "giving in to feel good," makes procrastinators feel worse later, when they face the consequences of missing a deadline or making a hasty, last-minute effort, says Timothy Pychyl (rhymes with Mitchell) click: Tim Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a researcher on the topic.
click: Carleton University - Canada's Capital Universitywww.carleton.ca/Degree-granting institution serving the Ottawa region
Increasingly, psychologists and time-management consultants are focusing on a new strategy: helping procrastinators see how attempts at mood repair are sabotaging their efforts and learn to regulate their emotions in more productive ways.
The new approach is based on several studies in the past two years showing that negative emotions can derail attempts at self-control. It fills a gap among established time-management methods, which stress behavioral changes such as adopting a new organizing system or doing exercises to build willpower.
Kathryn Gettler had a habit of procrastinating on cleaning the interior of her car until it became so littered with toys, snack wrappers, fast-food bags, pencils and other stuff that she was embarrassed to park it in a public lot or offer anyone a ride, says Ms. Gettler, a Salt Lake City mother of two school-age children and part-time computer-science student.
She came across podcasts by Dr. Pychyl click: Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in 2012 and realized she was just trying to make herself feel better when she told herself she would feel more like tackling a task later. She says, "I am trying to run away from the feelings and avoid the discomfort"—the anxiety she often feels that her work won't be good enough or that someone will disapprove.
"Emotion is at the core," Ms. Chodos says. "Just knowing that gives me a little bit of fight, to say, 'Fine, I'm feeling discomfort, but I'm going to feel more discomfort later' " if the job is left undone. The insight has helped her get around to cleaning her car more often, she says; "it's been a long time since my car was so bad that I freaked out at the thought someone might look inside."
Researchers have come up with a playbook of strategies to help procrastinators turn mood repair to their advantage. Some are tried-and-true classics: Dr. Pychyl advises procrastinators to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low." Procrastinators are more likely to put the technique to use when they understand how mood repair works, says Dr. Pychyl, author of a 2013 book, "Solving the Procrastination Puzzle." He adds, "A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
Procrastination Research Group Home Pagewww.procrastination.ca/ ABOUT DR. PYCHYL - You can learn more about my work here. BOOK - The Procrastinator's Digest: A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle". He adds, "A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
This is the same principle as the happiness research has shown that having a regular job gives us all deep feelings of happiness. Being unemployed makes us all very unhappy.
He also advises procrastinators to practice "time travel"—projecting themselves into the future to imagine the good feelings they will have after finishing a task, or the bad ones they will have if they don't. This remedies procrastinators' tendency to get so bogged down in present anxieties and worries that they fail to think about the future, says Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, click: Bishop's University and author of a forthcoming 4,000-person study on the topic. click: Dr. Fuschia M. Sirois
Sean Gilbertson read an earlier book by Dr. Pychyl in 2012 after trying other time-management techniques such as keeping a daily log of his attitudes. The Minneapolis software engineer says the techniques didn't go deep enough to help him see how his emotions were blocking action and shift them in a more positive direction. Using the time-travel technique, he asks himself, "What negative things will happen if I procrastinate? Will it come up in my review? How will it affect my reputation? Will it affect my raise and bonuses?"
He used the technique recently when programming a prototype of a medical device to help doctors prevent pressure sores in wheelchair-bound patients. He imagined the good feelings he would have after completing the project well and pleasing his client and his employer. He envisioned patients "living happily and feeling better." The resulting positive feelings gave him the energy to de-bug the device faster and finish the three-month project on time. The client was so pleased that "just talking to them is a pleasure," he says.
About 20% of adults claim to be chronic procrastinators, based on research by Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University, Chicago, and others. Other studies suggest the rate among college students may be as high as 70%. The habit predicts lower salaries and a higher likelihood of unemployment, according to a recent study of 22,053 people co-authored by Dr. Ferrari.
Procrastination also predicts such long-term problems as failing to save for retirement and neglecting preventive health care.
Studies show men are worse procrastinators than women, and researchers suspect the habit plays a role in men's tendency to complete fewer years of education.
Most procrastinators beat themselves up even as they put things off, repeating negative thoughts such as, "Why can't I do what I should be doing?" or, "I should be more responsible," says Gordon Flett, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto. "That negative internal dialogue reflects concerns and doubts about themselves," Dr. Flett says.Click: Faculty of Health - Profile of Gordon L Flett - York Universitywww.yorku.ca/health/people/index.php?dept=P&mid=3719Faculty & School/Dept. Faculty of Health - Department of Psychology.
Click: York Universitywww.yorku.com/York University in Toronto, Canada. Undergraduate and Graduate education at Canada's third largest university. Phone: (416) 736-2100.Current Students - Programs of Study - Future Students - Faculty & Staff
One mood-repair strategy, self-forgiveness, is aimed at dispelling the guilt and self-blame. University freshmen who forgave themselves for procrastinating on studying for the first exam in a course procrastinated less on the next exam, according to a 2010 study led by Michael Wohl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton.
click: Dr. Michael Wohl - Carleton Universityhttp-server.carleton.ca/~mwohl/Dr. Michael J. A. Wohl. Associate Professor. Department of Psychology. CarletonUniversity. 1125 Colonel By Drive. Ottawa, ON., CANADA. K1S 5B6.
Jim Hensley learned about the technique by reading research on self-regulation, including studies by Dr. Sirois and Dr. Pychyl. He put it to use after his family moved recently to a new house in Albany, N.Y. Instead of beating himself up for failing to unpack all the boxes stacked in his garage right away, Mr. Hensley decided to forgive himself and start with a single step. "I'd say, 'OK, I'm going to take an hour, with a goal of getting the TV set up, and that's it,' " he says; then he watched a TV show as a reward. Allowing himself to do the task in stages, he says, is "a victory."
Source: (1) WSJ, (2) STAF, Inc.
__________________________
The habit of procrastinating predicts
(1) lower salaries and (2) a higher likelihood of unemployment
Procrastination also predicts such long-term problems as
(1) failing to save for retirement and (2) neglecting preventive health care
Studies show men are worse procrastinators than women,
and researchers suspect the habit plays a role in men's tendency to complete fewer years of education
__________
End Procrastination - Start Getting Results
New studies help explain what's happening in the brain when people procrastinate
One New Approach Focuses on Helping People Regulate Their Emotions
"A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
This is the same principle as the happiness research has shown that having a regular job gives us all deep feelings of happiness. Being unemployed makes us all very unhappy.
Based on research by Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University, Chicago, and others:
about 20% of adults claim to be chronic procrastinators
& the rate among college students may be as high as 70%
The habit of procrastinating predicts lower salaries and a higher likelihood of unemployment, according to a recent study of 22,053 people co-authored by Dr. Ferrari.
Click: Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D. - DePaul University
Click: DePaul Universitywww.depaul.edu/
Founded in 1898, DePaul University is the largest Catholic university in the nation and the largest private institution in Chicago, serving over 25000 students ...
How to get the new results you want
Forgive Yourself:
If you are feeling guilty about procrastinating, stop beating yourself up. Replace the negative thoughts with something more positive.
Time Travel:
If you are rebelling against the feeling of having to work, project yourself into the future. Imagine the good feelings you will have if you stop procrastinating and finish a project (or the bad feelings you will have if you don't finish).
Just Get Started:
If you are feeling frightened of possible failure, just get started. Tell yourself you don't have to do the whole project. Just do the first one or two steps on it.
Easy Things First:
If you are feeling a lot of dread about one task in particular on your to-do list, start with something else, preferably the task you feel most like doing. The momentum you gain will help you start the toughest task later.
Everyone has been procrastinating. Fear. Low self-esteem. Skills missing. Wrong belief of your own capability.
There is a cure.
Procrastinators, take note: If you've tried building self-discipline and you're still putting things off, maybe you need to try something different. One new approach: Check your mood.
Often, procrastinators attempt to avoid the anxiety or worry aroused by a tough task with activities aimed at repairing their mood, such as checking Facebook or taking a nap. But the pattern, which researchers call "giving in to feel good," makes procrastinators feel worse later, when they face the consequences of missing a deadline or making a hasty, last-minute effort, says Timothy Pychyl (rhymes with Mitchell) click: Tim Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and a researcher on the topic.
click: Carleton University - Canada's Capital Universitywww.carleton.ca/Degree-granting institution serving the Ottawa region
Increasingly, psychologists and time-management consultants are focusing on a new strategy: helping procrastinators see how attempts at mood repair are sabotaging their efforts and learn to regulate their emotions in more productive ways.
The new approach is based on several studies in the past two years showing that negative emotions can derail attempts at self-control. It fills a gap among established time-management methods, which stress behavioral changes such as adopting a new organizing system or doing exercises to build willpower.
Kathryn Gettler had a habit of procrastinating on cleaning the interior of her car until it became so littered with toys, snack wrappers, fast-food bags, pencils and other stuff that she was embarrassed to park it in a public lot or offer anyone a ride, says Ms. Gettler, a Salt Lake City mother of two school-age children and part-time computer-science student.
She came across podcasts by Dr. Pychyl click: Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in 2012 and realized she was just trying to make herself feel better when she told herself she would feel more like tackling a task later. She says, "I am trying to run away from the feelings and avoid the discomfort"—the anxiety she often feels that her work won't be good enough or that someone will disapprove.
"Emotion is at the core," Ms. Chodos says. "Just knowing that gives me a little bit of fight, to say, 'Fine, I'm feeling discomfort, but I'm going to feel more discomfort later' " if the job is left undone. The insight has helped her get around to cleaning her car more often, she says; "it's been a long time since my car was so bad that I freaked out at the thought someone might look inside."
Researchers have come up with a playbook of strategies to help procrastinators turn mood repair to their advantage. Some are tried-and-true classics: Dr. Pychyl advises procrastinators to "just get started, and make the threshold for getting started quite low." Procrastinators are more likely to put the technique to use when they understand how mood repair works, says Dr. Pychyl, author of a 2013 book, "Solving the Procrastination Puzzle." He adds, "A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
Procrastination Research Group Home Pagewww.procrastination.ca/ ABOUT DR. PYCHYL - You can learn more about my work here. BOOK - The Procrastinator's Digest: A Concise Guide to Solving the Procrastination Puzzle". He adds, "A real mood boost comes from doing what we intend to do—the things that are important to us."
This is the same principle as the happiness research has shown that having a regular job gives us all deep feelings of happiness. Being unemployed makes us all very unhappy.
He also advises procrastinators to practice "time travel"—projecting themselves into the future to imagine the good feelings they will have after finishing a task, or the bad ones they will have if they don't. This remedies procrastinators' tendency to get so bogged down in present anxieties and worries that they fail to think about the future, says Fuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, click: Bishop's University and author of a forthcoming 4,000-person study on the topic. click: Dr. Fuschia M. Sirois
Sean Gilbertson read an earlier book by Dr. Pychyl in 2012 after trying other time-management techniques such as keeping a daily log of his attitudes. The Minneapolis software engineer says the techniques didn't go deep enough to help him see how his emotions were blocking action and shift them in a more positive direction. Using the time-travel technique, he asks himself, "What negative things will happen if I procrastinate? Will it come up in my review? How will it affect my reputation? Will it affect my raise and bonuses?"
He used the technique recently when programming a prototype of a medical device to help doctors prevent pressure sores in wheelchair-bound patients. He imagined the good feelings he would have after completing the project well and pleasing his client and his employer. He envisioned patients "living happily and feeling better." The resulting positive feelings gave him the energy to de-bug the device faster and finish the three-month project on time. The client was so pleased that "just talking to them is a pleasure," he says.
About 20% of adults claim to be chronic procrastinators, based on research by Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University, Chicago, and others. Other studies suggest the rate among college students may be as high as 70%. The habit predicts lower salaries and a higher likelihood of unemployment, according to a recent study of 22,053 people co-authored by Dr. Ferrari.
Procrastination also predicts such long-term problems as failing to save for retirement and neglecting preventive health care.
Studies show men are worse procrastinators than women, and researchers suspect the habit plays a role in men's tendency to complete fewer years of education.
Most procrastinators beat themselves up even as they put things off, repeating negative thoughts such as, "Why can't I do what I should be doing?" or, "I should be more responsible," says Gordon Flett, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto. "That negative internal dialogue reflects concerns and doubts about themselves," Dr. Flett says.Click: Faculty of Health - Profile of Gordon L Flett - York Universitywww.yorku.ca/health/people/index.php?dept=P&mid=3719Faculty & School/Dept. Faculty of Health - Department of Psychology.
Click: York Universitywww.yorku.com/York University in Toronto, Canada. Undergraduate and Graduate education at Canada's third largest university. Phone: (416) 736-2100.Current Students - Programs of Study - Future Students - Faculty & Staff
One mood-repair strategy, self-forgiveness, is aimed at dispelling the guilt and self-blame. University freshmen who forgave themselves for procrastinating on studying for the first exam in a course procrastinated less on the next exam, according to a 2010 study led by Michael Wohl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton.
click: Dr. Michael Wohl - Carleton Universityhttp-server.carleton.ca/~mwohl/Dr. Michael J. A. Wohl. Associate Professor. Department of Psychology. CarletonUniversity. 1125 Colonel By Drive. Ottawa, ON., CANADA. K1S 5B6.
Jim Hensley learned about the technique by reading research on self-regulation, including studies by Dr. Sirois and Dr. Pychyl. He put it to use after his family moved recently to a new house in Albany, N.Y. Instead of beating himself up for failing to unpack all the boxes stacked in his garage right away, Mr. Hensley decided to forgive himself and start with a single step. "I'd say, 'OK, I'm going to take an hour, with a goal of getting the TV set up, and that's it,' " he says; then he watched a TV show as a reward. Allowing himself to do the task in stages, he says, is "a victory."
Source: (1) WSJ, (2) STAF, Inc.
__________________________
When You Yell to Your Child You Can Ruin
His/Her Relationships & Marriage Happiness for Life
How to avoid yelling & secure a happier life for your child?
Nearly every parent loses control and screams at the children now and then. But what if you do it repeatedly?
Researchers suspect parents are yelling more. Parents have been conditioned to avoid spanking, so they vent their anger and frustration by shouting instead. Three out of four parents yell, scream or shout at their children or teens about once a month, on average, for misbehaving or making them angry, research shows. Increasingly, therapists and parenting experts are homing in on how it hurts a child, as well as how to stop it.
Raising your voice isn't always bad. Loudly describing a problem can call attention to it without hurting anyone, says Adele Faber, a parenting trainer in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and co-author of "How to Be the Parent You Always Wanted to Be." For example: "I just mopped the kitchen floor and now it is covered with muddy footprints."
Yelling becomes damaging when it is a personal attack, belittling or blaming a child with statements such as "Why can't you ever remember?" or, "You always get this wrong!" Ms. Faber says.
Many parents lose control because they take children's misbehavior or rebellion personally, research shows: They feel attacked or think the child's actions reflect poorly on them. Parents who see a child's negative emotions as unexpected, overwhelming and upsetting tend to feel more threatened and frustrated with each new outburst, says a study published earlier this month in the Journal of Family Psychology. This pattern, called "emotional flooding," triggers a downward spiral in the relationship, disrupting the parent's problem-solving ability and fueling emotional reactions, such as yelling.
Teens whose parents use "harsh verbal discipline" such as shouting or insults are more likely to have behavior problems and depression symptoms, says a recent study of 976 middle-class adolescents and their parents, published online last September and led by Ming-Te Wang, an assistant professor of psychology and education at the University of Pittsburgh.
Another study suggests yelling at children may have consequences that go beyond those of spanking. Eight-year-olds whose parents disciplined them by yelling have less satisfying relationships with romantic partners and spouses at age 23, according to a 15-year study led by Stephanie Parade, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. "Parents who yell may miss out on a chance to teach children to regulate their emotions," she says.
Spanking also predicted less satisfying adult relationships, but the negative effects were offset when parents praised their children at other times. The negative effects of yelling weren't erased by parental warmth, however. The negative problem-solving tactics that children learn when their parents yell may stick with them as adults, says the study, published in 2012 in Marriage & Family Review. Children also may expect others to treat them in a negative way, and unconsciously pick partners who fulfill that expectation.
"Yelling is where 90% of us do the most damage," says Julie Ann Barnhill, a speaker and author of "She's Gonna Blow," a book on parental anger that has sold 135,000 copies. Ms. Barnhill says she used to yell one to three times a week at her children when they were preschoolers. She got counseling, and learned to control her anger and discipline her kids in calmer, more positive ways, techniques she now teaches other parents in speeches and workshops.
Parents can learn to notice signs that a blowup is brewing and dial down their own tension. Warning signs can include: tightness in the throat or chest, shallow or rapid breathing, a clenching of the teeth or jaw, negative thoughts about oneself or feelings of being overwhelmed.
Deep breathing, envisioning a pleasant scene, counting to 10 or leaving the room can help. Ms. Barnhill advises practicing calming thoughts, such as "I'm having a miserable day, but getting angry will just make things worse."
Build a margin of spare time into daily routines to allow time for minor mishaps, such as spilled milk or lost jackets, says Jill Savage, author of "No More Perfect Moms." She adds, "If I have 20 minutes to clean up after dinner, I'm more likely to handle that spilled milk well."
Learning to start sentences with "I" rather than "you" can help parents shift from an angry attack to a teaching moment, Ms. Faber says. "Say what you don't like, then add what you would like or expect."
Leigh Fransen felt like yelling when her daughters, 10-year-old Alona and 8-year-old Elisha, forgot to feed the family dog, Balto, on two evenings in the same week. "This is a really important responsibility, and they're always asking me for more pets," says Ms. Fransen, of Fort Mill, S.C. "I wanted to yell, 'You're not getting any dinner tonight, because you didn't feed the dog, and you're going to know how it feels'—which would lead to nothing but tears and misery, and probably to me backing down."
Instead, she started her response with "I," saying, "I don't like seeing the dog not fed. Look at him: He is miserable. I expect him to be fed before you eat your own dinner," Ms. Fransen says. Alona and Elisha needed to be reminded of the deadline twice, but soon learned to remember on their own. Ms. Fransen praised them for taking responsibility and encouraged them to see that "Balto seems much happier now that he's getting dinner on time."
Many parents blow up because they have unrealistic expectations—such as assuming a 2-year-old shouldn't push parental limits, says Ms. Savage, chief executive of Hearts at Home, a Normal, Ill., nonprofit that runs conferences on parenting issues, including discipline. "We say to our children, 'Act your age,' and in reality, they are," she says. Not expecting children to be perfect, or nearly so, can calm parents' frustrations, Ms. Savage says. So can seeing a child's failure as an opportunity for him to learn.
Parents can turn a meltdown into a teaching moment by involving kids in finding solutions, Ms. Faber says. She suggests waiting for a calm moment and stating the rule the child violated. Then give the child a choice about how to prevent the misbehavior from happening again. Inviting a child to suggest solutions teaches problem-solving skills.
Sara Weingot of Baltimore used the technique after her 6-year-old son misbehaved during an outing in her minivan, kicking and pushing two other kids' booster seats. She later told him she never wanted it to happen again, then listened sympathetically as he explained that he had been squeezed too tightly between two other kids' car seats.
Ms. Weingot gave him a choice between staying home with a babysitter next time and finding another solution. He made a list from "get a better car" to taking turns with his siblings in more comfortable seats, an idea that worked, Ms. Weingot says.
Apologizing can help repair the damage after an outburst, says Ms. Barnhill, the author. She took her daughter aside in her teens and apologized for an explosive incident a few years earlier. "I have this memory of being in your face and yelling at you. I am so sorry, sweet girl," Ms. Barnhill says she told her.
Her daughter Kristen Draughan, who is now 25, married and studying for a master's degree in social work, says she doesn't remember her mother yelling much when she was a child. But Ms. Draughan does recall that her mother's remorse made her burst into tears. "It showed that she cared about my feelings," she says.
Source: (1) Journal of Family Psychology, (2) STAF, Inc.
Click: Journal of Family Psychology® - American Psychological Associationwww.apa.org/pubs/journals/fam/
American Psychological...
This journal offers cutting-edge, groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, and innovative empirical research with real-world applicability in the field of family psychology.
______________________________________
His/Her Relationships & Marriage Happiness for Life
How to avoid yelling & secure a happier life for your child?
Nearly every parent loses control and screams at the children now and then. But what if you do it repeatedly?
Researchers suspect parents are yelling more. Parents have been conditioned to avoid spanking, so they vent their anger and frustration by shouting instead. Three out of four parents yell, scream or shout at their children or teens about once a month, on average, for misbehaving or making them angry, research shows. Increasingly, therapists and parenting experts are homing in on how it hurts a child, as well as how to stop it.
Raising your voice isn't always bad. Loudly describing a problem can call attention to it without hurting anyone, says Adele Faber, a parenting trainer in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and co-author of "How to Be the Parent You Always Wanted to Be." For example: "I just mopped the kitchen floor and now it is covered with muddy footprints."
Yelling becomes damaging when it is a personal attack, belittling or blaming a child with statements such as "Why can't you ever remember?" or, "You always get this wrong!" Ms. Faber says.
Many parents lose control because they take children's misbehavior or rebellion personally, research shows: They feel attacked or think the child's actions reflect poorly on them. Parents who see a child's negative emotions as unexpected, overwhelming and upsetting tend to feel more threatened and frustrated with each new outburst, says a study published earlier this month in the Journal of Family Psychology. This pattern, called "emotional flooding," triggers a downward spiral in the relationship, disrupting the parent's problem-solving ability and fueling emotional reactions, such as yelling.
Teens whose parents use "harsh verbal discipline" such as shouting or insults are more likely to have behavior problems and depression symptoms, says a recent study of 976 middle-class adolescents and their parents, published online last September and led by Ming-Te Wang, an assistant professor of psychology and education at the University of Pittsburgh.
Another study suggests yelling at children may have consequences that go beyond those of spanking. Eight-year-olds whose parents disciplined them by yelling have less satisfying relationships with romantic partners and spouses at age 23, according to a 15-year study led by Stephanie Parade, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. "Parents who yell may miss out on a chance to teach children to regulate their emotions," she says.
Spanking also predicted less satisfying adult relationships, but the negative effects were offset when parents praised their children at other times. The negative effects of yelling weren't erased by parental warmth, however. The negative problem-solving tactics that children learn when their parents yell may stick with them as adults, says the study, published in 2012 in Marriage & Family Review. Children also may expect others to treat them in a negative way, and unconsciously pick partners who fulfill that expectation.
"Yelling is where 90% of us do the most damage," says Julie Ann Barnhill, a speaker and author of "She's Gonna Blow," a book on parental anger that has sold 135,000 copies. Ms. Barnhill says she used to yell one to three times a week at her children when they were preschoolers. She got counseling, and learned to control her anger and discipline her kids in calmer, more positive ways, techniques she now teaches other parents in speeches and workshops.
Parents can learn to notice signs that a blowup is brewing and dial down their own tension. Warning signs can include: tightness in the throat or chest, shallow or rapid breathing, a clenching of the teeth or jaw, negative thoughts about oneself or feelings of being overwhelmed.
Deep breathing, envisioning a pleasant scene, counting to 10 or leaving the room can help. Ms. Barnhill advises practicing calming thoughts, such as "I'm having a miserable day, but getting angry will just make things worse."
Build a margin of spare time into daily routines to allow time for minor mishaps, such as spilled milk or lost jackets, says Jill Savage, author of "No More Perfect Moms." She adds, "If I have 20 minutes to clean up after dinner, I'm more likely to handle that spilled milk well."
Learning to start sentences with "I" rather than "you" can help parents shift from an angry attack to a teaching moment, Ms. Faber says. "Say what you don't like, then add what you would like or expect."
Leigh Fransen felt like yelling when her daughters, 10-year-old Alona and 8-year-old Elisha, forgot to feed the family dog, Balto, on two evenings in the same week. "This is a really important responsibility, and they're always asking me for more pets," says Ms. Fransen, of Fort Mill, S.C. "I wanted to yell, 'You're not getting any dinner tonight, because you didn't feed the dog, and you're going to know how it feels'—which would lead to nothing but tears and misery, and probably to me backing down."
Instead, she started her response with "I," saying, "I don't like seeing the dog not fed. Look at him: He is miserable. I expect him to be fed before you eat your own dinner," Ms. Fransen says. Alona and Elisha needed to be reminded of the deadline twice, but soon learned to remember on their own. Ms. Fransen praised them for taking responsibility and encouraged them to see that "Balto seems much happier now that he's getting dinner on time."
Many parents blow up because they have unrealistic expectations—such as assuming a 2-year-old shouldn't push parental limits, says Ms. Savage, chief executive of Hearts at Home, a Normal, Ill., nonprofit that runs conferences on parenting issues, including discipline. "We say to our children, 'Act your age,' and in reality, they are," she says. Not expecting children to be perfect, or nearly so, can calm parents' frustrations, Ms. Savage says. So can seeing a child's failure as an opportunity for him to learn.
Parents can turn a meltdown into a teaching moment by involving kids in finding solutions, Ms. Faber says. She suggests waiting for a calm moment and stating the rule the child violated. Then give the child a choice about how to prevent the misbehavior from happening again. Inviting a child to suggest solutions teaches problem-solving skills.
Sara Weingot of Baltimore used the technique after her 6-year-old son misbehaved during an outing in her minivan, kicking and pushing two other kids' booster seats. She later told him she never wanted it to happen again, then listened sympathetically as he explained that he had been squeezed too tightly between two other kids' car seats.
Ms. Weingot gave him a choice between staying home with a babysitter next time and finding another solution. He made a list from "get a better car" to taking turns with his siblings in more comfortable seats, an idea that worked, Ms. Weingot says.
Apologizing can help repair the damage after an outburst, says Ms. Barnhill, the author. She took her daughter aside in her teens and apologized for an explosive incident a few years earlier. "I have this memory of being in your face and yelling at you. I am so sorry, sweet girl," Ms. Barnhill says she told her.
Her daughter Kristen Draughan, who is now 25, married and studying for a master's degree in social work, says she doesn't remember her mother yelling much when she was a child. But Ms. Draughan does recall that her mother's remorse made her burst into tears. "It showed that she cared about my feelings," she says.
Source: (1) Journal of Family Psychology, (2) STAF, Inc.
Click: Journal of Family Psychology® - American Psychological Associationwww.apa.org/pubs/journals/fam/
American Psychological...
This journal offers cutting-edge, groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, and innovative empirical research with real-world applicability in the field of family psychology.
______________________________________
Article 1 of 3 (Articles 2 -3 of 3 next below)
6 Habits of Remarkably Likeable People
When you meet someone, after, "What do you do?" you're out of things to say. You suck at small talk, and those first five minutes are tough because you're a little shy and a little insecure.
But you want to make a good impression. You want people to genuinely like you.
Here's how remarkably likeable people do it:
They lose the power pose.
I know: Your parents taught you to stand tall, square your shoulders, stride purposefully forward, drop your voice a couple of registers, and shake hands with a firm grip.
It's great to display nonverbal self-confidence, but go too far and it seems like you're trying to establish your importance. That makes the "meeting" seem like it's more about you than it is the other person--and no one likes that.
No matter how big a deal you are you pale in comparison to say, oh, Nelson Mandela. So take a cue from him. Watch how he greets Bill Clinton, no slouch at this either.
Clinton takes a step forward (avoiding the "you must come to me" power move); Mandela steps forward with a smile and bends slightly forward as if, ever so slightly, to bow (a clear sign of deference and respect in nearly every culture); Clinton does the same. What you have are two important people who put aside all sense of self-importance or status. They're genuine.
Next time you meet someone, relax, step forward, tilt your head towards them slightly, smile, and show that you're the one who is honored by the introduction--not them.
We all like people who like us. If I show you I'm genuinely happy to meet you, you'll instantly start to like me. (And you'll show that you do, which will help calm my nerves and let me be myself.)
They embrace the power of touch.
Nonsexual touch can be very powerful. (Yes, I'm aware that sexual touch can be powerful too.) Touch can influence behavior, increase the chances of compliance, make the person doing the touching seem more attractive and friendly.
Go easy, of course: Pat the other person lightly on the upper arm or shoulder. Make it casual and nonthreatening.
Check out Clinton's right-hand-shakes-hands-left-hand-touches-Mandela's-forearm-a-second-later handshake in the link above and tell me, combined with his posture and smile, that it doesn't come across as genuine and sincere.
Think the same won't work for you? Try this: The next time you walk up behind a person you know, touch them lightly on the shoulder as you go by. I guarantee you'll feel like a more genuine greeting was exchanged.
Touch breaks down natural barriers and decreases the real and perceived distance between you and the other person--a key component in liking and in being liked.
They whip out their social jiu-jitsu.
You meet someone. You talk for 15 minutes. You walk away thinking, "Wow, we just had a great conversation. She is awesome."
Then, when you think about it later, you realize you didn't learn a thing about the other person.
Remarkably likeable people are masters at Social Jiu-Jitsu, the ancient art of getting you to talk about yourself without you ever knowing it happened. SJJ masters are fascinated by every step you took in creating a particularly clever pivot table, by every decision you made when you transformed a 200-slide PowerPoint into a TED Talk-worthy presentation, if you do say so yourself...
SJJ masters use their interest, their politeness, and their social graces to cast an immediate spell on you.
And you like them for it.
Social jiu-jitsu is easy. Just ask the right questions. Stay open-ended and allow room for description and introspection. Ask how, or why, or who.
As soon as you learn a little about someone, ask how they did it. Or why they did it. Or what they liked about it, or what they learned from it, or what you should do if you're in a similar situation.
No one gets too much recognition. Asking the right questions implicitly shows you respect another person's opinion--and, by extension, the person.
We all like people who respect us, if only because it shows they display great judgment.
(Kidding. Sort of.)
They whip out something genuine.
Everyone is better than you at something. (Yes, that's true even for you.) Let them be better than you.
Too many people when they first meet engage in some form of penis-measuring contest. Crude reference but one that instantly calls to mind a time you saw two alpha male master-of-the business-universe types whip out their figurative rulers. (Not literally, of course. I hope you haven't seen that.)
Don't try to win the "getting to know someone" competition. Try to lose. Be complimentary. Be impressed. Admit a failing or a weakness.
You don't have to disclose your darkest secrets. If the other person says, "We just purchased a larger facility," say, "That's awesome. I have to admit I'm jealous. We've wanted to move for a couple years but haven't been able to put together the financing. How did you pull it off?"
Don't be afraid to show a little vulnerability. People may be (momentarily) impressed by the artificial, but people sincerely like the genuine.
Be the real you. People will like the real you.
They ask for nothing.
You know the moment: You're having a great conversation, you're finding things in common... and then bam! Someone plays the networking card.
And everything about your interaction changes.
Put away the hard-charging, goal-oriented, always-on kinda persona. If you have to ask for something, find a way to help the other person, then ask if you can.
Remarkably likeable people focus on what they can do for you--not for themselves.
They "close" genuinely.
"Nice to meet you," you say, nodding once as you part. That's the standard move, one that is instantly forgettable.
Instead go back to the beginning. Shake hands again. Use your free hand to gently touch the other person's forearm or shoulder. Say, "I am really glad I met you." Or say, "You know, I really enjoyed talking with you." Smile: Not that insincere salesperson smile that goes with, "Have a nice day!" but a genuine, appreciative smile.
Making a great first impression is important, but so is making a great last impression.
And they accept it isn't easy.
All this sounds simple, right? It is. But it's not easy, especially if you're shy. The standard, power pose, "Hello, how are you, good to meet you, good seeing you," shuffle feels a lot safer.
But it won't make people like you.
So accept it's hard. Accept that being a little more deferential, a little more genuine, a little more complimentary and a little more vulnerable means putting yourself out there. Accept that at first it will feel risky.
But don't worry: When you help people feel a little better about themselves--which is reason enough--they'll like you for it.
And you'll like yourself a little more, too.
More From Inc.com
Click green here, above & below (Article 2 -3 of 3 next below)
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Article 2 of 3 (Article 1 of 3 next above)
Important info for your and your family's success
Actions Super Successful Individuals Take Before 8 AM
Teach your children from early on to learn these same principles and same daily activities = do as many of these activities daily together with your whole family - with your spouse and with your children. You will give one of the best gifts to your children: (1) your family ties get better, (2) you & your spouse succeed better in your marriage, (3) your children succeed better in school (4) and do well later in their whole life.
At the end of this article, see another note how to handle this important success-bringing material in your family
Click green for further info
Rise and shine! Morning time just became your new best friend. Love it or hate it, utilizing the morning hours before work may be the key to successful and healthy lifestyle. That’s right, early rising is a common trait found in many CEOs, government officials, and other influential people. Margaret Thatcher was up every day at 5 a.m.; Frank Lloyd Wright at 4 am and Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney wakes at 4:30 am, The CEO of STAF, Inc. Christian von Christophers gets up at
4 a.m., just to name a few.
I know what you’re may be thinking - you do your best work at night. Not so fast.
According to Inc. Magazine, morning people have been found to be more proactive and more productive.
In addition, the health benefits for those with a life before work go on and on.
Let’s explore some of the things successful people do before 8 am.
1. Exercise.
Work out in the morning
Most people do work out daily. Whether it’s a morning yoga session or a trip to the gym, exercising before work gives you a boost of energy for the day and that deserved sense of accomplishment. Anyone can tackle a pile of paperwork after 200 ab reps! Morning workouts also eliminate the possibility of flaking out on your cardio after a long day at work. Even if you aren’t bright eyed and bushy tailed at the thought of a 5 am jog, try waking up 15 minutes early for a quick bedside set of pushups or stretching.
It’ll help wake up your body, and prep you for your day.
If possible, walk or run in a park, close to the ocean/river/woods/nature - breathe healthier air, see the colors in the nature, hear the birds singing, see the sunrise/sunset - they all affect positively your brains and improve your success.
If possible, do all these morning routines together with your spouse and your whole family - it will strengthen your family ties & will guide your children to success leading activities.
In the evening, before the bedtime, walk as a whole family 10 -1 5 minutes as close to the nature as possible or at least round 2 - 3 blocks.
Then go to bed all at the same time (if just possible). No TV, no technology, no computer, no cell phones (on) in anyone's bedroom - dangerous, unhealthy radiation. No TV watching, no radio listening, no newspaper reading, no "hard-rock" music during the last 1 - 2 hours before bedtime (the negative news & noise affect the sleep quality). In the evening play classical music, esp. baroque music; see link a few lines down.*) Eat dinner 3 hours before bedtime, no snacks after that except perhaps soft fruit and caffeine free herbal teas. Sleep 6 -8 hours (adults), children up to ten years 9 - 11 hours, teenagers 8- 11 hours. Teach your children also the same morning routines.
See below, at the end of this 2 of 3 article links to articles relating to sleep
*) Baroque music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music
Baroque music is a style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era follows the Renaissance, and was followed in turn by the
Baroque-Music.combaroque-music.com/ Baroque-Music.com - Baroque Music, Baroque Composers, Baroque Instruments.
2. Map Out Your Day. (Teach this also to your children)
Maximize your potential by mapping out your schedule for the day, as well as your goals and to dos. The morning is a good time for this as it is often one of the only quiet times a person gets throughout the day. The early hours foster easier reflection that helps when prioritizing your activities. They also allow for uninterrupted problem solving when trying to fit everything into your timetable. While scheduling, don’t forget about your mental health. Plan a 10 minute break after that stressful meeting for a quick walk around the block or a moment of meditation at your desk. Trying to eat healthy? Schedule a small window in the evening to pack a few nutritious snacks to bring to work the next day.
3. Eat a Healthy Breakfast. (Teach this also to your children)
We all know that rush out the door with a cup of coffee and an empty stomach feeling. You sit down at your desk, and you’re already wondering how early that taco truck sets up camp outside your office. No good. Take that extra time in the morning to fuel your body for the tasks ahead of it. It will help keep you mind on what’s at hand and not your growling stomach. Not only is breakfast good for your physical health, it is also a good time to connect socially. Even five minutes of talking with your kids or spouse while eating a quick bowl of oatmeal can boost your spirits before heading out the door.
4. Meditation / Visualization. (Teach this also to your children)
These days we talk about our physical health ad nauseam (= referring to something that has been done or repeated so often that it has become annoying or tiresome = to a disgusting or ridiculous degree; to the point of nausea; nausea = (LAT.) sickness), but sometimes our mental health gets overlooked. The morning is the perfect time to spend some quiet time inside your mind (1) meditating or (2) visualizing. Take a moment to visualize your day ahead of you, focusing on the successes you will have. Even just a minute of visualization and positive thinking can help improve your mood and outlook on your work load for the day.
5. Make Your Day Top Heavy. (Teach this also to your children)
We all have that one item on our to do list that we dread. It looms over you all day
(or week) until you finally suck it up and do it after much procrastination. Here’s an easy tip to save yourself the stress - do that least desirable task on your list first in the morning. Instead of anticipating the unpleasantness of it from first coffee through your lunch break, get it out of the way. The morning is the time when you are (generally) more well rested and your energy level is up. Therefore, you are more well equipped to handle more difficult projects. And look at it this way, your day will get progressively easier, not the other way around. By the time your work day is ending, you’re winding down with easier to dos and heading into your free time more relaxed. Success!
Click green title & study - if the link has expired search the web with the title
16 Things You Should Do At The Start Of Every Work Day
The Top 25 Small Companies In America
The 20 Best Non-Tech Small Companies In America
Source: Forbes
Important note:
Teach all these principles to your children (as will fit their schedule - they have to sleep longer than you).
Practice the above principles together as a family (with your children) - give a copy of this text to everyone in your family, including to your children. Have a weekly family meeting about these and other success & health principles, discuss - have your children involved in the meetings. Every meeting has a group leader (rotating weekly), including your children as a group leader.
You all will succeed better.
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Click: School Start Time - National Sleep Foundationwww.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/school-start-time-and-sleepSleep Topics. "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," said Ben Franklin. But does this adage apply to teenagers? Research in the ...
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Article 3 of 3 (Articles 2-3 of 3 next above)
Is Music the Key to Success?
Many successful individuals have music studies on their resumes
Click green for further info
Condolezza Rice (former U.S. Secretary of State) trained to be a concert pianist.
click: Condoleezza Rice - Wikipedia
Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player.
click: Alan Greenspan - Wikipedia
The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.
click: Bruce Kovner - Wikipedia
The Juilliard School: Homewww.juilliard.edu/ Private conservatory offering programs through the Divisions of Dance, Drama, and Music from its campus at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?
Music in this article means:
(1) learning to play an instrument (of your choice), (2) learning to sing well solo, group or choir. Playing music has multiple benefits for success: (1) activates the brain creative areas, gives focus, gives possibilities to deeper thinking, to endurance & to basically every activity in life.
Listening to music has also great benefits (listening to soft music - not rock, etc. loud, modern) = listening to baroque music is success creating; it stimulates positively your brains for creativity*)
*) Baroque music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_music
Baroque music is a style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era follows the Renaissance, and was followed in turn by the
Baroque-Music.combaroque-music.com/ Baroque-Music.com - Baroque Music, Baroque Composers, Baroque Instruments.
The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.
The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.
Will your school music program turn your kid into a Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft (guitar)? Or a Woody Allen (clarinet)? Probably not. These are singular achievers. But the way these and other visionaries I spoke to process music is intriguing. As is the way many of them apply music’s lessons of focus and discipline into new ways of thinking and communicating — even problem solving.
Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.
“It’s not a coincidence,” says Mr. Greenspan, who gave up jazz clarinet but still dabbles at the baby grand in his living room. “I can tell you as a statistician, the probability that that is mere chance is extremely small.” The cautious former Fed chief adds, “That’s all that you can judge about the facts. The crucial question is: why does that connection exist?”
Paul Allen offers an answer. He says music “reinforces your confidence in the ability to create.” Mr. Allen began playing the violin at age 7 and switched to the guitar as a teenager. Even in the early days of Microsoft, he would pick up his guitar at the end of marathon days of programming. The music was the emotional analog to his day job, with each channeling a different type of creative impulse. In both, he says, “something is pushing you to look beyond what currently exists and express yourself in a new way.”
Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection.” The veteran advertising executive Steve Hayden credits his background as a cellist for his most famous work, the Apple “1984” commercial depicting rebellion against a dictator. “I was thinking of Stravinsky when I came up with that idea,” he says. He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow.”
For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a “hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet.”
It’s in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano playing and investing strategy; as he says, both “relate to pattern recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different senses.”
Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of synesthesia — they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr. Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can “visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships,” a skill that translates intellectually into making “multiple connections in multiple spheres.”
For others I spoke to, their passion for music is more notable than their talent. Woody Allen told me bluntly, “I’m not an accomplished musician. I get total traction from the fact that I’m in movies.”
Mr. Allen sees music as a diversion, unconnected to his day job. He likens himself to “a weekend tennis player who comes in once a week to play. I don’t have a particularly good ear at all or a particularly good sense of timing. In comedy, I’ve got a good instinct for rhythm. In music, I don’t, really.”
Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day, because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they don’t: “If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am.” He performs regularly, even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. “I never thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000 people,” he says. “I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life tremendously.”
Music provides balance, explains Mr. Wolfensohn, who began cello lessons as an adult. “You aren’t trying to win any races or be the leader of this or the leader of that. You’re enjoying it because of the satisfaction and joy you get out of music, which is totally unrelated to your professional status.”
For Roger McNamee, whose Elevation Partners is perhaps best known for its early investment in Facebook, “music and technology have converged,” he says. He became expert on Facebook by using it to promote his band, Moonalice, and now is focusing on video by live-streaming its concerts. He says musicians and top professionals share “the almost desperate need to dive deep.” This capacity to obsess seems to unite top performers in music and other fields.
Ms. Zahn remembers spending up to four hours a day “holed up in cramped practice rooms trying to master a phrase” on her cello. Mr. Todd, now 41, recounted in detail the solo audition at age 17 when he got the second-highest mark rather than the highest mark — though he still was principal horn in Florida’s All-State Orchestra.
“I’ve always believed the reason I’ve gotten ahead is by outworking other people,” he says. It’s a skill learned by “playing that solo one more time, working on that one little section one more time,” and it translates into “working on something over and over again, or double-checking or triple-checking.” He adds, “There’s nothing like music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get better. You see the results.”
That’s an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country.
Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.
Source:
Joanne Lipman is a co-author, with Melanie Kupchynsky, of the book “Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations.”
Click green for further info:
Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of ... - Amazon.comwww.amazon.com › ... › Music › Instruments › Strings Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations [Joanne Lipman, Melanie Kupchynsky] on Amazon.com. *FREE* super saver shipping ..
Read the book and apply the knowledge - have your whole family, including your children, reading the book and practice the principles together in your family.
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Article 1 of 2 (Article 2 of 2 next below)
Serving and Healing Veterans Through Music
At her new post at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, MusicianCorps Fellow Jen Hastings is hearing a lot of surprised
reactions from her patients. “The other day I did a gait training with a Parkinson’s patient, having him walk to the beat of the metronome,” Hastings says. "Then I had him continue while I sang ‘Valderi Valdera’ to the beat, and he sang along with me, laughing and smiling as he walked. Afterward he said, ‘Singing takes away all the effort. It’s effortless.’”
Jen speaks about opportunities for music therapy at the VA
Currently in her fourteenth year of professional practice, Hastings, a Board Certified Music Therapist (BC-MT), is working with geriatric Veterans on an ongoing basis for the first time. Based in the VA’s residential Community Living Center, most of Hastings' patients are older men who struggle with a variety of health challenges. “I love working with this population much more than I could have expected,” she says. “These are men who have had fascinating lives, and despite much trauma, most are extremely kind. With some caution in the beginning, the majority of my patients have engaged with music in daring and creative ways.”
Hastings provides daily group and individual sessions that promote physical, mental, and emotional recovery for Veterans. Her interventions are helping stroke and traumatic brain injury patients regain speech and motor skills, and helping others fight the memory loss and senility that comes with dementia.
“Older Veterans are the ‘forgotten population’ in some ways. Most require more support than they have been given. Many have been homeless at some point in their lives and they tend to live fast and hard,” Hastings says. “[Through music therapy] Veterans can find ways to become less isolated and depressed.”
91-year-old WWII Veteran plays piano with MusicianCorps Volunteer
With MusicianCorps, Hastings has also been able to integrate the outside community into the VA. Recently, MusicianCorps volunteer Rashida Clendening aka ‘Audio Angel’ paid a visit to 91 year old WWII Veteran and pianist Ernesto Cinco. The two rehearsed and performed songs for the other Veterans during lunch.
Hastings also collaborated with MusicianCorps colleague Hernando Buitrago to bring his sixth grade students from Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 to the VA to perform for and interact with the Veterans. Following the performance, a Veteran exclaimed, “That was fantastic. Thank you for sharing your music with us. Please come back!”
“We’re hearing and witnessing the great stories [from Hastings and the Veterans], which is the best case we can make for sustaining the program,” says Michael Harper, Director of Geriatrics & Extended Care Service Line at the VA.
Hastings' MusicianCorps mission reaches beyond her service in San Francisco. “There are no standardized evaluation tools right now for music therapy interventions applied to Veteran populations,” she says. “So part of my role with MusicianCorps is to develop and test evaluation practices that will, hopefully, contribute to the field of music therapy nationally.”
Learning from Hastings' creative leadership and the SF VA pilot program, MusicianCorps envisions bringing high-quality music therapy and community engagement to more Veterans throughout the country.
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Article 2 of 2 (Article 1 of 2 next above)
Healing Veterans With Music
NEW YORK—With teary eyes and a keen expression on his face, Marine Corps veteran Earl Parks strummed the strings of an electric guitar. He was playing in a duet with Jean Newton the executive director of The Music Conservancy of Westchester, where Parks gets his music therapy. It is part of a new program called, Healing Our Heroes.Click: Music Conservatory of Westchester
The program began when founding sponsor, Joel Breitkopf, approached Newton last winter, and suggested that music therapy be given to veterans. Half a year later, the conservancy collected enough funds to provide scholarships for eight veterans. It became an official vendor for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
The VA refers potential veterans for the program. Once selected, the veterans receive a 45-minute, one-on-one music lesson with a music therapist every week for two years.
Learning music for people like Parks was an important step in dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physical injury.
“In my life, music is the gateway to peace,” Parks said. At the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum Thursday morning, Parks shared the difficulties he faced after coming back from service.
While serving in the Marine Corps between 1974 and 1979, Parks reached the rank of infantry operations specialist with an instinct to “kill, kill, kill,” he said.
“They took a weapon out of my hand and put an instrument in my hand,” Parks said.
Learning music, and feeling like he could accomplish something positive, was a transformational step for Parks. He always felt the infantry was the “bottom of the barrel in the military,” and when someone gave him a compliment after he played at a concert on Veterans Day at the Intrepid, he was deeply moved.
“That’s like someone putting gold in your pocket,” Parks said.
Working with veterans at the conservancy, Dr. Noelle Berger, counseling psychologist at the VA Medical Center found that music helped veterans with traumatic brain injury (TBI) to improve their memory and attention, and help them feel more relaxed.
She said veterans at the VA come by her office asking about the program every day. The only problem now, is that there’s not enough space for them.
“Eventually, we’ll have a veterans band or orchestra,” Berger said.
Newton also hopes to expand the program. They are currently looking for additional sponsors for the program to bring music classes to 30 veterans next year. Newton also wants to extend the program and send music therapists to VA hospitals to reach more “fragile patients.”
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Important info for every parent, for every grandparent, for every child
Losing Is Good for Your Child
Let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose - that's better for life success
The losing experience(s) will make the child stronger & wiser - then leading to a higher success in life
It's a Dog Eat Dog World. Don't Be on the Menu.
Old saying "When life wants to give us a gift, it always comes as a form of a problem"
When any of us, including your child, solves the problem he/she will get stronger in wisdom and knowledge - that becomes a habit leading always to a victory over any challenge in life. The more challenges solved, the more knowledge & wisdom - the final destination: a successful life that would not have been possible without learning to solve any challenge.
Quote: "Knowledge is no power - only applied knowledge is power"
(Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc. CEO)
Read these following 6 lines next below, discuss them with your child after he/she reads them also
Especially the boomers have had the habit to always praise the child even though the child was not doing so well. This sends a wrong message and is not the truth to start with. The truth is better than a lie. It is better to raise your child to accept losses and learn from those experiences. That builds strength & character. Multiple, worldwide research projects show that a child is not building strength to conquer challenges if he/she is always praised. No one is perfect, we all fail now and then. We all make mistakes now and then. It is better to tell the child the bitter truth: life is not always winning - one has to learn to handle the losing also - that builds mental-emotional strength and leads to a higher success.
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The article below - an important article - study & discuss this with your whole family
Losing Is Good for Your Child
Let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose - that's better for life success
The losing experience(s) will make the child stronger & wiser - then leading to a higher success in life
Click green for further info
When children sign up for extracurricular activities in their schools, parents should keep one question in mind. Whether your kid loves Little League or gymnastics, ask the program organizers this: “Which kids get awards?” If the answer is, “Everybody gets a trophy,” find another program.
Trophies were once rare things — sterling silver loving cups bought from jewelry stores for truly special occasions. But in the 1960s, they began to be mass-produced, marketed in catalogs to teachers and coaches, and sold in sporting-goods stores.
Today, participation trophies and prizes are almost a given, as children are constantly assured that they are winners. One Maryland summer program gives awards every day — and the “day” is one hour long. In Southern California, a regional branch of the A.Y.S.O. - American Youth Soccer Organization hands out roughly 3,500 awards each season — each player gets one, while around a third get two. Nationally, A.Y.S.O. local branches typically spend as much as 12 percent of their yearly budgets on trophies.
It adds up: trophy and award sales are now an estimated $3 billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada.
Po Bronson and I have spent years reporting on the effects of praise and rewards on kids. The science is clear. Awards can be powerful motivators, but nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.
Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University, found that kids respond positively to praise; they enjoy hearing that they’re talented, smart and so on. But after such praise of their innate abilities, they collapse at the first experience of difficulty. Demoralized by their failure, they say they’d rather cheat than risk failing again.
In recent eye-tracking experiments by the researchers Bradley Morris and Shannon Zentall, kids were asked to draw pictures. Those who heard praise suggesting they had an innate talent were then twice as fixated on mistakes they’d made in their pictures.
By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies. They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.
It turns out that, once kids have some proficiency in a task, the excitement and uncertainty of real competition may become the activity’s very appeal.
If children know they will automatically get an award, what is the impetus for improvement? Why bother learning problem-solving skills, when there are never obstacles to begin with?
If I were a baseball coach, I would announce at the first meeting that there would be only three awards: Best Overall, Most Improved and Best Sportsmanship. Then I’d hand the kids a list of things they’d have to do to earn one of those trophies. They would know from the get-go that excellence, improvement, character and persistence were valued.
It’s accepted that, before punishing children, we must consider their individual levels of cognitive and emotional development. Then we monitor them, changing our approach if there’s a negative outcome. However, when it comes to rewards, people argue that kids must be treated identically: everyone must always win. That is misguided. And there are negative outcomes. Not just for specific children, but for society as a whole.
In June, an Oklahoma Little League canceled participation trophies because of a budget shortfall. A furious parent complained to a local reporter, “My children look forward to their trophy as much as playing the game.” That’s exactly the problem, says Jean Twenge, author of “Generation Me.”
Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it’s part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who’ve grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work, but don’t see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion.
In life, “you’re going to lose more often than you win, even if you’re good at something,” Ms. Twenge told me. “You’ve got to get used to that to keep going.”
When children make mistakes, our job should not be to spin those losses into decorated victories. Instead, our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss, and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed. To do that, we need to refuse all the meaningless plastic and tin destined for landfills. We have to stop letting the Trophy-Industrial Complex run our children’s lives.
Let’s fight for a kid’s right to lose. - That builds the road to a better success in life
Source for the above article: NYT
Book endorsement by STAF, Inc.'s CEO, Dr. Christian
Ashley Merryman is the author, with Po Bronson, of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children” and “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing.” - It's a Dog Eat Dog World. Don't Be on the Menu.
(below click the Amazon book links)
STAF, Inc. endorses: every grandparent, every parent & every child (when old enough) to read these two books - if short of money the libraries have these books
Read these 2 books & discuss the information at home all together & apply the information - it gives you all new strength & wisdom to raise your child(ren) for a successful life and your child(ren) will be greatly motivated
(1) Click: NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children: Po Bronson, Ashley ...www.amazon.com › ... › Social Sciences › Children's Studies The central premise of this book by Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) and Merryman, a Washington Post journalist, is that many of modern society's most ...
(2) Click: Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing: Po Bronson, Ashley ...www.amazon.com › ... ›
Bronson and Merryman follow up the best-selling NurtureShock (2009) with this intriguing look at the nature of competition. Most of us are taught from an early .. It's a Dog Eat Dog World. Don't Be on the Menu.
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Poverty in America Is Mainstream
Click green for further info
By Mark R. Rank is click: a professor of social welfare at Washington University
Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making.
They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong.
Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of the population that directly encounters poverty is exceedingly high. My research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).
Even more astounding, if we add in related conditions like welfare use, near-poverty and unemployment, four out of five Americans will encounter one or more of these events.
In addition, half of all American children will at some point during their childhood reside in a household that uses food stamps for a period of time.
Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when.
But while poverty strikes a majority of the population, the average time most people spend in poverty is relatively short. The standard image of the poor has been that of an entrenched underclass, impoverished for years at a time. While this captures a small and important slice of poverty, it is also a highly misleading picture of its more widespread and dynamic nature.
The typical pattern is for an individual to experience poverty for a year or two, get above the poverty line for an extended period of time, and then perhaps encounter another spell at some later point. Events like losing a job, having work hours cut back, experiencing a family split or developing a serious medical problem all have the potential to throw households into poverty.
Just as poverty is widely dispersed with respect to time, it is also widely dispersed with respect to place. Only approximately 10 percent of those in poverty live in extremely poor urban neighborhoods. Households in poverty can be found throughout a variety of urban and suburban landscapes, as well as in small towns and communities across rural America. This dispersion of poverty has been increasing over the past 20 years, particularly within suburban areas.
Along with the image of inner-city poverty, there is also a widespread perception that most individuals in poverty are nonwhite. This is another myth: According to the latest Census Bureau numbers, two-thirds of those below the poverty line identified themselves as white — a number that has held rather steady over the past several decades.
What about the generous assistance we provide to the poor? Contrary to political rhetoric, the American social safety net is extremely weak and filled with gaping holes. Furthermore, it has become even weaker over the past 40 years because of various welfare reform and budget cutting measures.
We currently expend among the fewest resources within the industrialized countries in terms of pulling families out of poverty and protecting them from falling into it. And the United States is one of the few developed nations that does not provide universal health care, affordable child care, or reasonably priced low-income housing. As a result, our poverty rate is approximately twice the European average.
Whether we examine childhood poverty, poverty among working-age adults, poverty within single-parent families or overall rates of poverty, the story is much the same — the United States has exceedingly high levels of impoverishment. The many who find themselves in poverty are often shocked at how little assistance the government actually provides to help them through tough times.
Finally, the common explanation for poverty has emphasized a lack of motivation, the failure to work hard enough and poor decision making in life.
Yet my research and that of others has consistently found that the behaviors and attitudes of those in poverty basically mirror those of mainstream America. Likewise, a vast majority of the poor have worked extensively and will do so again. Poverty is ultimately a result of failings at economic and political levels rather than individual shortcomings.
The solutions to poverty are to be found in what is important for the health of any family — having a job that pays a decent wage, having the support of good health and child care and having access to a first-rate education. Yet these policies will become a reality only when we begin to truly understand that poverty is an issue of us, rather than an issue of them.
Source: NYT
Mark R. Rank is click: a professor of social welfare at Washington University and a co-author of the forthcoming book “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes our Fortunes.”
Click green for further info
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Important info for women aiming to become pregnant - heal your depression & and find peace
Depression linked in mothers, teenage kids
Teenagers are more likely to be depressed if their mothers were depressed while pregnant
Source: JAMA Psychiatry, online October 9, 2013.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenagers are more likely to be depressed if their mothers were depressed while pregnant, according to a new study.
Mothers' depression after giving birth was also tied to their children's mental health years later, but possibly for different reasons, researchers found.
Depression during pregnancy may affect a baby through stress hormones that move across the placenta, Rebecca Pearson, from the University of Bristol in the UK, and her colleagues said.
That goes against the suggestion of some researchers that depression is only important if it continues past the end of pregnancy and impacts parenting.
"It should be treated during pregnancy, irrespective of if it continues during birth. It's as important during pregnancy," Pearson said.
She said the findings mean therapy should be made available to pregnant women with depression whenever possible. They also add another layer to the debate over the use of antidepressants in pregnancy.
The data come from a large study that began following pregnant women in England who were due to deliver in 1991 and 1992. Researchers surveyed women twice during pregnancy and twice in their baby's first year about their depression symptoms.
About 12 percent of women met the criteria for depression during pregnancy and seven percent did after birth.
Researchers then followed families over time through surveys given to the parents and children. The current study included about 4,500 children.
At age 18, eight percent of them reported symptoms of depression.
Teens were 47 percent more likely to be depressed themselves if their mothers had been depressed during pregnancy, Pearson and her colleagues reported in JAMA Psychiatry. That was still true when they untangled the effects of mothers' depression before and after birth.
The study does not prove that exposure to a depressed mother while in the womb is the cause of the teens' depression.
But if one is an effect of the other, it could be because of stress hormones such as cortisol, which are higher in depressed people and able to cross the placenta to affect the developing brain, the researchers suggested.
Or, women who develop depression before and during pregnancy may have genes that put them at greater depression risk in general, and they pass on those genes to their children, said Laura Scaramella.
She has studied the effects of maternal depression at the University of New Orleans but wasn't involved in the new research.
Teens were also depressed more often when their mothers had been depressed in the year after they were born. However, when the researchers looked at other family characteristics, they found that link only remained among children of less educated and disadvantaged mothers.
"Postpartum depression seems to have a negative impact on children's development because it affects how responsive mothers are to their babies," Scaramella told Reuters Health.
"It inhibits their ability to really attend to and respond to their baby," she said.
More educated mothers may have more support and better access to childcare, which could offset the effects of their depression on their children, Pearson's team said.
Pearson said that for any given child, the extra risk related to a mother's depression is "quite small."
But the findings do show it's important to take depression during pregnancy seriously and make sure women get help, she added.
There are still concerns about the potential harms of antidepressants to a developing baby. For example, some research suggests babies are more likely to be born early when women use the drugs during pregnancy (see Reuters Health story of March 7, 2012 here: http://reut.rs/yoZyQN).
"We certainly don't want to say everyone should be going on antidepressants, because we don't know the risks," Pearson told Reuters Health.
Although talk therapy can be expensive and isn't always available, it should be prioritized for pregnant women who are depressed, Pearson said. "There's absolutely no controversy around that."
She said women should do what they can to put their own mental health first during pregnancy, and know that by doing that they are also looking out for their baby.
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Source: JAMA Network | JAMA | Homejama.jamanetwork.com/
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Flying the Surly Skies - Stay Positive
The title message relates to any situation in life
surly = bad-tempered and unfriendly; e.g."he left with a surly expression"
synonyms: sullen, sulky, moody, sour, unfriendly, unpleasant, scowling,unsmiling By Shawn Achor
- Click: Shawn Achor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Achor
Shawn Achor is an American educator, author, and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He is best known for his research reversing the formula of success leading to happiness—his research shows that happiness in fact leads to success.
I GIVE about 100 lectures a year, which translates to about 300 flights. I try to stay positive about everything, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering I’m a researcher, author and educator in the field of positive psychology.
I do have some things that work that make travel less tedious. I bring a Kindle instead of a book, and that means I gain about 30 minutes each flight during takeoff and landing when I can’t use electronics. I realized I was gaining time to do other things. Now I meditate, go through some Spanish flash cards, write a quick thank-you note to someone I met during my previous business trip and then pick up the airline magazine and learn one new fact about the world. I have a blast.
When you’re traveling for business, it can be hard to remember things that happened on a trip, especially if you travel alone. Researchers found that taking just two minutes to jot down notes in a travel journal about things that you did and how you felt doing those things can make the experience more meaningful to you. I know business travel can be tough, but many of us get to see new things and new places. It’s worth making the effort to try to remember those experiences that we enjoyed.
One time I was delayed at O’Hare for a while. I wound up being thrilled that my flight wasn’t canceled when many others were. When I play badly at tennis, I get frustrated. When I play great, I assume that’s my normal. When my plane is on time, I assume that’s normal. But in the normal world, travel delays happen all the time. As the comedian Louis C.K. points out, we need to keep things in perspective. He says we forget how good we have it, even in our frustrating times.
I worked with a group of critical care nurses in Boston who had a great idea. They make an “In Case of Emergency” folder. They print out pictures of family and friends, as well as great e-mails or notes that made them smile. They put all of this stuff in a folder. Then, when they were having a particularly tough day at work, they would open their folders and be reminded of all of the good things in life. I think it would be a great idea to make a folder like this, or even scan stuff onto a laptop, and then when a flight gets canceled or you’re sitting next to someone who does nothing but complain, you could find a little solace.
Some of my colleagues do give me a hard time sometimes when flights are really late or canceled. I’ll get a comment from them like, “So how are you doing now, Mr. Happy?” All I can say is that I try to find the positive. That’s important because our brains pick up on negativity easily. One of the things we like to do when traveling is a little experiment with “mirror neurons.” These brain neurons show activation when you see someone yawning, for example, raising the likelihood of you doing the same behavior.
Sometimes my colleagues and I will mess with people at the gate and start tapping our feet or looking at our watches, as if we’re anxious to get on board. Within about two minutes, several other people will start to mimic the same behavior. I never do this experiment at my gate, though. I don’t want to be on the plane with a bunch of anxious people. On the other hand, if you smile and act relaxed, people are going to pick up on those behaviors and possibly even create a ripple effect of, well, happiness.
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Source: Article first published in The New York Times
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Dishonest deeds lead to 'cheater's high,'
as long as no one gets hurt,
study finds - Behaving unethically may lead to feeling better than being guilt-free, research discovers
People who get away with cheating when they believe no one is hurt by their dishonesty are more likely to feel upbeat than remorseful afterward, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
Although people predict they will feel bad after cheating or being dishonest, many of them don't, reports a study published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"When people do something wrong specifically to harm someone else, such as apply an electrical shock, the consistent reaction in previous research has been that they feel bad about their behavior," said the study's lead author, Nicole E. Ruedy, of the University of Washington. "Our study reveals people actually may experience a 'cheater's high' after doing something unethical that doesn't directly harm someone else."
Even when there was no tangible reward, people who cheated felt better on average than those who didn't cheat, according to results of several experiments that involved more than 1,000 people in the U.S. and England. A little more than half the study participants were men, with 400 from the general public in their late 20s or early 30s and the rest in their 20s at universities.
Participants predicted that they or someone else who cheated on a test or logged more hours than they had worked to get a bonus would feel bad or ambivalent afterward. When participants actually cheated, they generally got a significant emotional boost instead, according to responses to questionnaires that gauged their feelings before and after several experiments.
In one experiment, participants who cheated on math and logic problems were overall happier afterward than those who didn't and those who had no opportunity to cheat. The participants took tests on computers in two groups. In one group, when participants completed an answer, they were automatically moved to the next question. In the other group, participants could click a button on the screen to see the correct answer, but they were told to disregard the button and solve the problem on their own. Graders could see who used the correct-answer button and found that 68 percent of the participants in that group did, which the researchers counted as cheating.
People who gained from another person's misdeeds felt better on average than those who didn't, another experiment found. Researchers at a London university observed two groups in which each participant solved math puzzles while in a room with another person who was pretending to be a participant. The actual participants were told they would be paid for each puzzle they solved within a time limit and that the other "participant" would grade the test when the time was up. In one group, the actor inflated the participant's score when reporting it to the experimenter. In the other group, the actor scored the participant accurately. None of the participants in the group with the cheating actor reported the lie, the authors said.
In another trial, researchers asked the participants not to cheat because it would make their responses unreliable, yet those who cheated were more likely to feel more satisfied afterward than those who didn't. Moreover, the cheaters who were reminded at the end of the test how important it was not to cheat reported feeling even better on average than other cheaters who were not given this message, the authors said. Researchers gave participants a list of anagrams to unscramble and emphasized that they should unscramble them in consecutive order and not move on to the next word until the previous anagram was solved. The third jumble on the list was "unaagt," which can spell only the word taguan, a species of flying squirrel. Previous testing has shown that the likelihood of someone solving this anagram is minuscule. The graders considered anyone who went beyond the third word to have cheated and found that more than half the participants did, the authors said.
"The good feeling some people get when they cheat may be one reason people are unethical even when the payoff is small," Ruedy said. "It's important that we understand how our moral behavior influences our emotions. Future research should examine whether this 'cheater's high' could motivate people to repeat the unethical behavior."
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Source: http://www.apa.org
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/This journal publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology.
Click:
The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of
Unethical ...www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-a0034231.pdf by NE Ruedy - Cited by 3 - Related articles
Article: "The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior," Nicole E. Ruedy, PhD, University of Washington; Celia Moore, PhD, London Business School; Francesca Gino, PhD, Harvard University; and Maurice E. Schweitzer, PhD, University of Pennsylvania; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, online, Sept. 3, 2013.
Contact: In the U.S. - Nicole E. Ruedy at [email protected], 206-543-0494
In the U.K. – Celia Moore at [email protected], +44 (0) 7780-462-357
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 134,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.
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Part A Part B next below
Data Supports Bloomberg on Disparity With Income
This article shows proof for rich people actually helping the poorer people live better in the same economical area as e.g. in the same city - in this article in New York City. The same principles is valid anywhere in any country and in any city
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has been criticized as being tone-deaf to the struggles of the poor, provoked more anger when he recently attributed New York’s rising income gap to the many rich people who have found the city an attractive place to live and called billionaires a “godsend.”
It turns out Mr. Bloomberg has a point.
There is no doubt that the city’s widening income gap, which is greater than the national rate and has been climbing for several years, reflects rising poverty.
But it has also grown, economists say, because more wealthy people have moved to the city since Mr. Bloomberg was elected mayor 12 years ago or have become rich while living here.
In 2001, 11,700 New Yorkers reported earning more than $1 million annually, according to summaries of resident tax returns provided by the mayor’s office. A decade later, 20,416 did.
Individuals are liable for local income taxes if they live in the city more than 180 days a year.
The number of poor people, as defined by the federal government, has also increased, to about 1.7 million in 2012, from about 1.6 million in 2000. Many poor people are stuck in low-wage jobs.
Mr. Bloomberg said that while the city had become a magnet for those with deep pockets, they had also helped ease the pain for those with fewer resources.
“We’ve been able to do something that none of these other cities can do, and that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and around the world,” Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.
“And they are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes, they’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.
“And we take tax revenues from those people to help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum. And you know, it gives you this income-inequality measure.”
Then, he added, “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here it would be a godsend; that would create a much bigger income gap.”
Ronnie Lowenstein, director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, said the data bore out Mr. Bloomberg’s assertion about the growing numbers of affluent residents.
Wealthy residents are contributing to the city’s coffers, she said.
“And many of these people also contribute in very big way to libraries, museums and other things that make this not only a nice place to visit but a nice place to live.”
In 2011, New Yorkers who made more than $10 million annually accounted for nearly one-fifth of the city’s personal income tax revenue, which is second only to property taxes as a revenue source. The city also taxes capital gains like ordinary income instead of at lower rates as the federal government does.
Some 1,041 taxpayers reported making more than $10 million, and an additional 120 reported income over $50 million.
“Nearly 18 percent of all city personal income taxes were generated by this very small group of not even 1,200 taxpayers,” Ms. Lowenstein said. “That’s a huge contribution.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s comments about the income gap and the rich resonated on the campaign trail because Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayoral candidate, has repeatedly portrayed New York as becoming two cities under Mr. Bloomberg’s stewardship.
But the Bloomberg administration has strongly defended its economic record.
“Other cities have much lower inequality levels,” Mr. Bloomberg’s press secretary, Marc LaVorgna, said, citing Detroit and Camden, N.J. “Are those better places for low-income families to live? Or would they be better off if they had more wealthy people, and a larger income gap, to provide a larger tax base to support a police department that keeps low income communities safe, funds good public schools and pays for a vast social services network like we do in New York City?
Mr. LaVorgna said that having more wealthy people did not make New York a worse place for poorer people.
“In fact, it makes it a better place and provides us with more ability to help those who are working their way up the economic ladder,” he said.
According to the city’s own more sophisticated measure, 46 percent of New Yorkers are living below 150 percent of the poverty line, which suggests that while they are not officially poor by the federal standard, they are struggling. Still, the poverty rate in New York is lower than in many other major cities.
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Source: NYT0
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PART B Part A next above
This article PART B shows proof that it is possible to have a cleaner air anywhere when corrective actions are taken - in a big city as New York the air in now cleaner than ever in 50 past year
New York’s Air Is Cleanest in 50 Years, Survey Finds
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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that his administration’s efforts at reducing air pollution had resulted in New York City’s having the best air quality in more than 50 years.
Sulfur dioxide levels have dropped by 69 percent since 2008, and the level of soot pollution has dropped by more than 23 percent since 2007, according to a new city survey.
The mayor said the reduction was largely the result of the city’s effort to get buildings that used the most polluting kinds of heating oil to convert to cleaner fuels.
Since pollution exacerbates lung and cardiovascular disease, the mayor said, the city estimates that the reduction in pollution is preventing 800 deaths and 2,000 emergency room visits and hospitalizations each year.
“The continued health benefits of this conversion to cleaner heating fuels will make it the single biggest step to save lives since we began our comprehensive smoking control program,” Mr. Bloomberg said, at a news conference at Chelsea Piers.
“City government’s number one responsibility, I’ve always thought, is protecting the health and safety of our people,” he added. “And when you look at the results like that, at the lives being saved and the illnesses being prevented, it tells you that we’re definitely doing something right.”
Three years ago, the mayor said, the 10,000 buildings — 1 percent of city buildings — that burned the two most polluting kinds of heating oil put more soot into the air than all the cars and trucks on the city’s streets and highways.
Since then, more than 2,700 of those buildings have converted to cleaner fuels, the city said, and an additional 2,500 buildings are pursuing conversions. Under regulations issued in 2011, use of the dirtier heating oils will become illegal in 2030.
The reductions in pollution were found through the click: New York City Community Air Survey, based on results from about 100 monitoring sites around the city.
The mayor displayed the results of the survey in two maps of wintertime sulfur concentrations, with pale yellow signifying low concentrations and brown signifying high concentrations.
Below click the green to see the map - if the link has expired, to see the maps, search The New York Times with the article title:
In the first map, based on 2008-9 results, a dark brown blob engulfed much of Manhattan and the southwest Bronx, and other brown splotches were scattered through Brooklyn and Queens.
In the second map, the brown was greatly reduced to a handful of spots in areas including Harlem, Inwood and the Bronx.
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Source: NYT
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Doubling Down on Gambling in Atlantic City
Date: July 6, 2013
Revel
Jeffrey Hartmann, the interim chief executive
brought in from Mohegan Sun in Connecticut to lift Revel’s fortunes
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ATLANTIC CITY — Known simply as Revel, the newest addition to this gambling city was going to be different.
The emphasis was on luxury, with the Himalayan salt grotto in the spa, the botanic garden winding toward a rooftop pool, the Michelin chefs instead of all-you-can-eat buffets. There was no smoking in its 47 stories, and with floor-to-ceiling windows offering vistas onto the Atlantic Ocean, you could almost forget the seedier streets at its back. There was a casino, but it was self-contained on one floor, as if it were an aside. This was a resort, its promoters said, that happened to have gambling.
Little more than a year after opening, Revel is sorry. Deeply, dearly sorry.
And it is an expensive apology. As it fights its way back from bankruptcy, Revel announced that it would refund all slot losses and match all other casinos’ promotions for the month of July. Revel cost $2.4 billion to open and has spent millions more in recent months to install diner-fare restaurants, more slot machines and air filtration systems — because it now allows smoking, too. Buttons worn by employees and billboards along the Atlantic City Expressway declare its new slogan: “Gamblers Wanted.” And its new official name: Revel Casino Hotel.
It is just another spin of the wheel here, where the casino industry that revived an ailing beach resort a generation ago is now itself in need of reviving. Revenues have fallen 40 percent since their peak in 2006, as new casinos in neighboring states have taken away gamblers. Revel, hailed by Gov. Chris Christie as a “turning point” for the city when it opened in April 2012, lost $111 million its first year. And last year, Pennsylvania displaced Atlantic City as the gambling capital of the East, according to the American Gaming Association.
Mr. Christie came into office with a five-year plan to turn Atlantic City around, establishing a new tourism district and a $30 million marketing campaign to promote the city as more than just a gambling destination. “Do AC,” the ads encouraged, as casinos rushed to promote their nongambling attractions: concerts, shopping, a gay nightclub, the beach.
But now, the emphasis is on gambling again, as Revel attests. Mr. Christie, who offered Revel tax incentives to keep going when its financial backers threatened to halt construction, recently signed a bill allowing gamblers to place bets online to casinos here, and is in federal court fighting to bring sports betting.
The Do AC campaign is taking a pop-up mock casino on a road show, setting it up in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York City to try to lure gamblers back to Atlantic City. Another casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, will bury vouchers worth $200,000 in the sand in September to try to lure the would-be lucky to dig them up — players will have to have their Trump players’ club card for a chance to win.
Above the banks of slot machines on Revel’s casino floor, signs promoting the new slots refunds declare “You Can’t Lose!”
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” said Jeffrey Hartmann, the interim chief executive brought in from Mohegan Sun in Connecticut to lift Revel’s fortunes. (The company entered bankruptcy in March and emerged 57 days later.) “We’re asking our customers for a second chance.”
“To quote ‘The Godfather,’ ” he added, “we wanted to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. If this doesn’t get to them, nothing will.”
Randall Fine, whose marketing company was brought in to help Revel, said that in 83 years of gambling, no casino had ever offered to refund slot money — and little wonder, given that the rule of thumb had been that casinos make 80 percent of their profits on slots.
He could not say how much the refund would cost. But, he said, “If it costs us something, it’s because it worked.”
That is because the refunds are not automatic: players have to sign up for a Revel card — a sort of rewards program — to get the money back. They have to lose at least $100 on slots. And the refunds will be put on the card, parceled out in weekly increments for a 20-week period beginning in August.
On the floor last week, this caused some grousing that “they’re not cutting us a check,” as one man said. Still, people had
begun lining up on the newly expanded casino floor at 8:30 Monday morning — the first day of the promotion — to get their Revel cards.
By late afternoon, the casino floor was buzzing compared with a normal Monday. “I couldn’t believe it, we came down the escalator and there’s people,” said Linda Walling, a retiree who comes to Atlantic City weekly with her husband, Richard, from their home in central New Jersey.
“It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous resort,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like you’re in Atlantic City, it’s more like Vegas.” But for all its sleek loveliness, she said, “We’d be walking past the restaurants, there’d be 100 employees and nobody in there. You walked down the escalator looking at the machines in the casino and it was empty.”
Looking around a new lounge catering to high-rolling slots players, she declared the new moves to be “going in the right direction.”
Pattie and Jack Paterson had come from Delaware County in Pennsylvania after friends told them about the slots promotion. “We’re not big gamblers, because we don’t have money to gamble,” Mr. Paterson, a welder, said. “But we’d been wanting to go to Atlantic City on a rainy day. We came in because of the promotion.”
They were looking for a poker slot machine and settled on Jacks or Better and Double Joker. “We’ll be back in August,” Mr. Paterson said.
Angela Roslatov, in Atlantic City with several branches of her extended family, was a target customer for the promotion. She had come to Revel once to see a show, but never returned, preferring Caesars or Harrah’s. Revel, she said, “had an attitude.”
Immaculate Zarbo, a relative, agreed, adding that the no-smoking policy was unwelcoming. “I can’t play five or six hours and not have a smoke,” she said.
She appreciated the new smoking area — Atlantic City casinos are allowed smoking in 25 percent of their properties, but most split it onto different floors, forcing people who move around to extinguish. Revel said its smoking area was the largest contiguous area in the city.
Still, they were complaining that they had been waiting an hour and a half to find someone to take their drink order. “We pressed the service button three times,” Ms. Roslatov said.
Revel, now owned by several hedge funds, has told state regulators that it anticipates cutting its operating loss by more than half, to less than $43 million this year. The fortunes are not just the casino’s, but New Jersey’s. The state relies on casino gambling for $300 million in tax revenue and is counting on online gambling at casinos to provide an additional $180 million.
Mr. Christie bet particularly big on Revel, after its biggest backer, Morgan Stanley, pulled out before construction was completed. The project was started with the help of $261 million in tax incentives.
If Atlantic City fails to turn around, there will be pressure from the northern part of the state, where legislators are eager to expand gambling. But Revel said it was not done luring customers.
“This is not the last thing we’re doing,” Mr. Fine, the casino marketer, said. “We’re showing gamblers we want them.”
On the casino floor, Ms. Roslatov’s family had finally found a waitress. She and a cousin asked for the cocktail menu.
Ms. Zarbo ordered a coffee, “so I can keep going.”
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Source: NYT
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PART A
Reasons Less Talented People
Make More Money Than You
Does it feel like no matter how hard you work, someone less qualified than you is more successful?
Here's what you can do about it
Quotation "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like."
Jean Cocteau, French director and poet - was one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century
Click: Jean Cocteau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It is a reality—a harsh reality—that in today's business world there are a lot of less talented individuals making a lot of money. This can be to witness—why should someone who is less dedicated, not as smart and not as passionate about what they do, make more money?
Here are four reasons why people not as smart as you are making more money than you, and what you can do about it.
1. The Rich Get Richer
Financial success is not always the result of hard work and skill alone; sometimes it's simply inherited.
There is a statistical correlation between a person’s income as an adult and his or her parent’s income.
Smart Action: Don't begrudge someone else's good fortune. After all, you do need investors, don't you?
2. Good Genes
It has been said that good looks play a large role in financial success. Daniel Hamermesh from Yale University concludes in his Beauty in the Labor Market study that "beautiful people will make $230,000 more in their lifetimes than average-looking people.” Other studies report that taller people tend to be more financially successful as well.
Smart Action: You might not have any control over your genes, but you do have control over how you project your image to others. Stand up tall, speak clearly and confidently, and show the world a self-assured you. You'll see how quickly and positively people respond. Not feeling very confident? Try the "fake it until you make it!" approach.
3. No More Mr. Nice Guy
A study suggests that men who are “below average on agreeableness earn roughly 18 percent more than men who are considered nice.” For women, the advantage is 5 percent. It seems that men who are rude are more successful negotiators and therefore earn more financial rewards.
Smart Action: The most successful negotiators aren't rude at all. They find a way to satisfy what is most important to both sides.
4. Brown Nosing*)
People who suck up to their vendors and customers, taking them out to lavish restaurants and sending them expensive gifts, may win the business, but have trouble sustaining it. (Those expensive gifts are usually meant to mask a shortcoming in their business.) Brown-nosers are also the first to tell their clients what they want to hear, even if it's not in the client's best interest.
*) Brown Nosing = Someone who sucks up to you*) to gain your favor. This is done by doing stuff for you for no apparent reason, laughing at stuff you do that wasn't suppose to be funny, agreeing with everything you say, etc... *) sucks up to you = displaying exaggerated flattery or affection; obsequious (in vulgar language: ass licker)
Smart Action: Anyone can buy a customer or vendor for a short period of time. But winning loyal clients and customers always comes down to offering exceptional service and products, and being the best at what you do.
5. Plain-Old Dumb Luck
Chance is the wild card in business success. Was Bill Gates fortunate that IBM did not want to own the source code for the new DOS operating system his small company developed for him? Did Jeff Bezos get lucky to start during a time when investors were pouring billions of dollars into the Internet? Frans Johansson, author of The Click Moment, writes that "unfortunately in business, you can be on top one day and then just a few years later, you’re at the bottom of the list because the rules of the game changed.”
Smart Action: In business, luck has no prejudice. It's there for the taking by smart, stupid and lazy people. However, hard work generates more opportunities for small-business owner to get lucky.
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PART B
Luck plays a critical role in success
In fact, many of us would prefer to be lucky than good in business
The reasoning is that if we are lucky, people automatically think we are good. A major frustration for many business owners is seemingly incompetent people who are very financially successful.
Jean Couteau explained it this way: “I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”
How do you get lucky in business? Of course, there are seven ways:
1. Spread your risk. Don’t use an “all or nothing strategy” to count on your business success. Make sure that not too much of your revenue is in one customer or in a single product line. The more your business spreads its risk, the more opportunities it has to get lucky.
2. Forget overnight success. Most overnight successes in business take seven to 10 years, even 15 years. Unfortunately, there really is no short cut for just plain hard work. Being resilient is one of the most important skills to develop. The longer a company stays in business, the more opportunity it has to get the lucky breaks it takes to succeed.
3. Fear dumb luck. If it is too good to be true, it usually is. Skip the sometimes irresistible “get rich quick schemes." If your business moves from its long-term focus into the pursuit of dumb luck, it will be distracted from the path that will most likely bring its success.
4. Focus, focus, focus. A laser-sharp pursuit of your company’s goals brings luck to your business. Getting caught in diversions supplied by vendors or customers can keep your company bogged down in daily tactics. It is amazing how “lucky” your company can get in building a profitable business if focus is kept on solving the customer’s pain.
5. Fortes fortuna adiuvat (Fortune favors the brave). Only your vision and relentless drive will sustain your business during the “unlucky” times. Sometimes bad luck happens for no particular reason. Mourn it, and then let go and move on. Remember that all luck eventually turns.
6. Stay connected with people. You may not be having much luck, but maybe the people around you are. Stay plugged in to influencers and connectors in your business and social circle. When they have good fortune, they will share it with you (and be able to buy from your business).
7. Feel Lucky. The luckier we feel, the luckier we get. As Rhonda Byrne said in “The Secret," we are what we think about. Remember those days that your business feels unstoppable? You are feeling lucky!
Study articles on how to be productive.
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"A must-to-read article"
Welcome to the ‘Sharing Economy
Who knew the spare room could pay the mortgage? (Really)
July 20, 2013
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Brian Chesky’s parents wanted just one thing for him when he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design — that he get a job with health insurance. He tried that for a while with a design firm in Los Angeles, but he got fed up and packed up his Honda Civic and drove up to San Francisco to crash with his pal, Joe Gebbia, who agreed to split the rental of his house with Chesky. “Unfortunately, my share came to $1,150 and I only had $1,000 in the bank, so I had a math problem — and I was unemployed,” said Chesky. But they did have an idea. The week Chesky got to town, in October 2007, San Francisco was hosting the Industrial Designers Society of America, and all the hotel rooms on the conference Web site were sold out. So Chesky and Gebbia decided, why not turn their house into a bed and breakfast for attendees?
The problem was “we had no beds,” but Gebbia did have three air mattresses. “So we inflated them and called ourselves ‘Airbed and Breakfast,’ ” Chesky, 31, recalled for me in an interview. “Three people stayed with us, and we charged them $80 a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local guides.” In the process, they made enough money to cover the rent. More important, though, it spawned a bigger idea that has since blossomed into a multimillion-dollar company and a whole new way for people to make money. The idea was to create a global network through which anyone anywhere could rent a spare room in their home to earn cash. In homage to its roots, they called the company Airbnb, which has grown so large, so fast that it is now the equivalent of a major global hotel chain — even though, unlike Hilton, it doesn’t own a single bed. And the new trend it set off is the “sharing economy.”
I first heard Chesky describe his company two years ago and thought it was a quaint idea that would find limited traction with niche travelers. I mean, how many people in Paris really want to rent out their kid’s bedroom down the hall to a perfect stranger who comes to them via the Internet? And how many strangers want to be down the hall? Wrong. Turns out there is an innkeeper residing in all of us!
On July 12, Chesky told me, “Tonight we have 140,000 people around the world staying in Airbnb rooms. Hilton has around 600,000 rooms. We will get up to 200,000 people per night by peak this summer.” Airbnb has 23,000 rooms and homes listed in New York City alone, and 24,000 in Paris. Worldwide, “we have listings in 34,000 cities and 192 countries,” added Chesky. “We are the largest short-term rental site of its kind in China today, and we have no office there.”
Chesky then fires up his iPad and shows me on Airbnb.com the rooms and homes being offered for rent: “We have over 600 castles,” he begins. “We have dozens of yurts, caves, tepees with TVs in them, water towers, motor homes, private islands, glass houses, lighthouses, igloos with Wi-Fi; we have a home that Jim Morrison used to live in; we have treehouses — hundreds of treehouses — which are the most profitable listings on our Web site per square footage. The treehouse in Lincoln, Vt., is more valuable than the main house. We have treehouses in Vermont that have had six-month waiting lists. People plan their vacation now around treehouse availability!”
In 2011, Prince Hans-Adam II offered his entire principality of Liechtenstein for rent on Airbnb ($70,000 a night), “complete with customized street signs and temporary currency,” The Guardian reported. You can rent any number of Frank Lloyd Wright homes — and even a one-square-meter house in Berlin that goes for $13 a night.
While it sounds like Chesky is just a global rental agent with more scale, there is something much bigger going on here. Airbnb’s real innovation is not online rentals. It’s “trust.” It created a framework of trust that has made tens of thousands of people comfortable renting rooms in their homes to strangers.
To rent a yurt in Mongolia, you go to the Airbnb Web site, sign up for it and pay Airbnb by credit card. It takes 6 percent to 12 percent of the fee from the guest and 3 percent from the host. The fee is paid to the renter after the first night. Through Airbnb, guests and hosts can verify each other’s driver’s license or passport, e-mail address and phone number, and connect Facebook profiles. No one is anonymous. They work out their own exchange of keys.
Afterward, guests and hosts rate each other online, so there is a huge incentive to deliver a good experience because a series of bad reputational reviews and you’re done. Airbnb also automatically provides $1 million in insurance against damage or theft to nearly all of its hosts (some countries have restrictions) and only rarely gets claims. This framework of trust has unlocked huge value from unused bedrooms. “In the last 12 months in Paris, we’ve generated $240 million in economic activity,” Chesky said.
Airbnb has also spawned its own ecosystem — ordinary people who will now come clean your home, coordinate key exchanges, cook dinner for you and your guests, photograph rooms for rent, and through the ride-sharing business Lyft, turn their cars into taxis to drive you around. “It used to be that corporations and brands had all the trust,” added Chesky, but now a total stranger, “can be trusted like a company and provide the services of a company. And once you unlock that idea, it is so much bigger than homes. ... There is a whole generation of people that don’t want everything mass produced. They want things that are unique and personal.”
There’s more. In a world where, as I’ve argued, average is over — the skills required for any good job keep rising — a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids’ rooms, their cars or their power tools. “There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes,” says Chesky. “Does everyone really need their own drill?”
More than 50 percent of Airbnb hosts depend on it to pay their rent or mortgage today, Chesky added: “Ordinary people can now be micro-entrepreneurs.” Jamie Wong, co-founder of Vayable.com, a platform through which locals anywhere can become custom tour guides of their area, told me: “I moved out of my apartment in central San Francisco, rented a cheaper annex in a friend’s home, and ‘airbnb-ed’ my apartment for $200 a night and earned about $20,000 in a year. It enabled me to bootstrap my start-up. Airbnb was our first round of funding!” And just think how much better all this is for the environment — for people to be renting their spare bedrooms rather than building another Holiday Inn and another and another. ... The sharing economy — watch this space. This is powerful.
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Source: NYT
Click green below for the original article and its pictures
Welcome to the 'Sharing Economy'...Who knew the spare bedroom could pay the monthly mortgage?
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Tips for Introverts
Strong Leadership & Negotiation Influence
in Business and in Work Life
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Most of the time, the business world is no place for shy folk. Many organizational cultures support those who talk about their accomplishments, who spend more time out and about networking instead of alone deep in thought, and who make sure they are the first to get their ideas heard.
Entrepreneurship is harder still on introverts. Especially when you're starting up, you need to constantly make contacts and seize every chance to sell yourself and your company, a condition that favors an outgoing personality. Plus: You're the boss! So you have to live your life more or less publicly whether you want to or not.
Even so, you can learn to make your love of solitude and keen observational skills work for you. Kahnweiler offered some helpful tips on how introverts can use their unique strengths to excel.
1. Spend Solo Time Thinking About Strategy
Your desire for time away from people can useful, if you can use the space to "become more self-aware and clearer about the positions and motivations of others," writes Kahnweiler. One way to do this is by using the time to deeply consider where others are coming from, what their secret motivations are, and how you can influence them or help them achieve their goals.
2. Use the Power of One-on-One Conversations
Big meetings, which can be intimidating for introverts, aren't the only place to get things done. Often, they're not even the best place. According to Kahnweiler, "Discussions that don’t happen in large groups but do off the factory floor and outside the conference room are more effective" in helping people get to know you and increasing comfort levels, as well as "solving problems, working through conflicts and asking for what you need." Consider placing an emphasis on smaller conversations, which can be a powerful force.
3. Notice Who the Other 'Quiet Influencers' Are
When people are constantly talking or at the center of the conversation, it's easy to miss the quiet influencers lingering on the edges. That's where fellow introverts have an advantage. Use your highly developed observational skills to find those who may not speak the loudest, but who "provoke new thoughts, create change and challenge others," writes Kahnweiler. They may have some of the most interesting, well-developed opinions and ideas for your business.
4. Identify What You Want to Change
Another benefit to time spent observing is being able to identify what's actually holding you back. One of Kahnweiler's clients realized that she needed to change how others were perceiving her, so she incorporated techniques from actors. "She slowed her breath down, raised her voice a level and increased her eye contact with others throughout the day," writes Kahnweiler, which helped people see her as "a highly competent and strong contributor."
5. Make the Most of Social Networking
Today, your physical presence is only part of your brand as a leader. Introverts may take more naturally to social media, where "others can get to know as much about you as you care to share. Developing a robust online presence "also helps you to achieve visibility that might be difficult to gain in person," Kahnweiler concludes. On Twitter, after all, it doesn't matter if you get tongue-tied after a few sentences; you only have to keep it up for 140 characters.
Read more - click green:
Put LinkedIn to Work For You: 7 Ways
8 Things You Should Not Do Every Day
Open Plan Offices: Not All They're Cracked Up to Be
Source: Inc.com
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Everyone of us will greatly benefit from learning
and from applying the information in this article below
Conflict Resolution Skills
Building the Skills That Can Turn Conflicts into Opportunities
This article has these 8 parts - click any of the 8 green titles next below to see that particular information or study the whole article below from the beginning to the end
- Understanding conflict in relationships
- Conflict may feel more threatening
- Successful conflict resolution
- Quick stress relief
- Emotional awareness
- Nonverbal communication
- Humor
- Tips for managing and resolving conflict Conflict is a normal part of any healthy relationship. After all, two people can’t be expected to agree on everything, all the time. Learning how to deal with conflict – rather than avoiding it – is crucial. When conflict is mismanaged, it can cause great harm to a relationship, but when handled in a respectful, positive way, conflict provides an opportunity to strengthen the bond between two people. By learning these skills for conflict resolution, you can keep your personal and professional relationships strong and growing.
- Understanding conflict in relationships
- Conflict arises from differences, both large and small. It occurs whenever people disagree over their values, motivations, perceptions, ideas, or desires. Sometimes these differences appear trivial, but when a conflict triggers strong feelings, a deep personal need is often at the core of the problem. These needs can be a need to feel safe and secure, a need to feel respected and valued, or a need for greater closeness and intimacy.
- Conflicts arise from differing needs
- Everyone needs to feel understood, nurtured, and supported, but the ways in which these needs are met vary widely. Differing needs for feeling comfortable and safe create some of the most severe challenges in our personal and professional relationships.
Think about the conflicting need for safety and continuity versus the need to explore and take risks. You frequently see this conflict between toddlers and their parents. The child’s need is to explore, so the street or the cliff meets a need. But the parents’ need is to protect the child’s safety, so limiting exploration becomes a bone of contention between them.
The needs of both parties play important roles in the long-term success of most relationships, and each deserves respect and consideration. In personal relationships, a lack of understanding about differing needs can result in distance, arguments, and break-ups. In workplace conflicts, differing needs are often at the heart of bitter disputes, sometimes resulting in broken deals, fewer profits and lost jobs. When you can recognize the legitimacy of conflicting needs and become willing to examine them in an environment of compassionate understanding, it opens pathways to creative problem solving, team building, and improved relationships.
Conflict 101- A conflict is more than just a disagreement. It is a situation in which one or both parties perceive a threat (whether or not the threat is real).
- Conflicts continue to fester when ignored. Because conflicts involve perceived threats to our well-being and survival, they stay with us until we face and resolve them.
- We respond to conflicts based on our perceptions of the situation, not necessarily to an objective review of the facts. Our perceptions are influenced by our life experiences, culture, values, and beliefs.
- Conflicts trigger strong emotions. If you aren’t comfortable with your emotions or able to manage them in times of stress, you won’t be able to resolve conflict successfully.
- Conflicts are an opportunity for growth. When you’re able to resolve conflict in a relationship, it builds trust. You can feel secure knowing your relationship can survive challenges and disagreements.
Conflict may feel more threatening to you than it really isDo you fear conflict or avoid it at all costs? If your perception of conflict comes from frightening or painful memories from previous unhealthy relationships or early childhood, you may expect all present-day disagreements to end badly. You may view conflict in relationships as demoralizing, humiliating, dangerous, and something to fear. If your early life experiences also left you feeling out of control and powerless, conflict may even be traumatizing for you.
If you view conflict as dangerous, it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you go into a conflict situation already feeling extremely threatened, it’s tough to deal with the problem at hand in a healthy way. Instead, you are more likely to shut down or blow up in anger. - Healthy and unhealthy ways of managing and resolving conflict
- Unhealthy responses to conflict:
- (1) An inability to recognize and respond to the things that matter to the other person;
- (2) Explosive, angry, hurtful, and resentful reactions;
- (3) The withdrawal of love, resulting in rejection, isolation, shaming, and fear of abandonment;
- (4) An inability to compromise or see the other person’s side;
- (5) The fear and avoidance of conflict; the expectation of bad outcomes
- Healthy responses to conflict
- (1) The capacity to recognize and respond to the things that matter to the other person;
- (2) Calm, non-defensive, and respectful reactions;
- (3) A readiness to forgive, forget, and to move past the conflict without holding resentments or anger;
- (4) The ability to seek compromise and avoid punishing;
- (5) A belief that facing conflict head on is the best thing for both sides
- Successful conflict resolution depends on your ability to regulate stress and your emotions Conflict triggers strong emotions and can lead to hurt feelings, disappointment, and discomfort. When handled in an unhealthy manner, it can cause irreparable rifts, resentments, and break-ups. But when conflict is resolved in a healthy way, it increases our understanding of one another, builds trust, and strengthens our relationship bonds.If you are out of touch with your feelings or so stressed that you can only pay attention to a limited number of emotions, you won’t be able to understand your own needs. And, if you don’t understand your own needs, you will have a hard time communicating with others and staying in touch with what's really troubling you. For example, couples often argue about petty differences—the way she hangs the towels, the way he slurps his soup—rather than what is really bothering them.
The ability to successfully resolve conflict depends on your ability to:- Manage stress quickly while remaining alert and calm. By staying calm, you can accurately read and interpret verbal and nonverbal communication.
- Control your emotions and behavior. When you’re in control of your emotions, you can communicate your needs without threatening, frightening, or punishing others.
- Pay attention to the feelings being expressed as well as the spoken words of others.
- Be aware of and respectful of differences. By avoiding disrespectful words and actions, you can almost always resolve a problem faster.
- Emotional awareness: The second core conflict resolution skill Emotional awareness is the key to understanding yourself and others. If you don’t know how you feel or why you feel that way, you won’t be able to communicate effectively or resolve disagreements.Although knowing your own feelings may sound simple, many people ignore or try to sedate strong emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. Your ability to handle conflict, however, depends on being connected to these feelings. If you’re afraid of strong emotions or if you insist on finding solutions that are strictly rational, your ability to face and resolve differences will be impaired.
Why emotional awareness is a key factor in resolving conflict Emotional awareness—the consciousness of your moment-to-moment emotional experience—and the ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately is the basis of a communication process that can resolve conflict.
Emotional awareness helps you:- Understand what is really troubling other people
- Understand yourself, including what is really troubling you
- Stay motivated until the conflict is resolved
- Communicate clearly and effectively
- Attract and influence others
What kind of relationship do I have with my emotions?- Do you experience feelings that flow, encountering one emotion after another as your experiences change from moment to moment?
- Are your emotions accompanied by physical sensations that you experience in places like your stomach or chest?
- Do you experience discrete feelings and emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, joy, each of which is evident in subtle facial expressions?
- Can you experience intense feelings that are strong enough to capture both your attention and that of others?
- Do you pay attention to your emotions? Do they factor into your decision–making?
If any of these experiences are unfamiliar, your emotions may be turned down or even turned off. In either case, you may need help developing your emotional awareness. You can do this by reading Click: Developing Emotional Awareness.
Nonverbal communication plays a big role in conflict resolution The most important information exchanged during conflicts and arguments is often communicated nonverbally. Nonverbal communication is conveyed by emotionally driven facial expressions, posture, gesture, pace, tone and intensity of voice.
The most important communication is wordless When people are upset, the words they use rarely convey the issues and needs at the heart of the problem. When we listen for what is felt—as well as what is said—we connect more deeply to our own needs and emotions, and to those of other people. Listening in this way also strengthens us, informs us, and makes it easier for others to hear us.When you’re in the middle of a conflict, paying close attention to the other person’s click: nonverbal signals may help you figure out what the other person is really saying, This will allow you to respond in a way that builds trust, and get to the root of the problem. A calm tone of voice, a reassuring touch, or an interested or concerned facial expression can go a long way toward relaxing a tense exchange.
Your ability to accurately read another person depends on your own emotional awareness. The more aware you are of your own emotions, the easier it will be for you to pick up on the wordless clues that reveal what others are feeling - Humor, judiciously used, can effectively defuse conflict Once stress and emotion are brought into balance your capacity for joy, pleasure and playfulness is unleashed. Joy is a deceptively powerful resource. Studies show that you can surmount adversity, as long as you continue to have moments of joy. Humor plays a similar role when facing conflict.
You can avoid many confrontations and resolve arguments and disagreements by communicating in a humorous way. Humor can help you say things that might otherwise be difficult to express without offending someone. However, it’s important that you laugh with the other person, not at them. When humor and play are used to reduce tension and anger, reframe problems, and put the situation into perspective, the conflict can actually become an opportunity for greater connection and intimacy.
Tips for managing and resolving conflict - Managing and resolving conflict requires the ability to quickly reduce stress and bring your emotions into balance. You can ensure that the process is as positive as possible by sticking to the following guidelines:
- Listen for what is felt as well as said. When we listen we connect more deeply to our own needs and emotions, and to those of other people. Listening also strengthens us, informs us, and makes it easier for others to hear us when it's our turn to speak.
- Make conflict resolution the priority rather than winning or "being right." Maintaining and strengthening the relationship, rather than “winning” the argument, should always be your first priority. Be respectful of the other person and his or her viewpoint.
- Focus on the present. If you’re holding on to grudges based on past resentments, your ability to see the reality of the current situation will be impaired. Rather than looking to the past and assigning blame, focus on what you can do in the here-and-now to solve the problem.
- Pick your battles. Conflicts can be draining, so it’s important to consider whether the issue is really worthy of your time and energy. Maybe you don't want to surrender a parking space if you’ve been circling for 15 minutes, but if there are dozens of empty spots, arguing over a single space isn’t worth it.
- Be willing to forgive. Resolving conflict is impossible if you’re unwilling or unable to forgive. Resolution lies in releasing the urge to punish, which can never compensate for our losses and only adds to our injury by further depleting and draining our lives.
- Know when to let something go. If you can’t come to an agreement, agree to disagree. It takes two people to keep an argument going. If a conflict is going nowhere, you can choose to disengage and move on. _______________ Related Articles - click the green title below
- Stress Relief in the Moment – Learn how you respond to stress along with fast and effective ways to rapidly reduce stress.
- Anger Management – Effective anger management tools can help you express feelings in healthier ways and keep your temper from hijacking your relationships.
- Developing Emotional Awareness – Learn more about the role your emotions play and how you can better manage them.
- Improve Communication
- Effective Communication – While communication may seem simple, there are skills you can learn to avoid misunderstandings and improve your relationship with your spouse, family or coworkers.
- Nonverbal Communication Skills – Nonverbal communication speaks louder than words in interpersonal relationships. Learning more about nonverbal cues will improve your ability to understand and resolve differences in all your relationships.
- Successful Relationships – How humor, laughter and play can be powerful tools in building successful relationships.
Source: Helpguide helps you help yourself and otherswww.helpguide.org
Practical, motivating information you can use to help yourself and others. Take control of your mental health, relationships, and lifestyle choices.
___________________________________________________________ "What your mind can conceive you can achieve" conceive = formulate, design, originate, create, develop Financial Success Story Samuel Adams Beer Creator becomes Billionaire Craft beer such as Sam Adams has been a bright spot in another wise stale U.S. beer market Craft beer = A distinctively flavored beer that is brewed and distributed regionally. Also called craft brew, microbrew. Total American beer sales fell 2 percent in the first half of 2013, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, while the craft brew segment grew 15 percent.Boston Beer's sales increased more than 17 percent during the period. - "What he has done is amazing," said David Geary, president of D.L. Geary Brewing, a craft brewer in Portland, Maine, he co-founded in 1983. "He's very focused, a brilliant marketer and he sort of taught us all how to sell beer."
Through a combination of in-person proselytizing and folksy TV ads, Koch created widespread awareness in the 1980s and 1990sthat there was more to beer than what the major U.S. brewers and European imports were offering.
Consumers have flocked to Boston Beer's 70-plus offerings,including its most popular seller, Boston Lager, to small batch specialty brews, such as Norse Legend, a Finnish-style sahti that Vikings drank. The demand has sent Boston Beer shares up ten-fold since mid-2009, propelling Koch's net worth above $1billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He has never appeared on an international wealth ranking.
Niche Market
"Having watched my stock price go up and down and up, it seems almost whimsical," Koch, 64, said in a telephone interview. "I remind people getting rich is life's great booby prize. Any normal person would much rather be happy than rich."
Selling craft beer has made Koch both. This week, Koch will travel to Los Angeles and Maine, where he will go bar-to-bar trying to persuade beverage managers to carry Sam Adams,something he has done since he started brewing beer in his Newton, Massachusetts, kitchen in 1984.
"Because this was something started out of passion, I've been able to sustain 30 years of growing the business with allthe ups and downs," Koch said.
‘Better Product'
Craft beer continues to require such hands-on sales calls.The segment occupies a niche in the U.S. beer market, with about6.5 percent market share, according to data compiled byBloomberg. Together, Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev NV (ABI),which sells more than 200 brands including Budweiser and Beck's,and Miller Coors LLC, a 70-brand joint venture of London-basedSABMiller Plc (SAB) and Denver-based Miller Coors Brewing Co., control about 80 percent of the U.S. beer market.
Boston Beer has 1.3 percent of the U.S. market, just behind DG Yuengling & Son Inc., the largest U.S.-owned brewing company with 1.5 percent share. Its owner -- and Koch's friend --Richard L. "Dick" Yuengling, has a fortune valued at more than$2.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.
"The Street generally likes underdogs like Boston Beer and the way that they are growing share by producing a better product," said Kenneth Shea, a beverage industry analyst with Bloomberg Industries in Princeton, New Jersey. "The mass-produced, industrial brands tend to be bland and undifferentiated."
To avoid tasting too similarly to his larger competitors,Koch samples every batch of beer the company produces and leads purchasing trips to Germany each year to buy hops, according to the company.
Sixth Generation
Koch is the sixth-generation oldest son in a row to be a brewer. Born in 1949, Koch grew up in Cincinnati, where his father was a brew master. The domestic beer business had been decimated by Prohibition, a period from 1920 to 1933 when theU.S. outlawed the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.Grain rationing in World War II then steered public tastes away from richer-flavored small batch beers to lighter-styled brands such as Budweiser and Coors.
The emergence of national television advertising and ease of transport allowed the major beer makers to dominate the market. Seeing no chance to be a brew master, Koch decided to pursue a different career.
After attending Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate school, Koch went to work for Boston Consulting Group in 1979, advising pulp and steel mills on manufacturing processes. When he decided he wanted to pursue his passion for beer, there were about a dozen craft brewers in the country,Koch said.
$60,000 Salary
"Everyone thought I was crazy, like I was leaving consulting to go make mud pies," he said. His original business plan was to be selling $1 million worth of beer in five years,have eight employees and pay himself a salary of $60,000.
When his father realized Koch was serious about starting a brewery, they went into the attic and dug out the recipe developed in the 1860s by his great-great grandfather Louis Koch. That became the basis for Boston Lager. Within a year, his marketing scored two boosts: taking the brand name from Samuel Adams, a Revolutionary War Patriot he found had a brewing connection, and getting the beer named the country's best at a national brewing festival.
By 1990, Koch had exceeded his business plan multiple times, selling $21.2 million in beer that year. Four years later, revenue topped $128 million.
Rankling Microbrewers
To keep up with demand and avoid heavy capital investment in facilities, Koch began leasing excess capacity at large brewers in New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania. That rankled other microbrewers who had made large investments in equipment andfelt mass production and marketing of beer was contrary to the ideals of the craft movement, according to Tom Acitelli, author of the book "The Audacity of Hops: The History of America's Craft Beer Revolution."
"He taught consumers what to expect in an American craft beer," said Acitelli in a phone interview from his Cambridge,Massachusetts office. "It's easy to look back now and assume it all would have worked out -- that good taste would have triumphed -- but it wasn't inevitable and Jim Koch helped that along, big time."
In 1995, Boston Beer sold shares in an initial public offering at $20 a share. Some Sam Adams drinkers found offers in six packs that allowed them to buy their stock for $15 a share.
Today, the company sells more than 2.7 million barrels of beer, cider and malt beverage under the Sam Adams, Angry Orchard and Twisted Tea labels. Koch sees plenty of room for growth,noting that if craft beer continued to capture one percentage point market share each year, the sector won't catch up toimports until 2020.
‘Rich, Happy'
The success also has inspired numerous other craft brewers into the business. There are 2,538 breweries in the country,more than at any time since at least 1887, according to the Brewers Association.
Koch, who mentors small businesses through a corporate philanthropic institute, said he offers one piece of advice to every entrepreneur.
"When you think about starting a business, the chances that it is going to make you rich are very small," he said."The chances that it will make you happy are pretty good. So when you go start a business, pick one that is going to make you happy." click green below:- Taxpayers Turn U.S. Farmers Into Fat Cats With Subsidies - is this wrong of right? _________________________ ============================================================================================================================================================================Starbucks Set to Change the World, Again! Click green for further info Date: October 24, 2013 Comment from the public
- I am not a fan of Starbucks but I have to admit his model has been successful. People forget that he wasn't selling coffee; he was selling an idea. His idea was that of a hip, cool place to hangout without the need to go to a bar, club, lounge PLUS the free internet among the first ones to offer etc. In some ways, it is like McDonald's. Kids don't just go there for the fries. They go there because of the scene, e.g. the play area, the toys, etc. In a steak house they say that you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. The same is true with Starbucks. It's not my scene but a lot of people do like it. _________________________
- On October 24, 2013, in Manhattan Teavana opens its first tea bar since Starbucks (SBUX) purchased the chain for $620 million last year. Featuring a decidedly more mellow atmosphere, the store is the first glimpse at Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's vision to build a global tea empire click: Howard Schultz It's easy to scoff at the notion of a nationwide chain of stores selling items like Monkey Picked Oolong Tea for $24.98, but there are a few things you should know before you bet against Starbucks. Number one on the list is that you never, ever bet against Howard Schultz when it comes to selling Americans beverages.
Not only did Schultz turn coffee from a $0.25 cup of mud served at diners into $8 specialty drinks people line up for at more than 16,000 locations worldwide, but he actually did it twice. After building the company the first time, Schultz retired for eight years only to come back in 2008 after becoming dissatisfied with what the company had become in his absence.
Schultz is the Steve Jobs of coffee. At least. Click: Steve Jobs
Another factor in Starbucks' favor is that tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world behind water. Americans may not mind drinking Snapple and Lipton teas, but that's only because they don't know what they're missing. Tea is a $90 billion market globally. As the company cuts back on the number of Starbucks locations, it plans on opening at least 1,000 "zen-like" Teavana's in North America alone.
Can Schultz redefine tea the way he did coffee? He doesn't see why not. Investors have learned to give Schultz the benefit of the doubt when he issues such predictions. Click: Teavana something outstanding or unique of its kind click: Starbucks debuts Teavana bar, and it's a doozy doozy = something outstanding or unique of its kind _________________________________
The cheating activity is widely spread - something must be done about it
degrades everyone - the honest & the crooked ones
42 percent of incoming Harvard freshmen
cheated in past: survey
PART A
Well, at least they're honest about being cheats.
A survey by the Harvard Crimson says 42 percent of incoming Harvard freshmen admit they've cheated on a homework assignment or problem set in the past. One in 10 (= 10 %) copped (= admitted) to having cheated on an exam.
The jocks*) especially have a lot to answer for. The Crimson's survey found that those recruited to play sports for Harvard were more likely to have cheated in the past than other students. *) jock = an enthusiast or participant in a specified activity (in this case sports); also: disc jockey; computer jock;
Additionally, male freshmen were "twice as likely as their female counterparts to have cheated on an exam and one-and-a-half times more likely to admit to cheating on a paper or take-home assignment."
The number of students who admitted to cheating pre-Harvard is higher than those who graduated from the university last spring. In a similar survey, 7 percent of Harvard's class admitted to cheating on an exam, paper or take-home test during their undergraduate years. Thirty-two percent said they had cheated on homework or a problem set at Harvard.
The survey, which covered other topics including student finances, sexual experience and drug use, comes a year after Harvard was embroiled in a cheating scandal that resulted in dozens of students being forced to withdraw.
Incoming freshmen would be well-advised to learn from their mistakes.
PART B
After going public a year ago with their investigation into Harvard’s largest cheating scandal in recent memory, administrators went to great lengths to promote a culture of academic integrity in the Harvard community.
But the results of a Crimson survey of the Class of 2017 conducted last month suggest that some of the newest members of that community are already guilty of academic dishonesty.
Ten percent of respondents admitted to having cheated on an exam, and 17 percent said they had cheated on a paper or a take-home assignment. An even greater percentage—42 percent—admitted to cheating on a homework assignment or problem set.
Recruited athletes were even more likely to admit to cheating—20 percent admitted to cheating on an exam, compared to 9 percent of students who were not recruited to play a varsity sport at Harvard. Twenty-six percent of recruited athletes said they had cheated on a paper or take-home assignment, compared to 16 percent of non-recruits.
Across the board, the incoming freshman class reported higher rates of cheating than did Harvard’s Class of 2013 in a Crimson senior survey conducted last spring. In that survey, 7 percent of graduating seniors said they had cheated on an exam, and 7 percent said they had cheated on a paper or take-home test. Thirty-two percent of graduating seniors said they cheated on a problem set or homework assignment during their undergraduate careers.
The Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2017 generated responses from more 1,300 incoming freshmen—nearly 80 percent of the class. Part III of a four-part series on the results of the survey focuses on the academic and extracurricular lives of freshmen.
ACADEMICS
Recruited athletes were not the only demographic to be more likely to cheat. Men were more likely than women to report having cheated. Male freshmen were twice as likely as their female counterparts to have cheated on an exam and one-and-a-half times more likely to admit to cheating on a paper or take-home assignment.
Despite the number of freshmen who admitted to academic dishonesty, their responses indicate that they overwhelmingly expect to prioritize academics at Harvard. Eighty-four percent of respondents put academics first when asked to rank their anticipated priorities among academics, extracurriculars, varsity sports, paid employment, and social life. Not a single respondent put academics at the bottom of their list.
The academic interests of the new freshman class were not always consistent with concentration numbers at the College. Twenty-six percent of surveyed freshmen said they plan to concentrate in economics or government, the two most populous concentrations at Harvard that represent 21 percent of current Harvard concentrators. And not a single freshman expressed plans to study African and African American Studies, Germanic Languages and Literatures, or South Asian Studies.
And just three months after a faculty committee released a set of reports advocating the revitalization of the study of the arts and humanities at Harvard, just 11 percent of surveyed freshmen said they plan to concentrate in that discipline. That figure is even lower than the current percentage of arts and humanities concentrators, who already make up just 16 percent of the student body.
Surveyed freshmen were also ambitious in their undergraduate academic plans. Fifty-nine percent said they plan to pursue a secondary field, and 36 percent a language citation. Among all surveyed freshmen, 23 percent plan to pursue both.
The survey results suggest that these high achievers are self-motivated. Eighty-two percent identified their greatest source of pressure as their own expectations. Just 8 percent named their parents as their greatest source of pressure. But not everyone was stressed out—7 percent of respondents said they are not under pressure.
The majority of surveyed freshmen said they expect to spend more time studying in college than they did in high school. A plurality of respondents—36 percent—indicated that they anticipate studying between 20 and 29 hours a week in college, and 26 percent said they anticipate spending between 30 and 39. Four percent said they anticipate studying 50 or more hours a week, and only 2 percent said they anticipate studying for 10 or fewer.
In comparison, 58 percent said that they studied for 19 or fewer hours in high school. However, pre-college study habits varied widely between respondents who went to public and private secondary schools. Only 17 percent of students who attended a non-denominational private school said they studied for 10 or fewer hours a week, compared to 39 percent of public, non-charter school students.
EXTRACURRICULARS
Although a large majority of respondents ranked academics as their anticipated highest priority for college, a plurality—40 percent—ranked extracurriculars*) second, and another 35 percent ranked it third.
*) = extracurriculars = Being outside the regular curriculum of a school or college, e.g.: Sports and drama are the school's most popular extracurricular activities
Surveyed freshmen were also enthusiastic about their secondary school extracurriculars. A large majority—84 percent—were involved in community service in high school. Also popular were music clubs/bands and student government, at 39 and 37 percent, respectively.
Respondents also reported being drawn to academic clubs in high school: 34 percent were involved in math clubs or competitions, 32 percent in science clubs or competitions, and 25 percent in other academic clubs.
Of those who were involved in student government in high school, 79 percent said they believe that student government has the power to effect change. Respondents who did not participate in student government were a bit more skeptical, with 60 percent expressing faith in the potential of student government.
Many surveyed freshmen rose to the top of their high school extracurriculars. A plurality of respondents—27 percent—were the president or top leader of two clubs in high school, and 26 percent were in charge of one. Two percent were the leaders of six or more clubs, and 9 percent were the editors-in-chief of their high school newspapers.
But not all freshmen obtained a top leadership role in their extracurriculars—19 percent led zero clubs.
ATHLETICS
One particularly popular high school extracurricular was athletics. Sixty-nine percent of surveyed freshmen reported being involved in athletics in high school, but just 12 percent of respondents were recruited to play a varsity sport at Harvard. An additional 9 percent of the class planned to walk on to a varsity team at Harvard.
Three quarters of freshman athletes, including both walk-ons and recruits, said they were likely or very likely to play their sport for all four years. However, recruited athletes were more likely than intended walk-on athletes to envision themselves graduating as four-year athletes, coming in at 93 and 47 percent, respectively.
Intended walk-on athletes were disproportionately drawn to certain sports. Among the intended walk-on athletes, more than 27 percent said they plan to try out for the men’s or women’s lightweight or heavyweight crew teams. Only three were ambitious enough to say they plan to walk on to the men’s basketball team that made it to March Madness the past two seasons.
Twenty-two percent of incoming recruited and walk-on athletes reported having received at least one concussion while playing a sport. Of those, two-thirds said they had been concussed once. But for most, these experiences did not dissuade them from playing their sports. Just 5 percent of all athletes and 19 percent of those who had been concussed from sports said they felt that concussions had affected their approach to their sport or desire to play that sport.
Athletes and non-athletes reported differing academic backgrounds. Coming into Harvard, 33 percent of incoming recruited athletes said that BC Calculus was the highest level of math they had completed prior to college, compared to 43 percent of non-athletes.
Athletes also expressed different academic plans for Harvard than their non-athlete counterparts. Although the “Gov Jock” is a commonly referenced stereotype among Harvard students, just one incoming recruited athlete expressed plans to concentrate in government. In comparison, 11 percent of non-athlete respondents were interested in becoming government concentrators.
On the other hand, economics, the most popular concentration among Harvard students, was disproportionately represented among incoming recruited athletes. Thirty-two percent said they expect to become economics concentrators, compared to 15 percent of non-athletes.
Click green for further info
Source: Harvard Crimson
_________________________________________________________
About immigration: finances, salaries, national economy
Being Legal Doesn’t End Poverty
Click green for further info
LOS ANGELES — THOSE pressing for change in the country’s immigration system like to say that creating a path to citizenship will bring the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants “out of the shadows.” It is taken as a given that legal status will help them climb the economic ladder.
But in this city, Los Angeles, and in urban areas across the country, it seems clear that even with full citizenship, many could remain in the shadow economy, earning cash for low-wage jobs.
Millions of workers in the United States — those who sew clothes, mow lawns, care for children, construct homes, clean offices and serve food — function almost entirely in a cash economy. For undocumented immigrants, working for cash tends to be the most reliable way to earn an income while avoiding any attention from the government.
Advocates of the immigration bill have used economic mobility as an argument for legalizing the millions already living here. They enthusiastically embraced a Congressional Budget Office report last month that said the Senate’s immigration bill would increase the size of the labor force and lead to greater productivity, which would raise average wages in the long term and have broad economic impact. Last week, business groups continued to pressure House Republicans to consider similar legislation.
But it is hardly a given that citizenship is a route to better jobs.
“Having legal status takes away one threat that people held over their workers, but it doesn’t do much more than that,” in the workplace, said Victor Narro, the project director for the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
When the Labor Center studied wage violations in 2009, it found that foreigners in general were more likely than native-born workers to be paid less than the minimum wage and that undocumented immigrants, particularly women, were even worse off. But the study also found that foreign-born workers who were legal residents were almost twice as likely to be paid less than the minimum wage as American-born employees.
“Until you have the government stepping in and creating real enforcement of worker protections, we’re going to have the same kinds of problems we have now. Employers are not going to start doing that voluntarily,” Mr. Narro said.
Countless workers earning a low hourly wage — regardless of their legal status — are paid in cash. Some are keen to avoid paying taxes on their modest income, while others feel trapped by a conundrum: work for cash, or don’t work at all.
Many of these workers are domestic employees in informal settings, like a day laborer picked up on a street corner or a nanny found through a social network, with homeowners who are reluctant to think of themselves as employers who are legally obliged to file for taxes, or reluctant to take on the cost and paperwork that taxes entail. Others work for businesses with dozens of employees that have come to rely on cash paydays as a way to cut costs.
“We see employers in a number of industries act as if there is a third-class labor market that is paid below the minimum wage and are made to suffer all manner of violations of labor law,” said Nik Theodore, an associate professor in urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “For many employers it is a calculated risk that they are willing to take. They trust that their employees aren’t going to report them and that nobody from the government is actually going to come check. When you have workers in desperate need of work, they are going to be willing to do a lot of things.”
Over all, unreported income amounts to roughly $2 trillion annually, but cash wages make up only a portion of that estimate, according to Edgar L. Feige, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has spent decades examining underground and cash economies, in part by using information on how much cash is in circulation at any given time. There is no way of knowing how many workers are earning their salaries in cash, Professor Feige said.
“Whatever unreported economy that exists, it goes well beyond immigration,” he said. The cash economy is particularly important in California, which has more undocumented immigrants than any other state and the eighth largest economy in the world. The sheer size of the immigrant work force and economy allows business owners to create a norm of paying off the books that would be unthinkable in another time or place, said Ruth Milkman, a labor expert and professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
“Employers have really gotten into the habit that this is the normal way of doing business,” Professor Milkman said. “They don’t particularly want to change, and nobody is making them do it. The immigration bill certainly doesn’t change much for employers who take the low road.”
Day laborers, those men standing in front of Home Depots and on street corners looking for whatever work comes their way, are perhaps the most widely recognizable stream of cash workers. Often, these men were mechanics, engineers or even architects and doctors in their home countries. The vast majority are undocumented immigrants. But in recent years, with the economy struggling, more of these immigrants have been standing in lots next to citizens, who are equally eager to find work, said Chris Newman, the legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
“We see people who rotate in and out, they come find work for the day and go to another job at night,” Mr. Newman said. “You lose a foothold in the formal economy and it’s a natural place to go.”
Last month, the Labor Department reported that there are 2.7 million temp workers, more than ever before. As more large companies rely on temp agencies to fill their ranks, it is possible that more American workers, legally or not, could be treated like day laborers — who can be employed one day and out of a job the next. Mr. Newman repeated something that he has said to himself over and over again amid the debate in Washington: “Immigration laws are malleable, but the law of supply and demand is immutable.” The way he sees it, as long as there is growing demand for an informal labor market, there will be people to supply that work force.
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By Jennifer Medina is a national correspondent for The New York Times
Source: NYT
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- More Latinos Consume News in English, Report Find
- Date: July 23, 2013
An increasing number of Hispanics in the United States are getting their news in English, according to a report released on Tuesday, 7.23.13, by the Pew Hispanic Center.
Eighty-two percent of Latino adults surveyed said that at least some of the news they followed in 2012 was in English, an increase from 78 percent in 2006. Nearly a third of Hispanics, 32 percent, said they got their news exclusively in English, according to the report, compared with 22 percent in 2006. At the same time, the consumption of Spanish news decreased among Hispanic adults, with 68 percent saying they got some of their news in Spanish, compared with 78 percent in 2006.
Part of what is driving these changes is the shifting demographics among the 52 million Latinos in the United States. Immigration of Hispanics to the United States is slowing, and more of the Latino population was either born or raised in the United States, increasing the level of English fluency. More than half of the adult Latino population in the United States, 59 percent, speaks English proficiently.
“U.S. births are going to take over Hispanic population growth going forward,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of the Pew Hispanic Center and a co-author of the report.
The report’s findings bode well for mainstream English-language news media outlets as well as news platforms that cater to bilingual or English-speaking Latinos like Fusion, a joint venture between ABC and Univision that targets bicultural Hispanic millennials.
Mirroring the media consumption patterns of other groups, more Latinos said they were getting their news via the Internet, 56 percent compared with 37 percent in 2006. The percentage of Latinos who got their news from television dropped slightly to 86 percent from 92 percent in 2006, but still beat radio and print newspapers.
News organizations that cater to Spanish-speaking communities will continue to have an audience. According to the report, 70 percent of Hispanic adults said that Spanish-language news outlets did an excellent or good job covering issues relevant to Latinos in the United States, while 59 percent expressed the same feelings about English-language news media.
An increasing number of Hispanics in the United States are not only bilingual in English and Spanish but also bicultural, identifying with American and Latino heritage, Mr. Lopez said. And 35 million Hispanics over the age of 5 speak Spanish at home.
“We do see some patterns within the Hispanic community that suggests an interest in maintaining some ties to cultural roots,” he said. “We have found that young Latinos are being told by their parents to emphasize their cultural identity.”
Whereas past generations of Latinos tried to assimilate by embracing an American identity at the expense of their ethnic roots, many Latinos today identify with both cultures, Mr. Lopez said. “That suggests there may be a market for entertainment and news that is focused on Hispanics in the United States,” he said.
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Source: Public report released on Tuesday, 7.23.13, by the Pew Hispanic Center.
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10 Things Therapists Won’t Tell You Good article full of information beneficial for every person to know
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How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one, but the light bulb has to be motivated to change.
(a joke)
One in five Americans in any given year will have a mental health disorder
and two-thirds never receive treatment
STAF, Inc.'s editors placed this article to inspire thinking about the therapy business and its challenges
Recent research shows that talk therapy can be helpful
Compared with medication, psychotherapy has fewer side effects and lower instances of relapse when discontinued
Talk therapy can be as effective in treating depression as the most recent generation of antidepressants, according to a 2011 review of 15 studies and published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease by researchers at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire
See below for further related info.
What is your experience and/or your opinion?
The person on the couch isn’t the only one with problems.
1.“Your childhood was bad? Wait till you see your bill.”
Among those who seek psychological help in the U.S., 40% undergo therapy with a social worker, psychiatrist or psychologist, according to JAMA Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association. All that talk doesn’t come cheap. There is no set charge, but therapists say rates can vary from $75 to $250 an hour. In fact, Americans spend around $10 billion a year on all kinds of psychotherapy — from relationship counseling to cognitive-behavioral therapy — according to research reviewed by Bruce E. Wampold, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One therapist’s fees for different clients can also vary wildly, experts say. When shopping around for a therapist, there’s nothing wrong with negotiating, says Simon Rego, director of psychology training at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. Many clinicians offer a sliding scale for those with limited funds, he says. Sometimes, therapists dedicate a certain number of slots per week to low-income clients, he says, and there are counseling organizations that offer pro bono services to veterans and victims of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. In other cases, Rego says, therapists expect potential clients to haggle (= to bargain, as over the price of something). “Some therapists claim a sliding scale as a rubric (= invitation, "bridge" to, guide) to negotiate,” he says.
There’s evidence though that good therapy is a bargain at any price. In clinical trials, psychotherapy has been shown to be effective in treating depression, anxiety, marital dissatisfaction, substance abuse and even sexual dysfunction, Wampold found. And relapse rates can be lower with some types of psychotherapy than with medication, according to research by Steve Hollon, a professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. For major depressive disorders, a 2009 Department of Veterans Affairs study on psychotherapy’s effectiveness suggests a combination of therapy and antidepressants as a first line of treatment.
One in five Americans in any given year will have a mental health disorder and two-thirds never receive treatment, says Paolo Delvecchio, director of the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Center for Mental Health Services in Rockville, Md.
2. “I may not have any training.”
While qualified psychologists, psychiatrists and licensed clinical social workers all require years of training, there’s very little stopping anyone from taking a night course in astrology or philosophy and calling himself a therapist.
Therapy is an umbrella term that covers many professions and problems
It’s more of a descriptive term than a professional one, says John C. Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton. In fact, anyone could advertise as a “therapist,” put it on a business card, set up a website and wait for people to call. “Seek mental health services from someone licensed to practice by the particular state in which you reside,” Norcross suggests.
Experts recommend that consumers who need mental health care turn to a psychologist, psychiatrist, or licensed clinical social worker. Psychologists must have a doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.), doctor of psychology (Psy.D) in counseling or clinical psychology or doctor of education (Ed.D.), and pass a state-level licensing exam. Psychiatrists have to earn a doctor of medicine (M.D.) and complete a medical residency. Licensed clinical social workers (LCSW) need a master’s degree (MSW or MA), and must meet medical clinical exam requirements. Licensed counselors also need a master’s degree (MA or MS) and pass a national licensing examination. The American Psychological Association, American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, American Psychiatric Association, National Association of Social Workers and American Counseling Association can make referrals, as do state licensing boards and many health insurance plans list in-network mental health professionals.
For therapeutic services slightly outside the realm of mental health, though, another type of professional might be appropriate. For instance, some life coaches practice as therapists, says Julie Hanks, owner and executive director of Wasatch Family Therapy in Salt Lake City, Utah. (A life coach draws on techniques from psychology and career counseling, but working as a life coach requires no formal training.) Life coaches can be well-suited to helping people decide their next career move or improve their productivity, and plenty of informed consumers choose them over therapists for personal projects, business mentoring and creative endeavors. Many life coaches clearly state that their services are profoundly different from therapy or counseling. Nonetheless, Hanks says, she’s been surprised by how many clients have told her they weren’t aware their coaches weren’t trained to treat mental health problems.
Although it’s important to find a qualified professional, Hanks says, the degree does not make the therapist. “What it boils down to is the quality of the connection between the client and therapist,” she says.
3. “Will you ever stop talking?”
While therapists are paid to listen to a patient for about 45 to 60 minutes at a time, it’s not always easy, especially since people in therapy can get so wound up in the minutiae of their day that they ramble on instead of tackling real issues. “I’ve been bored out of my mind occasionally,” says Hanks, the Salt Lake City therapist. But there’s an upside to her only very occasional boredom: It clues her in that something isn’t working. Then, she says, she knows to ask herself, “What do I need to do differently with this client?”
Sometimes it’s the therapist, rather than the client, who isn’t giving real issues the attention they deserve. Marci Robin, the beauty director of lifestyle and cosmetics site xoVain.com, recently wrote about her experience with a therapist who fell asleep during her session — while Robin was crying. Shortly before arriving at her therapist’s office in New York, Robin had been assaulted by a group of boys who hit her with a cup filled with ice. “As I spoke, I noticed her drifting off,” she says.
Such incidents are relatively uncommon. But therapists, like anyone on the job, can succumb to drowsiness and distractions. “Patients who have seen other therapists have reported this to me,” says Mirean Coleman, a clinical social worker and senior practice associate with the National Association of Social Workers. “I have also been informed by patients of therapists who texted or played games on their cellphones during therapy sessions.”
And of course when there’s a third party in the mix, he or she can be the reason conversations wander. In couple’s therapy, for instance, it’s not unusual for the more dominant partner to attempt to hijack the session. “There are some people who are a bit narcissistic and enjoy hearing themselves talk, and the therapist never really gets an accurate sense of what goes on in the relationship,” says Fran Walfish, a therapist in Beverly Hills, Calif.
4.“I need you more than you need me.”
After a few sessions, therapists often recommend additional treatment. But insiders say clients should watch for signs it’s time to move on. “If you feel like your therapist needs you financially” — for instance, if he or she is pushing for more sessions even though you feel better — “get another therapist,” Hanks says. Although the majority of therapists go into the profession because they genuinely want to help others, she says, a weak economy can make it difficult for a therapist to let a client go. Therapists who are struggling to keep their practice afloat — or who don’t have a potential client to fill the available time slot — might be particularly inclined to try to squeeze extra money out of their clients. “A good therapist does not want their clients in therapy forever,” she says.
What’s more, even a good therapist might not be the right therapist for a particular person. Clients reporting little or no change in their emotional well-being within their first six visits for cognitive therapy tend to show no improvement over the entire course of therapy or end up dropping out, according to multiple studies over three decades by psychologists Barry Duncan and Scott M. Miller, both of whom are also licensed therapists. “You should feel that you are on your way within a month, says Miller, Cummings Professor at the Department of Behavioral Health in Arizona State University.
A long-term client-therapist relationship with no early change can encourage inaction and co-dependency, he says. The length of time a patient should be with a therapist should be based on the treatment goals and progress of each patient, says Coleman from the National Association of Social Workers. “If a patient fails to meet their initial and revised treatment goals, then other alternatives should be considered.”
5. “Maybe I’m the one who needs therapy.”
There’s no shortage of patients who complain that their therapist has as many issues as they do. When it’s time to say goodbye to a client, for instance, some therapists themselves can exhibit signs of co-dependency. When Kathy Morelli, a family counseling therapist in Wayne, N.J., told her New York-based therapist that she was getting married, was moving to New Jersey and wouldn’t require her services anymore, her therapist wasn’t exactly tickled for her. In fact, she didn’t see why Morelli should have a problem going 25 miles out of her way. “She thought I could commute into the city to see her — at night,” Morelli says. “She made a big stink about it. It was very weird.”
Others have come across different peculiarities in their hunt for a good therapist. Stacey Glaesmann, a clinical psychologist and former therapist in Pearland, Texas, wanted to talk to her therapist about postpartum depression. But her therapist had more important things to discuss, she says. Chief among them: God. “I thought, ‘What the hell?’ I had come to her to talk about being depressed, not because I was looking for religion.” Another therapist she went to appeared to be addicted to her cellphone and answered it during a session. “She didn’t even say, ‘Excuse me,’” Glaesmann says. “How rude can you get?” Of course, such incidents aren’t the norm, says Lisa Brateman, a licensed social worker and therapist based in New York.
6.“A morning run might work just as well.”
Run only on a soft surface. When you run on a stone-hard city street walkway, every time your foot hits the surface your body puts about 400 lbs hit on the hard, stony walkway/street. Whose human joints are going to tolerate long that practice? No one's. Run on the ocean sand, on the park grass, in the natural woods with trees, bushes & flowers (but be careful, the may be holes, obstacles, stones, etc.). Running on the city street you breathe in engine & other pollution, in a park or in the wild woods you get plenty of refreshing oxygen, enjoy the natural beauty around and get inspired in a healthy manner.
A little exercise goes a long way. In fact, the effect of regular exercise on mild to moderate forms of depression is similar to the effect of cognitive behavioral therapy, according to the co-authors of the book “Exercise for Mood and Anxiety,” Jasper Smits, associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Michael Otto, a psychologist at Boston University. The two authors analyzed the results of dozens of published population-based and clinical studies related to exercise and mental health to arrive at their findings.
There’s little consensus on how or why exercise helps, but Smits says the public health recommendation for daily exercise — 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise or 150 minutes of moderate activity — should be more widely prescribed by mental-health care providers, especially as studies show that 25% to 40% of Americans don’t exercise at all. “Some professionals argue that exercise is the non-pharmacological antidepressant and may work in the same way as these medications,” he says.
7.“I don’t have to practice what I preach.”
Some university programs and state licensing authorities require mental-health professionals to undergo therapy, but it isn’t universal. Utah and California are among several states that don’t require therapists to receive psychotherapy before they practice. Hanks, who does require it of those who work in her practice, says it’s crucial for a therapist to lie on the proverbial couch in order to understand what the client is going through. “I can’t take a client beyond anywhere
I have not been willing to go myself,” she says.
Plus, Hanks says, when a therapist needs mental-health care, seeking treatment from another therapist is considered preferable to self-treatment. “Therapists need therapists like doctors need doctors. We need a different point of view.” Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, says therapy helps a qualified therapist remain an emotionally strong and independent observer.
Some experts suggest consumers ask potential therapists about their own experience in the patient’s chair and their mental health. Tessina even (1) recommends that those in the market for a marriage counselor seek a therapist who’s happily married. Others say (2) a therapist who’s experienced similar mental health issues to a patient’s — including a marriage breakup — might be more empathetic and wiser. On the other hand, some argue that (3) the therapist’s personal life isn’t relevant to treatment. After all, (4) a doctor who’s never broken a bone is still trained to set one. And (5) many therapists have a zero self-disclosure policy with clients, Glaesmann says.
8. “Your secret is (sort of) safe with me.”
Most patients assume their sessions are confidential, but there are many instances where these sessions could be made public. The records of therapy sessions could become part of a divorce proceeding or employment dispute if a client alleges emotional or mental damages on the part of a spouse or co-worker. Or they could be disclosed if there is a legal dispute between the therapist and the client. Laws also vary by state, therapists say.
If a client expresses suicidal or — indeed — homicidal thoughts, therapists may also be legally required to report that. Nor is a serious crime necessarily protected by client-therapist privilege. Glaesmann says she was obliged to turn over her notes on one client to the local district attorney after the client’s wife found child pornography on his computer, she says. “That had not come up during our therapy,” she says, “but if it had, I would have had to report it to authorities, as viewing child pornography is a crime.” Katherine Nordal, executive director for professional practice at the American Psychological Association, says the group advises therapists to provide a patient’s record only if a court orders it or if they have obtained consent from the patient.
The HIPAA = Health Information Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 does provide some protections for minors. Under HIPAA, the therapist must get a signed disclosure from a client ages 12 to 18 before releasing the minor’s health care records to anyone, including parents; however, in some states, parents may not be denied access to their child’s health records. Insurance companies are only entitled to certain types of information when evaluating whether a person qualifies for medical insurance; this excludes psychotherapy notes and diagnoses, which have special status under HIPAA.
9.“I’ll be there for you, but your insurance might not.”
Health insurance companies can place limits on how many therapy sessions they’ll pay for, and they may be keen to wrap up the sessions before the client is ready. Relying on insurance to pay for therapy isn’t always in a person’s best interest, says Joseph Winn, a clinical social worker in Arlington, Mass. “The insurance company will make their determination regardless of what you, or your therapist, feels is appropriate,” Winn says. If a client disagrees with an insurance company’s decision not to provide additional treatments, he or she can appeal, says Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade group. And people can continue treatment by paying out-of-pocket. Under the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, insurers must also provide their clients a reason why they stop or decline payment for mental health services.
There have been some efforts by lawmakers to make it easier for Americans to get mental health coverage. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which employers with 50 or more workers began adhering to in 2011, requires that when coverage for mental health and substance use conditions is provided, it be generally comparable to coverage for medical and surgical care. That means, for instance, that insurers can’t put a cap of, say, 30 annual trips to a psychiatrist for mental health if they haven’t put such limits on treatment for other conditions, like cancer or diabetes. President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which takes effect in 2014, broadened the 2008 act to include all insurance and employers providing health care and is expected to extend federal parity protections to 62 million Americans, with mental health coverage deemed an “essential health benefit.” Some insurers treat therapists as specialists, which typically require a higher copay: $30 or $50, say, instead of $20.
However, experts say handling insurance is currently still cumbersome for practices — and that the best therapists are increasingly the ones who won’t even accept insurance. “Insurance has become so difficult and expensive to work with,” says David Reiss, a psychiatrist in San Diego. “While there some very good therapists that work with insurance, if therapists can afford to practice without having to accept insurance, they often will.”
10. “Time’s up. Here’s a pill.”
There has been surge in the use of medication to treat mental health problems, studies show. In 2005, a mere 11% of psychiatrists — who, unlike social workers and some other kinds of therapists, are licensed to prescribe drugs — used talk therapy with all of their clients, down from 19% in 1996, according to a 2008 study in the medical journal of the American Medical Association. Similarly, the proportion of patients visiting psychiatrists for talk therapy fell to 29% from 44% in the same period. Psychiatrists get reimbursed by insurance companies at a lower rate for a 45-minute psychotherapy session than for a 15-minute medication visit, the study found.
As talk time went down, pill-popping went up — a trend which some mental health professionals find troubling. The use of psychiatric drugs among adults increased by 22% from 2001 to 2010, and one in five Americans now take such meds, according to industry data compiled by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefit manager in Franklin Lakes, N.J. And it’s not just adults who are increasingly being prescribed drugs for mental health. Some 6.4 million children ages 4 to 17 have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, an increase of over 40% in the past decade, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To be fair, the Food and Drug Administration policy states that it only approves drugs after rigorous clinical trials and that any potential side-effects are stipulated on the labels. And many people get prescriptions from their primary health provider rather than from a psychiatrist. But compared with medication, psychotherapy has fewer side effects and lower instances of relapse when discontinued, says Nordal of the American Psychological Association.
Talk therapy can be as effective in treating depression as the most recent generation of antidepressants, according to a 2011 review of 15 studies and published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease by researchers at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
That’s not to say therapy and pharmaceuticals are mutually exclusive options — or even the only options. Many people solve their own problems on a routine basis through exercise, yoga and meditation, or by talking to their families or attending religious services. But a professional can still be helpful, says Scott D. Miller, professor of behavioral health at Arizona State University. “There are many paths to having a more fulfilling and less troubled life, and psychotherapy is just one of those,” he says. “Like with toothpaste, people have a choice.
Comments from the public relating to the above article - what is your opinion?
(1) Exercise works wonders and getting involved in something useful instead of focusing all your time on yourself is beneficial to a healthy and happy life. People are so self-absorbed nowadays. Stop focusing on yourself and pitying yourself and look on the bright side and count your blessings!
(2) Running/walking outside in the nature improves your mood; therapy improves your thinking. If you're failing a class, does exercise improve your grades? No. Same goes for if you're failing at life. Get help.
(3) I've found that a good bartender if they are not to busy will work as well as a therapist they've heard it all.
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Approximately eight percent of the population — or 25 million Americans — suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s not just members of the military
Once a year, lately in June, is the PTSD Screening Day
To learn more about the condition, we talked to Dr. Mark Rubinstein,
a forensic*) psychiatrist and the author of the upcoming book “Love Gone Mad.”
*) forensic = of, relating to, or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime
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What are the main symptoms of PTSD - Post-traumatic stress disorder?
Before we talk about symptoms, let’s discuss events capable of evoking PTSD. The event must be traumatic and must be beyond the range of ordinary human experience. It’s typically experienced with a sense of imminent death and with overwhelming fear and helplessness by the victim. Typical events triggering the disorder are those such as wartime combat; the Sandy Hook school shootings; rape; riots; mob situations; assaults; prison camps; and natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes or tsunamis.
The symptoms involve reliving the trauma during the day with incessant, recurrent thoughts and recollections (flashbacks) in which the person re-experiences the intense feelings that accompanied the actual trauma. Often, there are recurrent nightmares in which all or part of the trauma is relived.
The victim tries to avoid any object or situation that either resembles or symbolizes the traumatic event. If exposed to such a situation, the person will likely experience anxiety that mounts to panic levels. For instance, a combat veteran of Vietnam will not go to a tropical area on vacation. A person who survived 9/11 cannot tolerate seeing an airplane in the sky.
In addition, having survived a catastrophic trauma, the victim often develops a foreshortened sense of the future and feels he or she won’t live very long. The person frequently begins experiencing free-floating anxiety, and feels uncontrollably anxious when exposed to any situation resembling the trauma. Often, the victim loses the ability to develop loving or intimate feelings toward another person. There may be nonspecific symptoms such as loss of sleep, poor appetite and withdrawal from social activities, along with feelings of depression, cynicism and despair.
Must it be a big, tragic even that triggers PTSD, or could a smaller event cause it?
Any event capable of causing a person to feel he or she may lose one’s life (or one in which a person witnesses such an event happening to others) can evoke PTSD. Certainly, some traumas are more catastrophic than others, but the basic requirement involves either being a victim or witnessing a situation in which death or serious physical injury occurs or is threatened to the self, to others or to loved ones. Any event experienced as life-threatening or with a sense of impending annihilation can bring on PTSD.
When do people with PTSD usually start noticing they’re afflicted? Or can people not even realize it?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Some people begin experiencing symptoms immediately. Technically, PTSD cannot be diagnosed until 30 days have elapsed since the trauma. This is because it’s considered normal for people to have symptoms following an overwhelming traumatic event — for a defined period of time. After 30 days, the diagnosis can technically be made. The signs and symptoms of PTSD are so overwhelmingly dramatic and life-altering, it’s difficult to imagine someone having them and not realizing something is terribly wrong. The person may not be able to define or diagnose exactly what is wrong, but he or she definitely recognizes something is amiss.
What’s the difference between PTSD and delayed-onset PTSD?
The only real difference is the timing of the onset of the disorder. Delayed PTSD may begin weeks, months, or even years after the traumatic event. While this is relatively uncommon, it can occur. I evaluated a concentration camp survivor who lost his entire family in Auschwitz during World War II. Though he was despondent and completely uprooted, he came to America and began leading a good, productive life. He was a carpenter who stayed alive in the camp because the SS officers admired his talent, and let him build cabinets and bookshelves for them. Forty years later, while doing construction work on a house in Queens, New York, he fell and injured his back. He could no longer work. His carpentry had not only saved his life, but was the glue holding him together. From the point of his incapacitating physical injury, he began experiencing nightmares of the camps, developed fears and panic attacks whenever he heard a police siren, and presented with the full constellation of signs and symptoms of PTSD. This of course, was a severe case of delayed-onset PTSD.
In your experience, has the number of cases of PTSD increased or decreased since you began practicing?
As a forensic psychiatrist, I have seen the same number of cases over many years. On the whole, there’s been no dramatic increase in the number of cases of this disorder. Of course, following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, there was a huge influx of patients with PTSD. I personally examined more than 300 survivors of that disaster. But on the whole, the numbers seem to have remained stable. Of course, these days, we’re more aware of the disorder, and people are diagnosed with it more frequently. Also, since the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq and the action in Afghanistan, there have been many more soldiers developing the disorder. There’s always an increase in the number of people afflicted when wartime combat is ongoing.
Do you see equal numbers of males and females with it? What about children?
The disorder seems to be equally distributed between men and women. There has been no real difference between the numbers of men and women who survived the World Trade Center disaster and developed PTSD. Of course, wartime combat cases are seen mostly among men, whereas cases of rape and assault have brought many more women into psychiatric treatment. Generally though, men and women are equally vulnerable if a catastrophic traumatic event arises.
As for children, they too can develop the disorder. Generally, they present with less typical symptoms than adults. Kids tend to “act out” their symptoms. While they may have nightmares, they also tend to become disruptive in school, defiant and antagonistic at home, and don’t often present with the classical, well-known signs and symptoms of PTSD as do adults. Rather, they present with more generalized behavioral and emotional difficulties.
What options for help are available?
Depending on the severity of the disorder, several options are available. The most severe cases of PTSD often require medication and counseling. Today, medicines are available that suffocate most if not all symptoms of PTSD. Over time, the victim encounters situations that either resemble or symbolize the trauma, but does not have an overwhelmingly anxious response due to the medication. In a very real way, the person becomes desensitized to the trauma and can get better. Counseling also helps the person identify triggering situations. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) has had variable results, and the jury is still out on this technique.
It should be emphasized that most people with PTSD can be helped. It should also be noted that the disorder can re-emerge years later if another triggering event occurs such as a situation similar to the one evoking PTSD in the first place. In a sense, the memories of the trauma are never truly erased.
Click green for further info
Source: (1) Metro NY Newspaper, (2) Dr. Mark Rubinstein
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Students Recall Special Schools Run Like Jails
Date: July 23, 2013
Once-Troubled Youths Say Abuse Was Rife*)
After Alexander Chomakhidze and his family moved to the United States from Greece a few years ago, he became so despondent he started skipping school and even tried to kill himself. Worried, his parents sent him to Horizon Academy, a Utah boarding school that promised therapy.
*) rife = common - prevalent - widespread
But Mr. Chomakhidze, now 18, said that instead of getting help he was roughed up and taunted by staff members, who held him down and cut off his long hair when he arrived. Later, after he slit his wrists, he said he was disciplined but received no mental health counseling.
“They didn’t help,” said Mr. Chomakhidze, who will be a college freshman this fall. “No one talked to me about it. They just punished me.”
During the past 15 years, a network of Utah-based “tough love” boarding schools for troubled youths has closed nearly two dozen programs amid claims of child abuse, which the schools have denied. But Horizon Academy and at least half a dozen other schools with business or family ties to those who ran the network are still operating, and others with those ties are newly opened. And once again, former students, parents and former staff members say that children at some of the schools, Mr. Chomakhidze among them, have been routinely mistreated.
School officials have denied Mr. Chomakhidze’s claims. But interviews and e-mail exchanges with more than 30 former students, parents, current and former staff members, and owners of the schools reveal a rigid system of discipline at the facilities, which are typically locked compounds, often in remote areas. Everyday activities like speaking, using the bathroom, walking freely between rooms, taking showers and talking to parents are limited by the staff.
Robert B. Lichfield, the founder of the network, the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools, said in an e-mailed statement that he no longer owns any of the schools and that he was unaware of children being harmed. He said that for more than a decade he has supplied only business and educational services to the programs.
“Allegations against schools I did not own or manage, I can’t answer,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I wasn’t there, I didn’t abuse or mistreat students, nor did I encourage or direct someone else to do so. I provided business services that were non-supervision, care, or treatment services to schools that were independently owned and operated.”
Behavior modification programs for troubled teenagers have thrived as state and federal laws allow private boarding schools far greater leeway in how they treat children than is permitted in public school systems, which generally prohibit physical punishment, the isolation of children and other severe discipline methods.
In fact, there are no federal laws governing schools like those built on the World Wide model. A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states.
Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.
In a case that is not directly related to World Wide, children at a number of privately operated facilities in Florida recently said they had been abused in programs with little governmental control because the schools are regulated as religious institutions.
‘Manipulative’ Students
Mr. Lichfield said that accusations of mistreatment by troubled adolescents are common in the business. “All schools working with disturbed teens have a few students who are angry and manipulative, with long histories of lying and dishonesty, who will make allegations,” he wrote. “Find one school for me that does not. The schools we provided services for had such volume that even a very small percentage of students who make such allegations start to add up, but every school has about the same percentage of students who didn’t like being there and are willing to make such allegations.”
Mr. Lichfield’s lawyer, J. Ralph Atkin, said that parents of the nearly 20,000 children who have attended World Wide schools during the past 20 years had a satisfaction rate of 96 percent, and that the schools’ employees had been required by law to report signs of mistreatment. Mr. Atkin himself owned a World Wide program in the Czech Republic during the 1990s. It was investigated by Czech authorities after accusations of child abuse and was later closed; World Wide said no children had been mistreated there.
A lawsuit on behalf of more than 350 former students and their parents in a Utah state district court claims that World Wide’s programs provide little education or mental health help, and that staff members engage in outright assault. “In many instances,” the suit says, “the abuse could be accurately described as torture of children.”
In May, a lawsuit against a World Wide-related company was resolved for $3 million without the company admitting liability — nine years after a 16-year-old girl hanged herself in a bathroom stall at a facility in Montana called Spring Creek Lodge Academy, which has since closed. Before her suicide, the girl had been punished by being forced to carry a bucket of rocks, according to depositions by the school’s owners and staff.
Owners of the facilities that are currently open say their programs have no connection to World Wide, and turned down requests to visit. But in interviews, former students, parents and staff members — many of them, like Mr. Chomakhidze, not part of a lawsuit against World Wide — described them as spartan places.
Daily life is highly structured, with limited free time. Students, who are required to wear uniforms, generally perform schoolwork at their own pace for about five hours a day, though many students and parents say the curriculum is far less rigorous than that of local public schools. While some of the programs have gyms, usually only those who have earned enough points for good behavior can use them. Former students say those points can be rescinded quickly after months of hard work.
Violating rules often leads to being placed in isolation, or being “restrained” — held on the floor for as long as an hour by staff members, who students say twist their limbs in painful positions until they stop resisting. Other punishments at World Wide programs have included pepper spraying, handcuffing, being forced into dog cages and being made to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, according to former students and claims in lawsuits.
Complaining or crying invited further punishment, the former students said, and children who intentionally injured themselves, including attempting suicide, were punished with demerits and extra work, according to former students and a school handbook. The programs’ contracts require parents to release the schools from legal liability.
The schools are typically surrounded by fences or walls to thwart runaways. As an additional deterrent, those who have insufficient accumulated points are required to wear flip flops, even in winter, because, staff members have told them, they make it harder to run.
Even if a student does escape, however, the schools’ isolated locations make hiding difficult, and former students said escapees were usually quickly recaptured. On a recent trip to one of the programs, Seneca Ranch, in Donalds, S.C., which is set amid pastures and woods on 500 acres, there was little along a stretch of rural highway.
World Wide once had behavior modification schools in at least 11 states, as well as countries including Costa Rica and Mexico. In recent years, hit by the recession and accusations of abuse, Mr. Lichfield has divested ownership of the schools, which he once likened to McDonald’s franchises. But the programs’ structure and the disciplinary philosophy he helped conceive continue to be the template at most if not all of the schools.
Mr. Lichfield, an entrepreneur who has an interest in dozens of Utah, Arizona and Nevada businesses, has along with members of his family raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for political candidates nationally over the years, and was a fund-raiser for the 2008 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.
World Wide lawyers say Mr. Lichfield’s original company has largely dissolved, and exists in name only. But World Wide was reregistered with the state of Utah in March, according to business records.
The Money Flow
Mr. Lichfield, family members and business partners have financial interests in a layer of secondary companies through a web of limited liability companies, consulting arrangements and property ownership that Mr. Lichfield has acknowledged in depositions — while also saying he does not fully understand the links himself. These entities oversee the marketing, business and educational services for many of the schools, and have received up to one-third of the programs’ gross revenues, according to business records and court depositions.
One former owner of two World Wide schools, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still does business with Mr. Lichfield, said that even after Mr. Lichfield transferred ownership of a school to him, Mr. Lichfield continued to treat him as an employee, including dictating contractual terms.
“He controlled the money flow,” he said.
According to business filings and Mr. Lichfield’s court testimony, the schools and programs that have ties to Mr. Lichfield and his associates are Horizon Academy, Cross Creek Programs and Old West Academy in Utah; Seneca Ranch in South Carolina; Midwest Academy in Iowa; Red River Academy in Louisiana; and
Pillars of Hope in Costa Rica. Annual tuition ranges from about $36,000 to $60,000. Most of the schools denied an affiliation with World Wide.
An example of the complex financial bond between Mr. Lichfield and the schools is illustrated in Red River Academy in Lecompte, a small Louisiana town.
The company that owns the school’s property, Octwell L.L.C., shares an address in LaVerkin, Utah — population 5,000 — with World Wide, of which Mr. Lichfield is listed in records as a trustee and part owner. Business filings show Mr. Lichfield is also a manager at Octwell. Further, Red River Outsources L.L.C., which has provided business services to Red River Academy, is owned in part by Mr. Lichfield and is based at the same LaVerkin address as World Wide and Octwell — 50 South State Street.
Still, Brent Hall, Red River’s owner, said he was not aware of any connection with World Wide or Mr. Lichfield. “Any association that I ever had with World Wide ended nearly a decade ago when I left my employment at Cross Creek Manor as a therapist,” Mr. Hall wrote in an e-mail.
Many of the hundreds of adolescents in the schools are sent by parents who say they can no longer cope with their problems, including Asperger’s syndrome**) - explained at the end of the article), depression and drug use. Many have been sexually or physically abused.
Some former students and their parents, while acknowledging the tough rules at the schools, say the programs’ emphasis on discipline and order helped steer children from serious antisocial behavior. “I don’t think my son would have graduated from high school,” said Jeff Cardwell, 52, an Illinois man who sent his 16-year-old son to Midwest Academy in 2012. “He probably would have ended up in some legal trouble.”
But other parents, students and former staff members say the programs’ harsh culture has had dire consequences, including at least one other suicide, in 2001, when a 17-year-old girl jumped from a balcony at Tranquility Bay,
a facility in Jamaica that is now closed as well.
World Wide schools in Samoa, Mexico and Costa Rica, in addition to the Czech Republic program, have closed after concerns were raised about mistreated children. World Wide says that while the school in Mexico was closed by the Mexican authorities, the other three programs were closed voluntarily. World Wide denies that any children in the Mexican program or the others were abused.
Tackled by Staff Members
Ken Stettler, director of licensing for Utah’s Department of Human Services, said he had received numerous complaints about World Wide programs over the years, and had temporarily closed one of its facilities after finding evidence of child abuse.
He said that while World Wide’s claims about high satisfaction rates among parents may be true, the company’s reasoning was flawed because it discounted the experiences of children who have been mistreated.
“Do you want to have a milkshake with a half teaspoon of dog poop in it? Would you still drink the milkshake?” he said. “There probably is a small percentage who had a bad experience, but why did they have a bad experience?”
Mr. Chomakhidze was at Horizon Academy for seven months in 2011 before his mother pulled him out. He said that on one occasion — after he was sent to an isolation room — he began to cry and was tackled by two staff members who twisted his arms behind his back for about 10 minutes.
Mr. Chomakhidze also said staff members and students bullied him because he is gay — and even though he had a history of suicide attempts, he said one staff member encouraged him to kill himself. “They said I was a girl,” he said. “They said I was crazy.”
When he slit his wrists, he lost his accumulated points for good behavior, which are necessary to finish the program. The school has denied mistreating Mr. Chomakhidze, but acknowledged a policy of taking away students’ points after a suicide attempt.
John, who requested that his last name not be used, was 16 when he was sent to Horizon last year. He said he had been restrained by staff members several times during his five-month stay, and that he became so distressed that he refused to eat for nearly three weeks, losing 15 pounds off his thin frame.
“When I stopped eating, they put me in a room for a few days,” he said, referring to a small isolation room used to punish students. He said his pants and jacket were taken away, leaving him with only his T-shirt and underwear in a room so cold he shivered. Horizon denied that the room was cold or that his clothes were removed.
Taylor Smith, who recently sent her 17-year-old daughter to Horizon, said she had wanted her child to receive therapy for depression. But Ms. Smith said it was only after she had enrolled her daughter that she was told there were no licensed therapists on staff. “I sent her there because it was supposed to be a residential treatment center,” she said. She took her daughter home after nine days.
Like some other managers at schools based on the World Wide model, Jade Robinson, Horizon’s director, has moved frequently among programs, including Casa by the Sea, which was shut by the Mexican authorities in 2004.
Another school run by Mr. Robinson, Bell Academy, in Terra Bella, Calif., was closed in 2003 after state officials found it operating without a proper license, according to California Department of Social Services records.
Several former students at schools operated by Mr. Robinson, a former amateur boxer, said in interviews — some dating back to the 1990s — that he had physically harmed them while disciplining them, and that they remained psychologically damaged.
Mr. Robinson declined a request for an interview and to respond to most written questions. But he wrote in an e-mail: “My intent and action for years have always been pure to help teens and their family. It is unfortunate that there are a few past students that are unhappy that want to tarnish my reputation for their revenge.”
He added that he had “always followed the state regulations in all areas and especially on restraints.”
One former student, Matt Hoyler, was 16 when his parents sent him to Casa by the Sea for smoking marijuana and being disobedient.
Mr. Hoyler, now 30, said that after violating a rule prohibiting passing gas without permission, staff members had hogtied*** him with duct tape and rope and left him in that position for 8 to 12 hours.
***Hogtie bondage requires the tying of all four limbs together behind a person's back. It typically involves connecting a person's wrists and ankles behind their back whilst lying face down using some form of physical restraints. It may also instead refer to the binding of armsand legs behind a person
The hogtie position places pressure on the abdomen of the tied person, which may created difficulty in breathing known as postural asphyxia. Care should be taken to ensure the person being bound can breathe easily throughout all stages of play. This is particularly important if gags, collars or rope (near the neck) is used to create a more stringent tie. This risk is in addition to the normal risks of physical restraint
While bound, Mr. Hoyler said, Mr. Robinson climbed atop him and pressed a knee into his spine while applying extreme pressure with an elbow to the back of his neck. Mr. Hoyler said that Mr. Robinson, who denied harming Mr. Hoyler, had physically hurt him in three or four similar incidents during his 11-month stay.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Hoyler, who said he still has nightmares about the episodes.
Source: NYT
***) Asperger's syndrome is a developmental disorder that affects a person's ability to socialize and communicate effectively with others. Children with Asperger's syndrome typically exhibit social awkwardness and an all-absorbing interest in specific topics.
Doctors group Asperger's syndrome with other conditions that are called autistic spectrum disorders or pervasive developmental disorders (see a few lines below for explanation). These disorders all involve problems with social skills and communication. Asperger's syndrome is generally thought to be at the milder end of this spectrum.
The person with "AS" canlearn how to interact more successfully in social situations.
Asperger's syndrome - MayoClinic.comwww.mayoclinic.com/health/aspergers-syndrome
The term "pervasive developmental disorders," also called PDDs, refers to a group of conditions that involve delays in the development of many basic skills. Most notable among them are the ability to socialize with others, to communicate, and to use imagination. Children with these conditions often are confused in their thinking and generally have problems understanding the world around them.
Because these conditions typically are identified in children around 3 years of age -- a critical period in a child's development -- they are called developmental disorders. The condition actually starts far earlier than age 3, but parents often do not notice a problem until the child is a toddler who is still not walking, talking, or developing in the ways other children of the same age are.
CLICK: Pervasive Developmental Disorders - WebMDwww.webmd.com/brain/autism/development-disorder
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Article 1 of 4 (Article 2 - 4 of 4 next below)
How Does Obamacare Work?
11 Questions, 11 Unbiased Answers
Date: July 26, 2013
When will it actually kick in? Who qualifies for a subsidy?
And what does it mean for indoor tanning addicts?
We have answers from Kamy Akhavan, president of ProCon.org.
If you’re still scratching your head about what the Affordable Care Act means or doesn’t mean or does or doesn’t do, you’re far from alone. With so many cherry-picking pundits, politicians, and media sources perpetuating the spinsanity, it’s hard to know how to get agenda-free information. Depending on where you get your news, opinions about Obamacare run the gamut from a step in the right direction to the savior of the American economy to the complete unraveling of democracy to the second coming of Karl Marx.
When Minyanville was searching for an unbiased take on this labyrinth of a law, we turned to an organization with only one dog in the health-care fight: the truth. ProCon.org is an award-winning nonprofit charity that operates with the explicit purpose of helping the public make informed decisions about complex social issues. For its 15.7 million readers, ProCon.org pores through volumes of legislation (in Obamacare’s case, 900 pages worth) and weighs -- in equal measure -- the pros and cons from experts on both sides of the political aisle.
We spoke with Kamy Akhavan, the president and managing editor of ProCon.org to see what he found out when his reference site posed the core question: Is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act good for America?
The answer is a resolute, unequivocal, and thundering... “Eh, we don’t know.”
Unfortunately, the jury is still out on certain nuts and bolts of the bill. Some questions about Obamacare fall into ProCon.org’s “debated” territory and will likely remain in a sort of speculative limbo until the law’s final implementation. Only then, when it’s laid bare before us in full effect, will we be able to dig in with that scalpel, dissect all its parts, and -- depending on our respective political bents -- either marvel at the innards or run for the restroom.
The good news is, ProCon.org does have definitive answers right now to many of our burning queries. Following are a sampling with clear-cut yes or no replies that we thought most relevant to Minyanville readers.
1. Can this thing still be repealed?
The big challenge to this came from the constitutional question -- which was answered 5-4 -- so it’s not going to get repealed by the Supreme Court. The other place it could’ve been axed was in Congress. The House of Representatives has voted over 30 times to get rid of Obamacare but it’ll never happen without passing the [Democrat-controlled] Senate. And even if it did pass the Senate, there’s no way Obama would sign it. So, between the Supreme Court, the legislature, and then the president all saying “no,” it looks like Obamacare is here to stay.
2. What parts of the Affordable Care Act have already taken effect?
In September of 2010 we started having coverage for young adults up to age 26 on their parents’ plan. We’ve had free preventative care for services such as mammograms and colonoscopies, being done without a deductible, copay, or coinsurance. Insurance companies can’t rescind your coverage if you make some kind of technical mistake on your form (like forgetting to put your middle initial). If your insurer says, “We don’t approve your new heart valve, our policy doesn’t cover it” you can appeal that. The lifetime limits on insurance coverage were lifted. And this is all nationwide, as federal law. In 2011 we started seeing more services for senior citizens. They can now get free wellness visits and free personalized prevention plans on Medicare.
Also, insurance premium rebates took effect if health insurers profit by more than 15%; so at least 85% of all the premium dollars they collect have to be spent on health-care services and health-care quality improvement. If they spend less than that they have to give back rebates to their members. Here at ProCon.org, we have received checks from our insurer because they were compelled to do so as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
3. So what’s left to kick in?
January 1, 2014 is when a lot of the meat of Obamacare takes effect. The big ones are the establishment of state-run health insurance exchanges and the individual insurance mandate that requires every single person in the United States to have insurance coverage. If you’re not insured, you have to pay a fine.
4. Is anyone off the hook for buying coverage?
There are literally some exceptions to the mandate. If someone already has insurance through Medicaid, Medicare, an employer, or a veterans health program, they don’t have to buy insurance because they already have it.
Prisoners, undocumented immigrants, some religious groups -- those who have been historically exempt from the Social Security system such as the Old Order Amish and religious groups whose members pay for one another’s health care. Also, if you’re an American Indian and subject to the sovereign laws of your tribal community.
5. How will the fines work for not buying coverage?
It’s a little bit complicated. First, they give you a year and they shake their finger at you. [Referencing the Cleveland Plain Dealer] in 2014, the penalty is either $95 for every adult and $47.50 for every child under the age of 18 in the household, or 1% of taxable income for the household, whichever is larger. And then it gets worse.
In 2015, they start shaking their fist. It's $325 for every adult and $162.50 for every child (up to $975 for a family), or 2% of taxable income, whichever is larger.
In 2016, that fist turns into a foot and it goes up to $695 for every adult and $347.50 for every child (up to $2,085 for a family), or 2.5% of income, whichever is higher. After 2016, the penalty increases annually by the cost-of-living adjustment.
6. How will the subsidies work for those who can’t afford coverage, and what kind of criteria need to be met to qualify?
There will be no penalty for those who can't afford insurance, including those who don't make enough to file federal taxes or whose insurance premiums will cost more than 8% of their household income. The government will help them pay for it and try to do what it can to make that insurance affordable.
The White House says broadly that there will be tax credits for middle class families, small businesses, and millions of Americans will soon be eligible for tax credits, and if you can’t afford insurance, it basically says don’t worry about it, we’ll help you.
The way Consumer Reports describes it, if you buy insurance on an exchange as an individual, you may qualify for a subsidy in the form of a tax credit if your household income is between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level.
7. How does the mandate work for employers?
The way the Affordable Care Act is written, the term “applicable large employer” means a company that employed an average of at least 50 workers during the preceding calendar year. They’ll have to pay a fine of $2,000 per full-time worker if any of their employees turn around and get premium tax credits through the new health insurance exchanges. So if the small business has 51 workers and one of those workers gets a tax credit to help them buy insurance, even though they’re already getting insured through their company, then the business has to pay a $2,000 fine per employee, per year.
8. So the mandate doesn’t apply at all to companies with under 50 employees?
No, and there’s no debate.
9. Can you keep your current coverage?
The White House says yes, and the answer is technically true, but -- and this is a big but -- a lot of the insurance providers will no longer be offering the exact plan. Part of the reason is that Obamacare mandates a certain level of quality and a certain number of services to be offered in their insurance packages. So if the insurance package you currently have doesn’t perform a certain service that Obamacare requires, that insurance plan will likely become a different plan. So your exact same plan may no longer exist because now they have to comply with some of the requirements of Obamacare, which are the ones intended to increase quality coverage.
Whether the forced, low-tier plans will cost more is still subject to debate because -- and this is one of the main theories of the Affordable Care Act -- by mandating that everyone get insurance, they are creating this big carrot for the insurance company. They’re saying we’ll give you 30 million more customers and that will help your bottom line. In exchange for doing that, we’re going to ask that you provide them a little more coverage. And in effect we hope that, on net, it’s a plus for all because more people are insured, you have more customers, they are still profitable, everyone’s happy. That’s the theory.
Whether it increases premiums or not, we won’t know until the mandate has kicked in. I can tell you that [at ProCon.org] for our particular company plan, our premiums have not gone up. In fact we’ve received rebates. Other people will say the opposite, that their premiums have gone up. So the bottom line is to be determined on that one.
10. Will Obamacare raise my taxes?
There will be 19 new taxes in the form of brand new taxes, fees, and penalties that have never existed and in the elimination of tax deductions. For example, we’ll see a $50,000 tax penalty on charitable hospitals that fail to meet five new requirements, a 2.3% excise tax on medical device manufacturers, and a removal of executive salary tax deductions for health insurance companies that compensate executives over 500,000 a year.
For individuals and families, an increased penalty of 20% will apply to early withdrawals from health or medical savings accounts, and people who buy indoor tanning products will incur a 10% excise tax.
11. What if I have [insert chronic disease]? Will I get to participate in the exchange? Will there be a limit on how much carriers can increase my premium, and how can they afford to cover me anyway?
A press release from the Department of Health and Human Services said that under the Affordable Care Act , in 2014, Americans with preexisting conditions cannot be denied coverage, cannot be charged significantly higher premiums, be subject to an extended waiting period, or have their benefits curtailed by an insurance company.
There’s specific language to the effect that increases have to be reasonable. The government will help subsidize what it calls “high-risk pools” so that it is not as cost-prohibitive for the insurers to offer those types of plans. But the law is very specific in that it says they cannot be denied coverage for a preexisting condition. No debate.
What have we learned today?
For starters, those of us carelessly carting around health insurance ID cards with no middle initial have been getting away with murder. So let’s all breathe a collective “Whew!” for that unwitting feat.
Although tan mom will certainly take a hit from Obamacare, even those among us without home tanning beds can likely expect raised taxes passed down from the companies and hospitals, directly incurring the $1 trillion increase between the 2013 and 2022 budget periods. We also know much of the revenue will be squeezed out of a 0.9% payroll tax and a 3.8% tax on investment income for couples earning over $250,000 and individuals making more than $200,000.
Some health-care companies are expected to benefit from the act, however, including the nation's largest hospital operator, HCA Holdings (NYSE:HCA), the largest insurer, UnitedHealthGroup (NYSE:UNH), drug companies like Merck (NYSE:MRK) and pharmacy manager Express Scripts (NASDAQ:ESRX), and drug retailers like CVS (NYSE:CVS) and Walgreen (NYSE:WAG).
Fingers crossed, you’re not doing as well, financially, as you thought. Check out the Department of Health and Human Services poverty level guidelines. If you’re a single earning $44,680, a couple earning $60,520, or a family of four earning $92,200, congratulations, the government thinks you’re just poor enough for a subsidy!
The rise and/or fall of insurance premiums under Obama’s signature law varies by state. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says New Yorkers will see their premiums drop by 50%. So, if rates where you live go up, just move to New York. There’s plenty of room.
Since companies with less than 50 employees are exempt from the mandate, Michael Moore may soon have new fodder for a Downsize This! sequel.
If repealing Obamacare is a matter left to the legislative and executive branches, it seems anti-health-care reformers needn’t despair just yet. The 2014 midterm elections -- when all 435 seats in the House and 33 in the Senate go up for grabs -- are a mere doctor’s checkup away. A mammogram or prostate exam later, and America will have a brand-new president.
And if the White House’s own decision to delay the employer mandate provision is any indication, it may very well be the Obamacare enthusiasts who are left waiting.
Finally, the success of the Affordable Care Act hinges on the participation of the young and the healthy. If this demographic opts out and instead takes the penalty, insurance companies won’t be able to mitigate the cost of the “high-risk pools,” and we can basically count this whole thing as kaput.
No positions in stocks mentioned.
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Source: (click: ProCon.org
(Article 2 - 4 of 4 next below)
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Article 2 of 4 (Article 1 - 4/4 next above)
It’s the Affordable Care Act. But What Is Affordable?
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Under the Affordable Care Act, if a company with 50 employees hopes to avoid the penalty in the so-called employer mandate, it is not enough to merely offer those workers health insurance. The insurance must be “affordable,” among other things, and the law is very specific about what affordable means: It means the employee’s share of the premium cannot exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income.
If this seems straightforward, putting it into action has been anything but. Household income is the benchmark because the Affordable Care Act ties affordability to the tax credits and subsidies available to help individuals purchase insurance in the new marketplaces created by the law. In fact, the penalty for employers who offer unaffordable insurance comes into play only when employees use these subsidies to buy their own insurance rather than accept the company’s coverage.
But employers, of course, are in no position to know what their employees’ household income might be, least of all as determined by the esoteric definition of household income used by the Internal Revenue Service. Among other things, determining household income would force employers to find out how much their employees’ spouses make and even to track down certain private household expenses, like alimony payments.
So the I.R.S., which is writing the regulations for the mandate, has proposed three alternatives to determining household income, safe harbors that would permit employers to comply with the mandate and avoid the penalty. First, a company could use the wages it reports to the I.R.S. on Form W-2 as a substitute for household income. So long as the employee’s share of the insurance premiums is no more than 9.5 percent of the wages reported in Box 1 of the form (meaning the amount excludes deferrals such as 401k or flexible spending account contributions), the coverage would be deemed affordable. (Again, this is for companies with more than 50 employees; smaller companies are under no obligation to provide health insurance.)
Or the company could calculate a baseline monthly wage based on the first month’s hourly rate or salary. Unlike the W-2 option, the wage calculated here would not exclude deferrals, so it would likely be higher. However, if the company reduced the employee’s hourly rate or salary over the year, it would not be able to use this option. And that eliminates this option for many companies, because they generally cannot plan for wage cuts, said Seth Perretta, an attorney from the Washington firm Crowell & Moring, who is representing several trade groups in the rule making.
Finally, the company could simply substitute the federal poverty level guidelines for an individual for the employee’s actual household income. In 2013, the federal poverty level for an individual in the mainland United States is $11,490. “The practical effect there is that if you have coverage that is affordable at that level, it’s definitely going to be affordable by the time the I.R.S. comes looking” at an employee’s household income, Mr. Perretta said.
With each of the safe harbors the I.R.S. has proposed, employers trade convenience or certainty for, potentially, a lower threshold for affordability. For example, imagine a household where the husband and wife earn $50,000 apiece: If the husband’s employer uses the W-2 safe harbor, the company’s affordability threshold falls from 9.5 percent of household income to 4.75 percent, which means the employer will have to pick up a larger portion of the employee’s insurance premium. “All those safe harbors are a disadvantage to the employers,” Mr. Perretta said. “They’re conservative estimates of affordable.”
The rule could also create confusion for employees who try to buy insurance on an exchange, because none of these safe harbors will actually be used by the exchanges to determine whether the insurance offered by the company really is unaffordable and, therefore, whether the worker is entitled to a government-paid subsidy. Instead, the exchanges will rely on household income, which the employee will estimate, backed by the most recent tax return available.
The upshot is that, as the I.R.S. acknowledged in its proposed rule, there could be cases where an employer’s offer of coverage would be treated as affordable for the purposes of the employer mandate but unaffordable when the worker seeks coverage on the exchange. In that event, the employer would get a pass. Though the employee would get the tax credits to buy individual insurance, the company would not have to pay the penalty that covers at least part of the cost of the subsidy. In addition, the safe harbors are voluntary. If a company is unhappy with the alternatives they offer, it can always attempt to calculate each employee’s actual household income.
In any case, the business lobby — perhaps relieved that companies will not have to figure out how much money their employees’ spouses are making — seems satisfied with what the I.R.S. has done. “The W-2 pay rule is a good objective standard that people can use,” said J.D. Piro, a senior vice president in charge of the health law group at the benefits consulting company Aon Hewitt. “The employers’ interest is in passing the test with the data that they have.”
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Source: NYT (Article 3 -4/4 next below)
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Article 3 of 4 (Article 2 of 4 next above)
How Obamacare Will Affect
Health Insurance Rates by Age Group
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One of the greatest health hazards of growing older has long been losing access to health insurance before reaching age 65 and qualifying for Medicare. Beginning next year, this will change under Obamacare. Beyond knowing there will be big changes, it is very challenging to figure out what the world of health insurance will look like for baby boomers who are not yet old enough to qualify for Medicare coverage.
Employer group policies do guarantee coverage for older applicants. For individual applicants outside the employer group market, however, the story has been much different. In most states, insurers have been allowed to reject applicants with pre-existing medical conditions. Even if they did agree to write a policy for an older applicant, they have had the freedom to charge rates many times higher than the premiums for comparable coverage charged to younger and healthier applicants.
But under health care reform, conditions in the non-group market for individual and family policies are set to change next year. No applicant can be turned down for health insurance due to a pre-existing condition or for any other reason. Insurers can still charge higher rates to older individual policyholders, but the ratios, or "bands," by which age-based rates can differ have been reduced to 3:1 (charging an adult age 64 years or older more than three times the premium they charge a 21-year-old for the same policy) from 5:1 under existing practices.
Anyone expecting major price declines for older consumers, however, will be disappointed. HealthPocket, an online health plan information and ranking service, provided a detailed look at next year's health insurance rates in California, Connecticut, Ohio and Rhode Island. These four states are among a growing number where insurers have already filed rates they propose charging in the new state-based health insurance exchanges being set up under the Affordable Care Act.
Premiums for a 60-year-old person will be higher in all four states next year than this year. But there are so many reasons for these changes that it would be a mistake to simply blame Obamacare for causing higher rates. Steve Zaleznick, HealthPocket's head of consumer strategy and development, stresses that consumers need to look specifically at their state's offerings and should not base decisions on what's happening in other states.
Even the rates in these four states are subject to change. Further, the impact of Obamacare may be more modest in certain states - HealthPocket experts cited Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington - that have already imposed some of the features that insurers in all states must begin providing in 2014.
In the four states used for the comparisons here, HealthPocket looked at current rate filings, those that have been filed for the new exchanges in 2014 and individual health insurance policies offered by all insurers in these states for 60-year-old males and females. (There are currently gender differences in rates in many states, but these will disappear next year because Obamacare doesn't allow gender-based pricing.)
HealthPocket also reviewed rates in different geographic markets within each of the four states and came up with averages for 2013 and 2014 and looked at the highest and lowest premiums charged by insurers in these markets.
There will be a shorter range between high and low rates under Obamacare than appears from the 2013 examples provided here. That's because health insurance policies are likely to be more standardized next year under the Affordable Care Act than they are today. The ACA says health insurers can offer policies with four types of payment structures, which have come to be known as metal tiers:
1. Bronze plans are the cheapest because insurers pay only 60 percent of a policyholder's covered health expenses, and the policyholder must come up with the other 40 percent.
2. Silver plans split covered expenses 70-30.
3. Gold plans split covered expenses 80-20.
4. Platinum plans split covered expenses 90-10.
The 2014 rate filings used by HealthPocket are for bronze plans. The same insurer may offer multiple plans within each tier, featuring different combinations of deductibles, co-pays and other coverage options. But each bronze plan requires the insurer to pay at least 60 percent of covered expenses.
Here are the 2014 rates as filed for Obamacare:
Health Insurance Premiums in 2014
Complete tables on the internet - search with the article title
Monthly Premium for 60-Year Old Individual
Average - High - Low;
California $592 - $665 - $479
Connecticut $651 - $801 - $536
Ohio $619 - $826 - $431
Rhode Island $482 - $499 - $470
Source: HealthPocket.com
Rhode Island features only modest differences among insurance plans in 2014, in large part because the state is so small it has only a single rating district. Its state exchange received rate filings from only one insurer - Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island - and the company has filed 2014 rates for only three types of individual bronze insurance plans.
Other states include more insurers and geographic pricing areas, and it will be important to look at the details of plans offered where you live.
Comparing plans under Obamacare to 2013 options should be done carefully, says Zev Coleman, HealthPocket's head of research. The 2013 rates below reflect modest gender-based differences. The table also includes information on the average percent of time that insurers either decline coverage entirely, and the percent of time they offer coverage at a higher price than was originally quoted.
Health Insurance Premiums in 2013
Monthly Premium for 60-Year Old Individual
Average Percentages
Average - High - Low - Declining Coverage Charging Higher Rates
California
Male $533 - $1,274 - $247 - 24% - 27%
Female $533 - $1,274 - $247 -24% - 27%
Connecticut
Male $529 - $1,157 - $227 - 16% - 29% Female $518 - $1,138 - $199 -16% - 29%
Ohio
Male $477 - $2,014 $178 - 21% -41% Female $487 - $1,948 - $176 - 21% - 41%
Rhode Island
Male $437 - $592 - $2909 - % 0 Female $436 - $591 - $289 %0%
Source: HealthPocket.com
One reason direct comparisons can be difficult between 2013 and 2014 is that insurers face higher claim costs next year. Remember that no one can be turned down for coverage in 2014. Even sick people with pre-existing conditions will be able to get coverage. Also, insurers will no longer be able to impose lifetime payout limits on anyone next year. Therefore, the 2014 rates will need to provide insurers with enough money to cover 60-year-olds who will, as a group, be less healthy in 2014 than the 60-year-olds who have individual health insurance this year.
Another reason it's tough to simply do an apples-to-apples comparison is that insurers can currently decline people who apply for coverage at the rates shown here. Rhode Island has very low rates of decline and also doesn't allow what's called up-rating, according to HealthPocket. In the other states, however, between 16 and 21 percent of all applications for individual and family policies are declined, and the rejection rates for some insurers approach 90 percent. These rates will fall to zero under Obamacare.
Further, an average of 27 percent (California), 29 percent (Connecticut) and 41 percent (Ohio) of the time, the rates that people are quoted wind up being lower than the rates they are actually offered. That's usually because an applicant's health history contains information that renders him or her ineligible for so-called preferred rates. But this distinction is often not made clear in the initial sales process. The bottom line is that the rates quoted for individual and family policies in 2013 are often not the rates actually offered to consumers. The rates under Obamacare, by comparison, cannot be increased for reasons other than age, location and smoking history.
Lastly, the 2014 rates filed for Obamacare represent an enormous "best guess" by insurers about how their 2014 claims experience will turn out. While the law's individual mandate requires nearly everyone to have health insurance, the penalties for not doing so will be modest next year. Many younger Americans could well decide it will be cheaper to pay a $95 penalty than to have health insurance.
Under Obamacare, it will be the younger generations' participation that helps make coverage affordable for everyone else. Younger people tend to have very low insurance claims, which explains why so many of them forgo insurance entirely. If too many of them continue to avoid buying insurance, then the rates charged to individual older Americans will need to rise in 2015 and perhaps beyond.
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Source: U.S.News & World Report
(Article 4 of 4 next below)
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Article 4 of 4 (Article 1-3 of 4 next above)
5 Ways Obama Health Care Reform
Will Impact Your Finances and Taxes
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Even if you've heard about health care reform, you may be confused about how the law impacts you, your finances and taxes. Whether you already have health insurance or not, here are the top five things you should know.
1. The uninsured will have affordable options. Beginning Oct. 1, 2013, uninsured Americans can start shopping for affordable health insurance using online health insurance marketplaces. Most uninsured United States citizens and legal residents will be required to purchase health insurance by March 31, 2014. If you purchase your own insurance, you may be eligible for more affordable insurance. For more information, visit your state's online health insurance marketplace.
2. Insurance coverage will be expanded. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, you cannot be denied coverage. The law also extends coverage to young adults who can stay on their parents' plan until age 26. Medicaid will now be offered if you're under age 65 with a yearly income less than about $15,300, or $31,155 for a family of four.
3. You may be eligible for a government subsidy to help cover insurance costs. If you purchase health insurance through an online health insurance marketplace or exchange and have yearly income no greater than $45,960, or $94,200 for a family of four, you may be eligible for a government subsidy to help pay for health insurance. The subsidy will be in the form of a tax credit. Unlike most tax credits, you will not have to wait to receive the credit or subsidy; it will be applied to your insurance premium when you purchase in 2014.
4. You may receive a penalty if not insured by March 31, 2014. If you are required to purchase health insurance and have not done so by March 31, 2014, you will receive a penalty on your 2014 tax return (filed in 2015). The penalty in 2014 is $95 per adult and $47.50 per child, and the fee is capped at $285 or 1 percent of household income. Each year the penalty increases; in 2016, the fine rises to $695 per adult and will be capped at $2,085 or 2.5 percent of income. There is no penalty for a gap in coverage for less than three months.
5. If you have health insurance, you are already covered under the law. Not everyone will need to purchase health insurance through the online marketplaces. If you already have health insurance through your employer, Medicare or Medicaid, you are all set.
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Source: U.S.News & World Report
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========================================================================================================================================================== Reaping Profit After Assisting on Obamacare Health Law
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Those who had a hand in the Obamacare law’s passage are finding lucrative work in the private sector,
as businesses try to understand the complex measure, reshape it by pressing for regulatory changes — or profit from it
That means boom times for what might be called an Obamacare cottage industry, providing work for dozens of former administration and mostly Democratic Congressional officials whose immersion in health policy minutiae, and friendships, make them invaluable to private business.
Dr. Dora Hughes, for example, has a medical degree from Vanderbilt and a master’s in public health from Harvard and never envisioned joining a law firm. But Dr. Hughes, a former Obama administration official, has something Washington lawyers and lobbying shops covet: an insider’s understanding of the new health care law.
After nearly four years as counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, she left government last year to work for Sidley Austin, which represents insurers, pharmaceutical companies, device makers and others affected by the law. She is not a registered lobbyist, but rather a “strategic adviser,” although some call that a distinction without a difference.
“Health policy is what I do,” Dr. Hughes said in a recent interview. “It’s what I’ve always done, so I’m not doing anything differently. My work is not based only on relationships or trying to curry favor.”
The health care industry now spends more money on lobbying in Washington than any sector of the economy — more than $243 million last year alone, slightly higher than the $242 million spent by financial, insurance and real estate companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics here.
Of the “revolving door lobbyists” profiled by the center, those specializing in health care account for 12 percent, more than any other economic sector.
Critics say these former officials are cashing in, trading on the relationships and expertise they acquired while working for the taxpayers, and cite such career moves as proof that Mr. Obama has not lived up to his promise to change the culture of influence peddling in the capital.
Liz Fowler, a onetime executive with WellPoint, the insurer, helped draft the legislation as the chief health counsel for the Senate Finance Committee and later joined the administration. Now she runs global health policy for Johnson & Johnson, the medical equipment and pharmaceutical giant, which strongly backed the health bill and stands to benefit from it.
Ms. Fowler is not a registered lobbyist, but she does provide in-house advice on the bill — work that has drawn criticism from publications like the British newspaper The Guardian and the Web sites Salon and The Huffington Post, where the journalist Bill Moyers singled out Ms. Fowler, asserting that “when push comes to shove, corporate interests will have the upper hand.”
Yet the progression from government to the private sector is also predictable, a window into the peculiar rhythms of life in the capital. Young aides, often fresh out of college or graduate school, acquire highly specialized knowledge but eventually settle down, build lives and long for jobs that pay more and let them see their children at night.
Those were considerations for Dr. Hughes, who has a 3-year-old, and Yvette Fontenot, a mother of three who began her Washington career in 1997, analyzing Medicare for the Office of Management and Budget. Ms. Fontenot worked on the health bill as a Finance Committee aide and later moved to the White House. Four months ago she joined Avenue Solutions, a boutique lobbying shop.
“Every client out there is interested in the Affordable Care Act and what it means,” said Ms. Fontenot, who like Dr. Hughes concentrates on strategic advice. With exchanges soon to go live, she said, companies “want to know whether there is a potential to build on this, to make changes.”
Many of the former health care officials are lawyers or lobbyists, though not all. Nancy-Ann DeParle, Mr. Obama’s former “health czar” and later his deputy chief of staff, now guides health care investments as a partner in a new private equity firm, Consonance Capital, with colleagues from her pre-White House days. Bob Kocher, a doctor, management consultant and former member of Mr. Obama’s economics team, is a California venture capitalist, helping finance health start-ups.
“The tentacles of Obamacare touch everybody — health insurance companies, doctors, the payers,” said Ivan Adler, an executive recruiter with the McCormick Group who specializes in K Street, Washington’s lobbying corridor. “This law is so complicated that you really have to have somebody playing sherpa in order to follow it, because it is fluid and changing. And the supply of people who understand it is way smaller than the demand.”
Since 2011, Mr. Adler said, he has counseled dozens of job-hunting former officials with health care experience, including some lawmakers.
Dr. Hughes has advised employers on how to comply with the law, and has at least one client interested in operating an insurance exchange. The daughter of a former Army doctor and a patient herself (she was given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis while in her 20s), she sees her job as an extension of work she began a decade ago, first as a health policy adviser to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and later to Mr. Obama, then a senator.
Under federal law, lobbyists must register if they meet certain conditions, like spending 20 percent or more of their time contacting officials on behalf of clients. Mr. Obama, who came into office vowing to change the culture of Washington, requires his appointees to sign an ethics pledge barring them from lobbying administration colleagues for the duration of his presidency.
Dr. Hughes, who is subject to the ban, could still lobby members of Congress if she wanted. “I don’t have any philosophical objection,” she said. But her real value to Sidley Austin, said Rick Boucher, a Democrat and former congressman who is her supervisor there, is that she understands the underpinnings of the health law, and can anticipate how regulations governing it might be written. “She’s sharing her understanding, based on experience,” he said.
Other officials who have gone to work in the health care industry include Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat and former congressman from North Dakota. He voted for the health care bill, lost his seat and now represents health care clients as a lawyer for Alston & Bird. Elizabeth Engel, who oversaw health legislation and served as a liaison to Congress when she was a deputy assistant health secretary under Ms. Sebelius, is now advising health care clients for the Glover Park Group.
James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University here, called all the activity “a natural phenomenon,” and one that is hardly limited to Democrats. After Republicans passed Medicare prescription drug legislation in 2003, Billy Tauzin, one of the bill’s major Republican supporters, resigned from Congress to head the pharmaceutical industry trade group.
The revolving door also spins in the other direction.
Chris Jennings, who advised President Bill Clinton on health policy, including the ill-fated reform effort in the early 1990s, closed his firm, Jennings Policy Strategies, in July when Mr. Obama asked him to join the White House to oversee implementation of the health bill. He has told friends that after two decades of advocating universal coverage, and with Republicans trying to undo the landmark legislation, he could not refuse to help.
At Sidley Austin, Dr. Hughes said she found her new work “meaningful and productive,” but has drawn one red line: she will not advise clients who opposed the health bill.
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Source: NYT
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The Least Stressful Jobs
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Every job comes with stress, but some are just easier on the mind and body.
Career site CareerCast.com compiled a list of the least stressful jobs of 2013, comparing 11 factors like travel, public visibility, competitiveness, growth potential, deadlines and physical demands. The lower the score, the more relaxing the job.
Which jobs are the most laid-back?
1. University professor
It’s true they have to create course work, give lectures, put in office hours, and grade hundreds of papers, but long summer vacations and seasonal breaks help wash away job-related stress. However, those looking to break into the field face serious competition, and teachers without the comfort of tenure may feel a bit more on edge.
- Median salary: $62,050 in 2010.
- Job outlook: 17 percent growth through 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- CareerCast stress score: 6.45.
2. Seamstress/tailor
Tailoring is mostly a low-stress job in a quiet work environment, but that’s probably not so true for those sewing costumes for big-budget productions with strict deadlines. However, CareerCast highlights the fact that people in these occupations work creatively on a daily basis, which may have given them a lower stress score.
- Median salary: $25,850.
- Job outlook: 1 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 6.5.
3. Medical records technician
Medical records technicians are responsible for categorizing and managing accurate patient data. They also have to be up-to-date on various laws and regulations, but otherwise their occupation keeps them behind a desk doing data entry. It’s possibly boring, but probably not stressful.
- Median salary: $32,350.
- Job outlook: 21 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 7.5.
4. Jeweler
Yet another job with a quiet, private work environment and a focus on being creative. The stresslevel likely goes up if you’re the owner of your own store.
- Median salary: $35,170.
- Job outlook: -5 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 8.26.
5. Medical laboratory technician
Medical laboratory technicians perform tests on things like bodily fluid that provide doctors with data for diagnoses. The job doesn’t require vigorous training — certification programs, vocational schools and accredited associate degrees are common – but technicians need to be accurate. Above-average pay and a decent job outlook don’t hurt.
- Median salary: $46,680.
- Job outlook: 13 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 9.28.
6. Audiologist
With an emphasis on hearing and the proper function of ears, an audiologist’s office is probably a quiet, peaceful place to work. The salary is respectable, the work is not physically demanding, and the job growth predicted by the BLS is exceptional.
- Median salary: $66,660.
- Job outlook: 37 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 9.35.
7. Dietitian
Dietitians teach patients how to eat better by providing personalized diets or meal plans.
With the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pegging America’s adult obesity rate at 35.7 percent, the demand for the services of dietitians can only increase. They earn a decent salary and can work in a variety of locations, such as hospitals, nursing homes and schools, or they can lose the boss and be self-employed.
- Median salary: $53,250.
- Job outlook: 20 percent.
- Stress score: 10.24.
8. Hairstylist
A visit to the beauty shop is usually a pleasant one, thanks to the stylist. They work in a friendly environment and make their customers look good. On the downside, they’re on their feet all day, and the pay is abysmal. Tips help, but at the end of the day, you might need a second job to support yourself.
- Median salary: $22,500.
- Job outlook: 14 percent.
- Stress score: 10.41.
9. Librarian
Maybe the only occupation on this list with the power to shush someone, the librarian works in the most peaceful of places. Surrounded by books in a quiet and pleasant location equals a calm work environment. Taking into consideration the solid median pay, the librarian should be at the top of this list.
- Median salary: $54,500.
- Job outlook: 7 percent.
- Stress score: 10.58.
10. Drill press operator
It’s understandable why this job isn’t considered stressful — it’s probably more monotonous than anything — but working with heavy machinery that can cause injury or death without proper worker precautions isn’t carefree.
- Median salary: $31,910.
- Job outlook: 6 percent.
- Stress score: 11.32.
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Source: MoneyTalks
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The Most Stressful Jobs
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A career site has produced a list of the most stressful jobs in America, based on a number of factors like danger, deadlines and how much you're in the public eye. Did your occupation qualify?
What’s your idea of a stressful job? Would taxi driver or senior corporate executive make the list? Think your job is more stressful than driving people around town or managing a company?
The career site CareerCast.com compiled a list of the 10 most stressful jobs , and some of their picks might surprise you. They took into account factors like:
- Competitiveness.
- Meeting the public.
- Danger.
- Physical demands.
- Travel.
- Environmental conditions.
- Deadlines.
1. Enlisted military personnel
The dangers of being deployed to a combat zone are obvious. Afterward, many veterans face difficulty re-entering society, and up to 30 percent grapple with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2012, there were 349 suicides among active-duty U.S. military personnel, more than the 295 American combat deaths in Afghanistan that year, The Associated Press says.
- Median pay: $42,000 for E-7 with eight-plus years of experience.
- Job outlook: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s “excellent” through 2020.
- CareerCast stress score: 84.72.
Generals have to devise strategies and make tactical decisions that could send troops to their deaths — a responsibility that most people will never face. Nor is it something most people would ever want to.
- Median salary: $196,300.
- Job outlook: Varies.
- CareerCast stress score: 65.54.
There were 83 U.S. firefighter fatalities last year, and 33 so far in 2013, FEMA says. In 2010, an average of 2.33 firefighter deaths occurred for every 100,000 fire incidents, and from 1977 through 2011 there were 4,325 on-duty fatalities, FEMA reports.
- Median salary: $45,250.
- Job outlook: 9 percent growth projected through 2020.
- CareerCast stress score: 60.54.
Flying is stressful enough for the passengers. Consider what it’s like to pilot a plane. Not only do you have to get dozens of people safely from Point A to Point B at 10,000 feet in the air, you have to deal with odd hours, layovers and jet lag.
- Median salary: $92,060.
- Job outlook: 11 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 60.28.
Is this job really more stressful than, say, working as a commercial fisherman? But PR people do have to manage corporate damage control, put themselves or their clients in front of the media all day, and run the risk of being fired whenever they don’t get the desired results.
- Median salary: $57,550.
- Job outlook: 21 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 48.52.
Corporate execs represent the company, facing media scrutiny and stockholder critique. And heaven forbid the company doesn’t make more and more money on their watch.
- Median salary: $101,250.
- Job outlook: 14 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 47.46.
7. Photojournalist
Photojournalists visually record fires, accidents, violent conflicts and war, all while a photo editor somewhere is harping about deadlines. Many have low-paying jobs and job uncertainty as the business of journalism undergoes radical change. Many are freelancers who have to constantly sell themselves and their work to publications.
- Median salary: $29,130.
- Job outlook: 13 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 47.12.
Newspaper reporters face multiple strict deadlines every day, long and sometimes unpredictable hours, and high public visibility. Assignments can vary from heartbreaking to boring. (Consider a four-hour school board meeting.) Everyone who works in the business knows multiple reporters who have been laid off as newspapers lose revenue.
- Median salary: $36,000.
- Job outlook: A very dismal -6 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 46.75.
Sixty-four taxi drivers and chauffeurs died on the job in 2011, according to the BLS. Cabbies are also susceptible to robbery because they carry cash. Then there’s the constant headache and hazard of driving in heavy traffic. Add low pay and you’ve got a stressful job.
- Median salary: $22,440.
- Job outlook: 20 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 46.18.
During an average years, 54,774 officers were assaulted, 72 officers were killed in the line of duty, and 53 officers died as a result of some type of accident, according to the FBI. Police routinely encounter dangerous situations. You’d think this job would be higher on the list.
- Median salary: $55,010.
- Job outlook: 7 percent.
- CareerCast stress score: 45.60.
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Source: MoneyTalks
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15 Great Jobs That Don’t Require a College Education
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College is a great time to figure out what you want to do with your life. But if you’re not on scholarship, it’s an expensive way to think things through. The Institute for College Access & Success’ Project on Student Debt reports two-thirds of the Class of 2010 graduated in debt, owing more than $25,000 on average.
It’s not uncommon for students to change majors multiple times and still end up in a field different from their degree. I went from computer science to English to communication, briefly flirting with photography somewhere in between. And after I graduated? I went into journalism, which sort of combines them all, but isn’t what my diploma says.
This doesn’t mean college isn’t worth it – for those who pick a field and stick to it, it usually is. Having a degree usually leads to higher lifetime earnings, in part because leadership roles and higher-paying positions tend to require them. And there are plenty of ways to cut college costs, from attending cheaper schools to scoring lots of scholarships and recycling textbook cash.
But college straight out of high school (or ever) isn’t for everybody, and many people get ahead in life pursuing jobs that don’t require a degree. By the time bright-eyed graduates hit the job market looking for their entry-level seats, those grizzled workforce veterans are a rung or two up the ladder with four years of experience under their belts.
A degree may even be an entry barrier in some fields – because practical experience is prized over a piece of paper. Plus, you’re making money instead of spending it. Or, as job search site CareerCast puts it…
Assuming you have no degree but are willing to do some advanced training, such as attending a technical school, you could earn around $30,000 a year as a beginner, if you are sharp. That means that over four years, you’d earn about $120,000, while your counterpart who’s in college earns little or nothing, and may even carry the same amount in debt by graduation.
With that in mind, here are 15 titles CareerCast says are great jobs making over $40,000 a year without a four-year degree…
1. Dental hygienist
Income average: $68,000
Income growth (from entry-level to top): 109 percent
Employment growth (through 2020): 37.70 percent
2. Online advertising manager
Income average: $87,000
Income growth: 255 percent
Employment growth: 25.00 percent
3. Web developer
Income average: $76,000
Income growth: 179 percent
Employment growth: 21.70 percent
4. Paralegal assistant
Income average: $47,000
Income growth: 159 percent
Employment growth: 18.30 percent
5. Stenographer – court reporter
Income average: $48,000
Income growth: 250 percent
Employment growth: 14.10 percent
6. Heating and refrigeration mechanic
Income average: $43,000
Income growth: 158 percent
Employment growth: 33.70 percent
7. Surveyor
Income average: $55,000
Income growth: 190 percent
Employment growth: 25.40 percent
8. Executive assistant
Income average: $44,000
Income growth: 131 percent
Employment growth: 12.60 percent
9. Insurance agent
Income average: $47,000
Income growth: 342 percent
Employment Growth: 21.90 percent
10. Industrial machine repairer
Income average: $45,000
Income growth: 127 percent
Employment growth: 21.60 percent
11. Tax examiner – collector
Income average: $49,000
Income growth: 207 percent
Employment growth: 7.30 percent
12. Wholesales sales representative
Income average: $52,000
Income growth: 304 percent
Employment growth: 15.60 percent
13. Construction machine operator
Income average: $40,000
Income growth: 173 percent
Employment growth: 23.50 percent
14. Electrical technician
Income average: $56,000
Income growth: 138 percent
Employment growth: 1.90 percent
15. Architectural drafter
Income average: $46,000
Income growth: 140 percent
Employment growth: 3.20 percent
Already saddled with college debt? Check out What to Do If You’re Struggling with Student Loans. And for more on this topic, When a High School Diploma Beats a College Degree
Related stories
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- 10 Tips to Writing a Resume Better Than Yahoo's CEO
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Click green or further info
Source: MoneyTalks
_________________________________________________
Next
"must-to-read" articles
The articles will inspire & motivate you to believe that
you do have the talents for a good financial success
Study the success stories below- then you can start training yourself to realize
"Anything you can conceive, you can achieve"
*) conceive = imagine - think - see - fancy
Also: Become pregnant with a child
These true stories & many other reports will prove the above statement true for you
Take action on your dreams - plan & execute; the desired results will come
The President of STAF, Inc. is the founder of the new science Successology ® (Reg.U.S.Pat.Off.1991)
In the terminology of that science he calls this the ICDA™ technology (ICDA ™ = "I can do anything")
______________________
Bulgarian Bodybuilder Defies Adversity
Published in April 2013
Click green to see the person's picture: Bogomil Yordanov - then in the internet click the article title and the picture will be larger
SOFIA, Bulgaria—Bogomil Yordanov’s muscular build immediately advertises his physical strength. His tenacity of spirit, however, revealed itself gradually as he sat in a club in downtown Sofia, Bulgaria, to tell The Epoch Times his story.
Yordanov, 28, is a national bodybuilding champion, in spite of a car accident doctors said would cripple him for life. He is an accomplished lawyer, in spite of little time to study as he worked from a young age when his mother became too sick to support them.
His father abandoned the family before Yordanov was born. He was raised by his mother and her parents.
“My grandfather told me heroic stories from history, and my grandmother read me books and fairy tales,” recalled Yordanov. His voice was soft, and his manner warm and tranquil.
“I wanted to help the good people so they would not suffer, to beat the bad guys, to spread justice, as I believed that the good characters should always be stronger than the evil,” he said.
His love of physical training began with karate as a child. By the age of 15 he had already been training long enough to work as a fitness instructor—a necessity, as that is the year his mother was diagnosed with cancer and became too ill to work.
His grades suffered, and he was unable to go to university. He had a dream of helping others obtain justice, and in particular, of helping the poor, as a lawyer.
“I did not have the opportunity to read enough, but I did not put up with it,” he said. “I had decided on my major and nothing could stop me,” he added seriously.
Yordanov dedicated himself to academic preparation and saving money. He began his studies at a private university in 2004 and later graduated with honors from Cambridge University’s law school. Now he works for the Bulgarian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy.
“[It’s about] the will to believe and continue to risk, even if nobody else believes in you,” Yordanov said.
While he exercised his mind, he continued to train his body.
He was ready for the national bodybuilding competition in April 2005, when the greatest adversity yet stopped him short.
Only 11 days before the competition, a tire on Yordanov’s car burst when he hit a bump. He lost control, crashed into a light pole, and awoke a day later in the hospital unable to remember what had happened.
He had dislocated hips, internal bleeding, and other injuries. The car was demolished, and the police officers that arrived at the scene were amazed he had survived, Yordanov said.
“You know, you’re already disabled and you will never be able to work out,” a nurse told him. He told her he was determined not only to train again, but also to continue competing as a bodybuilder. Yordanov recalled the nurse’s response: “This guy has brain damage and doesn’t realize what disability is!”
“I look around and see how many people are not happy, how many people are resigned to doing just anything in their lives and have never fought for their dreams,” the young man said earnestly. “[Such people] always say that this is the situation and that nothing else can be done. They blame it on their parents, on the state system, on the place they were born, on inequality in society, on the rich, on the politicians—on the others.”
Through the adversity Yordanov faced, he decided he would not give up, not only for himself, but also because “I wish to somehow inspire people’s faith in their own abilities, to convince them not to listen to anyone but yourself, and to follow their goals and dreams, no matter how hard it is and whatever others say.”
“So I had to continue to follow my path and to show that there are no boundaries,” he said firmly.
He returned to the gym two months after his accident. In 2006, he won the Balkan Bodybuilding Championship in Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, in the 85 kg (187-pound) category.
His victory was a milestone in his life. He said with a smile: “Nobody believed in me, but I believed. And when I accomplished it, everyone was speechless. When you succeed, you [gain] even greater strength to believe in yourself and in the future.”
As a chapter in his life closed, Yordanov knew that physical strength could not battle the injustices he truly cared about.
“It turns out that is not like in the books, where good overcomes evil,” Yordanov mused. “In life, it is much more complicated. You can not go out and enforce justice by being like Robin Hood, who takes from the rich and gives to the poor.”
His work for the Department of International Cooperation, part of the Bulgarian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, is very rewarding, said Yordanov. He stopped bodybuilding in 2008, and he hopes his less tangible virtues will stand out above his physique.
Yordanov ended his tale with a moral: “Even if I can get just one person to think, to follow his heart, to be better with others and to be happier, then my whole life and all my difficulties thus far will have not been in vain.”
Tags: body building - Bulgaria - doctors - Robin Hood
Click to see the person's picture: Bogomil Yordanov - then in the internet click the article title and the picture will be larger
Click green for further info
_____________________________________________
Study inspirational stories - they give you ideas, motivation, strength
to achieve anything your mind can conceive -
See also the other success stories above and below
___________
Here is a woman who started from zero in Spain (not the richest country in Europe/world),
yet she made herself the richest woman in the world
Whatever your mind can conceive you can achieve
*) conceive = imagine - think - see - fancy
Also: Become pregnant with a child
This true success story & many other reports will prove the above statement true for you
Take action on your dreams - plan & execute; the desired results will come
The President of STAF, Inc. is the founder of the new science Successology ® (Reg.U.S.Pat.Off.1991)
In the terminology of that science he calls this the ICDA™ technology (ICDA ™ = "I can do anything")
______________________
Mera, Spain's & World's richest woman, dies at age 69
MADRID (AP) — Rosalia Mera, a seamstress who co-founded a clothing store in northwestern Spain that grew into Zara, one of the world's largest retail chains, has died at the age of 69. She was Spain's & world's richest woman.
Inditex SA, the owner of Zara, issued a statement Friday confirming her death but did not provide more details and declined comment via email. Spanish media widely reported that Mera, a major stakeholder in Inditex, suffered a stroke while on vacation on the Mediterranean island of Menorca and died Thursday night at a hospital in La Coruna, the city where she was born in Spain's Galicia region.
Mera founded the first Zara store in 1975 in La Coruna with her then-husband, Armancio Ortega. He is listed by Forbes as the world's third-richest person.
They were originally going to call the store Zorba after the "Zorba the Greek" movie, but there was a bar with that name a few blocks away from the site, so the letters on the Zorba sign were rearranged to spell out Zara.
The store specialized in low-priced versions of more expensive popular clothes, and the formula turned into a success for store openings across Spain and then internationally.
Mera held 6.99 percent of Inditex stock, according to company filings at the Madrid stock exchange, and her fortune was estimated by Forbes at $6.1 billion. The magazine says she was the world's 195th richest person but was in the No. 1 spot on its list for "wealthiest self-made woman."
She also became known for voicing opposition to the current conservative government's plans to change Spanish abortion laws. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is a close ally of the Catholic Church on moral and social issues, and has repeatedly said he will revise Spain's abortion law, though he has not yet tabled any proposals. The previous Socialist government passed a law allowing 16 year olds to get abortions without parental consent. Mera said that law is "just fine" and "should be left as it is."
In addition, she opposed government cutbacks in the name of austerity affecting Spain's cherished education and national health care programs.
Besides the Zara chain, Inditex also owns retailers Bershka, Masssimo Dutti, Oysho, Pull & Bear, Stradivarius, Uterque and Zara Home. There are 1,763 Zara stores around the world, and Inditex has a total of 6,058 stores and 120,000 employees.
Source: Internet News
_______________________________________
Another inspiring success story
Newly crowned Miss Iowa hopes to advocate for people with disabilities
Click green for further info
Nicole Kelly, the newly crowned Miss Iowa, plans to use her title to help advocate for people with disabilities, reports the DesMoines Register.
Kelly, 23, was born without her left forearm, according to her biography at MissIowa.com .
Photos can be viewed also at the Miss Iowa Facebook page.
After winning the title, Kelly spoke with CBS-4 News. "It was shocking and overwhelming—just like that your life changes," she said.
"As I grew up I learned to counterbalance the initial stares I received from people with an outgoing personality that would not give into 'no,'" Kelly wrote on the pageant site. "This means that I tried everything. From baseball, to dance, to diving—there's nothing I would not try. I found my passion within a world where I was giving people permission to stare: the stage."
According to Kelly's biography, she's currently studying directing and theater management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She hopes to work on Broadway.
"If you would have told me a year ago that 'pageant queen' was in my future I would have laughed," she wrote. "Giving voice to a platform is a great honor and I am excited to continue my adventure of speaking out and touching lives."
Kelly will compete in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J.
________________________________
Newly crowned Miss Iowa hopes to advocate for people with disabilities
Click green for further info
Nicole Kelly, the newly crowned Miss Iowa, plans to use her title to help advocate for people with disabilities, reports the DesMoines Register.
Kelly, 23, was born without her left forearm, according to her biography at MissIowa.com .
Photos can be viewed also at the Miss Iowa Facebook page.
After winning the title, Kelly spoke with CBS-4 News. "It was shocking and overwhelming—just like that your life changes," she said.
"As I grew up I learned to counterbalance the initial stares I received from people with an outgoing personality that would not give into 'no,'" Kelly wrote on the pageant site. "This means that I tried everything. From baseball, to dance, to diving—there's nothing I would not try. I found my passion within a world where I was giving people permission to stare: the stage."
According to Kelly's biography, she's currently studying directing and theater management at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She hopes to work on Broadway.
"If you would have told me a year ago that 'pageant queen' was in my future I would have laughed," she wrote. "Giving voice to a platform is a great honor and I am excited to continue my adventure of speaking out and touching lives."
Kelly will compete in the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, N.J.
________________________________
Another inspiring story
How do you get from zero to $1 billion
in revenue in five years?
Google (GOOG) did it by organizing the world's information.
Facebook (FB) did it by making the world more open and connected.
A hyper-growth trajectory, you might assume, requires a world-changing idea, brilliant programmers, and a Silicon Valley address.
Not necessarily. Hamdi Ulukaya borrowed $1 million to buy an 85-year-old factory in upstate New York, came up with a new recipe for an ancient product and took on Fortune 500 giants in a consumer category that most experts figured was locked up.
Five years after selling the first case of his Greek-style yogurt, Chobani, in October 2007, Ulukayareached $1 billion in annual revenue. This kind of growth is unheard of, particularly for a startup, in the packaged-goods business—and rare in the tech world.
But Ulukaya has landed in the league of tech's fastest-growing companies--and can claim something that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page cannot: He owns 100% of his startup.
On Saturday night in Monte Carlo, Ulukaya, 41, was named Ernst & Young's World Entrepreneur of the Year, copping the grand prize in a competition that pitted him against 48 entrepreneurs whom E&Y designated tops in their own countries. Ulukaya's win was a surprise only because many of the 1,000 attendees at the professional services firms' annual confab guessed that the judges—successful entrepreneurs from across the globe—wouldn't bestow the top award on a U.S. founder. But Ulukaya, who emigrated from Turkey to America at 22, impressed the judges and everyone else with his up-from-nothing success story.
Over breakfast in Monte Carlo last Thursday, Ulukaya told me about growing up in a tiny village in eastern Turkey, working on his father's dairy farm and moving to the U.S. hoping to learn English and go to business school. New York City's hubbub overwhelmed him. So he moved upstate, took some classes at the Albany branch of the State University of New York, and started a wholesale feta cheese business called Euphrates.
Everything changed one day, a decade later, when Ulukaya opened a piece of mail that said: "Fully equipped yogurt factory for sale." Defying the advice of cautious friends and advisers, he borrowed just over $1 million from the SBA and Key Bank (KEY) to buy the Breyer's yogurt factory that plant Kraft Foods' was shuttering. He recruited four workers from the plant and a "yogurt master" from Turkey and started work on creating the best-tasting, highest-quality yogurt.
Ulukaya has no serious business training, no corporate role models ("I never worked for anyone except my father.") and no investors except for himself. So it's natural that Chobani's strategy is based on instinct—the founder-CEO's. The organization is flat—"no layers," Ulukaya says. He employs 3,000 people in New York State and Idaho and at a dairy he bought in Australia. His corporate motto: "Nothing but good." From the start, Ulukaya has allocated 10% of Chobani's after-tax profits to philanthropy. Chobani's foundation is small but growing rapidly.
A billionaire at least on paper, Ulukaya says he longs to inspire other entrepreneurs to do some version of what he's doing—that is, make real stuff in real America. "I want to help bring entrepreneurship back to small towns, or else wealth will be only on the coasts," he says.
As for the glamorization of the tech and social-media crowd, he adds, "Who says you have to be a certain way to be a cool entrepreneur?"
Source: Internet news
__________________________________
How do you get from zero to $1 billion
in revenue in five years?
Google (GOOG) did it by organizing the world's information.
Facebook (FB) did it by making the world more open and connected.
A hyper-growth trajectory, you might assume, requires a world-changing idea, brilliant programmers, and a Silicon Valley address.
Not necessarily. Hamdi Ulukaya borrowed $1 million to buy an 85-year-old factory in upstate New York, came up with a new recipe for an ancient product and took on Fortune 500 giants in a consumer category that most experts figured was locked up.
Five years after selling the first case of his Greek-style yogurt, Chobani, in October 2007, Ulukayareached $1 billion in annual revenue. This kind of growth is unheard of, particularly for a startup, in the packaged-goods business—and rare in the tech world.
But Ulukaya has landed in the league of tech's fastest-growing companies--and can claim something that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page cannot: He owns 100% of his startup.
On Saturday night in Monte Carlo, Ulukaya, 41, was named Ernst & Young's World Entrepreneur of the Year, copping the grand prize in a competition that pitted him against 48 entrepreneurs whom E&Y designated tops in their own countries. Ulukaya's win was a surprise only because many of the 1,000 attendees at the professional services firms' annual confab guessed that the judges—successful entrepreneurs from across the globe—wouldn't bestow the top award on a U.S. founder. But Ulukaya, who emigrated from Turkey to America at 22, impressed the judges and everyone else with his up-from-nothing success story.
Over breakfast in Monte Carlo last Thursday, Ulukaya told me about growing up in a tiny village in eastern Turkey, working on his father's dairy farm and moving to the U.S. hoping to learn English and go to business school. New York City's hubbub overwhelmed him. So he moved upstate, took some classes at the Albany branch of the State University of New York, and started a wholesale feta cheese business called Euphrates.
Everything changed one day, a decade later, when Ulukaya opened a piece of mail that said: "Fully equipped yogurt factory for sale." Defying the advice of cautious friends and advisers, he borrowed just over $1 million from the SBA and Key Bank (KEY) to buy the Breyer's yogurt factory that plant Kraft Foods' was shuttering. He recruited four workers from the plant and a "yogurt master" from Turkey and started work on creating the best-tasting, highest-quality yogurt.
Ulukaya has no serious business training, no corporate role models ("I never worked for anyone except my father.") and no investors except for himself. So it's natural that Chobani's strategy is based on instinct—the founder-CEO's. The organization is flat—"no layers," Ulukaya says. He employs 3,000 people in New York State and Idaho and at a dairy he bought in Australia. His corporate motto: "Nothing but good." From the start, Ulukaya has allocated 10% of Chobani's after-tax profits to philanthropy. Chobani's foundation is small but growing rapidly.
A billionaire at least on paper, Ulukaya says he longs to inspire other entrepreneurs to do some version of what he's doing—that is, make real stuff in real America. "I want to help bring entrepreneurship back to small towns, or else wealth will be only on the coasts," he says.
As for the glamorization of the tech and social-media crowd, he adds, "Who says you have to be a certain way to be a cool entrepreneur?"
Source: Internet news
__________________________________
Device From Israeli Start-Up Gives
the Visually Impaired a Way to Read
JERUSALEM,June, 2013 — Liat Negrin, an Israeli who has been visually impaired since childhood, walked into a grocery store here recently, picked up a can of vegetables and easily read its label using a simple and unobtrusive camera attached to her glasses.
Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move freely.
Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.
In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.
The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,” a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.
It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week will be sold through the company’s Web site for $2,500, about the cost of a midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the privately held company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.
The device is quite different from other technology that has been developed to give some vision to people who are blind, like the artificial retina system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products. That system, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February, allows visual signals to bypass a damaged retina and be transmitted to the brain.
The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass, which also offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with normal vision and has limited visual recognition and local computing power.
OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University here. It is based on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered with another faculty member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his former graduate students, Yonatan Wexler.
“What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to recognize a new product,” said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who is a computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua studied as a graduate student. “This is more complex than it appears, and, as an expert, I find it really impressive.”
The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing processing power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer’s pocket and the computer vision algorithm developed by the scientists.
On a broader technology level, the OrCam system is representative of a wide range of rapid improvements being made in the field of artificial intelligence, in particular with vision systems for manufacturing as well as fields like autonomous motor vehicles. (Dr. Shashua previously founded Mobileye, a corporation that supplies camera technology to the automobile industry that can recognize objects like pedestrians and bicyclists and can keep a car in a lane on a freeway.)
Speech recognition is now routinely used by tens of millions of people on both iPhones and Android smartphones. Moreover, natural language processing is making it possible for computer systems to “read” documents, which is having a significant impact in the legal field, among others.
There are now at least six competing approaches in the field of computer vision. For example, researchers at Google and elsewhere have begun using what are known as “deep learning” techniques that attempt to mimic biological vision systems. However, they require vast computing resources for accurate recognition.
In contrast, the OrCam technique, which was described in a technical paper in 2011 by the Hebrew University researchers, offers a reasonable trade-off between recognition accuracy and speed. The technique, known as Shareboost, is distinguished by the fact that as the number of objects it needs to recognize grows, the system minimizes the amount of additional computer power required.
“The challenges are huge,” said Dr. Wexler, a co-author of the paper and vice president of research and development at OrCam. “People who have low vision will continue to have low vision, but we want to harness computer science to help them.”
Additionally the OrCam system is designed to have a minimal control system, or user interface. To recognize an object or text, the wearer simply points at it with his or her finger, and the device then interprets the scene.
The system recognizes a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user to add to its library — for example, text on a label or billboard, or a stop light or street sign — by simply waving his or her hand, or the object, in the camera’s field of view.
One of the key challenges, Dr. Shashua said, was allowing quick optical character recognition in a variety of lighting conditions as well as on flexible surfaces.
“The professional optical character readers today will work very well when the image is good, but we have additional challenges — we must read text on flexible surfaces like a hand-held newspaper,” he said.
Although the system is usable by the blind, OrCam is initially planning to sell the device to people in the United States who are visually impaired, which means that their vision cannot be adequately corrected with glasses.
In the United States, 21.2 million people over the age of 18 have some kind of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases and birth defects, according to the 2011 National Health Survey by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. OrCam said that worldwide there were 342 million adults with significant visual impairment, and that 52 million of them had middle-class incomes.
Source: OrCam technology info
___________________________________________
the Visually Impaired a Way to Read
JERUSALEM,June, 2013 — Liat Negrin, an Israeli who has been visually impaired since childhood, walked into a grocery store here recently, picked up a can of vegetables and easily read its label using a simple and unobtrusive camera attached to her glasses.
Ms. Negrin, who has coloboma, a birth defect that perforates a structure of the eye and afflicts about 1 in 10,000 people, is an employee at OrCam, an Israeli start-up that has developed a camera-based system intended to give the visually impaired the ability to both “read” easily and move freely.
Until now reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been cumbersome devices that recognize text in restricted environments, or, more recently, have been software applications on smartphones that have limited capabilities.
In contrast, the OrCam device is a small camera worn in the style of Google Glass, connected by a thin cable to a portable computer designed to fit in the wearer’s pocket. The system clips on to the wearer’s glasses with a small magnet and uses a bone-conduction speaker to offer clear speech as it reads aloud the words or object pointed to by the user.
The system is designed to both recognize and speak “text in the wild,” a term used to describe newspaper articles as well as bus numbers, and objects as diverse as landmarks, traffic lights and the faces of friends.
It currently recognizes English-language text and beginning this week will be sold through the company’s Web site for $2,500, about the cost of a midrange hearing aid. It is the only product, so far, of the privately held company, which is part of the high-tech boom in Israel.
The device is quite different from other technology that has been developed to give some vision to people who are blind, like the artificial retina system called Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products. That system, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February, allows visual signals to bypass a damaged retina and be transmitted to the brain.
The OrCam device is also drastically different from Google Glass, which also offers the wearer a camera but is designed for people with normal vision and has limited visual recognition and local computing power.
OrCam was founded several years ago by Amnon Shashua, a well-known researcher who is a computer science professor at Hebrew University here. It is based on computer vision algorithms that he has pioneered with another faculty member, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, and one of his former graduate students, Yonatan Wexler.
“What is remarkable is that the device learns from the user to recognize a new product,” said Tomaso Poggio, a computer scientist at M.I.T. who is a computer vision expert and with whom Dr. Shashua studied as a graduate student. “This is more complex than it appears, and, as an expert, I find it really impressive.”
The advance is the result of both rapidly improving computing processing power that can now be carried comfortably in a wearer’s pocket and the computer vision algorithm developed by the scientists.
On a broader technology level, the OrCam system is representative of a wide range of rapid improvements being made in the field of artificial intelligence, in particular with vision systems for manufacturing as well as fields like autonomous motor vehicles. (Dr. Shashua previously founded Mobileye, a corporation that supplies camera technology to the automobile industry that can recognize objects like pedestrians and bicyclists and can keep a car in a lane on a freeway.)
Speech recognition is now routinely used by tens of millions of people on both iPhones and Android smartphones. Moreover, natural language processing is making it possible for computer systems to “read” documents, which is having a significant impact in the legal field, among others.
There are now at least six competing approaches in the field of computer vision. For example, researchers at Google and elsewhere have begun using what are known as “deep learning” techniques that attempt to mimic biological vision systems. However, they require vast computing resources for accurate recognition.
In contrast, the OrCam technique, which was described in a technical paper in 2011 by the Hebrew University researchers, offers a reasonable trade-off between recognition accuracy and speed. The technique, known as Shareboost, is distinguished by the fact that as the number of objects it needs to recognize grows, the system minimizes the amount of additional computer power required.
“The challenges are huge,” said Dr. Wexler, a co-author of the paper and vice president of research and development at OrCam. “People who have low vision will continue to have low vision, but we want to harness computer science to help them.”
Additionally the OrCam system is designed to have a minimal control system, or user interface. To recognize an object or text, the wearer simply points at it with his or her finger, and the device then interprets the scene.
The system recognizes a pre-stored set of objects and allows the user to add to its library — for example, text on a label or billboard, or a stop light or street sign — by simply waving his or her hand, or the object, in the camera’s field of view.
One of the key challenges, Dr. Shashua said, was allowing quick optical character recognition in a variety of lighting conditions as well as on flexible surfaces.
“The professional optical character readers today will work very well when the image is good, but we have additional challenges — we must read text on flexible surfaces like a hand-held newspaper,” he said.
Although the system is usable by the blind, OrCam is initially planning to sell the device to people in the United States who are visually impaired, which means that their vision cannot be adequately corrected with glasses.
In the United States, 21.2 million people over the age of 18 have some kind of visual impairment, including age-related conditions, diseases and birth defects, according to the 2011 National Health Survey by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. OrCam said that worldwide there were 342 million adults with significant visual impairment, and that 52 million of them had middle-class incomes.
Source: OrCam technology info
___________________________________________
Brain work-outs may help preserve mental function
Click green for further info
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A review of the best evidence for interventions to prevent declining brain power finds that only one - mental exercise - consistently makes a difference.
The analysis of clinical trial results for assorted drugs, supplements and activities still can't say, however, whether the brain training programs that do seem to sharpen mental function also improve people's daily lives or lower their risk of developing dementia.
"All we know is you will do better on certain (cognitive) tests. Whether that delays dementia...remains to be seen," said Dr. Raza Naqvi, the study's lead author and a researcher at the University of Toronto.
Mild cognitive impairment may affect as many as a quarter of people over age 70, according to Naqvi and his colleagues. And perhaps 10 percent of those seniors progress to more serious dementia each year, the researchers write in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Numerous products and activity programs claim to be able to slow mental decline, but nothing has proven a surefire way to preserve brainpower.
"Most physicians have a feeling that there isn't anything out there that has shown strong evidence, otherwise we would all be out there promoting it ourselves," said Naqvi.
To see whether any approach fits that bill, or at least seems promising, Naqvi and his colleagues gathered results from all the randomized controlled trials - the gold standard for research - they could find comparing the mental functioning of adults given a particular treatment to others who received no intervention.
Participants in all the trials were 65 years or older and had no mental decline at the beginning of the experiment.
Drugs, hormone therapy (in both men and women), vitamins and supplements including gingko and omega 3s mostly showed no benefits.
Indeed, most of the trials involving estrogen replacement therapy for women showed greater cognitive decline among women taking the hormones.
One study of the drug donepezil, which goes by the brand name Aricept and is approved for use to slow the progression of dementia, found improvements in users' ability to recall facts, but experiments with other medications showed no benefits.
"At this time, none of the medications or pharmacologic therapies have any evidence to support their use," Naqvi told Reuters Health. "I don't want researchers to give up - I think it's important to critically look at potential therapies - but I don't think the evidence is there to recommend a lot of these."
Studies that involved physical activity yielded mixed results; of the three that Naqvi's group reviewed, one found no benefit to memory, but an improvement in mental processing known as "executive function."
Another study found some memory benefits, but no other cognitive improvements, while a third saw no change in the performance on tests given to participants who went through an exercise program.
Only mental training - for which there were three studies - yielded positive results every time.
One large study that included more than 2,800 people offered one of three mental training programs focused on memory, reasoning or processing speed.
The participants randomly assigned to the memory group, for instance, went through 10 hour-long training sessions that taught methods for remembering written material, such as word lists.
Two years after the training programs, people who participated in a mental exercise performed better on related tasks than others who did not participate.
In other words, the memory group did better on memory tests than people who received no special training, while the reasoning group did better on reasoning tests.
The researchers also tested how well people performed on everyday tasks, such as finding a number in a phone book or preparing a meal, and found signs that people performed better if they had been through a mental training program.
"There was some evidence then that...specifically our speed and reasoning interventions had begun to transfer to everyday function," said Michael Marsiske, an associate professor at the University of Florida who was involved in the mental exercise study.
But he added that although mental exercises help boost performance on cognitive tests, "it's too early yet to say whether they actually prevent dementia or decline."
Marsiske said that the new review might overstate the benefits of cognitive training as a result of Naqvi and his colleagues selecting only studies that used the most rigorous experimental methods to include in their analysis.
Naqvi said it's difficult to compare the mental exercises used in the studies to those that are available to consumers, because each one is designed differently.
"Regardless, I still recommend to my patients to remain mentally and cognitively active as long as possible in whatever way is stimulating to them," Naqvi said.
Click green for further info
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/11lMrIJ Canadian Medical Association Journal, online April 15, 2013.
___________________________________________________________
Article 1 of 2 - Article 2 of 2 next below"Build a better brain"
Cool in temperature helps in mental processing and brain work
Schools Are Not Cool
"Cool" in this article means the level of any temperature
Click green for further info
New York, May, 2013 - As temperatures rise, life will become more unpleasant for teachers and students in New York City schools, which remain open through June 26, and many of which do not have air-conditioning. In New York roughly a third of public school classrooms lack this basic amenity; in other major cities, especially in poorer districts, the figures are comparable or worse.
My first year as a public school teacher, I taught at Manhattan’s P.S. 98, which did not have air-conditioning. From mid-May until June’s end — roughly 17 percent of the school year — the temperature in my classroom hovered in the 80s and often topped 90 degrees.
Students wilted over desks. Academic gains evaporated. Even restless pencil tappers and toe wigglers grew lethargic. Absenteeism increased as children sought relief at home or outdoors. By day’s end, my hair was plastered to my face with perspiration.
It seems obvious: schools need to be cool. It’s absurd to talk about inculcating 21st-century skills in classrooms that resemble 19th-century sweatshops.
Yet, when teachers or parents complain about a lack of air-conditioning, they often get back the Grumpy Grandpa Defense, which sounds something like this, “Grandpa went to school during the Great Depression. Grandpa didn’t have air-conditioning. Grandpa did fine. So why are all these spoiled kids complaining?”
This is essentially the argument Mayor Michael Bloomberg made last June, when a seasonal heat wave — funny how they arrive like clockwork — led to complaints about sweltering classrooms just as children were taking all-important end-of-year exams. When asked by a reporter about the stifling conditions, the mayor testily replied, “I suspect if you talk to everyone in this room, not one of them went to a school where they had air-conditioning.”
Meanwhile, city officials advised the young and elderly to seek cool shelter or face health consequences.
Cool schools are critical if we are to boost achievement. Studies show that concentration and cognitive abilities decline substantially after a room reaches 77 or 78 degrees. This is a lesson American businesses learned long ago. As Stan Cox wrote in “Losing Our Cool,” his book on our global dependence on air-conditioning, “The American office is, by definition, a refrigerated workplace.” A pleasant atmosphere leads to more productive employees.
Air-conditioning is, in fact, so pervasive in American offices that a common complaint among workers is not that cubicles are too hot but that they are too cold. It isn’t just white-collar laborers who work in cool climates. Amazon announced last year that it was spending $52 million to upgrade its warehouses with air-conditioning. Yet we can’t seem to do the same for vulnerable children, though some of the achievement gap is most likely owing to a lack of air-conditioning. One Oregon study found that students working in three different temperature settings had strikingly different results on exams, suggesting that sweating a test actually undermines performance.
Students who enjoy the luxury of air-conditioning may enjoy an unfair advantage over their hotter peers.
We are also investing enormous sums to extend the school day and school year in many locales. But these investments won’t be effective if schools are ovens.
There is one rationale, however, for resisting cooling our nation’s classrooms. As Mr. Cox wrote, air-conditioning is a global environmental disaster that contributes mightily to greenhouse gases and climate change. Some scientists theorize that it may even be contributing to the nation’s obesity epidemic. So, how do we balance the needs of Mother Earth with those of her children?
It’s time we introduced not just a Race to the Top but also a Race for the Cool. Let’s create financial incentives to reward schools that find new green solutions for keeping classrooms in the temperate zone. Schools are natural incubators of reform, and the resulting experimentation could become a continuing lesson for children, even part of the national science curriculum.
We have the Intel Science Talent Search, in which private laboratories, nonprofits and leading universities work hand in hand with the nation’s top students. Why not harness this same energy for a nationwide Science Fair devoted to helping schools chill?
Schools that designed alternative energy solutions — wind-powered classrooms or grassy roof gardens that naturally lower building temperatures — would receive the financing to upgrade their facilities.
This would not only spur innovation but also generate jobs, all the while helping to save the planet and foster environments where more children can learn.
Click green for further info
Source: NYT - By SARA MOSLE Article 2 of 2 next below"Build a better brain"
_____________________________________________________
Cool in temperature helps in mental processing and brain work
Schools Are Not Cool
"Cool" in this article means the level of any temperature
Click green for further info
New York, May, 2013 - As temperatures rise, life will become more unpleasant for teachers and students in New York City schools, which remain open through June 26, and many of which do not have air-conditioning. In New York roughly a third of public school classrooms lack this basic amenity; in other major cities, especially in poorer districts, the figures are comparable or worse.
My first year as a public school teacher, I taught at Manhattan’s P.S. 98, which did not have air-conditioning. From mid-May until June’s end — roughly 17 percent of the school year — the temperature in my classroom hovered in the 80s and often topped 90 degrees.
Students wilted over desks. Academic gains evaporated. Even restless pencil tappers and toe wigglers grew lethargic. Absenteeism increased as children sought relief at home or outdoors. By day’s end, my hair was plastered to my face with perspiration.
It seems obvious: schools need to be cool. It’s absurd to talk about inculcating 21st-century skills in classrooms that resemble 19th-century sweatshops.
Yet, when teachers or parents complain about a lack of air-conditioning, they often get back the Grumpy Grandpa Defense, which sounds something like this, “Grandpa went to school during the Great Depression. Grandpa didn’t have air-conditioning. Grandpa did fine. So why are all these spoiled kids complaining?”
This is essentially the argument Mayor Michael Bloomberg made last June, when a seasonal heat wave — funny how they arrive like clockwork — led to complaints about sweltering classrooms just as children were taking all-important end-of-year exams. When asked by a reporter about the stifling conditions, the mayor testily replied, “I suspect if you talk to everyone in this room, not one of them went to a school where they had air-conditioning.”
Meanwhile, city officials advised the young and elderly to seek cool shelter or face health consequences.
Cool schools are critical if we are to boost achievement. Studies show that concentration and cognitive abilities decline substantially after a room reaches 77 or 78 degrees. This is a lesson American businesses learned long ago. As Stan Cox wrote in “Losing Our Cool,” his book on our global dependence on air-conditioning, “The American office is, by definition, a refrigerated workplace.” A pleasant atmosphere leads to more productive employees.
Air-conditioning is, in fact, so pervasive in American offices that a common complaint among workers is not that cubicles are too hot but that they are too cold. It isn’t just white-collar laborers who work in cool climates. Amazon announced last year that it was spending $52 million to upgrade its warehouses with air-conditioning. Yet we can’t seem to do the same for vulnerable children, though some of the achievement gap is most likely owing to a lack of air-conditioning. One Oregon study found that students working in three different temperature settings had strikingly different results on exams, suggesting that sweating a test actually undermines performance.
Students who enjoy the luxury of air-conditioning may enjoy an unfair advantage over their hotter peers.
We are also investing enormous sums to extend the school day and school year in many locales. But these investments won’t be effective if schools are ovens.
There is one rationale, however, for resisting cooling our nation’s classrooms. As Mr. Cox wrote, air-conditioning is a global environmental disaster that contributes mightily to greenhouse gases and climate change. Some scientists theorize that it may even be contributing to the nation’s obesity epidemic. So, how do we balance the needs of Mother Earth with those of her children?
It’s time we introduced not just a Race to the Top but also a Race for the Cool. Let’s create financial incentives to reward schools that find new green solutions for keeping classrooms in the temperate zone. Schools are natural incubators of reform, and the resulting experimentation could become a continuing lesson for children, even part of the national science curriculum.
We have the Intel Science Talent Search, in which private laboratories, nonprofits and leading universities work hand in hand with the nation’s top students. Why not harness this same energy for a nationwide Science Fair devoted to helping schools chill?
Schools that designed alternative energy solutions — wind-powered classrooms or grassy roof gardens that naturally lower building temperatures — would receive the financing to upgrade their facilities.
This would not only spur innovation but also generate jobs, all the while helping to save the planet and foster environments where more children can learn.
Click green for further info
Source: NYT - By SARA MOSLE Article 2 of 2 next below"Build a better brain"
_____________________________________________________
Article 2 of 2 Build a better brain
I't’s common to experience a little brain fog as we age, but much like muscles, the more exercise you give your brain, the stronger it will be. And you don't need any crazy products or regiments to stay sharp: these simple lifestyle tips can keep your brain young for years.
I't’s common to experience a little brain fog as we age, but much like muscles, the more exercise you give your brain, the stronger it will be. And you don't need any crazy products or regiments to stay sharp: these simple lifestyle tips can keep your brain young for years.
- Foods That Pack a Brain Power Punch eating certain foods alone won't make you smarter, but combined with regular sleep, exercise and an overall balanced diet, these foods have been shown to increase focus, concentration, reaction time, and memory by keeping neurological pathways in the brain healthy and high-functioning.
- Crunch on Cruciferous Veggies
Research has shown cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts keep our memory sharper than any other fruit or vegetable.
Fill Your Cup with Coffee
Coffee has been shown to improve mental performance especially when under stressful situations.
Get Focused with Fish
The omega-3 fatty acids in fish can help keep us focused on a task, presentation, exam, etc. Other sources of omega-3 fatty acids include walnuts and flaxseeds.
Berry Good Blueberries
Blueberries contain healthy antioxidant compounds called polyphenols that may positively impact how well our brain cells signal to each other.
Get Your Beans On
Beans provide slow release glucose to fuel our brain and increase concentration. They are also good source of folic acid -- a B vitamin which may keep our brain cells healthy as we age. - 5 Daily Routines That Dull Your Brain
- Bad news: You're not just getting older—you're getting dumber. According to a new study published in the journal Trends in Genetics, humans have lost the smarts they once had in the days of fending off saber tooth tigers and seeking refuge in caves.
See, the stakes just aren't the same as they used to be, the study authors argue. They write that while our ancestors lived and died by the ability to find food and shelter, those processes simply don't require as much brainpower in today's world. The other side: Humans have simply evolved to do tons more cool things—way better than the cavemen could have.
While the jury's still out, there are plenty of things you do every day that certainly don't help your noggin—like these five. - You rely on the Web too much
- Why rack your brain for the name of that great Chinese restaurant downtown when you can just check the Internet? Having a search engine in your pocket 24/7 makes things super convenient—but it also makes you super forgetful, according to a 2011 study from Columbia University. When you're constantly searching the Web for instant answers, you're not helping yourself remember stuff—just where to find it, the study's researchers say. A better approach: When you want to remember something, repeat the information a few times aloud. You may sound crazy, but rehearsal is one of the best tricks for memory. Keep your mind in tip-top shape with these
- You drive everywhere
- If a caveman skipped his cardio, he likely made up for it walking those long miles home from work at night. Meanwhile, you hop in your car. The problem: Falling short in the fitness department hurts more than just your physique. A 2011 study found that the brain's striatum—an area associated with executive function and working memory--was smaller in non-athletes than in basketball players. But there's hope: A year of regular aerobic exercise can up the size of an adult's hippocampus by 2 percent, according to research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Experts believe that exercise can balance the chemical cocktail in your brain, strengthening connections and boosting brainpower.
- You go with fries instead of a salad
- Obesity rates are up since ancient times—so much so that more than two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's bad news for your brain: The brains of obese people work harder than those of normal weight people to achieve the same results, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. See, high blood pressure and inflammation—both of which strike obese people hard--irritate your brain's communication networks, which makes it more difficult for your brain to receive messages.
- You stay cooped up in the office
- In a recent study of 22 people, researchers gave participants a decision-making test while pumping the room full of carbon dioxide. (Normal levels of carbon dioxide are about 600 parts per million, and the study raised levels up to almost 2,500 ppm.) They found that at as the levels of carbon dioxide increased, people's focus and ability to strategize plummeted. It could be that excess CO2 in your blood leads to a lack of oxygen in the brain. Some plants, like peace lilies and lady palms, have been found to remove air pollutants, according to research at NASA. But the best option is fresh air—15 minutes or so can help level out the amount.
- You're always traveling for business
- Different time zones aren't just messing with your sleep patterns--they're messing with your smarts. Researchers at Cal Berkeley changed hamsters' sleep schedules--the equivalent of traveling from New York to Paris—every 3 days for a month. They found that the jet-lagged hamsters weren't as smart: They produced 50 percent fewer neurons than they did when they were sleeping normally. Researchers speculate that the production of the sleep hormone melatonin, stress, and an increase of cell deaths from lack of sleep could be to blame.
- click: 27 Ways to Power Up Your Brain.
The Benefits of Church
Visit our affiliate, modern church website at (click) www.gcg1org.weebly.com
Study this article with interesting facts
ONE of the most striking scientific discoveries about religion in recent years is that going to church weekly is good for you. Religious attendance — at least, religiosity — boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life. The reason for this is not entirely clear.
Social support is no doubt part of the story. At the evangelical churches I’ve studied as an anthropologist, people really did seem to look out for one another. They showed up with dinner when friends were sick and sat to talk with them when they were unhappy. The help was sometimes surprisingly concrete. Perhaps a third of the church members belonged to small groups that met weekly to talk about the Bible and their lives. One evening, a young woman in a group I joined began to cry. Her dentist had told her that she needed a $1,500 procedure, and she didn’t have the money. To my amazement, our small group — most of them students — simply covered the cost, by anonymous donation. A study conducted in North Carolina found that frequent churchgoers had larger social networks, with more contact with, more affection for, and more kinds of social support from those people than their unchurched counterparts. And we know that social support is directly tied to better health.
Healthy behavior is no doubt another part. Certainly many churchgoers struggle with behaviors they would like to change, but on average, regular church attendees drink less, smoke less, use fewer recreational drugs and are less sexually promiscuous than others.
That tallies with my own observations. At a church I studied in Southern California, the standard conversion story seemed to tell of finding God and never taking methamphetamine again. (One woman told me that while cooking her dose, she set off an explosion in her father’s apartment and blew out his sliding glass doors. She said to me, “I knew that God was trying to tell me I was going the wrong way.”) In my next church, I remember sitting in a house group listening to a woman talk about an addiction she could not break. I assumed that she was talking about her own struggle with methamphetamine. It turned out that she thought she read too many novels.
Yet I think there may be another factor. Any faith demands that you experience the world as more than just what is material and observable. This does not mean that God is imaginary, but that because God is immaterial, those of faith must use their imaginations to represent God. To know God in an evangelical church, you must experience what can only be imagined as real, and you must also experience it as good.
I want to suggest that this is a skill and that it can be learned. We can call it absorption: the capacity to be caught up in your imagination, in a way you enjoy. What I saw in church as an anthropological observer was that people were encouraged to listen to God in their minds, but only to pay attention to mental experiences that were in accord with what they took to be God’s character, which they took to be good. I saw that people were able to learn to experience God in this way, and that those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale. Increasingly, other studies bear out this observation that the capacity to imagine a loving God vividly leads to better health.
For example, in one study, when God was experienced as remote or not loving, the more someone prayed, the more psychiatric distress she seemed to have; when God was experienced as close and intimate, the more someone prayed, the less ill he was. In another study, at a private Christian college in Southern California, the positive quality of an attachment to God significantly decreased stress and did so more effectively than the quality of the person’s relationships with other people.
Eventually, this may teach us how to harness the “placebo” effect — a terrible word, because it suggests an absence of intervention rather than the presence of a healing mechanism that depends neither on pharmaceuticals nor on surgery. We do not understand the placebo effect, but we know it is real. That is, we have increasingly better evidence that what anthropologists would call “symbolic healing” has real physical effects on the body. At the heart of some of these mysterious effects may be the capacity to trust that what can only be imagined may be real, and be good.
But not everyone benefits from symbolic healing. Earlier this month, the youngest son of the famed pastor Rick Warren took his own life. We know few details, but the loss reminds us that to feel despair when you want to feel God’s love can worsen the sense of alienation. We urgently need more research on the relationship between mental illness and religion, not only so that we understand that relationship more intimately — the ways in which they are linked and different — but to lower the shame for those who are religious and nonetheless need to reach out for other care.
Source: NYT - T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” is a guest columnist.
Click: ‘The Ghost of Gun Control’Read More »
Visit our affiliate, modern church website at (click) www.gcg1org.weebly.com
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Too-Saggy Pants Banned in Louisiana,
Prompts Fears of Racial Profiling
There are certain limits for how we appear in the public - STAF, Inc. stands behind this ban
This is not about "too-saggy pants" - this is about showing your butt & your sexual organs in public
Click green for further info
Pants on the ground? Better pull ’em up fast if you’re in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, where a new law bans the low-slung, undies-exposing jeans look popularized by hip-hop culture.
Baggy Pants Ban in Florida Sparks Controversy
The ban, approved Wednesday and expected to be signed into law this week, targets the public wearing of pants—and, oddly, skirts—that hang “below the waist” and “expose the skin or undergarments.” Violators will be slapped with fines: $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $100 plus 16 hours of public service for each subsequent offense.
“Hopefully, it’ll get these young men to pull up their pants,” council member Russell Hornsby told.
Hornsby’s colleague John Navy proposed the ordinance, and explained to Yahoo! Shine that many constituents had called upon the council to do something about what has apparently become a widespread saggy pants problem. The ban was approved at an April 10th Parish council meeting by a vote of 8-1 and is expected to soon be signed into law by council president Michel Claudet.
Navy, though, said he did not know why the approved law said “below the waist,” and seemed confused by that wording when asked about it. “My understanding was that it was below the butt. I need to look at that again,” he said. “If it’s below your butt and underwear is showing, that’s not proper.”
The only council member to vote against the ban was Beryl Amedée, who told “I’m absolutely not a fan of this style. However, I don’t think the government should legislate style.”
But, Hornsby added, “The problem is our young men are emulating prisoners. It sends a sign that you’re available for sex. It’s a bad example to set.”
The idea that wearing low-slung pants in prison signals some sort of sexual come-on has been a long-held, generally disputed belief about the controversial style’s origins. Another theory is that folks who let their pants sag below their undies are emulating prisoners who have their belts taken away (for fears of suicide) when they are locked up.
Whatever the inspiration, Terrebonne Parish is not the first municipality to be offended enough by the style to take action. Nearby Shreveport, LA, banned the look, as did Lynwood and Colinsville, Illinois; Cocoa, Florida, which later repealed the law; and Albany, Georgia, which raked in about $4,000 in fines in 2011 alone. Groups in New York City and Boston have run ad campaigns against too-saggy pants.
But the ACLU says that such laws violate the constitution. (ACLU = American Civil Liberties Union - web link below)
“You shouldn’t really have fashion police, as the way you dress is a form of expression that’s protected by the First Amendment,” ACLU lawyer Gabe Rottman told. “These laws target primarily urban youth, African-American youth, and can be used selectively by law enforcement as a means of racial profiling. It’s similar to the outcry over zoot suits
in the 1930s.” (= A man's suit of an exaggerated style, characterized by a long loose jacket with padded shoulders and high-waisted tapering trousers,...) *) zoot suits web link below
A letter from the ACLU’s Louisiana chapter to the Terrebonne council told its members, “The proposed ordinance as described would also be unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. It allows no accidental slippage. It allows no one to inadvertently have underwear peek out while bending over. It makes no concessions for the stereotype of ‘plumber’s’ or ‘carpenter’s crack.’ It makes a criminal of everyone whose pants are not high enough to suit the arbitrary standards of law enforcement.”
In addition, it read, “To ban a particular clothing style would violate a liberty interest guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. The government does not belong in the business of telling people what to wear. Nor does it have the right to use clothing as a pretext to engage in otherwise unlawful stops of innocent people.”
But Navy—who points out that the local chapter of the NAACP has publicly supported the ban—said he is not targeting any specific group of people. “I am an African-American,” he told Yahoo! Shine. “I know I’m not racial profiling.” Terrebonne Parish, according to 2012 Census stats, has a population of 111,900 that’s 72 percent white and 19 percent black.
Hornsby added that he was personally torn about how to vote, and that he would like to reevaluate the effects of the law in a year to see if it’s doing any good. “I was skeptical, and had a lot of sleepless nights,” he said. “It may be against the constitution but if we can turn around a couple of young men it would be worth it.”
Related:
Minnesota High School Cracks Down on Leggings, Yoga Pants
Ugg Boots Banned in School. Education Crisis Solved!
Prom Dress Rules: High Schools Ban Sexy Gowns
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
www.aclu.org
National organization advocating individual rights, by litigating, legislating, and educating the public on a broad array of issues affecting individual freedom in ...
Contact Us - About the ACLU - Key Issues - Action Center
Zoot suit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_suit
A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit) is a men's suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide ...
Characteristics - History - See also - References
Click green for further info
_____________________________________________
Prompts Fears of Racial Profiling
There are certain limits for how we appear in the public - STAF, Inc. stands behind this ban
This is not about "too-saggy pants" - this is about showing your butt & your sexual organs in public
Click green for further info
Pants on the ground? Better pull ’em up fast if you’re in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, where a new law bans the low-slung, undies-exposing jeans look popularized by hip-hop culture.
Baggy Pants Ban in Florida Sparks Controversy
The ban, approved Wednesday and expected to be signed into law this week, targets the public wearing of pants—and, oddly, skirts—that hang “below the waist” and “expose the skin or undergarments.” Violators will be slapped with fines: $50 for the first offense, $100 for the second, and $100 plus 16 hours of public service for each subsequent offense.
“Hopefully, it’ll get these young men to pull up their pants,” council member Russell Hornsby told.
Hornsby’s colleague John Navy proposed the ordinance, and explained to Yahoo! Shine that many constituents had called upon the council to do something about what has apparently become a widespread saggy pants problem. The ban was approved at an April 10th Parish council meeting by a vote of 8-1 and is expected to soon be signed into law by council president Michel Claudet.
Navy, though, said he did not know why the approved law said “below the waist,” and seemed confused by that wording when asked about it. “My understanding was that it was below the butt. I need to look at that again,” he said. “If it’s below your butt and underwear is showing, that’s not proper.”
The only council member to vote against the ban was Beryl Amedée, who told “I’m absolutely not a fan of this style. However, I don’t think the government should legislate style.”
But, Hornsby added, “The problem is our young men are emulating prisoners. It sends a sign that you’re available for sex. It’s a bad example to set.”
The idea that wearing low-slung pants in prison signals some sort of sexual come-on has been a long-held, generally disputed belief about the controversial style’s origins. Another theory is that folks who let their pants sag below their undies are emulating prisoners who have their belts taken away (for fears of suicide) when they are locked up.
Whatever the inspiration, Terrebonne Parish is not the first municipality to be offended enough by the style to take action. Nearby Shreveport, LA, banned the look, as did Lynwood and Colinsville, Illinois; Cocoa, Florida, which later repealed the law; and Albany, Georgia, which raked in about $4,000 in fines in 2011 alone. Groups in New York City and Boston have run ad campaigns against too-saggy pants.
But the ACLU says that such laws violate the constitution. (ACLU = American Civil Liberties Union - web link below)
“You shouldn’t really have fashion police, as the way you dress is a form of expression that’s protected by the First Amendment,” ACLU lawyer Gabe Rottman told. “These laws target primarily urban youth, African-American youth, and can be used selectively by law enforcement as a means of racial profiling. It’s similar to the outcry over zoot suits
in the 1930s.” (= A man's suit of an exaggerated style, characterized by a long loose jacket with padded shoulders and high-waisted tapering trousers,...) *) zoot suits web link below
A letter from the ACLU’s Louisiana chapter to the Terrebonne council told its members, “The proposed ordinance as described would also be unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. It allows no accidental slippage. It allows no one to inadvertently have underwear peek out while bending over. It makes no concessions for the stereotype of ‘plumber’s’ or ‘carpenter’s crack.’ It makes a criminal of everyone whose pants are not high enough to suit the arbitrary standards of law enforcement.”
In addition, it read, “To ban a particular clothing style would violate a liberty interest guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. The government does not belong in the business of telling people what to wear. Nor does it have the right to use clothing as a pretext to engage in otherwise unlawful stops of innocent people.”
But Navy—who points out that the local chapter of the NAACP has publicly supported the ban—said he is not targeting any specific group of people. “I am an African-American,” he told Yahoo! Shine. “I know I’m not racial profiling.” Terrebonne Parish, according to 2012 Census stats, has a population of 111,900 that’s 72 percent white and 19 percent black.
Hornsby added that he was personally torn about how to vote, and that he would like to reevaluate the effects of the law in a year to see if it’s doing any good. “I was skeptical, and had a lot of sleepless nights,” he said. “It may be against the constitution but if we can turn around a couple of young men it would be worth it.”
Related:
Minnesota High School Cracks Down on Leggings, Yoga Pants
Ugg Boots Banned in School. Education Crisis Solved!
Prom Dress Rules: High Schools Ban Sexy Gowns
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
www.aclu.org
National organization advocating individual rights, by litigating, legislating, and educating the public on a broad array of issues affecting individual freedom in ...
Contact Us - About the ACLU - Key Issues - Action Center
Zoot suit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoot_suit
A zoot suit (occasionally spelled zuit suit) is a men's suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide ...
Characteristics - History - See also - References
Click green for further info
_____________________________________________
Lindsay Lohan Is Here to Stay:
Fame Not Fleeting, Study Finds
Click green for further info
Fame Not Fleeting, Study Finds
Click green for further info
- Fifteen minutes of fame? More like 15 years.
Once a celebrity claws their way to the top, they're unlikely to get knocked off the pedestal, a new study finds. In fact, 96 percent of people mentioned in newspapers more than 100 times in a given year were already famous three years before.
"There is almost a consensus among scholars in the field of the sociology of fame, that most fame is ephemeral *) study researcher Eran Shor of McGill University said in a statement. "What we've shown here that is truly revolutionary is that the people who you and I would consider famous, even the Kim Kardashians of this world, stay famous for a long time. It doesn't come and go."
They're not going anywhere
That's bad news to those tired of seeing reality star Kardashian or actress Lindsay Lohan plastered over every tabloid. The finding also doesn't bode well for those aiming for the spotlight: Turnover in the celebrity industry is low, the researchers report in April in the journal American Sociological Review.
Shor and his colleagues tracked names mentioned in English-language newspapers over several decades. They found that lasting fame is the norm in all areas, including sports, politics and entertainment.- [17 Species Named for Celebrities]
They also found the celebrities most likely to get name-checked by entertainment sections. Between 2004 and 2009, they found that the 10 most frequent names in newspaper entertainment articles were Jamie Foxx, Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Tommy Lee Jones, Naomi Watts, Howard Hughes, Phil Spector, John Malkovich, Adrien Brody and Steve Buscemi. All of these entertainers boast years- or decades-long careers. ("The Aviator," a movie based on the life of billionaire and movie producer Howard Hughes, came out in 2004, which might explain why Hughes' name was so common despite his death in 1976.)
The fame loop
Fame is self-reinforcing, the researchers wrote. A new talent or random chance might propel an individual into the spotlight, but once they're there, the media and audiences tend to devote attention to them simply because they are famous — and because competing media outlets are devoting attention to them, as well.
There are exceptions to long-lasting fame, of course, said study researcher Arnout van de Rijt, a sociologist at Stony Brook University.
"Leonard Cohen is still well-known today, over 40 years after he first became famous," Van de Rijt said in a statement. "But Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who received instant fame after safely landing a disabled plane on the Hudson, is a name that will likely be forgotten pretty quickly. What we have shown is that Leonard Cohen is the rule and Chesley Sullenberger the exception." - Click green for further info
Source: Internet news- Best Supporting Role: 8 Celebs Who Promote Science
- Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds
- 10ThingsYouDidn'tKnowAboutYou _______________________________________________________________
Does the language we speak determine
how healthy and rich we will be?
Example: Speaking a language that has obligatory future markers, such as English, makes people 30 percent less likely to save money for the future. This effect is as large as the effect of unemployment. Being unemployed decreases the likelihood of saving by about 30 percent as well.
Click green for further info
New research by Keith Chen of Yale Business School suggests so. The structure of languages affects our judgments and decisions about the future and this might have dramatic long-term consequences
Chen analyzed individual-level data from 76 developed and developing countries
There has been a lot of research into how we deal with the future.
For example: the famous marshmallow studies of Walter Mischel and colleagues showed that being able to resist temptation is predictive of future success. Four-year-old kids were given a marshmallow and were told that if they do not eat that marshmallow and wait for the experimenter to come back, they will get two marshmallows instead of one.
(1) Follow-up studies showed that the kids who were able to wait for the bigger future reward became more successful young adults.
Resisting our impulses for immediate pleasure is often the only way to attain the outcomes that are important to us.
We want to keep a slim figure but we also want that last slice of pizza. We want a comfortable retirement, but we also want to drive that dazzling car, go on that dream vacation, or get those gorgeous shoes.
(2) Some people are better at delaying gratification than others. Those people have a better chance of accumulating wealth and keeping a healthy life style. They are less likely to be impulse buyers or smokers, or to engage in unsafe sex.
Chen’s recent findings suggest that an unlikely factor, language, strongly affects our future-oriented behavior. Some languages strongly distinguish the present and the future. Other languages only weakly distinguish the present and the future. Chen’s recent research suggests that
(3) people who speak languages that weakly distinguish the present and the future are better prepared for the future.
They accumulate more wealth and they are better able to maintain their health. The way these people conceptualize the future is similar to the way they conceptualize the present. As a result, the future does not feel very distant and it is easier for them to act in accordance with their future interests.
Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as “will” or “going to.” In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German, future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar might say “Wo qu ting jiangzuo,” which translates to “I go listen seminar.”
(4) Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers.
Chen analyzed individual-level data from 76 developed and developing countries.
This data includes people’s economic decisions, such as whether they saved any money last year, the languages they speak at home, demographics, and cultural factors such as “saving is an important cultural value for me.” He also analyzed individual-level data on people’s retirement assets, smoking and exercising habits, and general health in older age. Lastly, he analyzed national-level data that includes national savings rates, country GDP and GDP growth rates, country demographics, and proportions of people speaking different languages.
People’s savings rates are affected by various factors such as their income, education level, age, religious affiliation, their countries’ legal systems, and their cultural values. After those factors were accounted for, the effect of language on people’s savings rates turned out to be big. Speaking a language that has obligatory future markers, such as English, makes people 30 percent less likely to save money for the future. This effect is as large as the effect of unemployment. Being unemployed decreases the likelihood of saving by about 30 percent as well.
Similar analyses showed that speaking a language that does not have obligatory future markers, such as Mandarin, makes people accumulate more retirement assets, smoke less, exercise more, and generally be healthier in older age. Countries’ national savings rates are also affected by language. Having a larger proportion of people speaking languages that does not have obligatory future markers makes national savings rates higher.
This is an unconventional way of explaining people’s consumption-saving decisions and health-related behavior. More conventional factors include dispositional*), situational, motivational, and cultural factors. The marshmallow studies focus on dispositional factors—being able to delay gratification is an innate ability. Other research has looked at situational factors.
For example, researchers have shown that simply rearranging the placement of food and beverages in a cafeteria can improve sales of healthy items. Other research focused on motivational factors. People often need to curb their current desire to consume in order to reach their future goal of getting out of debt.
Researchers have shown that closing smaller debt accounts first gives a sense of accomplishment early on, boosts motivation, and increases the likelihood of completely getting rid of debt.
The motivational effect is beneficial even if closing off smaller debt accounts does not make economic sense, for instance when the bigger debt accounts have higher interest rates attached to them. Other research has investigated cultural factors. It has been argued that Americans spend more than they need to because they want to emulate the lifestyles and spending patterns of people who are much richer than themselves. Chen’s findings suggest that maybe we should focus more on how we talk about the future in order to improve our intertemporal decision making.
These results also provide evidence for the language-cognition link, which has stirred some controversy among researchers. Early 20th century thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among the first who argued that language can impact the way people think and act. More recently Steven Pinker argued that we think in a universal grammar and languages do not significantly shape our thinking. The issue is still hotly debated.
At a more practical level, researchers have been looking for ways to help people act in accordance with their long-term interests. Recent findings suggest that making the future feel closer to the present might improve future-oriented behavior. For instance, researchers recently presented people with renderings of their future selves made using age-progression algorithms that forecast how physical appearances would change over time. One group of participants saw a digital representation of their current selves in a virtual mirror, and the other group saw an age-morphed version of their future selves. Those participants who saw the age-morphed version of their future selves allocated more money toward a hypothetical savings account. The intervention brought people’s future to the present and as a result they saved more for the future.
Chen’s research shows that language structures our future-related thoughts. Language has been used before to alter time perception with surprising effects. Ellen Langer and colleagues famously improved older people’s physical health by simple interventions including asking them to talk about the events of twenty years ago as if it they were happening now. Talking about the past as if it were the present changed people’s mindsets and their mindsets affected their physical states. Chen’s research points at the possibility that the way we talk about the future can shape our mindsets. Language can move the future back and forth in our mental space and this might have dramatic influences on our judgments and decisions.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs
*) dispositional = the predominant or prevailing tendency of one's spirits; natural mental and emotional outlook or mood; characteristic attitude: a girl with a pleasant disposition.
Click green for further info
Source: Internet - Scientific American
__________________________________________________________
how healthy and rich we will be?
Example: Speaking a language that has obligatory future markers, such as English, makes people 30 percent less likely to save money for the future. This effect is as large as the effect of unemployment. Being unemployed decreases the likelihood of saving by about 30 percent as well.
Click green for further info
New research by Keith Chen of Yale Business School suggests so. The structure of languages affects our judgments and decisions about the future and this might have dramatic long-term consequences
Chen analyzed individual-level data from 76 developed and developing countries
There has been a lot of research into how we deal with the future.
For example: the famous marshmallow studies of Walter Mischel and colleagues showed that being able to resist temptation is predictive of future success. Four-year-old kids were given a marshmallow and were told that if they do not eat that marshmallow and wait for the experimenter to come back, they will get two marshmallows instead of one.
(1) Follow-up studies showed that the kids who were able to wait for the bigger future reward became more successful young adults.
Resisting our impulses for immediate pleasure is often the only way to attain the outcomes that are important to us.
We want to keep a slim figure but we also want that last slice of pizza. We want a comfortable retirement, but we also want to drive that dazzling car, go on that dream vacation, or get those gorgeous shoes.
(2) Some people are better at delaying gratification than others. Those people have a better chance of accumulating wealth and keeping a healthy life style. They are less likely to be impulse buyers or smokers, or to engage in unsafe sex.
Chen’s recent findings suggest that an unlikely factor, language, strongly affects our future-oriented behavior. Some languages strongly distinguish the present and the future. Other languages only weakly distinguish the present and the future. Chen’s recent research suggests that
(3) people who speak languages that weakly distinguish the present and the future are better prepared for the future.
They accumulate more wealth and they are better able to maintain their health. The way these people conceptualize the future is similar to the way they conceptualize the present. As a result, the future does not feel very distant and it is easier for them to act in accordance with their future interests.
Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, such as English, Korean, and Russian, require their speakers to refer to the future explicitly. Every time English-speakers talk about the future, they have to use future markers such as “will” or “going to.” In other languages, such as Mandarin, Japanese, and German, future markers are not obligatory. The future is often talked about similar to the way present is talked about and the meaning is understood from the context. A Mandarin speaker who is going to go to a seminar might say “Wo qu ting jiangzuo,” which translates to “I go listen seminar.”
(4) Languages such as English constantly remind their speakers that future events are distant. For speakers of languages such as Mandarin future feels closer. As a consequence, resisting immediate impulses and investing for the future is easier for Mandarin speakers.
Chen analyzed individual-level data from 76 developed and developing countries.
This data includes people’s economic decisions, such as whether they saved any money last year, the languages they speak at home, demographics, and cultural factors such as “saving is an important cultural value for me.” He also analyzed individual-level data on people’s retirement assets, smoking and exercising habits, and general health in older age. Lastly, he analyzed national-level data that includes national savings rates, country GDP and GDP growth rates, country demographics, and proportions of people speaking different languages.
People’s savings rates are affected by various factors such as their income, education level, age, religious affiliation, their countries’ legal systems, and their cultural values. After those factors were accounted for, the effect of language on people’s savings rates turned out to be big. Speaking a language that has obligatory future markers, such as English, makes people 30 percent less likely to save money for the future. This effect is as large as the effect of unemployment. Being unemployed decreases the likelihood of saving by about 30 percent as well.
Similar analyses showed that speaking a language that does not have obligatory future markers, such as Mandarin, makes people accumulate more retirement assets, smoke less, exercise more, and generally be healthier in older age. Countries’ national savings rates are also affected by language. Having a larger proportion of people speaking languages that does not have obligatory future markers makes national savings rates higher.
This is an unconventional way of explaining people’s consumption-saving decisions and health-related behavior. More conventional factors include dispositional*), situational, motivational, and cultural factors. The marshmallow studies focus on dispositional factors—being able to delay gratification is an innate ability. Other research has looked at situational factors.
For example, researchers have shown that simply rearranging the placement of food and beverages in a cafeteria can improve sales of healthy items. Other research focused on motivational factors. People often need to curb their current desire to consume in order to reach their future goal of getting out of debt.
Researchers have shown that closing smaller debt accounts first gives a sense of accomplishment early on, boosts motivation, and increases the likelihood of completely getting rid of debt.
The motivational effect is beneficial even if closing off smaller debt accounts does not make economic sense, for instance when the bigger debt accounts have higher interest rates attached to them. Other research has investigated cultural factors. It has been argued that Americans spend more than they need to because they want to emulate the lifestyles and spending patterns of people who are much richer than themselves. Chen’s findings suggest that maybe we should focus more on how we talk about the future in order to improve our intertemporal decision making.
These results also provide evidence for the language-cognition link, which has stirred some controversy among researchers. Early 20th century thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein were among the first who argued that language can impact the way people think and act. More recently Steven Pinker argued that we think in a universal grammar and languages do not significantly shape our thinking. The issue is still hotly debated.
At a more practical level, researchers have been looking for ways to help people act in accordance with their long-term interests. Recent findings suggest that making the future feel closer to the present might improve future-oriented behavior. For instance, researchers recently presented people with renderings of their future selves made using age-progression algorithms that forecast how physical appearances would change over time. One group of participants saw a digital representation of their current selves in a virtual mirror, and the other group saw an age-morphed version of their future selves. Those participants who saw the age-morphed version of their future selves allocated more money toward a hypothetical savings account. The intervention brought people’s future to the present and as a result they saved more for the future.
Chen’s research shows that language structures our future-related thoughts. Language has been used before to alter time perception with surprising effects. Ellen Langer and colleagues famously improved older people’s physical health by simple interventions including asking them to talk about the events of twenty years ago as if it they were happening now. Talking about the past as if it were the present changed people’s mindsets and their mindsets affected their physical states. Chen’s research points at the possibility that the way we talk about the future can shape our mindsets. Language can move the future back and forth in our mental space and this might have dramatic influences on our judgments and decisions.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs
*) dispositional = the predominant or prevailing tendency of one's spirits; natural mental and emotional outlook or mood; characteristic attitude: a girl with a pleasant disposition.
Click green for further info
Source: Internet - Scientific American
__________________________________________________________
Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice
Date: March 15, 2013
Click green for further info
WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to visit Israel next week, he is turning, as he often does, to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a 35-year-old deputy national security adviser with a soft voice, strong opinions and a reputation around the White House as the man who channels Mr. Obama on foreign policy.
Mr. Rhodes is drafting the address to the Israeli people the president plans to give in Jerusalem, but his influence extends beyond what either his title or speechwriting duties suggest. Drawing on personal ties and a philosophical kinship with Mr. Obama that go back to the 2008 campaign, Mr. Rhodes helped prod his boss to take a more activist policy toward Egypt and Libya when those countries erupted in 2011.
Now that influence is being put to the test again on the issue of Syria, where the president has so far resisted more than modest American involvement. After two years of civil war that has left 70,000 people dead. Mr. Rhodes, his friends and colleagues said, is deeply frustrated by a policy that is not working, and has become a strong advocate for more aggressive efforts to support the Syrian opposition.
Administration officials note that Mr. Rhodes is not alone in his frustration over Syria, pointing out that Mr. Obama, too, is searching for an American response that ends the humanitarian tragedy, while not enmeshing the United States in a sectarian conflict that many in the White House say bears unsettling similarities to Iraq. Three former officials of the administration — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Robert Gates and David Petraeus — favored arming the opposition, a position Mr. Rhodes did not initially support.
“It’s hard for Ben in the same way it’s hard for the president,” said Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who worked closely with Mr. Rhodes in his previous job as the principal deputy national security adviser. “He cares about people. You can’t see what’s happening in Syria and not be torn by it. At the same time, he’s very realistic.”
Normally, the anguish of a White House deputy would matter little to the direction of American foreign policy. But Mr. Rhodes has had a knack for making himself felt, not just in the way the president expresses his policies but in how he formulates them.
Two years ago, when protesters thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, Mr. Rhodes urged Mr. Obama to withdraw three decades of American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. A few months later, Mr. Rhodes was among those agitating for the president to back a NATO military intervention in Libya to head off a slaughter by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“He became, first in the speechwriting process, and later, in the heat of the Arab Spring, a central figure,” said Michael A. McFaul, who worked with Mr. Rhodes in the National Security Council and is now the American ambassador to Russia.
Samantha Power, another former National Security Council colleague who joined him in advocating intervention in Libya, said: “He has a very high batting average in terms of prognostication. I don’t understand where Ben gets his ‘old man’ wisdom.”
Remarkably, Mr. Rhodes seems to have amassed his influence without rankling older and more seasoned advisers — a testament, colleagues say, to a diplomatic style not always common to members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle.
Mr. Rhodes has exerted influence outside the Middle East as well. In 2011, he worked with Jacob J. Sullivan, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, to persuade Mr. Obama to engage with the military rulers of Myanmar, formerly Burma, after gaining the endorsement of the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
“The person behind the scenes who played the largest role in the opening to Burma and the engagement with Aung San Suu Kyi was Ben Rhodes,” said Kurt M. Campbell, a former assistant secretary of state who led the negotiations with the Myanmar government.
Engineering a shift in Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is probably more difficult than persuading him to reach out to Myanmar, officials said, given the complexities of Syria, the volatility of its neighborhood, the grinding nature of the conflict, and the president’s deep aversion to getting entangled in another military conflict in the Middle East.
Not only is the United States limiting its support of the Free Syrian Army to food rations and medical supplies, the White House has designated one of the main Sunni insurgent groups, al-Nusra front, as a terrorist organization — a policy that alienated many Syrians because of the group’s effectiveness in fighting President Bashar al-Assad.
Colleagues say Mr. Rhodes opposed that decision, which was pushed by intelligence advisers. He also favors equipping the rebels with more robust nonlethal gear and training that would help them in their fight against Mr. Assad’s government, a position shared by Britain and other allies.
Mr. Rhodes declined to comment in detail on his role in policy deliberations, saying “my main job, which has always been my job, is to be the person who represents the president’s view on these issues.”
In many ways, Mr. Rhodes is an improbable choice for a job at the heart of the national security apparatus. An aspiring writer from Manhattan, he has an unfinished novel in a drawer, “Oasis of Love,” about a woman who joins a megachurch in Houston, breaking her boyfriend’s heart.
The son of a conservative-leaning Episcopalian father from Texas and a more liberal Jewish mother from New York, Mr. Rhodes grew up in a home where even sports loyalties were divided: he and his mother are ardent Mets fans; his father and his older brother, David, root for the Yankees.
“No one in that house agreed on anything,” said David Rhodes, who is now the president of CBS News.
Benjamin Rhodes, who worked briefly for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s re-election campaign in 1997, was living a writer’s life in Queens on Sept. 11, 2001, when he watched from the Brooklyn waterfront as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The trauma of that experience, he said, led him to move to Washington in 2002.
Mr. Rhodes went to work for a Democratic foreign-policy elder, former Representative Lee Hamilton, helping draft the 9/11 Commission report as well as the Iraq Study Group report. That report was a template for the anti-Iraq war positions taken by Barack Obama, then a senator, whose campaign Mr. Rhodes joined as a speechwriter in 2008.
At the White House, Mr. Rhodes first came to prominence after he wrote Mr. Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009. The speech was notable for Mr. Obama’s assertion that governments should “reflect the will of the people,” prefiguring his policy in dealing with Mr. Mubarak and Colonel Qaddafi.
In writing Mr. Obama’s speech next week, Mr. Rhodes is likely to focus on America’s unshakable support for Israel. But if history is any guide, he will slip in a reference to Syria’s democratic future.
“Ben always holds on to the pen,” Mr. McFaul said. “Because of his close personal relationship with the president, Ben can always make policy through the speeches and statements made by President Obama.”
Click green for further info
Source: NYT
______________________________________________________
In the article below: SAVE (Suicide Awareness and Voices of Education)
If you or anyone you know has any need for anti-suicidal counseling - the info below for contacts
The article below is suitable for every person to read
See at the end of this article national numbers to call 24/7 for free counseling
Suicide, With No Warning
Not a good idea
Life is a miracle : Life is a precious gift : Life is a beautiful flower - it needs nourishment to grow
Life is for living and growing - keep yourself alive
As you may need, seek help: call a friend
24/7 call 911,
24/7 other organizations for phone counseling - see the end of this article: numbers to call 24/7
TO his large, loving family and many friends, Kerry Lewiecki was an optimist and problem-solver, with a big laugh and impressive hugs. Early in the summer of 2010, he graduated from the University of Oregon with dual degrees in law and conflict resolution; invitations went out for his August wedding to his longtime girlfriend.
Then, just a few weeks later, within the span of a few hours, he bought a gun and shot and killed himself, at age 27. His father, Mike, a doctor in Albuquerque, who still chokes up when he recalls that day, said: “We had no clue he was desperate. I don’t think he’d ever shot a gun before.”
Support for stricter gun laws is growing, impelled by a year of grisly mass murders — at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., and, most recently, by a vengeful former policeman in California. Last month, the U.S. President kicked off a continuing national debate by proposing an array of new policies, including an assault weapons ban, an expansion of background checks and restrictions on high-capacity magazines.
But more than 60 percent of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, like Mr. Lewiecki’s. Reducing that statistic will most likely take different interventions than are currently proposed — like waiting periods and safe storage requirements — and those are not even on the table.
While background checks might turn up people with severe mental illness who have been prone to violence, gun suicides are often committed by people whose history doesn’t suggest a serious problem. In studies, a quarter to a third of those who killed themselves were not in contact with a psychiatrist at the time of death, and the majority were not on psychiatric medicines. “The first time the family may know of the distress is when they kill themselves,” said Dr. David Gunnell, a suicide epidemiologist at the University of Bristol in England. There may be no red flags and little forethought. To carry out a campus killing rampage, perpetrators collect weapons, identify victims and select locations. In contrast, suicides are often solitary, impulsive acts, experts say.
That is why a cornerstone of suicide prevention is simple: “restricting access to common and particularly lethal means for everyone — we know that’s effective,” said Dan Reidenberg, executive director of SAVE (Suicide Awareness and Voices of Education), a national suicide prevention group.
That means different things in different places. In Britain, suicide prevention efforts in the late 1990s involved banning the sales of large bottles of paracetamol (known as Tylenol in the United States), which had been used in tens of thousands of suicide attempts each year. When I was reporting from China a decade ago, rural officials responded to an epidemic of suicide among women by restricting pesticide sales.
In the United States, we build barriers on bridges, but have fewer barriers to the quick access to guns: “In the U.S. one of the most straightforward things to do to prevent suicide is to make firearms less accessible,” Dr. Gunnell said. The Lewiecki family believes that Kerry might well be alive if there had been a waiting period before purchase in Oregon. Studies suggest that far fewer American teenagers would commit suicide if gun owners were required to use trigger locks. Seventy-five percent of the guns used in youth suicides and unintentional injuries were accessible in the home or the home of a friend.
Psychiatrists first started focusing on how much the ready availability of lethal means affected suicide rates after a fortuitous experiment in England. When the country switched its heating from coal to natural gas in the 1970s, suicide rates plummeted, because the fumes were not as deadly; gas has a far lower carbon monoxide content. Sri Lanka developed the highest suicide rate in the world in the 1980s, following the introduction of pesticides on a mass scale. Once the government removed the most toxic compounds, like Paraquat (lethal in 70 percent of cases) suicide rates dropped 50 percent, though the number of attempts dropped by less.
Studies show that once a convenient lethal method is removed, many do not seek other options. “If people go to the Golden Gate Bridge and encounter a barrier, they don’t go to the Bay Bridge and try there,” Dr. Reidenberg said.
INDEED, many people who commit suicide are more momentarily desperate than classically depressed, experts say. In Sri Lanka, “pesticide was often taken after an argument with a parent or a spouse,” said Dr. Gunnell, who studied that epidemic.
Up to 50 percent of people who attempt suicide make the decision to do so within minutes to an hour before they act, studies have found. They may be depressed or have contemplated suicide, “but the final decision comes very quickly, and there’s often ambivalence up to the moment,” Dr. Reidenberg said.
Although SAVE has not taken a specific policy position on firearms, it maintains that guns, just like dangerous medicines, should be safely stored.
But putting time between a suicidal impulse and getting a loaded gun in hand may be hard to legislate in the United States. A 2008 Supreme Court decision struck down a Washington, D.C., law that required weapons to be stored disassembled or to have trigger locks on the grounds that the law interfered with the right to self-defense; a handful of states still mandate the safety features. While the 1993 Brady Violence Prevention Act required a five-day waiting period for a background check before firearms purchases, the provision expired in 1998 and checks are now done through the Internet-enabled National Instant Check System, in minutes.
Would a wait have deterred Kerry Lewiecki? In law school he had developed severe pain in his hands, arms and back that was not responding well to treatment. Despite that, he enjoyed weekends with his fiancée, and they spoke on the morning of his death. That same day he mailed books to his parents’ home, in preparation for a Father’s Day visit.
Said his father, “If it had not been so easy to buy a gun maybe he would have spoken with someone or woken up the next morning and heard the birds and felt better.”
Source: NYT
________________________________________________
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Why Call ? What To Expect · Crisis Call Chart · Basic Survival · Distraction · Why Live ? ... USA National. Phone Numbers, Chat, Web Sites, E-Mail, & Other Crisis Lines ....Trevor Lifeline Crisis intervention & Suicide prevention 1-866-488-7386 ... __________________________________________________________________
Hillary 2016? Founder of Hillary Clinton superPAC says, ‘No doubt she’s gonna run.’
Date: 2/4/13
Website: readyforHillary.com
Politics Confidential
Hillary Clinton had not even stepped down from her post as Secretary of State, when a superPAC supporting her run for president in 2016 was filed with the Federal Election Commission. The superPAC's website launched over the weekend.
Allida Black is chair and founder of the group, and says she is, as the superPAC is named, "Ready for Hillary."
"I've been waiting for Hillary all my life. But I am more than ready this time," says Black, who campaigned for Clinton in 14 states in 2008.
Clinton has not said whether she will throw her hat in the ring, telling ABC News in her last television interview as Secretary of State that she is "flattered and honored" at the intense interest in whether she might run for president in 2016.
"I have no doubt she's gonna run," says Black. "She knows there's this huge groundswell. She sees the challenges. She's not gonna say no. Not because of her, but because of us."
But there are a lot of other big-résumé Democrats out there as potential 2016 candidates, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Vice President Joe Biden. Black says it is not their time.
"Hillary is the leader that the country needs. I mean she's been president of the world really for the past four years," says the George Washington University professor and historian. "She spent her whole life getting ready."
SuperPACs played a big role the 2012 election, Mitt Romney's superPAC poured more than $80 million into his campaign. Some were as well funded as entire presidential campaigns. Black did not have a specific goal for how much money "Ready for Hillary" will be able to raise, but expects a lot from supporters.
"We're gonna need that gazillion dollars. And we will get that gazillion dollars," she says. "We have the contacts, we have the skills, we have the passion, and we have the people on the ground to pull it off."
For more on Allida Black, including whether she thinks Clinton would have been a better president than Obama, and how much she thinks Clinton's "sky high" popularity will fall if she gets back into politics, check out this week's Politics Confidential.
________________________________________
Looks matter. If someone tells you
that looks don’t matter, he’s wrong
Why Looks Matter
You don’t need to look like Brad Pitt or Beyonce to be successful, but you do have to put your best foot forward at all times. You tell the world what to think of you based on how you present yourself.
Your family and closest friends may look past your appearance. However, employers and individuals you meet throughout your career will subconsciously make judgments about your character, your personality, your intelligence, and your overall value as a human being based on what they see when they look at you. It might not be fair, but it’s a reality.
You might not like the analogy, but you need to see yourself as a product that you are marketing and selling 24-7-365. Looking your best is not about being phony or artificial; it’s just about taking pride in your presentation.
Here’s a quick analogy to demonstrate the power of appearances and marketing. A typical bottle of water sells for $1 or so at the store. However, there is a “luxury” brand of water that has been endorsed by Jaimee Foxx and other celebrities. It’s called Bling H20, and it has crystals embedded into the outside of each bottle. What does Bling H20 sell for?
$40 per bottle!
I’ve never drank Bling H20, but I bet that it does not taste 40 times better than Poland Spring or Aquafina. Why does it sell for 40 times more? Because it looks a lot better.
People pay more for products that appear to be of higher quality. Similarly, employers pay more for candidates and employees who appear to be of higher quality.
Salary negotiation doesn’t just happen when an employer makes you a job offer or when an employer brings you in for an annual performance review. Salary negotiation begins the moment you come in contact with an employer, and it never ends.
Want to negotiate a higher salary and be paid what you are truly worth throughout your career? Then, make sure you look your absolute best at all times on paper, online, and in-person.
Pete Leibman is the Author of the new book titled “I Got My Dream Job and So Can You” (AMACOM, 2012). His career advice has been featured on Fox, CBS, and CNN, and he is a popular Keynote Speaker at career events for students and recent grads and at conferences for people who work with college students and recent grads.
More Business articles from Business 2 Community:
that looks don’t matter, he’s wrong
Why Looks Matter
You don’t need to look like Brad Pitt or Beyonce to be successful, but you do have to put your best foot forward at all times. You tell the world what to think of you based on how you present yourself.
Your family and closest friends may look past your appearance. However, employers and individuals you meet throughout your career will subconsciously make judgments about your character, your personality, your intelligence, and your overall value as a human being based on what they see when they look at you. It might not be fair, but it’s a reality.
You might not like the analogy, but you need to see yourself as a product that you are marketing and selling 24-7-365. Looking your best is not about being phony or artificial; it’s just about taking pride in your presentation.
Here’s a quick analogy to demonstrate the power of appearances and marketing. A typical bottle of water sells for $1 or so at the store. However, there is a “luxury” brand of water that has been endorsed by Jaimee Foxx and other celebrities. It’s called Bling H20, and it has crystals embedded into the outside of each bottle. What does Bling H20 sell for?
$40 per bottle!
I’ve never drank Bling H20, but I bet that it does not taste 40 times better than Poland Spring or Aquafina. Why does it sell for 40 times more? Because it looks a lot better.
People pay more for products that appear to be of higher quality. Similarly, employers pay more for candidates and employees who appear to be of higher quality.
Salary negotiation doesn’t just happen when an employer makes you a job offer or when an employer brings you in for an annual performance review. Salary negotiation begins the moment you come in contact with an employer, and it never ends.
Want to negotiate a higher salary and be paid what you are truly worth throughout your career? Then, make sure you look your absolute best at all times on paper, online, and in-person.
Pete Leibman is the Author of the new book titled “I Got My Dream Job and So Can You” (AMACOM, 2012). His career advice has been featured on Fox, CBS, and CNN, and he is a popular Keynote Speaker at career events for students and recent grads and at conferences for people who work with college students and recent grads.
More Business articles from Business 2 Community:
- 5 Pro Tips for Successful Marketing Strategies with Tout
- When Lead Generation Feels Like Buying Collectibles
- The Difference Between Likers and Listeners
- 7 Email Marketing Ideas You Can Use Right Now!
- 16 Case Studies Prove ROI of Mobile Marketing ____________________________________________________________________________
Are You Making a Good First Impression?
When you meet someone for the first time or simply pass a stranger on the street, it's human nature to make assumptions about them: He's conceited (= excessively proud of oneself; vain), and lazy, she's rich and friendly, that little girl is a huge brat. And you may have wondered what people think of you the first time they lay eyes on you.
"When it comes to appearance, how you put yourself together matters more than being conventionally pretty," says Brandy Mychals, author of How to Read a Client from Across the Room (McGraw-Hill, 2012).
"A job interview can be over before you even sit down because the person has already made snap (= hasty, sudden) judgments."
Some of the ways others come to those opinions aren't what you may expect. Check out these five things people rate you by so you can make that tenth of a second count and wow everyone at first sight.
1. Your feet do the talking: You can never have too many shoes - and people judge you based on every single pair. In a study published in Journal of Research in Personality, researchers found that people could accurately guess a stranger's age, gender, and income simply by looking at what was on their feet. They also associated certain personality traits with different shoes. More masculine-looking pairs were thought to be worn by less agreeable people, while stylish or attractive shoes were assumed to be donned (= put on) by rich, conscientious folks. And people rocking those ankle boots that are so in right now came across as aggressive.
2. Cosmetic powers: Brushing on a little shadow or blush can not only up your attractiveness factor, it can make you appear more confident. In a 2011 study funded by Proctor & Gamble and performed by Harvard University, people said women wearing a little makeup were more likeable, competent, and trustworthy than those with bare faces.
But don't use a heavy hand with that eyeliner: Too much makeup still made women attractive, but they also seemed untrustworthy and dishonest, especially when participants only got a quick glimpse of the woman.
3. Grin and bear it: Your dentist is about to become your most popular medical practitioner. Earlier this year, Kelton Research conducted a study funded by Invisalign where more than 1,000 people were shown pictures of men and women's teeth. Those with straight smiles were perceived to be happier, smarter, and more successful and popular than those with crooked teeth.
Thirty-eight percent also said crooked choppers would kill the chances of a second date, and almost half said that when two job candidates had the same skills and experience, one with straight teeth would be hired over one with crooked teeth.
4. The clothes make the woman: While Hillary Rodham Clinton rocks the pantsuit-and certainly nobody would doubt her confidence or competence-showing a little leg (tastefully, of course) may work better for you. Women in skirt suits were thought to earn more money and be more confident than those in pantsuits in a study conducted at the U.K.'s University of Hertfordshire. The researchers say the skirt balances professionalism with attractiveness without being provocative.
Wearing the right outfit can also change your self-perception, researchers at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found. Students who wore white lab coats while doing a scientific experiment performed better than those in regular clothes.
5. Take up space: Simply standing tall can speak volumes. According to a 2011 study published in Psychological Science, so-called "posture expansiveness"-where you open up the body and occupy space-not only makes you appear more confident and authoritative, you actually think and act that way. Posture matters even more than your title: It gives you a sense of power, no matter where you line up on the totem pole, researchers say.
___________________________________________________
When you meet someone for the first time or simply pass a stranger on the street, it's human nature to make assumptions about them: He's conceited (= excessively proud of oneself; vain), and lazy, she's rich and friendly, that little girl is a huge brat. And you may have wondered what people think of you the first time they lay eyes on you.
"When it comes to appearance, how you put yourself together matters more than being conventionally pretty," says Brandy Mychals, author of How to Read a Client from Across the Room (McGraw-Hill, 2012).
"A job interview can be over before you even sit down because the person has already made snap (= hasty, sudden) judgments."
Some of the ways others come to those opinions aren't what you may expect. Check out these five things people rate you by so you can make that tenth of a second count and wow everyone at first sight.
1. Your feet do the talking: You can never have too many shoes - and people judge you based on every single pair. In a study published in Journal of Research in Personality, researchers found that people could accurately guess a stranger's age, gender, and income simply by looking at what was on their feet. They also associated certain personality traits with different shoes. More masculine-looking pairs were thought to be worn by less agreeable people, while stylish or attractive shoes were assumed to be donned (= put on) by rich, conscientious folks. And people rocking those ankle boots that are so in right now came across as aggressive.
2. Cosmetic powers: Brushing on a little shadow or blush can not only up your attractiveness factor, it can make you appear more confident. In a 2011 study funded by Proctor & Gamble and performed by Harvard University, people said women wearing a little makeup were more likeable, competent, and trustworthy than those with bare faces.
But don't use a heavy hand with that eyeliner: Too much makeup still made women attractive, but they also seemed untrustworthy and dishonest, especially when participants only got a quick glimpse of the woman.
3. Grin and bear it: Your dentist is about to become your most popular medical practitioner. Earlier this year, Kelton Research conducted a study funded by Invisalign where more than 1,000 people were shown pictures of men and women's teeth. Those with straight smiles were perceived to be happier, smarter, and more successful and popular than those with crooked teeth.
Thirty-eight percent also said crooked choppers would kill the chances of a second date, and almost half said that when two job candidates had the same skills and experience, one with straight teeth would be hired over one with crooked teeth.
4. The clothes make the woman: While Hillary Rodham Clinton rocks the pantsuit-and certainly nobody would doubt her confidence or competence-showing a little leg (tastefully, of course) may work better for you. Women in skirt suits were thought to earn more money and be more confident than those in pantsuits in a study conducted at the U.K.'s University of Hertfordshire. The researchers say the skirt balances professionalism with attractiveness without being provocative.
Wearing the right outfit can also change your self-perception, researchers at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found. Students who wore white lab coats while doing a scientific experiment performed better than those in regular clothes.
5. Take up space: Simply standing tall can speak volumes. According to a 2011 study published in Psychological Science, so-called "posture expansiveness"-where you open up the body and occupy space-not only makes you appear more confident and authoritative, you actually think and act that way. Posture matters even more than your title: It gives you a sense of power, no matter where you line up on the totem pole, researchers say.
___________________________________________________
Interesting & important information
Aches and Pains: You Can Thank Evolution for Them
Click green for further info
BOSTON — Bad backs, dangerous childbirths, sore feet and wisdom teeth pains are among the many ailments humans face from evolution, researchers say.
In an evolutionary sense, humans are by far the most successful primates on the planet, with a world population close to 7 billion. Humanity owes this success to a number of well-known adaptations, such as large, complex brains and walking upright on two feet. However, there are downsides to these advances as well.
"We're dealing with the scars of human evolution," anthropologist Alan Mann at Princeton University told.
For instance, while walking upright freed up our hands for tool use, a key factor in human success, the resulting stresses from gravity on the human spine may have led to unique back pains.
"We're the only mammals that spontaneously fracture vertebra," anthropologist and anatomist Bruce Latimer at Case Western Reserve University told.
Latimer and other scientists detailed their findings on human evolution on Feb. 15/2013 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Achy backs
To underscore the challenges the human spine faces because of humanity's upright posture, Latimer compared the spine to a tower of 24 cups and saucers, with each cup representing a vertebra in the spine and each saucer one of the disks between each vertebra. [10 Wacky Facts About Humans]
"Then take a book like a dictionary and put it on top. This is the head. If you are really careful, you can balance it — otherwise there's a lot of porcelain on the ground," Latimer said. "Then imagine taking this and putting in all the curves that you naturally have in the spine. I could give you all the duct tape in the world, and you still couldn't possibly balance it."
As the spine developed curves to keep balanced while upright, it can become stressed at certain points. This can result in conditions such as lordosis*), or swayed backs*); kyphosis*), a rounded upper back or hunch back; and scoliosis*), a sideway curve in the spine. *) = see at the end of this article
In addition, the spine also suffers from how people walk — one foot forward at a time with the opposite side arm swinging in step.
"This creates a twisting motion that, after millions of twists over time, the discs between the vertebrae begin to wear out and break down, resulting in herniated discs," Latimer explained.
Evolving from four-footed to two-footed walking has also resulted in a host of foot problems, such as flat feet and bunions. Fossil evidence suggests that humans have suffered foot problems such as high-ankle sprains as far back as 3.5 million years ago, not just because of more recent, sedentary lifestyles.
"The fossil record is revealing that a lot of the foot problems we have now can be traced back to our past," functional morphologist Jeremy DeSilva at Boston University told LiveScience.
Pain in the teeth
The dramatic boost in brain size that helps set humans apart the most from the rest of the animal kingdom also has led to problems many now experience with wisdom teeth, the third set of molars that get their name from the fact that they erupt as people approach the end of adolescence. [10 Odd Facts About the Human Brain]
"Our brains expanded to more than triple of our ancestors. As a result, the architecture of the brain case has changed," Mann said.
This often leaves wisdom teeth no room to grow, causing them to erupt in painful ways.
"Evolution doesn't produce perfection," Mann said.
The problems that wisdom teeth can pose likely explain why genetic mutations that prevent their development have spread in human populations.
"The population with the highest frequency of missing third molars are the Inuit in the Arctic of North America, where it's as high as 44 percent," Mann said. Intriguingly, the only human population that apparently always had wisdom teeth in adulthood were the Neanderthals, he added.
Designing a human body
The evolution of upright walking has also made childbirth much riskier for humans than any other primate.
"If you want to look for examples of how we're not the result of intelligent design, you don't have to go far — just look at the complicated, uncomfortable way we have babies,"anthropologist Karen Rosenberg at the University of Delaware told.
The complex societies that humans have developed now help women survive childbirth.
"We mitigate*) these problems with midwives, obstetricians, attendants of any sort in the childbirth process," Rosenberg said
*) mitigate = Make less severe, serious, or painful: "he wanted to mitigate misery in the world" - Lessen the gravity of (an offense or mistake) - Synonyms: palliate - alleviate - allay - relieve - ease - soothe
"If an engineer were given the task to design the human body, he or she would never have done it the way humans have evolved," Latimer said. "Unfortunately, we can't go back to walking on four feet. We've undergone too much evolutionary change for that — and it is not the answer to our problems."
Click green below for further info in Wikipedia
*) lordosis - (1) Excessive inward curvature of the spine, (2) a posture assumed by some female mammals during mating, in which the back is arched downward
More info - Wikipedia - Dictionary.com - Answers.com - Merriam-Webster
Lordosis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis
Lordosis. Lordosis is the inward curvature of a portion of the lumbar and cervical vertebral .... Lordosis - MedlinePlus definition · Lordosis - SpineUniverse ...Cause - Treatment - In animals - Other
*) swayed backs - Excessive lordotic curvature is also called hyperlordosis, hollow back, saddle back, and swayback. Common causes of excessive lordosis include tight low back muscles, excessive visceral fat, and pregnancy.
*) kyphosis - Excessive outward curvature of the spine, causing hunching of the back.
*) scoliosis - Abnormal lateral curvature of the spine.
Click green:
- The 9 Most Bizarre Medical Conditions
- Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor
- Know Your Roots? Human Evolution Quiz Source: Lifescience.com Click green for further info _________________________________________________________________________________________
See the article above - interesting info about the human body
Use Your Body's Hidden Talents
The human body is amazing
It fights germs, heals its own scrapes, and can run for miles. But the body can do other things you don’t even know about. Tap into your body's hidden talents by learning how to fight back tears, dull needle pain, stop hiccups, and more.
Hold Back Tears
If you're tearing up at an inappropriate moment, just clear your throat. "It interrupts the mechanism in the nasal passage and larynx that controls crying," says Rebecca Nagy, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based meditation expert. Plus, after you clear your throat, you tend to swallow. This lifts your tongue to the roof of your mouth, which blocks the soft palate, making you unable to cry. "I've suggested this technique many times to brides and grooms who had trouble getting through their vows," Nagy says.
Silence Hiccups
Take the deepest breath you can, hold it for 10 seconds, then, without exhaling, suck in more air and hold it for five more seconds. Finally--still without exhaling!--breathe in as much more air as you can squeeze in, hold for another five seconds, and exhale. Then breathe normally. This technique immobilizes the diaphragm (the muscle at the base of your lungs), preventing the spasms. Luc Morris, M. D., and his colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine tested the method on 30 patients who were prone to frequent hiccups. "It worked immediately on everyone who could do it," he says.
Break a Fainting Spell
Cross your legs, squeeze your thighs, and contract your abs. You can feel faint when your blood pressure drops and blood pools in your extremities. By tensing muscles, you keep your BP up and divert blood back to your heart and brain. University of Amsterdam researchers who tested muscle-tightening exercises found that they reduced the risk of passing out by 30 percent.
Heal Nighttime Heartburn
Feeling the fire? Sleep on your left side. This preserves the natural curve of the esophagus, which helps keep stomach acid from creeping up. (When you sleep on your back or on your right side, gravity straightens out the curve.) A study by Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia found that frequent heartburn sufferers had fewer episodes when they slept on their left sides than when they slept on their backs or right sides.
Stop Needle Pain
Make your next flu shot feel less piercing by putting pressure around the area that's about to be stuck, says Ross I. Donaldson, M.D., M.P.H., assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. "Make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and push down for a few seconds as you're receiving the shot," he says. By stimulating receptors for pressure or touch, you can override nearby pain receptors in your skin. "It confuses your nerves, so a shot feels more like a gentle poke than a sharp jab," Donaldson says.
Beat Brain Freeze
Fold the tip of your tongue backward and stick the bottom of your tongue to the roof of your mouth. The warmth will help heat up the nerves in your palette and cause the blood flow to your brain to normalize, says Jorge Serrador, M.D. of Harvard Medical School, who has researched the mechanisms at work during brain freeze. You can also sip slowly so your body has time to heat the tissue in the roof of your mouth and cup your hands around your mouth like you would in the winter and exhale deeply. Doing so will trap warm air in your mouth and help thaw your noggin*), Serrador says. *) human head (slang)
Prevent Motion Sickness
Seat yourself wisely: "Always ride where your eyes will see the same motion that your ears and body feel," says Keri Peterson, M.D. internal medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and Women's Health advisor. So in a car, ride in the front seat; on a boat, position yourself on the deck and keep your eyes on the horizon; on an airplane, try to score a window seat over the wing of the plane, Peterson suggests.
Relieve Stress
Tap on your body's acupressure points while repeating certain statements aloud, says Jessica Ortner, co-producer of The Tapping Solution, a documentary film that explores tapping.
Research shows that the Emotional Freedom Technique (a.k.a. EFT or tapping), a treatment which combines ancient Chinese acupressure with modern psychology, can reduce cortisol*) levels in the body and counteract the negative impact of stress by sending a calming signal to the amygdala (the part of our brain responsible for our fight or flight response).
Start by using the tip of your index and middle fingers to rhythmically tap the side of your hand point while saying the "setup statement" aloud (speaking out loud will help with focus): "Even though I have this problem [insert your particular problem, such as neck pain, stress from a deadline, or anxiety], I accept myself." Repeat three times.
Tap briefly where the eyebrow begins at the bridge of your nose, to the side of your eye, under your eye, under your nose, on your chin, on your collarbone point, under your arm, and on top of your head while you express how you feel aloud, as if you're venting to a friend. Then repeat on the other side.
*) cortisol - the major natural glucocorticoid **) elaborated by the adrenal cortex***); it affects the metabolism of glucose, protein, and fats and has mineralocorticoid activity. See hydrocortisone for therapeutic uses.
*) cortisol - A hormone released by the cortex (outer portion) of the adrenal gland when a person is under stress. Cortisol levels are now considered a biological marker of suicide risk.
**) glucocorticoid - click: Glucocorticoid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucocorticoid
***) cortex = 1. Anatomy
a. The outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, as of the kidney or adrenal gland.
b. The outer layer of gray matter that covers the surface of the cerebral hemisphere****).
2. Botany The region of tissue in a root or stem lying between the epidermis and the vascular tissue.
3. An external layer, such as bark or rind.
****) cerebral hemisphere - click: Cerebral hemisphere | Define Cerebral hemisphere at Dictionary.comdictionary.reference.com/browse/cerebral+hemisphere
either of the rounded halves of the cerebrum of the brain, divided laterally by a deep fissure and connected at the bottom by the corpus callosum. Compare left ... ___________________________________________________________________________
Use Your Body's Hidden Talents
The human body is amazing
It fights germs, heals its own scrapes, and can run for miles. But the body can do other things you don’t even know about. Tap into your body's hidden talents by learning how to fight back tears, dull needle pain, stop hiccups, and more.
Hold Back Tears
If you're tearing up at an inappropriate moment, just clear your throat. "It interrupts the mechanism in the nasal passage and larynx that controls crying," says Rebecca Nagy, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based meditation expert. Plus, after you clear your throat, you tend to swallow. This lifts your tongue to the roof of your mouth, which blocks the soft palate, making you unable to cry. "I've suggested this technique many times to brides and grooms who had trouble getting through their vows," Nagy says.
Silence Hiccups
Take the deepest breath you can, hold it for 10 seconds, then, without exhaling, suck in more air and hold it for five more seconds. Finally--still without exhaling!--breathe in as much more air as you can squeeze in, hold for another five seconds, and exhale. Then breathe normally. This technique immobilizes the diaphragm (the muscle at the base of your lungs), preventing the spasms. Luc Morris, M. D., and his colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine tested the method on 30 patients who were prone to frequent hiccups. "It worked immediately on everyone who could do it," he says.
Break a Fainting Spell
Cross your legs, squeeze your thighs, and contract your abs. You can feel faint when your blood pressure drops and blood pools in your extremities. By tensing muscles, you keep your BP up and divert blood back to your heart and brain. University of Amsterdam researchers who tested muscle-tightening exercises found that they reduced the risk of passing out by 30 percent.
Heal Nighttime Heartburn
Feeling the fire? Sleep on your left side. This preserves the natural curve of the esophagus, which helps keep stomach acid from creeping up. (When you sleep on your back or on your right side, gravity straightens out the curve.) A study by Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia found that frequent heartburn sufferers had fewer episodes when they slept on their left sides than when they slept on their backs or right sides.
Stop Needle Pain
Make your next flu shot feel less piercing by putting pressure around the area that's about to be stuck, says Ross I. Donaldson, M.D., M.P.H., assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. "Make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and push down for a few seconds as you're receiving the shot," he says. By stimulating receptors for pressure or touch, you can override nearby pain receptors in your skin. "It confuses your nerves, so a shot feels more like a gentle poke than a sharp jab," Donaldson says.
Beat Brain Freeze
Fold the tip of your tongue backward and stick the bottom of your tongue to the roof of your mouth. The warmth will help heat up the nerves in your palette and cause the blood flow to your brain to normalize, says Jorge Serrador, M.D. of Harvard Medical School, who has researched the mechanisms at work during brain freeze. You can also sip slowly so your body has time to heat the tissue in the roof of your mouth and cup your hands around your mouth like you would in the winter and exhale deeply. Doing so will trap warm air in your mouth and help thaw your noggin*), Serrador says. *) human head (slang)
Prevent Motion Sickness
Seat yourself wisely: "Always ride where your eyes will see the same motion that your ears and body feel," says Keri Peterson, M.D. internal medicine physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and Women's Health advisor. So in a car, ride in the front seat; on a boat, position yourself on the deck and keep your eyes on the horizon; on an airplane, try to score a window seat over the wing of the plane, Peterson suggests.
Relieve Stress
Tap on your body's acupressure points while repeating certain statements aloud, says Jessica Ortner, co-producer of The Tapping Solution, a documentary film that explores tapping.
Research shows that the Emotional Freedom Technique (a.k.a. EFT or tapping), a treatment which combines ancient Chinese acupressure with modern psychology, can reduce cortisol*) levels in the body and counteract the negative impact of stress by sending a calming signal to the amygdala (the part of our brain responsible for our fight or flight response).
Start by using the tip of your index and middle fingers to rhythmically tap the side of your hand point while saying the "setup statement" aloud (speaking out loud will help with focus): "Even though I have this problem [insert your particular problem, such as neck pain, stress from a deadline, or anxiety], I accept myself." Repeat three times.
Tap briefly where the eyebrow begins at the bridge of your nose, to the side of your eye, under your eye, under your nose, on your chin, on your collarbone point, under your arm, and on top of your head while you express how you feel aloud, as if you're venting to a friend. Then repeat on the other side.
*) cortisol - the major natural glucocorticoid **) elaborated by the adrenal cortex***); it affects the metabolism of glucose, protein, and fats and has mineralocorticoid activity. See hydrocortisone for therapeutic uses.
*) cortisol - A hormone released by the cortex (outer portion) of the adrenal gland when a person is under stress. Cortisol levels are now considered a biological marker of suicide risk.
**) glucocorticoid - click: Glucocorticoid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucocorticoid
***) cortex = 1. Anatomy
a. The outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, as of the kidney or adrenal gland.
b. The outer layer of gray matter that covers the surface of the cerebral hemisphere****).
2. Botany The region of tissue in a root or stem lying between the epidermis and the vascular tissue.
3. An external layer, such as bark or rind.
****) cerebral hemisphere - click: Cerebral hemisphere | Define Cerebral hemisphere at Dictionary.comdictionary.reference.com/browse/cerebral+hemisphere
either of the rounded halves of the cerebrum of the brain, divided laterally by a deep fissure and connected at the bottom by the corpus callosum. Compare left ... ___________________________________________________________________________
Family Lives Without Money—By Choice—and Thrives
A Berlin family of three has been living on practically nothing but love and the goodwill of others for more than two years and counting—not as a victims of the rough economy, but as activists who are on a money strike to protest what they call our “excess-consumption society.”
Click: German Grandmother Lives Money-free and Has Never Been Happier (if the link has expired search the net with the title)
“As consumers, we support the system, and we are all responsible for making a wasteful society,” Raphael Fellmer, 29, told Yahoo! Shine. “This strike is to inspire other people to reflect about our other possibilities.”
Fellmer, who said he’d held jobs since he was 12 years old, began his protest after years of working in hotels, bars, restaurants and various offices. In 2010, after graduating from college in the Hague as a European Studies major, he and two friends embarked upon a 15-month “journey of humanity” to raise awareness of environmental destruction and of society’s many wastes, including estimates that about one-third of all food produced worldwide (valued at about $1 trillion a year) gets wasted.
Click: German Bin Divers Get Connected to Wage War on Food Waste
That trip involved hitchhiking from Europe to Mexico without cash, simply depending on the goodwill and excess resources of others. It carried them over more than 19,000 miles on more than 500 vehicles—including a sailboat that took the trio from the Canary Islands to Brazil in exchange for crew duties—and soon led Fellmer to meet his wife, Nieves Palmer, who became pregnant along the way.
Now the couple, along with their 18-month-old daughter Alma Lucia, are continuing to live nearly money-free in Berlin, where they do odd jobs and organizing work in exchange for living space, with roommates, in the Peace House Martin Niemöller, which contains various non-profits. (Though Fellmer uses no money, he said Palmer does use a little, mainly in the form of child support she receives from the government, which is granted to all children.)
Fellmer has become a full-time activist in the name of bringing attention to problem of waste and over consumption, running organizations and websites including The (R)evolution: In Harmony with the Earth. There is a network of others, too, beyond the two pals he traveled with. A 2010 documentary called “Living Without Money,” for example, profiles a 68-year-old German woman named Heidemarie Schwermer who gave up money 14 years ago. She says she’s never felt freer.
But Fellmer admits his lifestyle is radical, explaining that it’s to get his message across. “Not everybody needs to do this to such an extreme. This is for protest. We want to inspire people to think about changes they can make. There are so many tools out there, so many ways to reduce one's carbon footprint.”
One is through the fast-growing German movement of “foodsharing,” in which adherents use the Internet to share edible food that’s been foraged from grocery-store dumpsters. Fellmer founded an organization in which he partnered with a leading German organic-food chain to create an efficient way of “rescuing” food for distribution just before it is thrown away. He's also part of a website, foodsharing.de, which has registered more than 12,000 people across the country in just two months of its existence, he said, and has drawn interest from around the world in more than 20 languages (6 of which Fellmer speaks). In the U.S., where about 40 percent of food—or about $165 billion worth—gets wasted annually, there exists a similar fringe movement of vegan dumpster divers called “freegans.”
Other ways to take part in what Fellmer calls “collaborative consumption” include using popular couch surfing sites, or finding people with empty homes who need long-term house-sitters. “We have not only a surplus of food but of housing,” he said. “Everything we need is already there. We just need to make the connections.”
Even as a new parent, Fellmer said he’s been able to stave off money-related anxieties. “Children need from parents love, attention, time. All these materialistic things are really ridiculous,” he said, adding that used baby clothes are as easily had as thrown-away food. Germany offers universal medical care, although Fellmer and his family have managed to find a dentist to give them free services, and did gardening and repair work for a gynecologist when Palmer was pregnant. (They did spend their one bit of money on the overseas journey, however, when Palmer, a former psychologist, used funds she had saved in order to pay a midwife.)
Though Fellmer’s parents are supportive of his lifestyle and “pretty open,” he admitted to having plenty of critics. “People are very creative with their negative comments. They say I’m lazy, abusing other people,” he said. “But when they talk to me, they learn I’m working 40 to 50 hours a week on projects for the good of society.”
Mostly, Fellmer hopes his money strike can help change others’ lives. “Money is hampering our dreams. Most people have forgotten it, or are completely afraid of living without money, so they are enslaved by the monetary system,” he said. “I hope to motivate people to believe a little more in their dreams.”
Related:
Top Frugal Living Tips for Single Moms
10 Ways to Stop Wasting Food
11 "Legitimate" Reasons for Becoming a Crazy Vegan _____________________________________________________________________________________
A Berlin family of three has been living on practically nothing but love and the goodwill of others for more than two years and counting—not as a victims of the rough economy, but as activists who are on a money strike to protest what they call our “excess-consumption society.”
Click: German Grandmother Lives Money-free and Has Never Been Happier (if the link has expired search the net with the title)
“As consumers, we support the system, and we are all responsible for making a wasteful society,” Raphael Fellmer, 29, told Yahoo! Shine. “This strike is to inspire other people to reflect about our other possibilities.”
Fellmer, who said he’d held jobs since he was 12 years old, began his protest after years of working in hotels, bars, restaurants and various offices. In 2010, after graduating from college in the Hague as a European Studies major, he and two friends embarked upon a 15-month “journey of humanity” to raise awareness of environmental destruction and of society’s many wastes, including estimates that about one-third of all food produced worldwide (valued at about $1 trillion a year) gets wasted.
Click: German Bin Divers Get Connected to Wage War on Food Waste
That trip involved hitchhiking from Europe to Mexico without cash, simply depending on the goodwill and excess resources of others. It carried them over more than 19,000 miles on more than 500 vehicles—including a sailboat that took the trio from the Canary Islands to Brazil in exchange for crew duties—and soon led Fellmer to meet his wife, Nieves Palmer, who became pregnant along the way.
Now the couple, along with their 18-month-old daughter Alma Lucia, are continuing to live nearly money-free in Berlin, where they do odd jobs and organizing work in exchange for living space, with roommates, in the Peace House Martin Niemöller, which contains various non-profits. (Though Fellmer uses no money, he said Palmer does use a little, mainly in the form of child support she receives from the government, which is granted to all children.)
Fellmer has become a full-time activist in the name of bringing attention to problem of waste and over consumption, running organizations and websites including The (R)evolution: In Harmony with the Earth. There is a network of others, too, beyond the two pals he traveled with. A 2010 documentary called “Living Without Money,” for example, profiles a 68-year-old German woman named Heidemarie Schwermer who gave up money 14 years ago. She says she’s never felt freer.
But Fellmer admits his lifestyle is radical, explaining that it’s to get his message across. “Not everybody needs to do this to such an extreme. This is for protest. We want to inspire people to think about changes they can make. There are so many tools out there, so many ways to reduce one's carbon footprint.”
One is through the fast-growing German movement of “foodsharing,” in which adherents use the Internet to share edible food that’s been foraged from grocery-store dumpsters. Fellmer founded an organization in which he partnered with a leading German organic-food chain to create an efficient way of “rescuing” food for distribution just before it is thrown away. He's also part of a website, foodsharing.de, which has registered more than 12,000 people across the country in just two months of its existence, he said, and has drawn interest from around the world in more than 20 languages (6 of which Fellmer speaks). In the U.S., where about 40 percent of food—or about $165 billion worth—gets wasted annually, there exists a similar fringe movement of vegan dumpster divers called “freegans.”
Other ways to take part in what Fellmer calls “collaborative consumption” include using popular couch surfing sites, or finding people with empty homes who need long-term house-sitters. “We have not only a surplus of food but of housing,” he said. “Everything we need is already there. We just need to make the connections.”
Even as a new parent, Fellmer said he’s been able to stave off money-related anxieties. “Children need from parents love, attention, time. All these materialistic things are really ridiculous,” he said, adding that used baby clothes are as easily had as thrown-away food. Germany offers universal medical care, although Fellmer and his family have managed to find a dentist to give them free services, and did gardening and repair work for a gynecologist when Palmer was pregnant. (They did spend their one bit of money on the overseas journey, however, when Palmer, a former psychologist, used funds she had saved in order to pay a midwife.)
Though Fellmer’s parents are supportive of his lifestyle and “pretty open,” he admitted to having plenty of critics. “People are very creative with their negative comments. They say I’m lazy, abusing other people,” he said. “But when they talk to me, they learn I’m working 40 to 50 hours a week on projects for the good of society.”
Mostly, Fellmer hopes his money strike can help change others’ lives. “Money is hampering our dreams. Most people have forgotten it, or are completely afraid of living without money, so they are enslaved by the monetary system,” he said. “I hope to motivate people to believe a little more in their dreams.”
Related:
Top Frugal Living Tips for Single Moms
10 Ways to Stop Wasting Food
11 "Legitimate" Reasons for Becoming a Crazy Vegan _____________________________________________________________________________________
Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth
By Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a professor at Columbia and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank, is the author of “The Price of Inequality.”
President Obama’s second Inaugural Address used soaring language to reaffirm America’s commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”
The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.
Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.
It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According toresearch from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.
Another way of looking at equality of opportunity is to ask to what extent the life chances of a child are dependent on the education and income of his parents. Is it just as likely that a child of poor or poorly educated parents gets a good education and rises to the middle class as someone born to middle-class parents with college degrees? Even in a more egalitarian society, the answer would be no. But the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.
How do we explain this? Some of it has to do with persistent discrimination. Latinos and African-Americans still get paid less than whites, and women still get paid less than men, even though they recently surpassed men in the number of advanced degrees they obtain. Though gender disparities in the workplace are less than they once were, there is still a glass ceiling: women are sorely underrepresented in top corporate positions and constitute a minuscule fraction of C.E.O.’s.
Discrimination, however, is only a small part of the picture. Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality. After World War II, Europe made a major effort to democratize its education systems. We did, too, with the G.I. Bill, which extended higher education to Americans across the economic spectrum.
But then we changed, in several ways. While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs — or rich enough to send their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance — the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found.
Of course, there are other forces at play, some of which start even before birth. Children in affluent families get more exposure to reading and less exposure to environmental hazards. Their families can afford enriching experiences like music lessons and summer camp. They get better nutrition and health care, which enhance their learning, directly and indirectly.
Unless current trends in education are reversed, the situation is likely to get even worse. In some cases it seems as if policy has actually been designed to reduce opportunity: government support for many state schools has been steadily gutted over the last few decades — and especially in the last few years. Meanwhile, students are crushed by giant student loan debts that are almost impossible to discharge, even in bankruptcy. This is happening at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.
Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships. Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.
Americans are coming to realize that their cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth. Grand deceptions of this magnitude are hard to maintain for long — and the country has already been through a couple of decades of self-deception.
Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. We have an economic, and not only moral, interest in saving the American dream.
Policies that promote equality of opportunity must target the youngest Americans. First, we have to make sure that mothers are not exposed to environmental hazards and get adequate prenatal health care. Then, we have to reverse the damaging cutbacks to preschool education, a theme Mr. Obama emphasized on Tuesday. We have to make sure that all children have adequate nutrition and health care — not only do we have to provide the resources, but if necessary, we have to incentivize parents, by coaching or training them or even rewarding them for being good caregivers. The right says that money isn’t the solution. They’ve chased reforms like charter schools and private-school vouchers, but most of these efforts have shown ambiguous results at best. Giving more money to poor schools would help. So would summer and extracurricular programs that enrich low-income students’ skills.
Finally, it is unconscionable that a rich country like the United States has made access to higher education so difficult for those at the bottom and middle. There are many alternative ways of providing universal access to higher education, from Australia’s income-contingent loan program to the near-free system of universities in Europe. A more educated population yields greater innovation, a robust economy and higher incomes — which mean a higher tax base. Those benefits are, of course, why we’ve long been committed to free public education through 12th grade. But while a 12th-grade education might have sufficed a century ago, it doesn’t today. Yet we haven’t adjusted our system to contemporary realities.
The steps I’ve outlined are not just affordable but imperative. Even more important, though, is that we cannot afford to let our country drift farther from ideals that the vast majority of Americans share. We will never fully succeed in achieving Mr. Obama’s vision of a poor girl’s having exactly the same opportunities as a wealthy girl. But we could do much, much better, and must not rest until we do.
Source: NYT & Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a professor at Columbia and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank, is the author of “The Price of Inequality.”
_______________________________________________
7 Health Dangers Hiding in Your Closet
Scary things no one tells you about some of your favorite fashion choices
We all know the saying “beauty is pain,” but can it be downright dangerous?
Shapewear smooths out all those unwanted lumps and bumps, and six-inch stilettos make legs look oh-so-sexy. But what happens if said shapewear is cutting off your circulation and said stilettos squish your feet to the point of deformity?
Hidden inside some of our favorite fashion choices are scary things like fungal infections, hammertoes, and even hunchback! Here are seven fashion hazards that can be bad for your health.
1. High Heels
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that high heels are bad for your feet. But who knew those six-inch stilettos could also cause posture problems, skin irritations, and even toe deformities?“High heels put all your body’s weight on our forefoot, causing you to adjust the rest of your body to maintain balance,” says Dr. Ava Shamban, board certified dermatologist and author of Heal Your Skin. “The bottom half of your body leans forward so the top half must lean back—this disrupts the normal ‘S’ curve of your back, flattening your lower spine and displacing your mid-back and neck. It is very difficult to maintain good posture in this position—not only is it detrimental to the health of your spine, ‘stooped over’ is not a sexy look!”
Doctors say high heels can also cause structure and skin problems for your feet. “With the foot in a downward position, there is a significant increase in the pressure on the bottom plantar of the forefoot, which can lead to pain or deformities such as hammer toes, bunions, and more. The downward foot position also causes your foot to supinate, or to turn to the outside. Not only does this put you at risk for a sprained ankle, it changes the line of pull of the Achilles tendon and may cause a deformity known as ‘pump bump,’” Dr. Shamban says.
The best way to avoid any high-heel mishaps? Switch between heels and sneakers as much as possible and save the sky-high ones for the shortest stints possible (like wearing out to dinner when you’ll likely be sitting most of the evening).
2. Tight, Low-Rise Jeans
Numbness in the outer thigh region? It might be because your jeans are too tight! According to board certified emergency physician Dr. Jennifer Hanes, this phenomenon, known as ‘tight pants syndrome’ (very scientific) has sent many women to the neurologist’s office.“This condition is caused by a compression of the Lateral Femoral Cutaneous nerve. It was previously only seen in large bellied men that wore their belts too tight,” Hanes says. “Now, we see it in ladies wearing too tight jeans.”
The doc says you can still wear low-rise jeans if you like, just get them in a larger size.
3. Wet Bathing Suits
Remember when Mom used to tell you not to sit around in a wet bathing suit? She was right! Most women don't realize that wet bathing suits and sweaty workout clothes can actually give them a nasty (and itchy) infection, says Dr. Allison Hill, board-certified OB/GYN, star of the hit OWN show Deliver Me, and co-author of The Mommy Docs: The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth.“To avoid yeast infections, change out of tight or wet clothing as soon as possible, and keep the genital area cool and dry by wearing cotton underwear instead of synthetic fabrics,” Hill says. “If you feel itching or burning, or notice a difference in your discharge, talk to your doctor. You can easily treat a yeast infection with an over-the-counter like Monistat.”
4. Too-Tight Bra
Although rare, there are definitely health hazards when it comes to wearing a bra that’s too tight, including skin irritations, fungal infections, breathing problems, and even claims that it can hinder the lymphatic system (a heavily debated subject). According to Ohio-bas.ed doctor Jennifer Shine Dyer, “tight bras can reduce the lymphatic flow to the breasts thus creating an environment with more 'cellular waste and toxins' that should have been cleared by the lymphatic system.”
However, the biggest concern is for pregnant women who can get mastitis, which is an inflammation and sometimes infection of the mammary glands. Getting properly fittedand being careful to wear a bra that’s not too constrictive is the best way to avoid this fashion hazard.
5. Thong Underwear
Once again, yeast infections are the culprit here. “Due to the constant rubbing of the material inside the labia, some women experience more frequent yeast infections from wearing thong underwear,” Dr. Hanes says. “I also believe that thongs can increase the risk of urinary tract infections because they help push bacteria from the rectum up into the urethra.”The doctor says, unless you practice “immaculate hygiene” in your nether regions, skip the thong.
6. Spanx and Other Shapewear
It’s hard to argue with the benefits of shapewear. Since its inception, this cousin of the girdle (and control top pantyhose) has us cinched, smoothed, and sucked in to perfection. However, when it’s simply too tight, “it can lead to a host of health issues, from bladder and yeast infections to nerve damage and even blood clots,” says Dr. Shine Dyer.The constrictive clothing “can also compress nerves, leading to leg pain, numbness, and tingling,” she adds. And if the garment is also putting pressure on your lungs, you may not be able to breathe properly in it either.
7. Flip Flops
While comfy and cute for the summertime, flip-flops are a fail when it comes to proper foot support.
“Flip-flops give no support to the bottom of your foot, so it can twist and turn any which way, leading to sprains, breaks, and falls," says podiatrist Dr. Kerry Dernbach. “The thin, flat soles have virtually no shock-absorbing qualities.”
Not to mention, lack of support while you’re pounding the pavement can lead to plantar fasciitis*) (a painful inflammation of the connective tissue) and blisters and callouses**) on the soles of feet. Ouch!
*) Plantar fasciitis is inflammation of the thick tissue on the bottom of the foot. This tissue is called the plantar fascia. It connects the heel bone to the toes and creates the arch of the foot.
**) Corns and calluses are thickened layers of skin caused by repeated pressure or friction.
Source:
By Jene Luciani
________________________________________________________
7 Health Dangers Hiding in Your Closet
Scary things no one tells you about some of your favorite fashion choices
We all know the saying “beauty is pain,” but can it be downright dangerous?
Shapewear smooths out all those unwanted lumps and bumps, and six-inch stilettos make legs look oh-so-sexy. But what happens if said shapewear is cutting off your circulation and said stilettos squish your feet to the point of deformity?
Hidden inside some of our favorite fashion choices are scary things like fungal infections, hammertoes, and even hunchback! Here are seven fashion hazards that can be bad for your health.
1. High Heels
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that high heels are bad for your feet. But who knew those six-inch stilettos could also cause posture problems, skin irritations, and even toe deformities?“High heels put all your body’s weight on our forefoot, causing you to adjust the rest of your body to maintain balance,” says Dr. Ava Shamban, board certified dermatologist and author of Heal Your Skin. “The bottom half of your body leans forward so the top half must lean back—this disrupts the normal ‘S’ curve of your back, flattening your lower spine and displacing your mid-back and neck. It is very difficult to maintain good posture in this position—not only is it detrimental to the health of your spine, ‘stooped over’ is not a sexy look!”
Doctors say high heels can also cause structure and skin problems for your feet. “With the foot in a downward position, there is a significant increase in the pressure on the bottom plantar of the forefoot, which can lead to pain or deformities such as hammer toes, bunions, and more. The downward foot position also causes your foot to supinate, or to turn to the outside. Not only does this put you at risk for a sprained ankle, it changes the line of pull of the Achilles tendon and may cause a deformity known as ‘pump bump,’” Dr. Shamban says.
The best way to avoid any high-heel mishaps? Switch between heels and sneakers as much as possible and save the sky-high ones for the shortest stints possible (like wearing out to dinner when you’ll likely be sitting most of the evening).
2. Tight, Low-Rise Jeans
Numbness in the outer thigh region? It might be because your jeans are too tight! According to board certified emergency physician Dr. Jennifer Hanes, this phenomenon, known as ‘tight pants syndrome’ (very scientific) has sent many women to the neurologist’s office.“This condition is caused by a compression of the Lateral Femoral Cutaneous nerve. It was previously only seen in large bellied men that wore their belts too tight,” Hanes says. “Now, we see it in ladies wearing too tight jeans.”
The doc says you can still wear low-rise jeans if you like, just get them in a larger size.
3. Wet Bathing Suits
Remember when Mom used to tell you not to sit around in a wet bathing suit? She was right! Most women don't realize that wet bathing suits and sweaty workout clothes can actually give them a nasty (and itchy) infection, says Dr. Allison Hill, board-certified OB/GYN, star of the hit OWN show Deliver Me, and co-author of The Mommy Docs: The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth.“To avoid yeast infections, change out of tight or wet clothing as soon as possible, and keep the genital area cool and dry by wearing cotton underwear instead of synthetic fabrics,” Hill says. “If you feel itching or burning, or notice a difference in your discharge, talk to your doctor. You can easily treat a yeast infection with an over-the-counter like Monistat.”
4. Too-Tight Bra
Although rare, there are definitely health hazards when it comes to wearing a bra that’s too tight, including skin irritations, fungal infections, breathing problems, and even claims that it can hinder the lymphatic system (a heavily debated subject). According to Ohio-bas.ed doctor Jennifer Shine Dyer, “tight bras can reduce the lymphatic flow to the breasts thus creating an environment with more 'cellular waste and toxins' that should have been cleared by the lymphatic system.”
However, the biggest concern is for pregnant women who can get mastitis, which is an inflammation and sometimes infection of the mammary glands. Getting properly fittedand being careful to wear a bra that’s not too constrictive is the best way to avoid this fashion hazard.
5. Thong Underwear
Once again, yeast infections are the culprit here. “Due to the constant rubbing of the material inside the labia, some women experience more frequent yeast infections from wearing thong underwear,” Dr. Hanes says. “I also believe that thongs can increase the risk of urinary tract infections because they help push bacteria from the rectum up into the urethra.”The doctor says, unless you practice “immaculate hygiene” in your nether regions, skip the thong.
6. Spanx and Other Shapewear
It’s hard to argue with the benefits of shapewear. Since its inception, this cousin of the girdle (and control top pantyhose) has us cinched, smoothed, and sucked in to perfection. However, when it’s simply too tight, “it can lead to a host of health issues, from bladder and yeast infections to nerve damage and even blood clots,” says Dr. Shine Dyer.The constrictive clothing “can also compress nerves, leading to leg pain, numbness, and tingling,” she adds. And if the garment is also putting pressure on your lungs, you may not be able to breathe properly in it either.
7. Flip Flops
While comfy and cute for the summertime, flip-flops are a fail when it comes to proper foot support.
“Flip-flops give no support to the bottom of your foot, so it can twist and turn any which way, leading to sprains, breaks, and falls," says podiatrist Dr. Kerry Dernbach. “The thin, flat soles have virtually no shock-absorbing qualities.”
Not to mention, lack of support while you’re pounding the pavement can lead to plantar fasciitis*) (a painful inflammation of the connective tissue) and blisters and callouses**) on the soles of feet. Ouch!
*) Plantar fasciitis is inflammation of the thick tissue on the bottom of the foot. This tissue is called the plantar fascia. It connects the heel bone to the toes and creates the arch of the foot.
**) Corns and calluses are thickened layers of skin caused by repeated pressure or friction.
Source:
By Jene Luciani
________________________________________________________
Study also the next article below - about fashion industry
This article gives an answer to common statement why "physically good-looking
individuals, women & men", are often emotionally the most insecure people
Model Cameron Russell:
"Models Are the Most Physically Insecure People On the Planet"
Cameron Russell is arguably one of the most beautiful women on the planet. Over the past 10 years, she's graced the cover of Vogue, frolicked in a bikini for numerous fashion ads, and stomped down the runway for Victoria's Secret. But don't assume she has it all. She doesn't—and she's the first one to admit it.
More on Yahoo! Shine: Too-Skinny Model Ban Takes Effect in Israel
The 25-year-old model recently gave apresentation at the global series TED, on life as a model. She began by saying, “I am standing on this stage because I am a pretty white woman and in my industry we call that a 'sexy girl.' I am going to answer some of the questions people ask me but with an honest twist."
Russell explained that while a model's lifestyle is filled with travel, glamour, and working with brilliant creatives, that's only a glossy exterior for the corruption and sometimes manipulative nature of the modeling industry, describing how when she started out as a model, she had to act sexual at photo shoots having never even had a boyfriend.
More on Yahoo! Tyra Banks: At 17 and a Size 4, I 'Would've Been Considered Too Heavy' To Model Now
While explaining that she often gets asked how one becomes a model, Russell says, "....The real way I became a model is I won a genetic lottery and I became the recipient of a legacy. Saying you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's awesome and it's out of your control and it's not a career path."
While showing photos of her in both fashion spreads juxtaposed against photos of her in real life, Russell says, "These pictures are not pictures of me, they're constructions," says Russell. "They're constructions by professionals — hairstylists, make up artists, photographers stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production and they build this. That's not me."
But the most insightful part of her talk is when Russel confesses: "I am insecure. Because I have to think about what I look like every day. If you ever are wondering, 'If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair will I be happier?' you just need to meet a group of models because they have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes and they're the most physically insecure women on the planet."
It makes sense. When a woman is valued primarily for her physical appearance, it can be easy for her to believe that her beauty is her only form of currency. If looks are the focus of a woman's day, they will inevitably occupy most of her thoughts and drive her fears. No wonder models are so insecure.
Russell's words are indeed powerful, but just weeks after her Ted Talk she walked in the Victoria's Secret fashion show. Is she being hypocritical by criticizing the modeling industry while also cashing in on it? "Not at all," says Bethany Marshall, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, CA. "She sounds grounded in reality. We all have to use our assets and gifts to advance ourselves in life. If she was a math genius and refused to go to college, we'd be critical of her. The fact is, she's a gorgeous woman—why shouldn't she use that to advance her life? Her beauty is a resource and an instrument. The difference is, we don't envy the math genius. We envy the model."
This isn't the first time models have let us in on the secrets of the industry. In 2012, Tyra Banks penned an open letter to models praising Vogue for banning images of anorexia. And in 2010, Victoria's Secret Angel Doutzen Kroes spoke out about her struggle to attain the ideal figure, saying: "I probably fit the sample size once, when I was eleven or twelve. It became a problem — I was always told lots of times that I should lose weight. It was a thing, ‘You look great, but you should probably lose a few pounds. That kept going on until I was about 22, and when I was like, ‘This is crazy,’ because I would look in the mirror and I like the way I look."
Study also the next article below - about fashion industry
___________________________________________________________
This article gives an answer to common statement why "physically good-looking
individuals, women & men", are often emotionally the most insecure people
Model Cameron Russell:
"Models Are the Most Physically Insecure People On the Planet"
Cameron Russell is arguably one of the most beautiful women on the planet. Over the past 10 years, she's graced the cover of Vogue, frolicked in a bikini for numerous fashion ads, and stomped down the runway for Victoria's Secret. But don't assume she has it all. She doesn't—and she's the first one to admit it.
More on Yahoo! Shine: Too-Skinny Model Ban Takes Effect in Israel
The 25-year-old model recently gave apresentation at the global series TED, on life as a model. She began by saying, “I am standing on this stage because I am a pretty white woman and in my industry we call that a 'sexy girl.' I am going to answer some of the questions people ask me but with an honest twist."
Russell explained that while a model's lifestyle is filled with travel, glamour, and working with brilliant creatives, that's only a glossy exterior for the corruption and sometimes manipulative nature of the modeling industry, describing how when she started out as a model, she had to act sexual at photo shoots having never even had a boyfriend.
More on Yahoo! Tyra Banks: At 17 and a Size 4, I 'Would've Been Considered Too Heavy' To Model Now
While explaining that she often gets asked how one becomes a model, Russell says, "....The real way I became a model is I won a genetic lottery and I became the recipient of a legacy. Saying you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's awesome and it's out of your control and it's not a career path."
While showing photos of her in both fashion spreads juxtaposed against photos of her in real life, Russell says, "These pictures are not pictures of me, they're constructions," says Russell. "They're constructions by professionals — hairstylists, make up artists, photographers stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production and they build this. That's not me."
But the most insightful part of her talk is when Russel confesses: "I am insecure. Because I have to think about what I look like every day. If you ever are wondering, 'If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair will I be happier?' you just need to meet a group of models because they have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes and they're the most physically insecure women on the planet."
It makes sense. When a woman is valued primarily for her physical appearance, it can be easy for her to believe that her beauty is her only form of currency. If looks are the focus of a woman's day, they will inevitably occupy most of her thoughts and drive her fears. No wonder models are so insecure.
Russell's words are indeed powerful, but just weeks after her Ted Talk she walked in the Victoria's Secret fashion show. Is she being hypocritical by criticizing the modeling industry while also cashing in on it? "Not at all," says Bethany Marshall, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst in Beverly Hills, CA. "She sounds grounded in reality. We all have to use our assets and gifts to advance ourselves in life. If she was a math genius and refused to go to college, we'd be critical of her. The fact is, she's a gorgeous woman—why shouldn't she use that to advance her life? Her beauty is a resource and an instrument. The difference is, we don't envy the math genius. We envy the model."
This isn't the first time models have let us in on the secrets of the industry. In 2012, Tyra Banks penned an open letter to models praising Vogue for banning images of anorexia. And in 2010, Victoria's Secret Angel Doutzen Kroes spoke out about her struggle to attain the ideal figure, saying: "I probably fit the sample size once, when I was eleven or twelve. It became a problem — I was always told lots of times that I should lose weight. It was a thing, ‘You look great, but you should probably lose a few pounds. That kept going on until I was about 22, and when I was like, ‘This is crazy,’ because I would look in the mirror and I like the way I look."
Study also the next article below - about fashion industry
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Study also the article above - about fashion industry
This article draws attention to the abusive habits in the fashion industry
Tyra Banks: At 17 and a Size 4, I ‘Would’ve Been
Considered Too Heavy’ to Model Now
Tyra Banks has created a multi-million-dollar empire with her own production company, her hit reality series "America's Next Top Model," her own syndicated daytime talk show that had a five year run, and a book franchise. But none of it would have ever happened had the 5' 10" beauty not landed her first modeling contract as a teenager more than 20 years ago.
[Related: Supermodel Moms (Photos)]
Had the timing been different, however, Banks now says wouldn't have been able to become a model in the first place. Why? In an "open letter to models" published in The Daily Beast on Tuesday, the 38-year-old says the size 4 figure she flaunted when she first kicked off her career wouldn't have flown in today's fashion industry. "The truth is that if I was just starting to model at age 17 in 2012, I could not have had the career that I did. I would've been considered too heavy," Banks writes. "In my time, the average model's size was a four or six. Today you are expected to be a size zero. When I started out, I didn't know such a size even existed."
[Related: Tyra Banks Fires America's Next Top Model's Nigel Barker, and Others]
In fact, she reveals she began dealing with rejection midway through her modeling career as her body began to change. "In my early 20s I was a size four. But then I started to get curvy. My agency gave my mom a list of designers that didn't want to book me in their fashion shows anymore," Banks shares. "In order to continue working, I would've had to fight Mother Nature and get used to depriving myself of nutrition."
The real goal of the letter, however, was to "celebrate" Vogue's recent decision to ban models who "appear to have an eating disorder" from all 19 of its editions worldwide. "When I started modeling, I used to see models who seemed unhealthy backstage at fashion shows. They appeared to be abusing their bodies to maintain a certain weight," Banks continues in the letter. "These girls were booked over and over again for countless fashion shows and photo shoots. I'm sure many of you today have witnessed this, or even live it. Now, real progress is finally on the horizon. Vogue is stepping up, doing the right thing, and protecting that girl. Perhaps that girl is you!"
The former Victoria's Secret model isn't alone in her fight to get the industry to focus on featuring healthy bodies rather than those with eating disorders.
Prior to this year's New York Fashion Week in February, designer and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Diane von Furstenberg, sent out guidelines to participating designers on how to best handle suspicions that a model is suffering from an eating disorder, and required them to provide models with healthy meals and snacks backstage. Around the same time, Israeli lawmakers essentially banned skinny models from catwalks, ads, and billboards, passing legislation that says that modeling jobs cannot be given to anyone with a body mass index under 18.5.
Still, some models believe that it's not the industry that's to blame. "I never suffered this problem because I had a very strong family base," supermodel Gisele Bundchen told Brazilian newspaper Globo in 2007. "The parents are responsible, not fashion."
But Banks believes that Vogue's decision is a very fashionable step in the right direction … and she knows just how to mark the occasion, writing: "This calls for a toast over some barbecue and burgers!"
Well, Tyra, you might have to make it grilled chicken over greens to get any actual models to join you.
See below - one more fashion related article
__________________________________________________
This article draws attention to the abusive habits in the fashion industry
Tyra Banks: At 17 and a Size 4, I ‘Would’ve Been
Considered Too Heavy’ to Model Now
Tyra Banks has created a multi-million-dollar empire with her own production company, her hit reality series "America's Next Top Model," her own syndicated daytime talk show that had a five year run, and a book franchise. But none of it would have ever happened had the 5' 10" beauty not landed her first modeling contract as a teenager more than 20 years ago.
[Related: Supermodel Moms (Photos)]
Had the timing been different, however, Banks now says wouldn't have been able to become a model in the first place. Why? In an "open letter to models" published in The Daily Beast on Tuesday, the 38-year-old says the size 4 figure she flaunted when she first kicked off her career wouldn't have flown in today's fashion industry. "The truth is that if I was just starting to model at age 17 in 2012, I could not have had the career that I did. I would've been considered too heavy," Banks writes. "In my time, the average model's size was a four or six. Today you are expected to be a size zero. When I started out, I didn't know such a size even existed."
[Related: Tyra Banks Fires America's Next Top Model's Nigel Barker, and Others]
In fact, she reveals she began dealing with rejection midway through her modeling career as her body began to change. "In my early 20s I was a size four. But then I started to get curvy. My agency gave my mom a list of designers that didn't want to book me in their fashion shows anymore," Banks shares. "In order to continue working, I would've had to fight Mother Nature and get used to depriving myself of nutrition."
The real goal of the letter, however, was to "celebrate" Vogue's recent decision to ban models who "appear to have an eating disorder" from all 19 of its editions worldwide. "When I started modeling, I used to see models who seemed unhealthy backstage at fashion shows. They appeared to be abusing their bodies to maintain a certain weight," Banks continues in the letter. "These girls were booked over and over again for countless fashion shows and photo shoots. I'm sure many of you today have witnessed this, or even live it. Now, real progress is finally on the horizon. Vogue is stepping up, doing the right thing, and protecting that girl. Perhaps that girl is you!"
The former Victoria's Secret model isn't alone in her fight to get the industry to focus on featuring healthy bodies rather than those with eating disorders.
Prior to this year's New York Fashion Week in February, designer and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Diane von Furstenberg, sent out guidelines to participating designers on how to best handle suspicions that a model is suffering from an eating disorder, and required them to provide models with healthy meals and snacks backstage. Around the same time, Israeli lawmakers essentially banned skinny models from catwalks, ads, and billboards, passing legislation that says that modeling jobs cannot be given to anyone with a body mass index under 18.5.
Still, some models believe that it's not the industry that's to blame. "I never suffered this problem because I had a very strong family base," supermodel Gisele Bundchen told Brazilian newspaper Globo in 2007. "The parents are responsible, not fashion."
But Banks believes that Vogue's decision is a very fashionable step in the right direction … and she knows just how to mark the occasion, writing: "This calls for a toast over some barbecue and burgers!"
Well, Tyra, you might have to make it grilled chicken over greens to get any actual models to join you.
See below - one more fashion related article
__________________________________________________
10 Things You Need to Know About the World’s Most Famous Personal Shopper
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If Betty Halbreich is not yet a household name in your world, just hold on, because she will be any minute.
The supercool octogenarian—a personal shopper at NYC's high-falutin' Bergdorf Goodman since 1976—just had her new memoir optioned as a series by HBO, and, in a stroke of cross-generational genius, the ubiquitous Lena Dunham (along with "Girls" executive producer Jenni Konner) is writing the script. The show, based on her memoir All Dressed Up and Everywhere To Go,will be a window into the fashionable world of famously witty Halbreich, 85. But first, a preview:
1. She's basically a fancy shrink."My work is like lay therapy," Halbreich told New Yorker writer Judith Thurman in a . "You listen, you prescribe—clothes are a fix-and you hold up a mirror. Most people can't see themselves."
2. She's not into high-pressure sales. Though she says she sells $2 million to $3 million worth of clothing annually, "I'm not a commission lady," Halbreich told New York Magazine writer Bob Morris, who in 1997. "The other day, Mrs. Astor came in and I watched a senior saleswoman on the floor go after her. I couldn't bear it. I hate when a salesperson tells a customer she looks fabulous. What does that mean? And I really hate when they say something is only $1,000. That's a lot of money. I don't even know how to ask customers how much money they want to spend. It's too embarrassing. Nice people don't talk about money."
3. She doesn't read fashion magazines. Because of this, says, she walks all eight floors of Bergdorf's every morning to inspect any new merchandise.
4. She helped dress Carrie Bradshaw. The clothing pro shopped with stylist Patricia Field to dress the cast of Sex and the City, and would reportedly a hundred thousand dollars worth of clothes for a single episode from time to time. Other clients have included Joan Rivers, Estee Lauder, Betty Buckely, Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and the cast of early Woody Allen films.
5. Her mother was very fancy. As a girl, she wrote in her 1997 memoir Secrets of a Fashion Therapist, she would watch as her mom got dressed in "sequined dresses, fox-trim suits, a cocktail dress with feathers lining the hem." One Christmas, the photographer Victor Skrebneski gave her a white marabou jacket. Halbreich would often play dress-up, her favorite childhood game, in her mother's well-stocked closet.
6. Her children know style, too. Halbreich's daughter Kathy is the associate director of the Museum of Modern Art; her son works in fashion for a women's sleepwear manufacturer.
7. Her apartment's décor is charmingly outdated. The bedroom in her oversized Park Avenue rental has gingham walls and needlepoint rugs, according to the New Yorker profile.
8. She wound up at Bergdorf's by chance. Halbreich met former CEO Ira Neimark while lunching with her mom in Chicago. As she told the New Yorker: "He thought I was chic. 'Get that girl,' he said." Her first position was as a salesperson at Geoffrey Beene's in-store boutique.
9. She's no label whore. She also isn't into the color black, and frequently goes for bold colors over dull hues (but always in a sophisticated cut, as evidenced by what she wore in the New Yorker photo shoot, above left). "Deluxe prison garb," she said about a rack of Prada raincoats during a Bergdorf walk-through with the New Yorker.
10. She originally wanted to be an artist. Or a cartoonist. But the Chicago native, née Betty Stoll, instead got married at 22, to Sonny Halbreich, who owned a garment district business that manufactured bathrobes.
And the rest is her story.
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Interesting, not so commonly known
Facts About Redheads - The Hair Color (natural)
Information everyone should know
The world’s highest rate of redheads is found in Scotland, where an estimated 13 percent of Scots—about 650,000 people—have flame-colored tresses, compared to 4 percent of Europeans and less than 2 percent of the global population, according to STV News. In the US, there are an estimated 6 million redheads.
Click green for further info
Compared to blondes or brunettes, redheads are more than twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist—and they may have good reason. The same genetic variant that explains their fiery locks also makes redheads resistant to local anesthesia, such as Novocaine, explaining their dread of dental procedures, University of Louisville researchers reported in Journal of the American Dental Association.
In fact, redheads may need 20 percent more anesthesia, researchers from the same center reported in an earlier study, in which women with bright red hair were compared to those with dark tresses. And those with ruby locks are also more sensitive to heat and cold than the rest of us, researchers report. Here’s a look at other surprising findings about redheads.
Higher risk for skin cancer—even if they shun the sun Fair skin that provides less natural protection from the sun isn’t the only reason redheads are three times more susceptible to skin cancer than people with other hair colors. A new animal study published in Nature shows that the pigment responsible for their distinctive coloring also plays a role in their risk for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.
The researchers were planning to study the effects of UV radiation on mice bred to mimic olive-skinned, ginger, and albino coloring, but were shocked when half of the ginger mice developed melanoma before being exposed to UV rays. According to researcher David Fisher, “There is something about the redhead genetic background that is behaving in a carcinogenic fashion, independent of UV,” suggesting that slathering on sunscreen or avoiding the sun may not be enough protection.
The study suggests that redheads should be extra diligent about checking their skin for suspicious spots and being screened for skin cancer, which is highly treatable if caught early. The researchers emphasize that the risk associated with red pigment is almost certainly a less common trigger than sun exposure, since only 20 percent of these cancers develop in areas that are normally covered by a swimsuit.
What Does Skin Cancer Look Like?
Higher Risk for Other DiseasesOther disorders that disproportionately affect redheads include:
Some biologists believe that the reason there are more redheads in cold, cloudy climes, such as Scotland, is that the pale skin that typically accompanies a fiery mane allows the body to soak more vitamin D. Not only does D help protect against many diseases, but it’s essential for healthy bones—and helps ward off osteoporosis, the brittle-bone disease that leads to fractures.
At a recent seminar on hair color and health, Scottish researcher Jonathan Rees reported that throughout history the “ginger gene” may have “played a big role” in protecting many redheads from rickets (soft, weak bones triggered by vitamin D deficiency). He added that, “there’s also good data that we need vitamin D to fight against infections like tuberculosis,” the world’s most common contagious disease.
Foods That Boost The Immune System
Redheads don't go gray
Unlike blondes and brunettes, redheads never develop gray hair as they age. A little-known fact about natural red hair is that it retains its original color longer than any other hair hue. Eventually, the ginger tends to turn blond, and ultimately white. On average, redheads have thicker hair, but fewer strands (about 90,000), compared to blondes (110,000) or brunettes (140,000).
And they're not becoming extinct
Although redheads have been around since the Neanderthal days, a few years ago many news reports claimed that by 2060 they’d be extinct. This myth was spawned by the notion that recessive genes—such as red hair—inevitably die out. Actually, even if all redheads stopped having kids, there’s no shortage of non-redheads who carry “ginger genes” to pass the trait on. In fact, scientists reported in December that 40 percent of Britons carry recessive genes for red hair, based on DNA analysis of saliva samples from 5,000 people.
The world’s highest rate of redheads is found in Scotland, where an estimated 13 percent of Scots—about 650,000 people—have flame-colored tresses, compared to 4 percent of Europeans and less than 2 percent of the global population, according to STV News. In the US, there are an estimated 6 million redheads.
Click green for further info
__________________________________
Facts About Redheads - The Hair Color (natural)
Information everyone should know
The world’s highest rate of redheads is found in Scotland, where an estimated 13 percent of Scots—about 650,000 people—have flame-colored tresses, compared to 4 percent of Europeans and less than 2 percent of the global population, according to STV News. In the US, there are an estimated 6 million redheads.
Click green for further info
Compared to blondes or brunettes, redheads are more than twice as likely to avoid going to the dentist—and they may have good reason. The same genetic variant that explains their fiery locks also makes redheads resistant to local anesthesia, such as Novocaine, explaining their dread of dental procedures, University of Louisville researchers reported in Journal of the American Dental Association.
In fact, redheads may need 20 percent more anesthesia, researchers from the same center reported in an earlier study, in which women with bright red hair were compared to those with dark tresses. And those with ruby locks are also more sensitive to heat and cold than the rest of us, researchers report. Here’s a look at other surprising findings about redheads.
Higher risk for skin cancer—even if they shun the sun Fair skin that provides less natural protection from the sun isn’t the only reason redheads are three times more susceptible to skin cancer than people with other hair colors. A new animal study published in Nature shows that the pigment responsible for their distinctive coloring also plays a role in their risk for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.
The researchers were planning to study the effects of UV radiation on mice bred to mimic olive-skinned, ginger, and albino coloring, but were shocked when half of the ginger mice developed melanoma before being exposed to UV rays. According to researcher David Fisher, “There is something about the redhead genetic background that is behaving in a carcinogenic fashion, independent of UV,” suggesting that slathering on sunscreen or avoiding the sun may not be enough protection.
The study suggests that redheads should be extra diligent about checking their skin for suspicious spots and being screened for skin cancer, which is highly treatable if caught early. The researchers emphasize that the risk associated with red pigment is almost certainly a less common trigger than sun exposure, since only 20 percent of these cancers develop in areas that are normally covered by a swimsuit.
What Does Skin Cancer Look Like?
Higher Risk for Other DiseasesOther disorders that disproportionately affect redheads include:
- Parkinson’s disease. A Harvard study reports that redheads have a nearly 90 percent-increased risk for the progressive neurological disorder that affects balance and coordination. However, another recent study suggests that taking folic acid may be protective.
- Endometriosis. Another Harvard study involving more than 90,000 women linked red hair to a 30 percent higher risk for this painful gynecological disorder in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the pelvis. However, the study found that red hair only ups the threat in fertile women, while lowering it in infertile women, compared to those with any other hair color.
- Tourette’s syndrome. An Australian study reported that not only is there a nearly seven-fold higher rate of neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by motor and verbal tics in redheads, but 55 percent of the Tourette’s patients studied had also relatives with ruby hair. The researchers theorize that a gene for the tic disorder may be located near the ginger gene.
Some biologists believe that the reason there are more redheads in cold, cloudy climes, such as Scotland, is that the pale skin that typically accompanies a fiery mane allows the body to soak more vitamin D. Not only does D help protect against many diseases, but it’s essential for healthy bones—and helps ward off osteoporosis, the brittle-bone disease that leads to fractures.
At a recent seminar on hair color and health, Scottish researcher Jonathan Rees reported that throughout history the “ginger gene” may have “played a big role” in protecting many redheads from rickets (soft, weak bones triggered by vitamin D deficiency). He added that, “there’s also good data that we need vitamin D to fight against infections like tuberculosis,” the world’s most common contagious disease.
Foods That Boost The Immune System
Redheads don't go gray
Unlike blondes and brunettes, redheads never develop gray hair as they age. A little-known fact about natural red hair is that it retains its original color longer than any other hair hue. Eventually, the ginger tends to turn blond, and ultimately white. On average, redheads have thicker hair, but fewer strands (about 90,000), compared to blondes (110,000) or brunettes (140,000).
And they're not becoming extinct
Although redheads have been around since the Neanderthal days, a few years ago many news reports claimed that by 2060 they’d be extinct. This myth was spawned by the notion that recessive genes—such as red hair—inevitably die out. Actually, even if all redheads stopped having kids, there’s no shortage of non-redheads who carry “ginger genes” to pass the trait on. In fact, scientists reported in December that 40 percent of Britons carry recessive genes for red hair, based on DNA analysis of saliva samples from 5,000 people.
The world’s highest rate of redheads is found in Scotland, where an estimated 13 percent of Scots—about 650,000 people—have flame-colored tresses, compared to 4 percent of Europeans and less than 2 percent of the global population, according to STV News. In the US, there are an estimated 6 million redheads.
Click green for further info
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Etiquette Lessons for the Braggart:
Step 1, Don’t Pretend to Be Humble
Braggart= a person who boasts about achievements or possessions
Synonyms: boaster - blusterer - loudmouth
MOST of you are probably not aware that, in December, many seniors in high school have learned whether they have been accepted to their top-choice college.
Or maybe you are. Maybe, even if you have no interest in this news, you’ve heard it reverberating on social media and across phone lines. Some call it celebrating. Others call it bragging.
As a newcomer to all of this, I was fascinated by the self-imposed rules that people have about how and when it’s proper to boast about such an achievement.
Some friends told me they thought it was fine for students to post about their acceptances and let their friends know, but too much for parents announce their son’s or daughter’s accomplishment online. Others felt that students should hold back in deference to peers who may have been rejected, but gave free rein to proud mothers and fathers.
Watching people parse the sharing of good news made me think about the bigger issue of bragging. As I researched it further, it became clear that this is something most of us are conflicted about: we want to let people know about our successes, but we don’t want to appear to be doing so. And we want to hear about others’ victories, but not too often or too loudly.
There is a common perception that it’s more acceptable to brag now than it was in the past, especially about our children. It used to be that parents didn’t want their children to get swollen heads (when’s the last time you heard that expression?) or, for more superstitious reasons, feared that praise would bring on the wrath of the gods, or at least bad luck.
Such trends are hard to measure. What is clear is that technology has provided “more outlets and a lot more reinforcement,” said Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Every cute thing a baby does is on YouTube.”
There are many reasons people feel the need to publicize their successes, ranging from sharing the joy to one-upping. But what research shows is that talking about ourselves just feels good.
Last year, two Harvard neuroscientists published a paper, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They conducted brain imaging and behavioral experiments and found that when people talked about themselves, there was heightened activity in the same brain regions associated with rewards from food, money or sex.
Diana I. Tamir, co-author of the study and a doctoral student at Harvard, said the research focused not on bragging, but on answering neutral questions about one’s personality.
“When asked questions about themselves, there was more reward activity than when asked about someone else,” Ms. Tamir said. And there was even more activity when the participants could choose to share information, by pressing a button, with someone outside the scanner.
Another experiment found that people were willing to give up small amounts of money to reveal information about themselves, rather than talk about someone else.
“I think there is a natural human tendency” to talk about oneself, Ms. Tamir said. “The interesting question is why we are motivated to share.”
Another interesting question is when sharing turns into bragging — and the answer is often in the eye of the beholder. As one commenter wrote on the Canadian blog wondercafe.ca, “I wonder if it’s sharing if I do it and bragging if someone else does it.”
Although boasting may seem more acceptable now, Susan A. Speer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Manchester in England, has found that “self-praise” is still largely considered unacceptable.
Professor Speer, a conversation analyst, looked at a variety of data, from psychiatric interventions to everyday conversations, that involved self-praise. The information came from the United States and Britain.
In her study, published last year in the Social Psychology Quarterly, Professor Speer discovered that in almost every case, directly praising oneself seemed to violate social norms.
She said people responded to self-praise negatively or, more subtly, with a long silence or a roll of the eyes.
She found that the only way to really blow your own horn — or toot your own trumpet, as they say in Britain — without alienating someone was to repeat something positive someone else said about you.
It’s easier for a listener to respond to this kind of self-praise, Professor Speer said, by saying, for instance, “How nice someone said that.”
Even being self-deprecating about accomplishments doesn’t work. In fact, it can be even more irritating, and it has come to be known as “humblebragging” or “underbragging.”
Examples? Complaining about e-mail service from Cannes or about having to sign too many autographs. As Henry Alford wrote in The New York Times last November about his annoyance with this phenomenon: “Outright bragging expects to be met with awe, but humblebragging wants to be met with awe and sympathy.”
Oliver Burkeman, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian, has also written about the art of boasting while appearing not to. He argued that while technology is partly to blame, so are these economic times, because there is great pressure in a highly competitive job market to portray yourself as better than everyone else.
Often, the advice to would-be braggarts is to “know your audience.” Are the people you’re telling (or tweeting or posting to) really interested in your child’s sports victories or your brilliant cooking efforts, or should you save that information for your husband or the grandparents?
The trouble, Mr. Burkeman told me, is that it has become harder to determine who your audience is. On Facebook, for example, friends can include everyone from family members to work colleagues you barely know.
“It’s unacceptable to brag about the achievements of your child to strangers, but to close friends it’s great,” said Mr. Burkeman, author of “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.”
Presumably, we would be sensitive to the feelings of an unemployed friend and not boast about a recent promotion. But when we’re talking to a vast social network, we don’t know whose buttons we’re pushing.
Such confusion may be why an August 2011 post on The Times’s Motherlode blog on bragging about one’s children got 141 heated comments.
So to brag (or celebrate) or not? Professor Whitbourne suggests stopping before you open your mouth or type something and asking: “What are you trying to accomplish? What is your goal? You have to ask yourself, ‘Why am I sharing my information?’ ”
And while most of us find incessant braggarts annoying and avoid them if possible (hey, that’s what the “hide” option on Facebook is for), Professor Whitbourne says it is also worth noting if you are constantly irritated by people’s successes. Do they make you feel insecure or resentful? Why does it matter to you, and what can you learn about yourself?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that questions of how to present ourselves in the best light are so complicated. As Professor Speer noted, researchers have found that it involves a delicate balance of “self-enhancement, accuracy and humility.”
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Source: NYT
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When You Don’t Do What You Meant To, and Don’t Know Why
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HOW many times has this happened to you? You firmly decide what you’re going to do — whether it be going to the gym or asking your boss for a raise or placing a much-delayed call to a friend.
But then, you end up doing exactly what you did not intend to: sitting on the couch eating ice cream, letting one more day go by without speaking to your boss or calling your friend.
Issues of procrastination and will power come into play, of course. But how we decide what to do, and why our decisions often go the wrong way, are more complicated than that.
Two books scheduled for release in March look at why we often do not make the right decisions — or follow through on the ones we planned — and how we can change that.
Francesca Gino, a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of one of the books, “Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How We Can Stick to the Plan” (Harvard Business Review Press), offers this anecdote. She and her husband visited a souk in Dubai, determined to enjoy the day and to buy something authentic to help them remember the experience when they returned home.
After a day of wandering through stalls that sold traditional goods and faux designer products, her husband was drawn to a store where he spent almost two hours haggling over counterfeit watches that looked as good as the superexpensive originals.
He ended up with a replica of a $7,000 watch for just $100. But, Professor Gino wrote, his euphoria was short-lived. How did a plan to go to the souk and enjoy its traditional ambience turn into hours of bartering over a fake watch? And now, her husband isn’t even sure he likes it that much.
Having experienced similar situations in the past (don’t ask me about the silver bracelet I bought in an Istanbul market that, I discovered later, was stamped “Made in Mexico”), I might just argue that Professor Gino’s husband fell under the sway of a particularly persuasive salesman. But she says that’s too simple.
Too often, in areas big and small — new career paths, saving for retirement, buying a house — we think we’re going to go in one direction and end up in another.
It’s not that changing our minds is necessarily bad, if, with time and research, we discover that our goals have evolved. But it’s quite another thing to end up in a place you do not want to be — walking out of a souk with a counterfeit watch, say — with no real idea of how you got there. That, Professor Gino wrote, can be “discouraging, demoralizing and baffling.”
Just a little background here: Over the last three decades or so, a growing body of research has demonstrated that far from making decisions on a rational basis, as economists had long believed, humans make all sorts of decisions for all sorts of irrational reasons.
We’re affected by offers that seem better than they are. Who hasn’t added items they don’t really need into their shopping cart on Amazon to get “free” shipping? We are affected by having to make too many decisions, and this doesn’t apply just to trivial matters. Researchers have demonstrated that parole decisions by an Israeli panel were largely determined by what time the hearings were held.
We also all tend to do things we’re often not aware of doing, but they hamper our ability to make good choices.
Let me lay out the main ones that I took away from Professor Gino’s book and another one to be published in March on the same subject, “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work” (Crown Business), by Chip Heath, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, and his brother, Dan Heath, a senior fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke.
We tend to gather research that confirms our own biases — a phenomenon called, not surprisingly, confirmation bias by social scientists.
A blatant but true example from the Heaths’ book is that back in the 1960s, before we had so much medical information on the dangers of smoking, smokers were much more likely to read an article headlined, “Smoking Does Not Lead to Lung Cancer,” than one with the headline, “Smoking Leads to Lung Cancer.”
We let emotions play too big a role. They can be set off by situations unrelated to the event. If you’re going on a first date, for example, Professor Gino said, and get caught in traffic, you may feel angry and that can spill over into your date. You may decide it was just a bad match, rather than reflecting on the mood you were in when you arrived.
Most of us tend to be overly optimistic about the future and about own abilities and attributes. The Heaths cite studies showing that doctors who reckoned they were “completely certain” about a diagnosis were wrong 40 percent of the time.
I liked even more a 1997 survey conducted by U.S. News & World Report of 1,000 people, cited by Professor Gino, about who was most likely to get into heaven. Michael Jordan had a 65 percent chance, Mother Teresa a 79 percent chance. But 87 percent of the survey takers decided they were the ones most likely to go to heaven.
So we’re overconfident, emotional and irrational. What do we do about it?
Being aware when we make decisions that our own feelings, our relationships to others and outside powers all have an impact is a good start, Professor Gino said.
Here’s one of her suggestions: Take your emotional temperature. Try to be more aware of where your emotions are coming from and how, even if seemingly irrelevant, they may be clouding your decision.
When short-term emotions threaten to swamp long-term considerations, Chip Heath suggests that a simple yet highly effective way to think about a difficult decision is to consider what you would recommend to your best friend.
“When we step back and simulate someone else, it’s a clarifying move,” he said.
Carefully researching information — while at the same time considering the source of that information — is important for a number of reasons. It can help you make a better decision, and it may cause less regret in the long term.
Research shows that we tend to have greater regrets about decisions that have gone wrong when we feel we approached the subject without looking into it deeply enough or considering enough options, said Terry Connolly, a professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona.
One more thing we should consider when making decisions is that we should not fear regret too much. It’s an inevitable part of life, and if you can say you’ve lived a life without regret, “you’re not having enough adventures, or you’re rationalizing and not truly examining when things went wrong,” Professor Connelly said.
We also tend to overemphasize how much regret we are going to feel, said Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Most of the time, regret happens quickly and sharply, it hurts, and then it’s over.”
So as much as possible, think about your decisions carefully, dispassionately and with as much valid information as possible. Look to sources you normally would not. Question your own beliefs and confidence. And then go for it. If you regret it, well, there’s always another decision waiting to be made.
Source: NYT
_______________________________________________________________________
This works: much less sickness
The Easiest, Cheapest Way to Stay Healthy
Click green for further info
An easy action that takes just 20 seconds can cut your risk for catching a cold, flu or other contagious diseases by up to 51 percent, recent studies show. And if everyone made it a regular habit, one million deaths a year would be prevented, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which calls this habit the single most important way to avoid spreading infection.
Frequent hand washing with soap and water can save you money—and misery—by helping you avoid medical bills, missed workdays, or having to stay home with a sick child. And you’ll also protect your friends and family: A CDC survey found that 40 million Americans a year fall prey to illnesses spread by hands, which can harbor up to 500,000 bacteria per square centimeter.
Click: The 11 Germiest Places in Your Home
Clean Hands Save Lives
Not only does lathering up protect you from respiratory illnesses like colds, but it also helps ward off more serious conditions, including hepatitis A, meningitis, and potentially life-threatening superbug infections, such as MRSA. Overall, 80 percent of all infectious diseases are spread by touch.
Here are just a few research findings that illustrate the protective power of clean hands:
At-Home Remedies that Really Work
Our Dirty Little Secrets
Ninety-one percent of Americans say they wash their hands after using a public toilet, but an observational study conducted in the six US airports found that only 26 percent of men and 17 percent of women actually did. And here’s something to ponder before you shake someone’s hand during cold and flu season: A recent survey also found that only 24 percent of men and 39 percent of women always wash their hands after they cough or sneeze.
Hand hygiene among doctors is even worse, with 73 percent of pediatric ICU physicians claiming that they soaped up between patients, but when the MDs were secretly observed, only 10 percent actually washed. If doctors and nurses were more diligent about hand hygiene, up to 80,000 Americans lives would be saved each year.
Experts caution patients to ask healthcare providers a simple question before any hands-on exam: “Did you wash your hands?” That’s important even if the provider is wearing gloves, reports Texas Health Resources Infection Control.
When to Wash Away Germs
To stay healthy and avoid spreading germs to others, the CDC and other experts advise washing your hands before and after preparing food, before eating, after changing diapers or using the toilet, after sneezing, coughing or blowing your nose, after touching an animal, and after touching garbage.
Follow these simple steps:
The Easiest, Cheapest Way to Stay Healthy
Click green for further info
An easy action that takes just 20 seconds can cut your risk for catching a cold, flu or other contagious diseases by up to 51 percent, recent studies show. And if everyone made it a regular habit, one million deaths a year would be prevented, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which calls this habit the single most important way to avoid spreading infection.
Frequent hand washing with soap and water can save you money—and misery—by helping you avoid medical bills, missed workdays, or having to stay home with a sick child. And you’ll also protect your friends and family: A CDC survey found that 40 million Americans a year fall prey to illnesses spread by hands, which can harbor up to 500,000 bacteria per square centimeter.
Click: The 11 Germiest Places in Your Home
Clean Hands Save Lives
Not only does lathering up protect you from respiratory illnesses like colds, but it also helps ward off more serious conditions, including hepatitis A, meningitis, and potentially life-threatening superbug infections, such as MRSA. Overall, 80 percent of all infectious diseases are spread by touch.
Here are just a few research findings that illustrate the protective power of clean hands:
- Kids who washed their hands four times a day had 25 percent fewer school absences due to contagious diseases and 57 percent fewer sick days due to GI bugs.
- When 40,000 Navy recruits were instructed to wash their hands five times a day, their rate of respiratory infections fell by 45 percent, according to a study published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
- A 2011 study found that when students disinfected their hands three times a day with ethanol gel sanitizer, there was a 66 percent drop in pupils who missed four or more days due to illness and a 20 percent rise in students with zero absences, compared to data from the previous year.
- Hand washing reduces risk for colds and other respiratory illnesses by 21 percent, according to the CDC.
- Washing with soap and water lowers risk for diarrhea and severe or fatal intestinal infections by up to 59 percent, a systematic review published in The Lancet *) reported. *) The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals (1) Lancet (surgery), a cutting instrument (scalpel) with a double-edged blade, (2) Blood lancet, a pricking needle used to obtain drops of blood for testing, (3) The Lancet, a medical journal
At-Home Remedies that Really Work
Our Dirty Little Secrets
Ninety-one percent of Americans say they wash their hands after using a public toilet, but an observational study conducted in the six US airports found that only 26 percent of men and 17 percent of women actually did. And here’s something to ponder before you shake someone’s hand during cold and flu season: A recent survey also found that only 24 percent of men and 39 percent of women always wash their hands after they cough or sneeze.
Hand hygiene among doctors is even worse, with 73 percent of pediatric ICU physicians claiming that they soaped up between patients, but when the MDs were secretly observed, only 10 percent actually washed. If doctors and nurses were more diligent about hand hygiene, up to 80,000 Americans lives would be saved each year.
Experts caution patients to ask healthcare providers a simple question before any hands-on exam: “Did you wash your hands?” That’s important even if the provider is wearing gloves, reports Texas Health Resources Infection Control.
When to Wash Away Germs
To stay healthy and avoid spreading germs to others, the CDC and other experts advise washing your hands before and after preparing food, before eating, after changing diapers or using the toilet, after sneezing, coughing or blowing your nose, after touching an animal, and after touching garbage.
Follow these simple steps:
- Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold) and remove jewelry. A recent study compared bacteria counts on the hands of 50 healthcare workers who wore rings to 50 who didn’t. Hand washing lowered levels of staph bacteria by nearly 50 percent for those without rings, but only 29 percent among ring wearers.
- Lather up with soap. Avoid antibacterial products, which don’t work any better than regular soap, according to the Mayo Clinic, and can even lead to bacteria becoming resistant to that antimicrobial ingredient.
- Rub hands together for at least 20 seconds. To get the timing right, kids can recite the alphabet as they scrub. Pay equal attention to all surfaces of both hands: Research shows that righties don’t wash their right hand as carefully as the left, while the opposite is true for lefties. Fingernails and fingertips typically harbor the most microorganisms.
- Rinse thoroughly under running water—the force of the stream sweeps dirt and germs down the drain. And be sure to dry well, which helps rub away remaining microbes. A study published in Epidemiology and Infection found that when people touched someone else with freshly washed, but damp hands, they transferred a whopping 68,000 microorganisms, compared to just 140 when their hands were dry.
- The CDC says that while soap and water is best, hand sanitizers containing at least 60 percent alcohol can do in a pinch. However, they don’t eliminate all types of germs, Click green for further info
- ___________________________
Looks matter. If someone tells you
that looks don’t matter, he’s wrong
Why Looks Matter
You don’t need to look like Brad Pitt or Beyonce to be successful, but you do have to put your best foot forward at all times. You tell the world what to think of you based on how you present yourself.
Your family and closest friends may look past your appearance. However, employers and individuals you meet throughout your career will subconsciously make judgments about your character, your personality, your intelligence, and your overall value as a human being based on what they see when they look at you. It might not be fair, but it’s a reality.
You might not like the analogy, but you need to see yourself as a product that you are marketing and selling 24-7-365. Looking your best is not about being phony or artificial; it’s just about taking pride in your presentation.
Here’s a quick analogy to demonstrate the power of appearances and marketing. A typical bottle of water sells for $1 or so at the store. However, there is a “luxury” brand of water that has been endorsed by Jaimee Foxx and other celebrities. It’s called Bling H20, and it has crystals embedded into the outside of each bottle. What does Bling H20 sell for?
$40 per bottle!
I’ve never drank Bling H20, but I bet that it does not taste 40 times better than Poland Spring or Aquafina. Why does it sell for 40 times more? Because it looks a lot better.
People pay more for products that appear to be of higher quality. Similarly, employers pay more for candidates and employees who appear to be of higher quality.
Salary negotiation doesn’t just happen when an employer makes you a job offer or when an employer brings you in for an annual performance review. Salary negotiation begins the moment you come in contact with an employer, and it never ends.
Want to negotiate a higher salary and be paid what you are truly worth throughout your career? Then, make sure you look your absolute best at all times on paper, online, and in-person.
Pete Leibman is the Author of the new book titled “I Got My Dream Job and So Can You” (AMACOM, 2012). His career advice has been featured on Fox, CBS, and CNN, and he is a popular Keynote Speaker at career events for students and recent grads and at conferences for people who work with college students and recent grads.
More Business articles from Business 2 Community:
that looks don’t matter, he’s wrong
Why Looks Matter
You don’t need to look like Brad Pitt or Beyonce to be successful, but you do have to put your best foot forward at all times. You tell the world what to think of you based on how you present yourself.
Your family and closest friends may look past your appearance. However, employers and individuals you meet throughout your career will subconsciously make judgments about your character, your personality, your intelligence, and your overall value as a human being based on what they see when they look at you. It might not be fair, but it’s a reality.
You might not like the analogy, but you need to see yourself as a product that you are marketing and selling 24-7-365. Looking your best is not about being phony or artificial; it’s just about taking pride in your presentation.
Here’s a quick analogy to demonstrate the power of appearances and marketing. A typical bottle of water sells for $1 or so at the store. However, there is a “luxury” brand of water that has been endorsed by Jaimee Foxx and other celebrities. It’s called Bling H20, and it has crystals embedded into the outside of each bottle. What does Bling H20 sell for?
$40 per bottle!
I’ve never drank Bling H20, but I bet that it does not taste 40 times better than Poland Spring or Aquafina. Why does it sell for 40 times more? Because it looks a lot better.
People pay more for products that appear to be of higher quality. Similarly, employers pay more for candidates and employees who appear to be of higher quality.
Salary negotiation doesn’t just happen when an employer makes you a job offer or when an employer brings you in for an annual performance review. Salary negotiation begins the moment you come in contact with an employer, and it never ends.
Want to negotiate a higher salary and be paid what you are truly worth throughout your career? Then, make sure you look your absolute best at all times on paper, online, and in-person.
Pete Leibman is the Author of the new book titled “I Got My Dream Job and So Can You” (AMACOM, 2012). His career advice has been featured on Fox, CBS, and CNN, and he is a popular Keynote Speaker at career events for students and recent grads and at conferences for people who work with college students and recent grads.
More Business articles from Business 2 Community:
Brown-Eyed Guys Seem More Trustworthy,
Study Suggests
Click green for further info
Good news for all the brown-eyed guys out there: Men with chocolate-colored irises are judged as more trustworthy than blue-eyed dudes.
But the results are somewhat complicated by the fact that it's not eye color itself that's judged as trustworthy, but baby-faced features that seem linked to having brown eyes. The findings also come from a study of Czech participants, so the judgments could vary across cultures.
"Eye color is something superficial, and nobody would expect there is a deeper association with the structure of the bones," said study researcher Karel Kleisner of Charles University in Prague.
"We were a little bit surprised," Kleisner told LiveScience.
Windows to the soul?
Kleisner became interested in what social signals eye color might convey, because blue eyes are relatively new on an evolutionary timescale. Before about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, humans didn't have blue eyes, scientists have found.
So why might the mutation that caused blue eyes have spread so far, Kleisner wondered? There could be an evolutionary reason for the variability in eye color, he said, but it doesn't seem to have to do with how well different colored eyes work. Perhaps instead, Kleisner said, eyes convey something about their owners.
"Eyes are not only for seeing, but also to be seen," he said.
To test the hypothesis, Kleisner and his colleagues photographed 40 male and 40 female students from the Czech Republic, all with either blue or brown eyes. They then asked another group of Czech students (142 female and 98 male) to rate the photographs for trustworthiness, attractiveness or dominance on a scale of one to 10.
The results revealed that brown-eyed faces were seen as more trustworthy than blue-eyed ones, particularly for male faces. Female faces showed the same trend, but the results did not reach statistical significance, leaving open the possibility that they were the result of chance.
The catch, however, arose in a second study. This time, researchers took the same faces and used a photo-editing program to swap the eye color of each person. Now the brown-eyed guys and girls sported blue eyes and the blue-eyed folks had brown eyes. Another 106 students judged those photos for trustworthiness.
The same faces as in the first experiment were seen as the most trustworthy, even though they now had blue eyes. That means that it's not the eye color itself, but something about the face shape that engenders trust, Kleisner said.
Click green here, above & below
7 Personality Traits That Are Bad For You
Face shapes seen as trustworthy
An analysis of the faces revealed that the brown-eyed men had bigger mouths, broader chins, bigger noses and more prominent eyebrows than the blue-eyed men. In other words, their mugs looked more baby-faced and cheerful, perhaps a look that makes people feel trusting, Kleisner said.
Evolution of eye color
Explaining why this might be — and why eyes appear linked to face shape — is more speculative. One possibility, Kleisner said, is that when blue eyes first appeared on the scene 10,000 years or so ago, their novelty made them sexy. If men were pursuing blue-eyed babes with more ardor than brown-eyed girls, they may have cared less about other facial features, such as ones indicating trustworthiness. This, in effect, would have made it easier for less trustworthy-looking facial genes to get passed on in blue-eyed men and women.
Male faces in the study were more variable in shape than the female faces, Kleisner said, which could explain why the trustworthiness differences were noticeable only in men. There simply may not have been enough variety in the women's faces to tell for sure whether their shapes influenced trustworthiness.
Kleisner expects that face shapes seen as trustworthy would likely be similar across cultures, but eye color might be more susceptible to cultural stereotype, which could influence similar experiments done outside of the Czech Republic. In Turkish folklore, for example, he said, blue eyes are said to be more susceptible to the Evil Eye, with the potential for cursing others. More work across borders is needed to pin down the effects of eye color, he said.
Kleisner and his colleagues report their work on Jan. 9, 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE
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The article next below is giving advice for successful debating - even though it is political in its
attitude, it is still suitable for any successful debate.
Apply the good information - you'll win in debates.
Quotation "Knowledge is no power - only applied knowledge is power"
(Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc. President)
____________________________________
Below IMPORTANT INFORMATION
(1) TO MASTER WINNING DEBATES
(2) TO CLOSE NEGOTIATIONS, SALES & AGREEMENTS
(3) TO HAVE HIGHER INCOME
NEXT below: Good information for winning in any debate - study & apply
Newt Gingrich offers free debate advice to Mitt Romney
Newt's advice: Relax and be prepared
Good information for winning in any debate - study & apply
(End of this article: see personal data for both of the above men)
To make a lasting impact wear suitable eyeglasses
click green on the next 2 lines for a video for eyeglasses bringing charisma and success
click green for a video
(1) Stylish eyeglass frames for guys One "vintage but classic" design will turn heads for all the right reasons.
Does face shape matter? Related links (2) The right hat for you, (3) How to hide your gut (4) The playground workout
Print a copy of the text below for your own private use
succeed in debates
I tell the stories to make the point that too much debate preparation is cognitive, fact-filled, rational and focused on verbal game playing.
The most important aspect of a debate is how you feel.
Mike Deaver, the great media adviser to President Reagan, used to assert that television is 85 percent visual, 10 percent how you sound and 5 percent what you say.
In every Presidential debate I participated in I always remembered Deaver's rule.
More important than what Romney knows is how he feels.
Is he confident?
Is he relaxed?
Is he in command of himself?
Can he stand up to both the media and the president?
These body language issues are far more important than the specific things he says.
Be assertive and be on offense against both Obama and his media
You can be on offense without being offensive.
The strongest reactions I got to my debates came from people who were desperate for someone to stand up to the media and redefine the questions and reframe the assumptions.
Americans are sick and tired of the unending liberalism and suffocating groupthink of the elite media.
If you look at my strongest applause lines virtually every one was taking on the media.
It is inevitable the media will ask Romney about "the 47 percent." Instead of answering it, Romney should pivot and say, "Let me tell you about the 100 percent. Obama has failed the 100 percent who have to buy gasoline. Obama has failed the 100 percent who will be paying interest on the Obama national debt for the rest of their lives. Obama has failed 100 percent of those who want to get a job and move on with their lives. Obama has failed everyone in the Middle East who had hoped the Arab Spring would lead to freedom by allowing it to turn into an Islamist winter."
The country would be electrified.
Be honest
There are things Romney has done wrong.
Admit it.
There are things he would like to do better.
Admit it.
People can smell dishonesty and disingenuous efforts to sell or hide.
Use humor
Reagan and Kennedy both had this wonderful knack of using humor to make points.
President Obama is a detached, often stiff person who overestimates his competence (the next time you see a story on the Middle East remember he got a Nobel Peace Prize for having done nothing).
No president in my lifetime has been as vulnerable to humor as President Obama.
Gingrich relishes political debates. Before he dropped his bid for the White House last spring, he vowed to challenge Obama to seven, three-hour debates in the Lincoln-Douglas style if nominated. (The style is reminiscent of contests between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Senate campaign. The debates have no moderator, a schedule of opening statements, cross-examinations and rebuttals as well as in-depth talks on a specific theme.)
Gingrich said in an interview with Yahoo News that Obama would have given in, too.
"I think I would have nagged him pretty ferociously," Gingrich said.
________________
Below personal details for the above 2 gentlemen:
Click for the green for further information
Newt Gingrich
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich ( /ˈnjuːt ˈɡɪŋɡrɪtʃ/; born Newton Leroy McPherson; June 17, 1943) is an American politician, author, and political consultant. He represented Georgia's 6th congressional district as a Republican from 1979 until his resignation in 1999, and served as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Gingrich was a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.
Further info:
Newt Gingrich - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich
Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich is an American politician, author, and political consultant. He represented Georgia's 6th congressional district as a Republican ...
Callista Gingrich - Political positions of Newt ... - Emory University - Tulane University
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and politician who, in 2012, is the nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United ...
Governorship of Mitt Romney - Political positions of Mitt Romney - Ann Romney
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Eight Words that Most Liars Use
Click green for further info
Odds are, you and your guy have a great relationship, and the only lies he tells are little fibs. But it's good to know how to spot the signs he could be telling a whopper. Lie detection expert Janine Driver, author of the new book,
You Can't Lie to Me, fills us in on the words that give away a liar.
"Left"
Sure, sometimes 'left' is the only word you can use in a situation, but there's some kind of drama involved when he uses it in place of another word that will do (think: "I left the bar at six" vs. "I went home at six"). It could be due to his desire to "leave" the lie behind.
"Never"
The big thing to look out for is when he says "never" when "no" will do. It's a sign he's overcompensating. For example, if you ask, "Did you just look at that girl's butt?" and he says, "Never!"
"That"
Like never, it depends on how he uses it. If he puts "that" in front of a noun, like "that woman" or "that money," it's a subconscious attempt for him to distance himself from the word. This is a common trick of manipulators.
Related: 10 Signs He Wants to Marry You
"Would"
If he skips "no" and goes straight to "I would never do something like that!" when talking about a past event, be wary. For example, "Are you still talking to your ex?" "I would never do that to you!" "Would never" suggests that he plans to do it in the future.
"Yes, ma'am"
If your guy is a Southern gentleman, then this doesn't apply. But if he suddenly says "ma'am" to you out of nowhere, be cautious. It's a sign that he feels like he's feeling stressed and knows he's in trouble.
"By the way…"
Liars use phrases like this to try to minimize what they say next-but usually it's what's most important to the story. Pay extra attention to what he says afterward.
Related: 6 Ways to Win Over His Friends
"But"
Liars usually try to downplay what they say with this word, so pay attention when he says something like, "I know this is going to sound strange, but…" or "I know you think I'm lying, but…"
"Why would I do that?"
It's a favorite stalling line of liars, so they can buy a little time to work out what to say next. These phrases also fit the bill: "What kind of person do you think I am?", "Are you calling me a liar?", and "I knew this was going to happen to me!"
Read more at Cosmopolitan.com!
10 Surprising Things You Don't Know About Kissing
Easy Ways To Make Your Relationship Work
How To Look Good In Pictures With Your Guy
75 Things Men Don't Know About Women
This article is for your private use, only
Can be used for educational purposes
Source: Cosmopolitan
___________________________________
STAF, Inc. agrees with President Bush's statement
Bush wades into immigration debate,
says immigrants ‘invigorate our soul’
Former President George W. Bush made a rare foray into public policy on Tuesday when he urged the nation's leaders to take a "benevolent" approach to reforming the nation's immigration system.
Bush, who has maintained a low political profile since departing office four years ago, spoke briefly about immigration at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, a talk that was part of a daylong conference on immigration and the economy.
"America can become a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time," Bush said, (Click:) according to the Texas Tribune. "As our nation debates the proper course of action on immigration reform, I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.
"Not only do immigrants help build the economy, they invigorate our soul," Bush added.
Bush has said one of his major regrets about his presidency is that he did not manage to pass immigration reform. In 2007, he hammered out a deal that would have put millions of illegal immigrants in the country on a lengthy path to citizenship. The measure died in the Senate when Bush couldn't persuade enough members of his own party to vote to consider it.
Immigration reform is again a hot topic in Congress after President Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote in November. Some leading Republicans have said the party must address reform in order to stay competitive with the growing demographic. Last week, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, introduced a bill that would give young illegal immigrants visas if they join the military. So far, it's faced criticism from immigrant groups, who say they won't accept reform bills that don't provide full citizenship.
This article is for your private use, only
_________________________________________________________________________
Bush wades into immigration debate,
says immigrants ‘invigorate our soul’
Former President George W. Bush made a rare foray into public policy on Tuesday when he urged the nation's leaders to take a "benevolent" approach to reforming the nation's immigration system.
Bush, who has maintained a low political profile since departing office four years ago, spoke briefly about immigration at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, a talk that was part of a daylong conference on immigration and the economy.
"America can become a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time," Bush said, (Click:) according to the Texas Tribune. "As our nation debates the proper course of action on immigration reform, I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.
"Not only do immigrants help build the economy, they invigorate our soul," Bush added.
Bush has said one of his major regrets about his presidency is that he did not manage to pass immigration reform. In 2007, he hammered out a deal that would have put millions of illegal immigrants in the country on a lengthy path to citizenship. The measure died in the Senate when Bush couldn't persuade enough members of his own party to vote to consider it.
Immigration reform is again a hot topic in Congress after President Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote in November. Some leading Republicans have said the party must address reform in order to stay competitive with the growing demographic. Last week, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, introduced a bill that would give young illegal immigrants visas if they join the military. So far, it's faced criticism from immigrant groups, who say they won't accept reform bills that don't provide full citizenship.
This article is for your private use, only
_________________________________________________________________________
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The ten habits of remarkably charismatic people
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Some people instantly make us feel important. Some people instantly make us feel special. Some people light up a room just by walking in.
We can't always define it, but some people have it: They're naturally charismatic.
Unfortunately, natural charisma quickly loses its impact. Familiarity breeds, well, familiarity.
But some people are remarkably charismatic: They build and maintain great relationships, consistently influence (in a good way) the people around them, consistently make people feel better about themselves--they're the kind of people everyone wants to be around...and wants to be.
Fortunately we can, because being remarkably charismatic isn't about our level of success or our presentation skills or how we dress or the image we project--it's about what we do.
Here are the 10 habits of remarkably charismatic people:
1. They listen way more than they talk.
Ask questions. Maintain eye contact. Smile. Frown. Nod. Respond--not so much verbally, but nonverbally.
That's all it takes to show the other person they're important.
Then when you do speak, don't offer advice unless you're asked. Listening shows you care a lot more than offering advice, because when you offer advice in most cases you make the conversation about you, not them.
Don't believe me? Who is "Here's what I would do..." about: you or the other person?
Only speak when you have something important to say--and always define important as what matters to the other person, not to you.
2. They don't practice selective hearing.
Some people--I guarantee you know people like this--are incapable of hearing anything said by the people they feel are somehow beneath them.
Sure, you speak to them, but that particular falling tree doesn't make a sound in the forest, because there's no one actually listening.
Remarkably charismatic people listen closely to everyone, and they make all of us, regardless of our position or social status or "level," feel like we have something in common with them.
Because we do: We're all people.
3. They put their stuff away.
Don't check your phone. Don't glance at your monitor. Don't focus on anything else, even for a moment.
You can never connect with others if you're busy connecting with your stuff, too.
Give the gift of your full attention. That's a gift few people give. That gift alone will make others want to be around you and remember you.
4. They give before they receive--and often they never receive.
Never think about what you can get. Focus on what you can provide. Giving is the only way to establish a real connection and relationship.
Focus, even in part and even for a moment, on what you can get out of the other person, and you show that the only person who really matters is you.
5. They don't act self-important…
The only people who are impressed by your stuffy, pretentious, self-important self are other stuffy, pretentious, self-important people.
The rest of us aren't impressed. We're irritated, put off, and uncomfortable.
And we hate when you walk in the room.
6. …Because they realize other people are more important.
You already know what you know. You know your opinions. You know your perspectives and points of view.
That stuff isn't important, because it's already yours. You can't learn anything from yourself.
But you don't know what other people know, and everyone, no matter who they are, knows things you don't know.
That makes them a lot more important than you--because they're people you can learn from.
7. They shine the spotlight on others.
No one receives enough praise. No one. Tell people what they did well.
Wait, you say you don't know what they did well?
Shame on you--it's your job to know. It's your job to find out ahead of time.
Not only will people appreciate your praise, they'll appreciate the fact you care enough to pay attention to what they're doing.
Then they'll feel a little more accomplished and a lot more important.
8. They choose their words.
The words you use impact the attitude of others.
For example, you don't have to go to a meeting; you get to go meet with other people. You don't have to create a presentation for a new client; you get to share cool stuff with other people. You don't have to go to the gym; you get to work out and improve your health and fitness.
We all want to associate with happy, enthusiastic, fulfilled people. The words you choose can help other people feel better about themselves--and make you feel better about yourself, too.
9. They don't discuss the failings of others...
Granted, we all like hearing a little gossip. We all like hearing a little dirt.
The problem is, we don't necessarily like--and we definitely don't respect--the people who dish that dirt.
Don't laugh at other people. When you do, the people around you wonder if you sometimes laugh at them.
10. ...But they readily admit their failings.
Incredibly successful people are often assumed to have charisma simply because they're successful. Their success seems to create a halo effect, almost like a glow.
The keyword is seem.
You don't have to be incredibly successful to be remarkably charismatic. Scratch the shiny surface, and many successful people have all the charisma of a rock.
But you do have to be incredibly genuine to be remarkably charismatic.
Be humble. Share your screwups. Admit your mistakes. Be the cautionary tale. And laugh at yourself.
While you should never laugh at other people, you should always laugh at yourself.
People won't laugh at you. People will laugh laugh with you.
They'll like you better for it--and they'll want to be around you a lot more.
Click green areas for further information
Read more:
Click the green
This Is the Only Management Strategy You'll Ever Need
6 Ways to Make Someone's Day
9 Beliefs of Truly Successful People
Source:
Yahoo Science
This article is for your private use, only
_______________________________________________
The ten habits of remarkably charismatic people
Click green areas for further information
Some people instantly make us feel important. Some people instantly make us feel special. Some people light up a room just by walking in.
We can't always define it, but some people have it: They're naturally charismatic.
Unfortunately, natural charisma quickly loses its impact. Familiarity breeds, well, familiarity.
But some people are remarkably charismatic: They build and maintain great relationships, consistently influence (in a good way) the people around them, consistently make people feel better about themselves--they're the kind of people everyone wants to be around...and wants to be.
Fortunately we can, because being remarkably charismatic isn't about our level of success or our presentation skills or how we dress or the image we project--it's about what we do.
Here are the 10 habits of remarkably charismatic people:
1. They listen way more than they talk.
Ask questions. Maintain eye contact. Smile. Frown. Nod. Respond--not so much verbally, but nonverbally.
That's all it takes to show the other person they're important.
Then when you do speak, don't offer advice unless you're asked. Listening shows you care a lot more than offering advice, because when you offer advice in most cases you make the conversation about you, not them.
Don't believe me? Who is "Here's what I would do..." about: you or the other person?
Only speak when you have something important to say--and always define important as what matters to the other person, not to you.
2. They don't practice selective hearing.
Some people--I guarantee you know people like this--are incapable of hearing anything said by the people they feel are somehow beneath them.
Sure, you speak to them, but that particular falling tree doesn't make a sound in the forest, because there's no one actually listening.
Remarkably charismatic people listen closely to everyone, and they make all of us, regardless of our position or social status or "level," feel like we have something in common with them.
Because we do: We're all people.
3. They put their stuff away.
Don't check your phone. Don't glance at your monitor. Don't focus on anything else, even for a moment.
You can never connect with others if you're busy connecting with your stuff, too.
Give the gift of your full attention. That's a gift few people give. That gift alone will make others want to be around you and remember you.
4. They give before they receive--and often they never receive.
Never think about what you can get. Focus on what you can provide. Giving is the only way to establish a real connection and relationship.
Focus, even in part and even for a moment, on what you can get out of the other person, and you show that the only person who really matters is you.
5. They don't act self-important…
The only people who are impressed by your stuffy, pretentious, self-important self are other stuffy, pretentious, self-important people.
The rest of us aren't impressed. We're irritated, put off, and uncomfortable.
And we hate when you walk in the room.
6. …Because they realize other people are more important.
You already know what you know. You know your opinions. You know your perspectives and points of view.
That stuff isn't important, because it's already yours. You can't learn anything from yourself.
But you don't know what other people know, and everyone, no matter who they are, knows things you don't know.
That makes them a lot more important than you--because they're people you can learn from.
7. They shine the spotlight on others.
No one receives enough praise. No one. Tell people what they did well.
Wait, you say you don't know what they did well?
Shame on you--it's your job to know. It's your job to find out ahead of time.
Not only will people appreciate your praise, they'll appreciate the fact you care enough to pay attention to what they're doing.
Then they'll feel a little more accomplished and a lot more important.
8. They choose their words.
The words you use impact the attitude of others.
For example, you don't have to go to a meeting; you get to go meet with other people. You don't have to create a presentation for a new client; you get to share cool stuff with other people. You don't have to go to the gym; you get to work out and improve your health and fitness.
We all want to associate with happy, enthusiastic, fulfilled people. The words you choose can help other people feel better about themselves--and make you feel better about yourself, too.
9. They don't discuss the failings of others...
Granted, we all like hearing a little gossip. We all like hearing a little dirt.
The problem is, we don't necessarily like--and we definitely don't respect--the people who dish that dirt.
Don't laugh at other people. When you do, the people around you wonder if you sometimes laugh at them.
10. ...But they readily admit their failings.
Incredibly successful people are often assumed to have charisma simply because they're successful. Their success seems to create a halo effect, almost like a glow.
The keyword is seem.
You don't have to be incredibly successful to be remarkably charismatic. Scratch the shiny surface, and many successful people have all the charisma of a rock.
But you do have to be incredibly genuine to be remarkably charismatic.
Be humble. Share your screwups. Admit your mistakes. Be the cautionary tale. And laugh at yourself.
While you should never laugh at other people, you should always laugh at yourself.
People won't laugh at you. People will laugh laugh with you.
They'll like you better for it--and they'll want to be around you a lot more.
Click green areas for further information
Read more:
Click the green
This Is the Only Management Strategy You'll Ever Need
6 Ways to Make Someone's Day
9 Beliefs of Truly Successful People
Source:
Yahoo Science
This article is for your private use, only
_______________________________________________
Fish story lands in NC's high court, $1Million on line
The lesson in this story is in this quotation:
Quotation "The more attention is paid to the smallest of the details, the bigger the results"
(Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc. President)
Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — About four hours after the fishing charter boat Citation left dock on the Outer Banks to compete in one of the country's richest deep-sea fishing tournaments, crew members were in the fight of their lives. Something huge was hooked, but it was invisible to human sight as it dove for the ocean bottom about 27 miles off the North Carolina coast.
Five hours later they hauled up a monster, an 883-pound, 14-foot-long blue marlin. They knew the silvery-blue torpedo of muscle bigger than a bear would mean a huge payday in the June 2010 Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament when they recorded their catch in coastal Morehead City.
"When we finally saw it we couldn't believe it," the Citation's captain, Eric Holmes of Buxton, said at the time. "To catch a fish this big ... it's something. It really is. We got lucky and it's good to be lucky."
But their luck soured. The boat's owners landed in a fight for the $910,000 in prize money that continued Tuesday with arguments to North Carolina's Supreme Court.
Tournament officials disqualified the Citation's crew because the 22-year-old first mate, Peter Wann of Alexandria, Va., did not have a $15 North Carolina fishing license when the fish was hooked. His license was purchased while the Citation was still two hours out to sea and chugging toward a landing.
Tournament rules state that a fishing license is required for everyone aboard a participating vessel, said E. Bradley Evans, a lawyer for the contest's organizers. That rule was also emphasized at a pre-tournament meeting that Holmes and Wann did not attend.
The non-profit group that runs the tournament has no gain in disqualifying the Citation, but did so to protect the contest's integrity, Evans said.
"If none of the rules are material, then people could take rifles and shoot fish. They could fish at any hours of the day if they want to," Evans said. He said the rules were critical to the operation of the tournament and the most important aspect.
Wann thought the Citation had a blanket license that covered the entire crew, and when he found out there may have been a question if his license was active he got online while still miles at sea and bought another while still outside the state's territorial waters, which extend three miles from shore, said Darren Jackson, an attorney for the boat's owners.
"Maybe it was just luck that they happened to have a computer with internet access out in the middle of the ocean, but they did. And they did get the license," Jackson said.
State regulators couldn't decide when or if Wann violated state fishing laws and had to amend the citation they issued the mate, Jackson said. While one tournament rule said North Carolina required a recreational fishing license for anyone aboard, the language didn't state that failing to follow the state law could lead to disqualification from the contest, Jackson said. Disqualification for violating the fishing license rule was as unreasonable as if the same punishment were leveled for other violations that didn't tilt the competition, like going too fast in a "no wake" zone or failing to have the proper number of lifejackets on board.
"They applied this provision with the most drastic remedy they could," Jackson said. "It's the ultimate decision. It's their death penalty, so to speak. I would argue to you that's the height of arbitrariness."
The high court should send the case back for a jury to decide, Jackson said, not let stand a lower-court ruling that he said doesn't pass the smell test.
The Citation's lawsuit to reclaim its winnings was dismissed after it was transferred to the county where the tournament is based, and after local Superior Court Judge John Nobles Jr. decided its merits without a jury. Only just before the hearing did the Citation's lawyers learn that Nobles was the former law partner and vacation buddy of the attorney representing the boat finishing second after Citation.
Claud Wheatly III and Nobles had taken several vacations together, including during the time the lawsuit had been under way, the Citation's lawyers said. Owners of the second-place Carnivore stand to divide $999,453 after taking the winner's share and part of the third-place money.
Wheatly noted to the high court that Citation's lawyers have no evidence that Nobles displayed any prejudice or bias in the case.
Source: Associated Press
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A business related JOKE
Why did the banker stop seeing his girlfriend?
Because he lost his interest.
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Success Secrets Fit for Any Goal
By Dr. Christian, Ph.D, N.D.,D.D., President, STAF, Inc. - Founder of SUCCESSOLOGY® (Reg. U.S.Pat.Off. 1991)
Your Sense of Humor – a Gift for Business & Life
A merry heart has the ability to capture and enjoy those wonderful times of life and let them turn to laughter.
Your sense of humor is a gift and will tremendously help you in any business and to achieve social, marital, family, relationship, financial, business success. Laughter will help you to stay healthier and live a longer, more meaningful life.
“Every thought has a biochemical reality in the body. Uplifting thoughts and emotions are associated with an entirely different mix of neuropeptides and hormones than are thoughts of panic, fear or anger. So entertain thoughts that produce the biochemistry of health and joy."
_________________
Quote "It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear."
(Edward Henry Harriman) - CREATED BIG SUCCESS IN EVERY ASPECT IN HIS LIFE
American railroad owner and financier Edward Henry Harriman modernized much of the nation's railways. He was born in 1848 in New York. He dropped out of school at 14 to work on Wall Street. By age 22, he had a seat on the NY Stock Exchange. After he bought the Union Pacific, he inspected every mile of the aging rail system. In 1899, he organized a scientific exploration of the Alaska coastline. His estate outside New York City is now Harriman State Park. He died in 1909.
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Research studies have shown that laughter, along with a well-rounded sense and use of humor, is one of the sure signs of intelligence. It is also known to produce endorphins in your body that generate feelings of well-being. When people laugh at your proper jokes, they create similar "feel-good-chemicals" and relate their feelings to YOUR presence - then "the rest is history": HOW YOU BECAME SUCCESSFUL AND RICH.
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Quote
"A day without laughter is a day wasted."-- Charlie Chaplin Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, (1889–1977) English comic actor and film director of the silent film era.
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JOKE
Juror
Judge: Is there any reason you could not serve as a juror in this case? Juror: I don't want to be away from my job that long. Judge: Can't they do without you at work? Juror: Yes, but I don't want them to know it.
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Humor and properly using jokes can and will bring SUCCESS results.
Good, wholesome laughter is a useful gift for success in any field.
President Abraham Lincoln said, "God must have meant for us to laugh, or else he would not have made so many mules, parrots, monkeys and human beings. God wants us to laugh."
Read jokes, study quotes - adopt & use them. Read biographies of successful people - from any era of the human history, present and past - you'll learn more than you expected.
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Quote
"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."
--Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.Twain was very popular, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death he was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age”, and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".
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Pass along the gift of laughter today to someone. Tell a good, wholesome joke. Send an email of a funny story to a friend that you haven't talked to in a while. Create laughter and you create smiles and happiness - people respond to your more positively. Learn to end most of your emails with a proper joke or/and with a suitable quote fitting the topic(s) and the situation. You will learn by practice and will become finally a Grand Master with a Black Belt in Success.
LEARN TO TELL JOKES.
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JOKE
Violin Practice
Little Harold was practicing the violin in the living room while his father was trying to read in the den. The family dog was lying in the den, and as the screeching sounds of little Harold's violin reached his ears, he began to howl loudly. The father listened to the dog and the violin as long as he could. Then he jumped up, slammed his paper to the floor and yelled above the noise, "For pity's sake, can't you play something the dog doesn't know?" _______________________
STAF, Inc. uses plenty of jokes - this website has jokes, our Radio/TV Shows use jokes. STAF, Inc. uses quotes and jokes almost in every letter (where it is proper). When people laugh, they accept your ideas, plans, and product or service easier - and: you succeed.
Save all jokes you see and keep them in the "jokes" file in your computer. Save all interesting sounding QUOTES and keep them in a separate file in your computer - and USE them.
Use jokes and quotes in your emails, in your phone calls, in your social events. Learn by practice. Buy joke books (and Quote books), study and adopt material from them, from magazines & newspapers.Proper use of jokes and quotes comes gradually step-by-step until you finally have become "the winner of your audience (= your customer/clients)" and will earn a "standing ovation" = a fuller bank account.
You create a natural sounding talent by practicing and using jokes and quotes. Your relationships and marriage get better and happier. With a cheerful attitude that comes from adopting humor, which comes from practicing and telling jokes, YOU OPEN MANY MORE DOORS AND REACH A HIGHER LEVEL of financial and social success in your life.
We are all "salespeople" no matter what our profession.
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Quotation
"People who laugh live longer than those who don't laugh. Few persons realize that health varies according to the amount of laughter."--James J. Walsh
James Joseph Walsh, M.D., LL.D., Litt.D., Sc.D. (1865–1942) was an American physician and author, born in New York City. He graduated from Fordham College in 1884 (Ph. D., 1892) and from the University of Pennsylvania (M.D.) in 1895. After postgraduate work in Paris, Vienna and Berlin he settled in New York. In addition to contributing to the New International Encyclopedia and to medical and other journals, he also published a variety of popular works.
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JOKE
Bidding Higher
One day a man went to an auction. While there, he bid on a parrot. He really wanted this bird, so he got caught up in the bidding. He kept on bidding, but kept getting outbid, so he bid higher and higher and higher.
Finally, after he bid way more than he intended, he won the bid - the parrot was his at last!
As he was paying for the parrot, he said to the Auctioneer, "I sure hope this parrot can talk. I would hate to have paid this much for it, only to find out that he can't talk!"
"Don't worry." said the Auctioneer, "He can talk. Who do you think kept bidding against you?"
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Salesmanship WITH HUMOR & USING PROPER JOKES and QUOTES fitting the situation brings much better sales results.
Even though you might be employed by some company or by someone, you had to first "sell your resume and your talents", daily you need to "sell" your ideas to the public, to your your superiors, etc.
When you use humor, jokes, and quotes, your children behave better and love you deeper with added respect. You succeed in everything.
YOU BECOME A BUSINESS SUCCESS BY SERVING PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY EXPECT - give more to people than they pay for - you seal your own financial success by giving more than expected. The same principle goes with all social & relationship success: when you give more than "normally" expected BY MAKING PEOPLE LAUGH = FEELING BETTER (by feel-good-chemical creation) thus feeling happiness, people automatically relate it to and with YOU. As a result they want your services, your company, and automatically help you to succeed.
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Quote
"Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success."– Swami Sivananda Saraswati
About Swami Sivananda Saraswati Swami Sivananda Saraswati, born Kuppuswamy, was an Indian doctor and Yoga guru. He was born in 1887 in India. When he set up a clinic in Malaysia, he became known for his kind heart and charitable work. He left a successful medical practice to go on a pilgrimage to India, where he took monastic vows. As a spiritual leader, he attracted many disciples, including Krishnamurti*}. He called his discipline the Yoga of synthesis. He wrote more than 300 books on Yoga and spirituality. He died in 1963
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How to start a new business
By Dr. Christian, Ph.D, N.D.,D.D., President, STAF, Inc. Founder of SUCCESSOLOGY® (Reg. U.S.Pat.Off. 1991)
Quotation
“All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible.” Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924) - founder of Success Magazine, is also considered to be the founder of the modern success movement in America.
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STAF, Inc. Radio/TV shows give motivational and practical information for you to follow your dreams.
The principle is: “What your mind can conceive you can achieve”.
Write down your ideas, study them, and give them time to develop further in your conscious and subconscious mind.
It is helpful to record your ideas immediately because a new thought comes (to all of us) in about every 2 seconds and the previous thought could be replaced by the new one. Every day we all have 40 000 to 60 000 thoughts coming to us. Many of them are every day the same – thus it makes a difference to read and to be “interested in everything”. Reading, taking seminars, seeing new people, getting involved in new activities, etc., give material to your mind to develop new thoughts and new solutions. When an “interesting sounding” thought comes to your mind, it is a good practice to record it immediately (paper, recording device, etc.). It could be the key to hold to a new idea.
Perhaps you are after a new product that can give you a chance to becoming wealthier and financially more successful. The biggest “enemies” to your thoughts and dreams are your closest people - they easily criticize “everything”. Realize: the other people (no matter how close to you) are not you with YOUR unique ideas and capabilities. Thus, follow your own thinking and do not let anyone put your ideas down. As a matter a fact, keep your new ideas first only in your own mind (as long as you save them by recording them). To have feedback when a new idea comes to you can be beneficial IF you do not put yourself down.
Any discussions with other people might lead to new solutions. You never know where your mental work might lead you when you do not give up. The link below (article: Obscure businesses that made a million) shows some new services or products as a good source to see “one never knows where the strangest ideas might lead” as long you do not give up. To create, market, and succeed in a business is demanding, needs a full dedication, and probably other people’s professional business guidance and help.
One of the most important factors is “you need to love what you do and be truly enthusiastic about it”. A new product needs somehow to give the customer or the client “a solution in something”. It is not necessary to invent a totally new product to succeed. Take any existing service or product you believe in and love, improve it somehow only by 10 % and the public will easily experience it as a new product on the market. A lower price, a higher quality, an easier use of the product or service are some examples of what could be involved in those 10 % of new factors.
Obscure businesses that made a million (click) Most were born of inspiration — and some required very little start-up cash. How to start a business (click)
The following 10 quotes will motivate
(1) “You respect: you keep – you don’t: you lose”(Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc.) (Hint: includes your thoughts and ideas coming to your mind)
(2) “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” (Lao-Tzu)
(3) “Life is a constant stream of multiple choices - mark the wrong box - you are gone”
(Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc.)
(4) “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now”
(Author Unknown)
(5) “Fear defeats more people than any other thing in the world” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
(6) ”Fear” = false-evidence-appearing real” (Author Unknown)
(7) ”To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom” (Bertrand Russell)
(8) "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
(Steve Jobs – Apple co-founder)
(9) “The one who plays best, wins” (Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc.)
(10) ”Multiple counselors bring success”
(The Bible)
One more as a bonus:
“Do the thing today you fear and:
your fear will disappear”
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Joan Rivers:
Why Johnny Carson 'Never Ever Spoke to Me Again'
Click green for further info
When I started out, a pretty girl did not go into comedy. If you saw a pretty girl walk into a nightclub, she was automatically a singer. Comedy was all white, older men. It was Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Shelley Berman, Red Skelton ... even Amos and Andy were white men, which is hilarious if you think about it.
Phyllis Diller was happening right before me. But even Phyllis was a caricature, and I didn’t want to be a caricature. I was a college graduate; I wanted to get married.
Click here to read THR's complete Women in Entertainment list
I didn’t even want to be a comedian. Nobody wanted to be a comedian. Nowadays, everyone wants to be a comedian. You look at a Whitney Cummings, who is so beautiful — she wanted to be a comedian! I wanted to be an actress. I was an office temp when one secretary said to me: “You’re very funny. You should go do stand-up, be a comedian. They make $6 a night some places.” And I said, “That’s more than I’m making as an office temp” — I made eight, but I had to also pay for my Correcto-Type because I was a lousy speller — so I thought, “Oh, I could do that and have days free to make the rounds.” And that’s why I became a comedian.
I had no idea what I was doing. The white men were doing “mother-in-law” and “my wife’s so fat ...” jokes. It was all interchangeable. Bob Hope would walk into a town and say, “The traffic lights in this town are so slow that ...” and it could be any town. When I went onstage, that just didn’t feel right. So I just said, “Let me talk about my life.” It was at the moment when Woody Allen was saying, “Let me talk about my life,” and George Carlin was saying, “Maybe I'll talk about my life.” So I came in at the right moment.
My group was Woody and George and Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby. Rodney Dangerfield. Dick Cavett. All the ones who were coming up at the same time. But I never was one of the guys. I was never asked to go hang out — I never thought about it until later. They would all go to the Stage Delicatessen afterward and talk. I never got to go uptown and have a sandwich with them. So, even though I was with them, I wasn’t with them.
Everybody broke through ahead of me. I was the last one in the group to break through, or to be allowed to break through. Looking back, I think it was because I was a woman. Because in those days, they would come down to the Village and look at you for Johnny Carson. I was the very last one of the group they put on the Carson show.
I was brought up seven times to the Carson show — interviewed and auditioned seven times by seven different people, and they rejected me, each time, over a period of three years. Then Bill Cosby was filling in, and the comedian that night bombed. Bill said to the booking producer, Shelly Schultz:“Joan Rivers couldn’t be any worse than this guy. Why don’t you use her?” And that’s when they put me on the show. But they didn’t bring me on as a stand-up comic. They brought me on as a funny girl writer. I’m the only stand-up that never did a stand-up routine on the Carson show.
Carson, give him credit, said on air in 1965, “You’re gonna be a star.” Right smack on the air.
I adored Johnny. In the ’70s, I did opening monologues, I was hosting. The turning point was when I left the show. Everybody left the show to go to do their own shows. Bill Cosby. David Brenner. George Carlin. Everybody. I stuck around for 18 years. And they finally offered me my own late-night show.
PHOTOS: THR's Women in Entertainment Power List
The first person I called was Johnny, and he hung up on me — and never, ever spoke to me again. And then denied that I called him. I couldn’t figure it out. I would see him in a restaurant and go over and say hello. He wouldn’t talk to me.
I kept saying, “I don’t understand, why is he mad?” He was not angry at anybody else. I think he really felt because I was a woman that I just was his. That I wouldn’t leave him. I know this sounds very warped. But I don’t understand otherwise what was going on. For years, I thought that maybe he liked me better than the others. But I think it was a question of, “I found you, and you’re my property.” He didn’t like that as a woman, I went up against him.
And I was put up against him. In the press, he said, “She didn’t call me, and she was so terrible.” When you’ve told the truth and you read a lie, there’s nothing you can do about it. To this day, I’m very angry about that. Don’t f---in’ lie. You’re making, what, $300 million a year? What are you talking about? And I was going on Fox. Fox didn’t even have call letters at that point. Fox wasn’t Fox. Fox was six stupid little stations.
Looking back, and I never like to say it, the Carson breakup hurt me a lot, without realizing it. Even now, with Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, our reality show, or Fashion Police, when I say, “No, this is wrong,” people say: “See? She is a bitch. She is a c---.” If I were a man, they’d say: “So brilliant. He’s tough, but he’s right.” Nobody ever says to me, “You’re right.”
I have a friend. She was a producer at NBC and so brilliant. And they fired her because she was very abrasive. Lorne Michaels has a reputation of being a tough nut. But they all say, “That Lorne, he’s mean, but he’s brilliant.”
This woman, they said, “Oh, she’s too nasty.” But she pulled in the numbers.
It’s very tough in the business. My act consists of my gown that I carry and two spotlights and a microphone. I’ll do my sound check, and sometimes they’re not happy when I say, “The sound isn’t right,” or “Can we try other lights?” Because they’re men at the board.
STORY: The Exec Who Made Lindsay Lohan's 'Liz & Dick': It Was 'Not A Risk,' And She'd Do It Again
And lighting is very key for a woman, especially. I’ve been in the business almost 50 years — I know my f---ing lighting. And there is always pushback from the lighting people. They just don’t want to hear it from a woman. They just don’t want to give you that cookie.
I don’t want to hear that male comics want someone to match wits with. No, they don’t. They want someone to sit there and gaze at them adoringly. That’s still what they want. The upside is, they don’t get to wear the pretty clothes. They don’t get to have the pretty dressing room. Women comedians get the private bathroom first.
During women’s lib, which was at its height in the ’70s, you had to say: “F--- the men. I could do better.” I think women did themselves a disservice because they wouldn’t talk about reality. Nobody wanted to say, “I had a lousy date” or “He left me.” But if that’s your life, that’s what they wanna hear. If you look around, very few women comics came out of the ’70s. It really started again in the ’90s, when they realized, it’s all right to say you wanna get married. It’s all right to say I wanna be pretty. That’s also part of your life. Thank God. Because now you know, we’ve got Whitney. I love Whitney. I think what she does is so smart. Sarah Silverman, oh my God. You just look at them and go: Good girls.
I love stand-up — the connection with an audience is awesome. I just played Royal Albert Hall, which is 4,500 people, probably not a lot for some. But for me, it was amazing. The energy! From the beginning, and to this day, I would never tell a lie onstage. So now I walk out, I go, “I’m so happy to see you,” and I really truly am so happy to see them. The one thing I brought to this business is speaking the absolute truth. Say only what you really feel about the subject. And that’s too bad if they don’t like it. That’s what comedy is. It’s you telling the truth as you see it.
I think it was Cosby who also said to me, “If only 2 percent of the world thinks you’re funny, you’ll still fill stadiums for the rest of your life.”
My advice to women comedians is: First of all, don’t worry about the money. Love the process. You don’t know when it’s gonna happen. Louis CK started hitting in his 40s; he’d been doing it for 20 years. And don’t settle. I don’t want to ever hear, “It’s good enough.” Then it’s not good enough. Don’t ever underestimate your audience. They can tell when it isn’t true. Also: Ignore your competition. A Mafia guy in Vegas gave me this advice: “Run your own race, put on your blinders.” Don’t worry about how others are doing. Something better will come.
Ignore aging: Comedy is the one place it doesn’t matter. It matters in singing because the voice goes. It matters certainly in acting because you’re no longer the sexpot. But in comedy, if you can tell a joke, they will gather around your deathbed. If you’re funny, you’re funny. Isn’t that wonderful?
If there is a secret to being a comedian, it’s just loving what you do. It is my drug of choice. I don’t need real drugs. I don’t need liquor. It’s the joy that I get performing. That is my rush. I get it nowhere else.
What pleasure you feel when you’ve kept people happy for an hour and a half. They’ve forgotten their troubles. It’s great. There’s nothing like it in the world. When everybody’s laughing, it’s a party. And then you get a check at the end. That’s very nice.
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This article is for your private use, only
__________________________________________
Article # 1 of 2
Here an example
HOW NO ONE SHOULD EVER BEHAVE
A much longer jail sentence
would have been better for this man
Man Sentenced to Jail After Mocking Disabled Girl
Click green for further info
An Ohio man faces one month of jail time for teasing and taunting a 1o-year-old girl with cerebral palsy after a video of the incident went viral.
On Nov. 27, Judge John A. Poulos of the Canton Municipal Court sentenced 43-year-old William Bailey to 29 days in jail.
The taunting occurred on Sept. 26, when Tricia Knight and her mother-in-law were waiting for her children's bus to return from school. Knight's three children, including 10-year-old Hope, attendWalker Elementary with Bailey's 9-year-old son, Joseph.
What happened next was caught on an iPod camera by Knight's mother-in-law, Marie Prince.
William Bailey "was dragging his leg and patting his arm across his chest to pick his son Joseph up," said Knight. "I asked him to please stop doing this. 'My daughter can see you.' He then told his son to walk like the R-word."
The next day Knight posted the video on her Facebook page while Prince uploaded the video they called "Bus Stop Ignorance" to YouTube. Within days, the video went viral.
The Knight family has lived next door to the Baileys for the past two years, and the incident at the bus stop, according to Knight, is the culmination of rising tensions and intimidation against her kids.
In the days that followed the taunting at the bus stop, the Knight family filed a complaint with Canton City prosecutors.
Jennifer Fitzsimmons, the chief assistant city prosecutor for this case, says in the three years she's been in this role, she's never seen anything like this.
"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But when there's nothing out there regarding disabilities, it took me a little bit longer to come to a decision."
After Fitzsimmons reviewed the Knight family's complaint, a police report based on a phone call from the Knight family, and the video captured by Prince, she decided to press charges.
"It was settled without Hope having to relive what she saw and how it impacted her," said Fitzsimmons. "I think the trial could have been just as traumatic as the event itself."
Bailey, who works as a truck driver, was charged twice. He was originally charged for aggravated menacing, a misdemeanor of the first degree. In this charge, the victim was Knight, an incident she says took place the same day as the bus stop scene.
Bailey, she said, "was swinging a tow chain on his porch, saying he was going to choke me until I stopped twitching. I sent my kids with my mother-in-law to leave with them. My husband called the sheriff."
In Ohio, a menacing charge is a misdemeanor fourth degree, which carries a maximum of 30 days in jail.
The second original charge, for the bus stop incident, was disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor of the fourth degree. A disorderly conduct is a minor misdemeanor and carries no jail time.
Although Bailey's sentencing technically reflects the charges brought by his actions toward Knight, Hope's mother, Fitzsimmons explains how the plea deal enabled the sentence to cover his actions toward Hope.
"Because the menacing misdemeanor charge was directed toward Hope's mother, and they're all interrelated, the judge took into account all the actions of Mr. Bailey and the entire Holcomb family," said Fitzsimmons.
Bailey "entered a plea of 'no contest' to a menacing charge and to disorderly conduct," said Fitzsimmons. His sentence will go into effect on Jan. 2.
Judge Poulos required Bailey to pay $400 in court costs as well as other fees. He was given a credit for one day which is why his sentence is 29 days and not the maximum 30.
Following the Nov. 27 hearing, Bailey's attorney, John R. Giua, released a statement and apology on Bailey's behalf, according to the The Repository, an online newspaper for Stark County, Ohio.
"I don't think this sentence will change things because it hasn't so far," said Knight.
Knight says living next door to the Baileys affects their everyday lives.
Just last summer, said Knight, 9-year-old Joseph Bailey came over to play with Knight's children and brought over a pocket knife, threatening to "cut [Hope] up," followed by name calling. That harassment continued into the school year.
Since the bus stop incident, Knight has spoken with the bus driver and the school's principal. Knight now drives Hope to school every day while her other two children ride another bus to school.
Hope was born 29 weeks premature after Knight was involved in a head-on auto collision. When she was born, Hope weighed only two pounds, 12 ounces, which caused several medical problems resulting in two brain surgeries. Knight says her daughter fought for her life the first two years.
As for whether this case presents a new precedent in Ohio is another debate.
"I don't know if it sets a precedent so much maybe as it begins a conversation between people," said Fitzsimmons. "I think conversation starts progress, and I think if it can bring something else to light, it would be good."
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Article #2 of 2
Here an example of a praiseworthy human kindness
the opposite type of behavior than the man had in the previous article just above
NYPD officer photographed giving boots to
barefoot homeless man melts icy hearts online
This Police Officer was later honored by a personal invitation to meet the NYC Council Chairman for special thanks for the positive public attention his personal choice of behavior brought.
Click green below for further info, pictures & videos
Photo of a New York City police officer kneeling down to give a barefoot homeless man in Times Square a pair of boots on a cold November night is melting even the iciest New Yorkers' hearts online.
Click green for the police officer's photo photo was posted
On Nov. 14, NYPD officer Lawrence DePrimo, who was on counterterrorism duty in Times Square, saw the older homeless man without shoes sitting on 42nd Street. DePrimo, 25, left and then returned with a pair of $100 boots he bought at a nearby Skechers store.
"It was freezing out, and you could see the blisters on the man's feet," DePrimo, a three-year veteran of the department who lives with his parents on Long Island, told the New York Times. "I had two pairs of socks, and I was still cold."
The random act of kindness was captured by Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Ariz., who was visiting the city. Foster, communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, emailed the photo to the NYPD with a note commending DePrimo.
"The officer said, 'I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let's put them on and take care of you,'" Foster wrote. "The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man.
"I have been in law enforcement for 17 years," she continued. "I was never so impressed in my life. ... It is important, I think, for all of us to remember the real reason we are in this line of work. The reminder this officer gave to our profession in his presentation of human kindness has not been lost."
Foster's (click for the officer's foto: photo was posted on the NYPD's Facebook page on Tuesday, 11/27/12, where it received more than 320,000 "likes," 77,000 "shares" and 20,000 comments—most of them praising DePrimo, who seems to have restored Facebook's faith in humanity.
"This is one hell of a police officer," Desiree Wright-Borden wrote.
"Wow," Jack Horton wrote. "It's nice to know there are still good people out there."
"Angels truly do walk on earth!!!" Charlene Hoffman-Pestell wrote.
Some commenters, though, were skeptical, saying the photo could have been staged.
"Clever stunt!" Louis Zehmke wrote. "The hobo is 'parked' at the entrance of a shoe shop."
But Foster claims DePrimo had no idea he was being photographed: "The officer expected NOTHING in return and did not know I was watching."
EXPLORE RELATED CONTENT
CLICK for photos, for videos, for texts
Here an example of a praiseworthy human kindness
the opposite type of behavior than the man had in the previous article just above
NYPD officer photographed giving boots to
barefoot homeless man melts icy hearts online
This Police Officer was later honored by a personal invitation to meet the NYC Council Chairman for special thanks for the positive public attention his personal choice of behavior brought.
Click green below for further info, pictures & videos
Photo of a New York City police officer kneeling down to give a barefoot homeless man in Times Square a pair of boots on a cold November night is melting even the iciest New Yorkers' hearts online.
Click green for the police officer's photo photo was posted
On Nov. 14, NYPD officer Lawrence DePrimo, who was on counterterrorism duty in Times Square, saw the older homeless man without shoes sitting on 42nd Street. DePrimo, 25, left and then returned with a pair of $100 boots he bought at a nearby Skechers store.
"It was freezing out, and you could see the blisters on the man's feet," DePrimo, a three-year veteran of the department who lives with his parents on Long Island, told the New York Times. "I had two pairs of socks, and I was still cold."
The random act of kindness was captured by Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Florence, Ariz., who was visiting the city. Foster, communications director for the Pinal County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, emailed the photo to the NYPD with a note commending DePrimo.
"The officer said, 'I have these size 12 boots for you, they are all-weather. Let's put them on and take care of you,'" Foster wrote. "The officer squatted down on the ground and proceeded to put socks and the new boots on this man.
"I have been in law enforcement for 17 years," she continued. "I was never so impressed in my life. ... It is important, I think, for all of us to remember the real reason we are in this line of work. The reminder this officer gave to our profession in his presentation of human kindness has not been lost."
Foster's (click for the officer's foto: photo was posted on the NYPD's Facebook page on Tuesday, 11/27/12, where it received more than 320,000 "likes," 77,000 "shares" and 20,000 comments—most of them praising DePrimo, who seems to have restored Facebook's faith in humanity.
"This is one hell of a police officer," Desiree Wright-Borden wrote.
"Wow," Jack Horton wrote. "It's nice to know there are still good people out there."
"Angels truly do walk on earth!!!" Charlene Hoffman-Pestell wrote.
Some commenters, though, were skeptical, saying the photo could have been staged.
"Clever stunt!" Louis Zehmke wrote. "The hobo is 'parked' at the entrance of a shoe shop."
But Foster claims DePrimo had no idea he was being photographed: "The officer expected NOTHING in return and did not know I was watching."
EXPLORE RELATED CONTENT
CLICK for photos, for videos, for texts
- Play VideoNYPD Officer Gives Boots to Homeless …
hulu videos - This screen shot taken from the NYPD …
- NYPD officer's kindness sparks online …
Associated Press - Play Video$675,000 settlement for (showing a negative happening by another policeman) Click all green above for further info, pictures & videos This article is for your private use, only _______________________________________________________________________________
Want to Live to 100?
Have a Balanced Diet & Sleep 8 Hours
during every 24-hour period - also sleeping in smaller fractions counts
Source:
By Glenn Ruffenach | SmartMoney
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
Your chances of reaching age 100 could be better than you think – especially if you get some additional sleep and improve your diet.
New research from UnitedHealthcare looks at centenarians and baby boomers, asking the former about the “secrets of aging success” and evaluating whether the latter are taking the necessary steps to celebrate a 100th birthday.
The primary findings: Many boomers are embracing lifestyles that could lead to a long and rewarding life – with two exceptions. More than seven in 10 centenarians – 71% – say they get eight hours or more of sleep each night. By contrast, only 38% of boomers say they get the same amount of rest. And when it comes to eating right, more than eight in 10 centenarians say they regularly consume a balanced meal, compared with just over two-thirds (68%) of baby boomers.
[Related: De-Stressing Secrets from Around the World]
The report – “100@100 Survey” – begins with some startling numbers. As of late 2010, the U.S. had an estimated 72,000 centenarians, according to the Census Bureau. By the year 2050, that number – with the aging of the baby-boom generation – is expected to reach more than 600,000. Meanwhile, an estimated 10,000 boomers each and every day – for the next decade – will turn 65.
How to reach 100? Centenarians point to social connections, exercise and spiritual activity as some of the keys to successful aging. Among surveyed centenarians, almost nine in 10 – fully 89% – say they communicate with a family member or friend every day; about two thirds (67%) pray, meditate or engage in some form of spiritual activity; and just over half (51%) say they exercise almost daily.
In each of these areas, baby boomers, as it turns out, match up fairly well. The same percentage of boomers as centenarians – 89% – say they’re in touch with friends or family members on a regular basis. Sixty percent of surveyed baby-boomers say spiritual activity is an important part of their lives, and almost six in 10 boomers (59%) exercise regularly.
[Related: 10 Countries Where Retirees Live Large]
Again, sleep and diet are the two areas where baby boomers come up short. Not surprisingly, the one area where boomers are more active is the workplace. Three-quarters (76%) of surveyed baby boomers say they work at a job or hobby almost every day; that compares with 16% of centenarians.
Finally, researchers turned to cultural affairs and asked centenarians and boomers to identify – from a list of 14 notable people (including President Obama, singer Paul McCartney and actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts) – their preferred dinner guest. The top choice among centenarians and boomers alike: the comedian Betty White.
MORE FROM SMART MONEY
U.S. can get better on the international level
5 states to increase class time in some schools
At least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states announced on 2/3/12 that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.
All told, education officials expect to provide nearly 6 million more student learning hours next year.
"I'm convinced the kind of results we'll see over the next couple of years I think will compel the country to act in a very different way," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
A mix of federal, state and district funds will cover the costs of expanded learning time, with the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning also chipping in resources. In Massachusetts, the program builds on the state's existing expanded-learning program. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy is hailing it as a natural outgrowth of an education reform law the state passed in May that included about $100 million in new funding, much of it to help the neediest schools.
Spending more time in the classroom, officials said, will give students access to a more well-rounded curriculum that includes arts and music, individualized help for students who fall behind and opportunities to reinforce critical math and science skills.
"That extra time with their teachers or within a structured setting means all the world," said Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. "It means it allows them to continue the momentum they had the day before. It means they don't slip back over the summer. It allows them to really deliver."
The project comes as educators across the U.S. struggle to identify the best ways to strengthen apublic education system that many fear has fallen behind other nations. Student testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and voucher programs join longer school days on the list of reforms that have been put forward with varying degrees of success.
The report from the center, which advocates for extending instruction time, cites research suggesting students who spend more hours learning perform better. One such study, from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, argues that of all the factors affecting educational outcomes, two are the best predictors of success: intensive tutoring and adding at least 300 hours to the standard school calendar.
More classroom time has long been a priority for Duncan, who warned a congressional committee in May 2009 — just months after becoming education secretary — that American students were at a disadvantage compared to their peers in India and China. That same year, he suggested schools should be open six or seven days per week and should run 11 or 12 months out of the year.
"I think this is the kernels of a national movement," he said Monday as he announced the initiative.
But not everyone agrees that shorter school days are to blame. A report last year from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education disputed the notion that American schools have fallen behind in classroom time, pointing out that students in high-performing countries like South Korea, Finland and Japan actually spend less time in school than most U.S. students.
The broader push to extend classroom time could also run up against concerns from teachers unions. Longer school days became a major sticking point in a seven-day teachers strike in September in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel eventually won an extension of the school day but paid the price in other concessions granted to teachers.
Just over 1,000 U.S. schools already operate on expanded schedules, an increase of 53 percent over 2009, according to a report being released Monday in connection with the announcement by the National Center on Time & Learning. The nonprofit group said more schools should follow suit but stressed that expanded learning time isn't the right strategy for every school.
Some of the funds required to add 300 or more hours to the school calendar will come from shifting resources from existing federal programs, making use of the flexibility granted by waivers to No Child Left Behind. All five states taking part in the initiative have received waivers from the Education Department.
This article is for your private use, only
___________________________________________________________________________
5 states to increase class time in some schools
At least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Open your notebooks and sharpen your pencils. School for thousands of public school students is about to get quite a bit longer.
Five states announced on 2/3/12 that they will add at least 300 hours of learning time to the calendar in some schools starting in 2013. Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee will take part in the initiative, which is intended to boost student achievement and make U.S. schools more competitive on a global level.
The three-year pilot program will affect almost 20,000 students in 40 schools, with long-term hopes of expanding the program to include additional schools — especially those that serve low-income communities. Schools, working in concert with districts, parents and teachers, will decide whether to make the school day longer, add more days to the school year or both.
All told, education officials expect to provide nearly 6 million more student learning hours next year.
"I'm convinced the kind of results we'll see over the next couple of years I think will compel the country to act in a very different way," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
A mix of federal, state and district funds will cover the costs of expanded learning time, with the Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning also chipping in resources. In Massachusetts, the program builds on the state's existing expanded-learning program. In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy is hailing it as a natural outgrowth of an education reform law the state passed in May that included about $100 million in new funding, much of it to help the neediest schools.
Spending more time in the classroom, officials said, will give students access to a more well-rounded curriculum that includes arts and music, individualized help for students who fall behind and opportunities to reinforce critical math and science skills.
"That extra time with their teachers or within a structured setting means all the world," said Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. "It means it allows them to continue the momentum they had the day before. It means they don't slip back over the summer. It allows them to really deliver."
The project comes as educators across the U.S. struggle to identify the best ways to strengthen apublic education system that many fear has fallen behind other nations. Student testing, teacher evaluations, charter schools and voucher programs join longer school days on the list of reforms that have been put forward with varying degrees of success.
The report from the center, which advocates for extending instruction time, cites research suggesting students who spend more hours learning perform better. One such study, from Harvard economist Roland Fryer, argues that of all the factors affecting educational outcomes, two are the best predictors of success: intensive tutoring and adding at least 300 hours to the standard school calendar.
More classroom time has long been a priority for Duncan, who warned a congressional committee in May 2009 — just months after becoming education secretary — that American students were at a disadvantage compared to their peers in India and China. That same year, he suggested schools should be open six or seven days per week and should run 11 or 12 months out of the year.
"I think this is the kernels of a national movement," he said Monday as he announced the initiative.
But not everyone agrees that shorter school days are to blame. A report last year from the National School Boards Association's Center for Public Education disputed the notion that American schools have fallen behind in classroom time, pointing out that students in high-performing countries like South Korea, Finland and Japan actually spend less time in school than most U.S. students.
The broader push to extend classroom time could also run up against concerns from teachers unions. Longer school days became a major sticking point in a seven-day teachers strike in September in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel eventually won an extension of the school day but paid the price in other concessions granted to teachers.
Just over 1,000 U.S. schools already operate on expanded schedules, an increase of 53 percent over 2009, according to a report being released Monday in connection with the announcement by the National Center on Time & Learning. The nonprofit group said more schools should follow suit but stressed that expanded learning time isn't the right strategy for every school.
Some of the funds required to add 300 or more hours to the school calendar will come from shifting resources from existing federal programs, making use of the flexibility granted by waivers to No Child Left Behind. All five states taking part in the initiative have received waivers from the Education Department.
This article is for your private use, only
___________________________________________________________________________
Education: A Predictor of Longer Life - below
STAF,Inc.'s: Comment to this article:
Excellent level of information . Knowledge, yes: applied knowledge, is the key to a long life.
The article below refers to the level and length of our education (High School, College, University) and shows: the broader the education the better choices we make and the longer we stay healthy and the longer we live.
The same principle applies to becoming financially rich. Education & applied knowledge is power.
STAF,Inc.'s: Comment to this article:
Excellent level of information . Knowledge, yes: applied knowledge, is the key to a long life.
The article below refers to the level and length of our education (High School, College, University) and shows: the broader the education the better choices we make and the longer we stay healthy and the longer we live.
The same principle applies to becoming financially rich. Education & applied knowledge is power.
Education: A Predictor of Longer Life
By Philip Moeller
U.S.News & World Report
This is for your personal use, only
If you want to know how long you will live, you might stop fretting over genetics and family history and instead look at your educational achievements. Education is certainly not the only variable associated with longer lives, but it may be the most powerful.
[See Top 10 U.S. Places for Healthcare.]
Recent study findings published in the journal Health Affairs present a remarkable update to the already considerable research showing education to be a powerful predictor of longer life spans.
"The lifelong relationships of education and its correlates with health and longevity are striking," the article said. "Education exerts its direct beneficial effects on health through the adoption of healthier lifestyles, better ability to cope with stress, and more effective management of chronic diseases. However, the indirect effects of education through access to more privileged social position, better-paying jobs, and higher income are also profound."
While the findings are good news for educated Americans, they also indicate that medical and lifestyle breakthroughs that have triggered the much-publicized longevity revolution are not being enjoyed by less-educated Americans whose lifespans have fallen further behind over time. This trend has implications for the debate about raising the Social Security retirement age. It also adds a compelling mortality tale to the economic costs of the nation's falling educational-achievement levels compared with other nations.
Within U.S. racial groups, educational achievement is associated with significant longevity benefits. But compared across racial groups, the longevity gap is even greater, which indicates continued race-based differences in how long Americans live. The Health Affairs article was co-authored by 15 leading academic experts in aging and longevity. The research was conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society.
[See 10 Things Aging Americans Want.]
"We found that in 2008 U.S. adult men and women with fewer than twelve years of education had life expectancies not much better than those of all adults in the 1950s and 1960s," the article said. "When race and education are combined, the disparity is even more striking."
Within racial and ethnic groups, there was a pronounced longevity benefit when comparing people with 16 or more years of school with those with less than 12 years. Among women, the differences in life expectancy at birth were 10.4 years among whites, 6.5 years among blacks, and 2.9 years for Hispanics. Among men, the gaps were 12.9 years among whites, 9.7 years among blacks, and 5.5 years for Hispanics.
But the differences were more striking across all racial groups. "White U.S. men and women with 16 years or more of schooling had life expectancies far greater than black Americans with fewer than 12 years of education--14.2 years more for white men than black men, and 10.3 years more for white women than black women," the article said.
"These gaps have widened over time and have led to at least two 'Americas,' if not multiple others, in terms of life expectancy, demarcated by level of education and racial-group membership." Compared with similar 1990 measures, by 2008, the gap among men had widened by nearly a year, and among women, by more than two-and-a-half years.
[See Tips on Social Security Spousal Benefits.]
"The current life expectancy at birth for U.S. blacks with fewer than twelve years of education is equivalent to the life expectancy observed in the 1960s and 1970s for all people in the United States, but blacks' longevity has been improving with time," the article said.
That hasn't been the case for whites. "White males with fewer than twelve years of education currently have a life expectancy at birth equivalent to that of all men in the United States born in 1972, while white females with similar education have the life expectancy of all women in the country born in 1964," it added. "And the longevity of these white males and females is growing worse over time."
The impact of education on lifespans is so powerful, the authors said, that improving people's health and lifestyle behaviors alone "are not likely to have a major impact on disparities in longevity." The authors called on policymakers to "implement educational enhancements at young, middle, and older ages for people of all races, to reduce the large gap in health and longevity that persists today."
More From US News & World Report
By Philip Moeller
U.S.News & World Report
This is for your personal use, only
If you want to know how long you will live, you might stop fretting over genetics and family history and instead look at your educational achievements. Education is certainly not the only variable associated with longer lives, but it may be the most powerful.
[See Top 10 U.S. Places for Healthcare.]
Recent study findings published in the journal Health Affairs present a remarkable update to the already considerable research showing education to be a powerful predictor of longer life spans.
"The lifelong relationships of education and its correlates with health and longevity are striking," the article said. "Education exerts its direct beneficial effects on health through the adoption of healthier lifestyles, better ability to cope with stress, and more effective management of chronic diseases. However, the indirect effects of education through access to more privileged social position, better-paying jobs, and higher income are also profound."
While the findings are good news for educated Americans, they also indicate that medical and lifestyle breakthroughs that have triggered the much-publicized longevity revolution are not being enjoyed by less-educated Americans whose lifespans have fallen further behind over time. This trend has implications for the debate about raising the Social Security retirement age. It also adds a compelling mortality tale to the economic costs of the nation's falling educational-achievement levels compared with other nations.
Within U.S. racial groups, educational achievement is associated with significant longevity benefits. But compared across racial groups, the longevity gap is even greater, which indicates continued race-based differences in how long Americans live. The Health Affairs article was co-authored by 15 leading academic experts in aging and longevity. The research was conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society.
[See 10 Things Aging Americans Want.]
"We found that in 2008 U.S. adult men and women with fewer than twelve years of education had life expectancies not much better than those of all adults in the 1950s and 1960s," the article said. "When race and education are combined, the disparity is even more striking."
Within racial and ethnic groups, there was a pronounced longevity benefit when comparing people with 16 or more years of school with those with less than 12 years. Among women, the differences in life expectancy at birth were 10.4 years among whites, 6.5 years among blacks, and 2.9 years for Hispanics. Among men, the gaps were 12.9 years among whites, 9.7 years among blacks, and 5.5 years for Hispanics.
But the differences were more striking across all racial groups. "White U.S. men and women with 16 years or more of schooling had life expectancies far greater than black Americans with fewer than 12 years of education--14.2 years more for white men than black men, and 10.3 years more for white women than black women," the article said.
"These gaps have widened over time and have led to at least two 'Americas,' if not multiple others, in terms of life expectancy, demarcated by level of education and racial-group membership." Compared with similar 1990 measures, by 2008, the gap among men had widened by nearly a year, and among women, by more than two-and-a-half years.
[See Tips on Social Security Spousal Benefits.]
"The current life expectancy at birth for U.S. blacks with fewer than twelve years of education is equivalent to the life expectancy observed in the 1960s and 1970s for all people in the United States, but blacks' longevity has been improving with time," the article said.
That hasn't been the case for whites. "White males with fewer than twelve years of education currently have a life expectancy at birth equivalent to that of all men in the United States born in 1972, while white females with similar education have the life expectancy of all women in the country born in 1964," it added. "And the longevity of these white males and females is growing worse over time."
The impact of education on lifespans is so powerful, the authors said, that improving people's health and lifestyle behaviors alone "are not likely to have a major impact on disparities in longevity." The authors called on policymakers to "implement educational enhancements at young, middle, and older ages for people of all races, to reduce the large gap in health and longevity that persists today."
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- JUNE 6, 2012
- 10 Things Law Schools Won't Tell You
- We reveal why the Juris Doctor isn't what it used to be
By ANNAMARIA ANDRIOTIS - 1. "Lawyers are a dime a dozen."
- After graduating from California Western School of Law in 2005, Kathryn Tokarska sent dozens of resumes to law firms. Prior to attending law school, she worked at investment firms, so she was hoping to land a job at a securities law firm or another related field that could use her experience. Instead, says Tokarska, the only position she was offered after graduating was a $10 per hour part-time clerkship. Knee deep in debt and unable to find a decent job, she opened her own law office in San Diego in 2008. "I thought if I got a higher degree, I'd have a better chance to get a job, but that's not what happened," she says.
Tokarska isn't alone. This year, around 45,000 students are graduating law school -- the highest number ever, according to the American Bar Association. But there are only about 28,000 positions for lawyers that are available, according to Economic Modeling Specialists, a labor market analysis firm. The latest survey data available by the National Association for Law Placement shows that about 88% of law students who graduated in 2010 were employed by February 2011 -- the lowest rate since 1996 and down from a peak of 92% in 2007. And almost a third of the graduates known to be employed were not working in a legal position that required passing the Bar exam.
Meanwhile, big law firms made an average of 22 offers to second-year students for internships this summer, compared to a ten-year peak of 39 in 2007, according to NALP. These positions often lead to permanent jobs after graduation. The number of students firms take on in the summer is largely based on the amount of work firms expect to have going forward, says Judy Collins, research director at NALP. One small piece of good news: The number of offers made is up slightly from the fall 2010 average of 19, according to NALP numbers.
2. "We're being sued by former students."Since 2011, a total of 15 lawsuits have been filed against law schools, including New York Law School, DePaul University College of Law and Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Auburn Hills, Mich., claiming, among other things, that the schools inflate job placement numbers. Specifically, the lawsuits allege that job placement rates don't specify how many students are actually working as lawyers or other legal positions versus graduates who are employed in fields that don't require a law degree. "Law schools count working at a Starbucks as employed," says Frank Raimond, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers on the case. The lawsuits also allege that schools inflate graduate salary data by basing it on a small group of intentionally-selected students.
The schools named in the suit deny the allegations. James Thelen, general counsel at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, says the institution follows the American Bar Association and NALP's rules when reporting job placement rates, and its web site lists the sectors its graduates have been hired to work in. Separately, he says, colleges can't predict how an economic downturn will impact job openings. "No reasonable person could look at the accurate data we report about graduate employment today and believe that it is a guarantee that the very same percentage of job opportunities will be available when he or she graduates," says Thelen. For its part, DePaul's College of Law says it provides students with a high-quality, legal education and that its career services office is dedicated to helping students find careers that are right for them.
Plaintiffs were dealt a setback in March when the New York State Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit against New York Law School in Manhattan on the grounds that students are capable of sifting through the job placement data and realizing that not all law school graduates end up with successful careers. Raimond says the plaintiffs have filed their appeal, and will be submitting the brief shortly. "We are very confident the judge's decision will be affirmed," says Michael Volpe, counsel to NYLS. He adds that a law school graduate's success can't be evaluated nine months or even two years after graduation but more like 10 years later. Meanwhile, Raimond and the other plaintiffs' lawyers are preparing to file suit against another 40 schools.
3. "Salaries are shrinking ..."While public service and government attorneys don't expect to make the big bucks, corporate law positions have traditionally paid some of the highest salaries of any industry. But even these lofty positions aren't recession-proof. Law school students who graduated in 2010 earn $84,111 on average during their first year, down 10% from 2009, according to the most recent available data from NALP.
And fewer graduates are landing six figure jobs. Eighteen percent of 2010 graduates earned $160,000 compared to 25% in each of the previous two years. Nearly half of 2010 graduates made between $40,000 and $65,000, up from about 40% for the prior two classes. In some cases, starting pay is even lower: Last week, Boston-based civil practice law firm Gilbert & O'Bryan posted a full-time associate position that pays $10,000 annually. Larry O'Bryan, a partner with the firm, says it has just two lawyers, hires when it receives extra cases, and that the salary is based on the amount of work billed and collected. So far, he says, the firm has received around 35 applications, mostly from recent law graduates.
In March, an ABA council struck down a proposal requiring schools to report detailed graduate salary data on their web sites. In a statement at the time, the ABA said that "fewer than 45% of law graduates contacted by their law schools report their salaries" and that the council felt that collection of this data is "unreliable and produces distorted information." Some members of Congress had asked the ABA last year to take more steps to prevent law schools from overstating job prospects and salaries. "I am very concerned that the ABA appears to be backing away from its commitment to provide prospective law school students with the critical information they need to make the best decision for their future," said Senator Barbara Boxer in a statement after the council's decision to reject the proposal.
For its part, the ABA council did vote in favor of proposals that would require law schools to disclose more information on their web sites about their admissions data, Bar passage rates and job placement figures. An ABA spokesman says the revised standards are up for review and the council will recommend that the ABA's House of Delegates approve its recommendations at an August meeting.
4. " ... while tuition is soaring"The slowdown in jobs and salaries hasn't stopped law schools from raising their fees. Tuition has jumped 5% to 10% a year since 2008. The cost of attending a private university averaged $39,184 for the academic year that ended this May, up 21% from the 2007-08 academic year and up 71% from a decade ago, according to the ABA.
Tuition at public schools for in-state students is much less than private schools, but those costs are rising, too: It averaged $22,116 this past year, up 43% from 2007-08 and up 163% from a decade ago. For context, tuition for in-state undergrads at public colleges rose 33% and 119% over the same periods, according to the College Board. It seems prospective law students are taking notice. For the first time since the recession, first-year enrollment in law school has declined, falling 7% in the 2011-12 school year compared to the year before, according to ABA numbers.
No one at the ABA was available to comment on this issue, but in past statements on tuition costs, the organization has said the increases are largely due to a more hands-on approach and more competition between the schools for higher rankings.
5. "You'll be paying off your student loans for years."When Laurie Jaffee graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York in 2001 with $95,000 in student loans, she never imagined she'd be stuck with that debt more than a decade later. But, Jaffee never found a job as an attorney.
Nine out of ten 2012 law school graduates (about 48,000 total) will leave school with student loan debt, according to FinAid.org. That's the highest percentage of any undergraduate or advanced degree programs, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, which tracks student debt. What's more, the projected average debt owed by law school students is now roughly $91,100, up 14% from four years ago.
Law students have few options for debt relief. Employers rarely pay a portion of tuition costs the way they do for, say, MBA students. Federal grants don't exist for law school and scholarships don't reach many students, says Kantrowitz. There's no official data, but Kantrowitz observes that parents often end up footing some of the bill. In fact, some law schools ask applicants as old as 30 to submit their parents' financial statements in addition to their own. "If you don't have a trust fund or parents who can afford to pay, your only choice is to borrow," says Kantrowitz.
6. "Average students foot the bill for the bright ones."First the good news: The number of scholarships for law school students has increased. In 2010 nearly 40,000 law students received strictly merit-based scholarships, up 27% from 2005, according to the ABA. In total, schools spent more than $522 million on these scholarships, an 80% increase compared to 2005. Now for the bad news: Only students with the best grades and test scores qualify. That's because by admitting brighter students, schools can raise their rankings, says Jerry Organ, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis.
Law school scholarship funding doesn't usually come from the schools' endowments, but rather through so-called tuition discounting, he says. That's when schools raise overall tuition so that in effect, those with lower grades can subsidize the bill for the brightest students. Those lower-performing students also have a harder time paying off the tuition debt they incur because they're less likely to get the high-paying positions that often go to the students with high grades, says Kyle McEntee, executive director at Law School Transparency, a nonprofit legal education policy organization.
Separately, experts say it's tougher to hold onto merit-based scholarships in law school than in undergraduate programs. Organ says he reviewed 150 law schools offering merit scholarships and found that 80% of them renew scholarships for the students who rank somewhere between the top 15% and 30% of their class. But the initial scholarship they award for the incoming class is given out to as many as the top 50% of students. In law school, grades are distributed on a curve. Schools ration the number of As and Bs that they dole out each semester. The result? It's guaranteed that a certain number of students at those schools will lose their scholarships, says Organ. In contrast, undergraduates who receive merit-based scholarships have to maintain a certain GPA to keep it, but their fate is decided by the grades they earn rather than a curve. An ABA spokesman says that if the group's revised standards (initially approved in March) are adopted, law schools will be required to publish information on their web sites about merit scholarship retention rates.
7. "You can't trust our numbers."Students usually compare law programs before they choose, looking at school websites and marketing materials as well as independent rankings. Most schools report what grades and LSAT scores are needed for an application to be accepted. Recent events, however, have cast doubt on the accuracy of that information, says McEntee.
Last year an assistant dean at the University of Illinois College of Law resigned after the university found that grade-point averages and standardized test scores for recent incoming classes were inflated. In a public statement, dean Bruce Smith wrote that the institution found "that a single individual -- no longer employed by the college -- was responsible for these inaccuracies." The College of Law also announced it was correcting the data.
In February 2011, the Villanova University School of Law announced that it had reported inaccurate information to the American Bar Association about the students it was admitting, according to a letter it sent to students and alumni. The erroneous information pertained to LSAT and GPA scores from 2005 to 2009, according to the school. In a separate letter last August, the university's dean, John Gotanda, said the school had found a small group of former employees engaged in misconduct. The school has since taken measures to "assure that this type of misconduct never again occurs," said the letter.
8. "We're not accredited by the ABA."For law schools, national accreditation is provided by the American Bar Association. But they can only apply for this accreditation after they've been operating for at least one year. In many parts of the country, students who enroll in new law schools may face problems. Sixteen states, including Arkansas, Indiana and New Jersey, require students to have graduated from an ABA-approved school in order to take the Bar exam, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners. Several other states, like Illinois and Louisiana, have other requirements that make sitting for the Bar exam difficult for students who've graduated from a non-ABA approved school. Without passing the Bar, graduates won't be able to practice law even if they've graduated law school.
Elsewhere, law school grads from unaccredited schools may still take the Bar and practice in the state. That's the case in Tennessee, home of the Lincoln Memorial University John J. Duncan, Jr. School of Law, which opened in 2009. The school has state approval and its 180 students are allowed to take the Bar after graduating and practice in the state. But the ABA denied the school its accreditation in December because of what it called, in a brief on the matter, a weak academic plan, declining LSAT and GPA scores and other reasons. In response, the school filed a lawsuit against the ABA accusing it of stifling competition by limiting the number of law schools. The school has said it's trying to offer a lower-cost law education for students from distressed parts of the country. An LMU spokeswoman says the university isn't commenting about the ABA accreditation process. An ABA spokesman says the school's case is under review and that the ABA doesn't comment on pending litigation.
9. "... so we're a lot cheaper."Law schools that have state or regional approval but lack ABA national accreditation have one major advantage -- a much lower price tag. At the Nashville School of Law for instance, tuition is roughly $22,000 for four years of night classes -- less than one year of tuition at an ABA-accredited law school. Graduates may take the Tennessee Bar and practice in the state. Separately, the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover charges $17,000 a year for day classes (or nearly $13,000 for night classes) and is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Students who pass the Bar in Massachusetts or other Northeastern states, such as Connecticut and Vermont, and the District of Columbia, may practice throughout the region.
Experts say non-accredited law schools charge less tuition partly because they don't hire many (if any) full-time professors and because faculty salaries are lower than accredited schools. For students who plan to start their own law office, McEntee says this might be the most cost-effective option if they can pass the Bar. By attending a non-ABA-accredited law school in their state, they're less at risk of incurring crippling debt and will be more eligible to borrow to start up their businesses.
James Michael Dulany says he decided to attend the Massachusetts School of Law after seeing his father, an MSL alum, flourish in his own business. Dulany, who will start his third year at MSL this fall, says he had the grades and LSAT score to apply to ABA accredited schools but decided against it because of the cost. "At graduation, I wanted to be in a position where I'd choose a career that I'm passionate about -- not based on what kind of money I'd make in order to pay down loans," he says.
10. "You're better off going to law school abroad."Christopher Schuller, a native of Nashville, Tenn., says he knew he wanted to study law when he was applying to undergraduate school. So when he was accepted by Oxford University in England he jumped at the offer. It wasn't just the school's prestige that attracted him. He also liked the idea of becoming a lawyer on the fast track. Unlike in the U.S., English universities don't offer a core curriculum of arts and sciences. Prospective students declare their major during the application process. After three years at an English university, law students can complete their undergrad studies and qualify for the Bar exams in 27 states, including California, New York and Texas, and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners. (Students who get their law degrees elsewhere abroad can also qualify for the Bar in those states.) Schuller graduated in 2008 at age 22 with a law degree. This month he'll take a break from his position as an assistant law professor in Germany and head to Albany where he'll be sworn in as a New York State attorney.
In England, the average university tuition for international students ranges from $13,000 to $21,000. Students who pay the high end of that range would save $30,000 in tuition costs, compared to U.S. schools and $170,000 compared to private universities in the states, according to U.S. tuition data from the College Board and the ABA. To be sure, in most of those 27 states that permit taking the Bar, students will need to meet extra requirements, like attaining additional education at an ABA-approved law school that can include a Master's program in Law, but that still wouldn't wipe out their savings.
Of course, attending law school overseas is a drastic move. Students who want to return to the U.S. to practice law will initially be restricted to the states that permit them to take the Bar, says McEntee. They could also run into a greater risk of failing the Bar exam since they're likely less familiar with U.S. law, says Kantrowitz.
____________________________
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
The New York Times, 4/15/2012
The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage
By MEG JAY
AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.
When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”
Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.
In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.
But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.
Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.
As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”
“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”
She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.
WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.
Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months, even years, later. It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest. At the end of 12 months when the interest goes up to 23 percent you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s called consumer lock-in.
Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for, or change to, another option once an investment in something has been made. The greater the setup costs, the less likely we are to move to another, even better, situation, especially when faced with switching costs, or the time, money and effort it requires to make a change.
Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs. Living together can be fun and economical, and the setup costs are subtly woven in. After years of living among roommates’ junky old stuff, couples happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. They share wireless and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup and switching costs have an impact on how likely they are to leave.
Jennifer said she never really felt that her boyfriend was committed to her. “I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife,” she said. “We had all this furniture. We had our dogs and all the same friends. It just made it really, really difficult to break up. Then it was like we got married because we were living together once we got into our 30s.”
I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together. Others want to feel committed to their partners, yet they are confused about whether they have consciously chosen their mates. Founding relationships on convenience or ambiguity can interfere with the process of claiming the people we love. A life built on top of “maybe you’ll do” simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the “we do” of commitment or marriage.
The unfavorable connection between cohabitation and divorce does seem to be lessening, however, according to a report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services. More good news is that a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans saw cohabitation as a step toward marriage.
This shared and serious view of cohabitation may go a long way toward further attenuating the cohabitation effect because the most recent research suggests that serial cohabitators, couples with differing levels of commitment and those who use cohabitation as a test are most at risk for poor relationship quality and eventual relationship dissolution.
Cohabitation is here to stay, and there are things young adults can do to protect their relationships from the cohabitation effect. It’s important to discuss each person’s motivation and commitment level beforehand and, even better, to view cohabitation as an intentional step toward, rather than a convenient test for, marriage or partnership.
It also makes sense to anticipate and regularly evaluate constraints that may keep you from leaving.
I am not for or against living together, but I am for young adults knowing that, far from safeguarding against divorce and unhappiness, moving in with someone can increase your chances of making a mistake — or of spending too much time on a mistake. A mentor of mine used to say, “The best time to work on someone’s marriage is before he or she has one,” and in our era, that may mean before cohabitation.
Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now.”
___________________________________________
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only.
The New York Times, 4/15/2012
The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage
By MEG JAY
AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.
When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”
Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.
In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.
But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.
Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.
As Jennifer and I worked to answer her question, “How did this happen?” we talked about how she and her boyfriend went from dating to cohabiting. Her response was consistent with studies reporting that most couples say it “just happened.”
“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”
She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.
WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.
Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months, even years, later. It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest. At the end of 12 months when the interest goes up to 23 percent you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s called consumer lock-in.
Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for, or change to, another option once an investment in something has been made. The greater the setup costs, the less likely we are to move to another, even better, situation, especially when faced with switching costs, or the time, money and effort it requires to make a change.
Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs. Living together can be fun and economical, and the setup costs are subtly woven in. After years of living among roommates’ junky old stuff, couples happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. They share wireless and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup and switching costs have an impact on how likely they are to leave.
Jennifer said she never really felt that her boyfriend was committed to her. “I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife,” she said. “We had all this furniture. We had our dogs and all the same friends. It just made it really, really difficult to break up. Then it was like we got married because we were living together once we got into our 30s.”
I’ve had other clients who also wish they hadn’t sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together. Others want to feel committed to their partners, yet they are confused about whether they have consciously chosen their mates. Founding relationships on convenience or ambiguity can interfere with the process of claiming the people we love. A life built on top of “maybe you’ll do” simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the “we do” of commitment or marriage.
The unfavorable connection between cohabitation and divorce does seem to be lessening, however, according to a report released last month by the Department of Health and Human Services. More good news is that a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans saw cohabitation as a step toward marriage.
This shared and serious view of cohabitation may go a long way toward further attenuating the cohabitation effect because the most recent research suggests that serial cohabitators, couples with differing levels of commitment and those who use cohabitation as a test are most at risk for poor relationship quality and eventual relationship dissolution.
Cohabitation is here to stay, and there are things young adults can do to protect their relationships from the cohabitation effect. It’s important to discuss each person’s motivation and commitment level beforehand and, even better, to view cohabitation as an intentional step toward, rather than a convenient test for, marriage or partnership.
It also makes sense to anticipate and regularly evaluate constraints that may keep you from leaving.
I am not for or against living together, but I am for young adults knowing that, far from safeguarding against divorce and unhappiness, moving in with someone can increase your chances of making a mistake — or of spending too much time on a mistake. A mentor of mine used to say, “The best time to work on someone’s marriage is before he or she has one,” and in our era, that may mean before cohabitation.
Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now.”
___________________________________________
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only
Source:
Our heart-to-heart on why it costs so much and takes so long to get out of wedlock.
(1) 10 Things What STAF, Inc.'s Professional Marriage Happiness Restorer™ Say
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by Dr. Christian von Christophers, the leading Marriage Happiness Restorer™ - the STAF, Inc.'s lead author in developing the modern Restoring Any Marriage™ result-bringing technology
(1) A divorce lawyer is the
(a) #1 enemy of your marital happiness;
(b) #1 enemy of your possible children's health & life success;
(2) a divorce lawyer is like the devil - the devil thrives on your & family's failure, unhappiness & suffering
Question & Analysis by Dr. Christian:
Was your marriage done based on the traditional manner = (1) you two met, (2) you started dating, (3) you both fell in love, (4) someone proposed, (5) you started planning your wedding, (6) you got married on your wedding day.
Analysis:
This "getting-married-in-a-traditional-manner" took in most cases a few years.
The point is NOT how many years, months or weeks - the point is you went through these 5 steps.
That took effort, it most likely cost money (more or less).
This all proves: YOU TWO HAD AND HAVE T-R-U-E LOVE BETWEEN BOTH OF YOU in order to bother going true all these time & effort & money taking steps .
THE FACT IS: TRUE LOVE N E V E R DIES. NEVER. Most people do not really know this fact. Before any of us learns this scientific fact, we, without the proper knowledge, feel "my love towards my spouse is gone" - this belief is based on the atavistic, animal-like emotional effect that always steps in first in disappointments, arguments, tiredness, etc.
In our Radio Show DrDrCanYouHelpMe (see blog: Radio/TV Shows - link to the web) we have handled all these issues.
In a traditionally done marriage the biggest reason for a marriage failure is the lack of of time to communicate and be together. There are many other reasons.
The good news is that all those reasons will always disappear in a proper training for your Heavenly Marriage Happiness.
STAF, Inc. with its new counseling help and programs will be your life savior.
Work out your problems - they come to every couple.
You can avoid & get rid of them with STAF, Inc.'s help.
IT CAN BE DONE IN EVERY MARRIAGE DONE IN A TRADITIONAL MANNER.
Before going to the enemy of your life happiness, your divorce lawyer, contact & visit your real, true friend:
The STAF, Inc. organization's professional Marriage Happiness Restorer(TM) - he/she will give you a "new life" in your marriage, restore your heavenly happiness, save your family & save your possible children's future & success.
See in this same website, same blog "Services", there "Restoring Any Marriage" the 12 terrible, life-destroying facts coming to your children in any separation or divorce. Your children deserve life, not failure. You, your spouse & your whole family deserves happiness everyone wants. STAF, Inc.'s specialist can give these most precious results.
STAF, Inc. is working on a federal legislation to secure happier marriages.
Most couples have no idea what it means to be married - it takes skills, skills that must be learned.
YOU need to know how to work in your marriage to have it lasting forever.
Most couples split totally unnecessarily because no one has prepared them before hand to know what it takes to build a happy, heveanly marriage.
STAF, INC. will work on creating regulations that no one can get married (= to get a marriage licence) BEFORE THE COUPLE HAS TAKEN TRAINING HOW TO BUILD A SAFE MARRIAGE WITH HEAVENLY HAPPINESS.
This is not a private matters. It is a matter for our whole society. All broken marriage cause physical, mental, emotinal health challenges - they add in a huge manner to our health care costs. It makes the health care bill bigger for the whole nation and for every individual in our country, not only for the couple breaking their marriage.
Some states have already mini-training in the pre-marital matters - not enough. Some religious organizations do not marry anyone before the couple has taken a competent marriage training. If you have such a precious program available, take it with your partner before getting married.
Another important thing is that the pre-marital training has to also have enough basic training for caring for a baby - most couples have no real knowledge how to avoid serious mistakes in all these matters.
When most split with still (deep down) existing love feelings (that never die - the problems cover that wit negative feelings and that is then believed to have "no love anymore".
SUMMARY:
LEARN FIRST THE NECESSARY SKILLS - THEN GET MARRIED
IF YOU FAIL IN YOUR MARRIAGE,
STAF, INC. WILL HELP YOU AND RETURN THE HEAVENLY HAPPINESS
TO YOUR MARRIAGE & TO YOUR WHOLE FAMILY
Call 212-946-1234
__________________
NOW MEET THE #1 ENEMY OF YOUR HEAVENLY HAPPINESS
- THE DIVORCE LAWYER -
What The Divorce Lawyers Will Not Tell You
By CATEY HILL
1. You'll pay more than the advertised rate -- way more.
The U.S. divorce rate has nearly doubled since 1960, according to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and the number of divorce lawyers has grown apace. Though divorce rates leveled off during the recession, competition among divorce lawyers has increased -- and billboards flashing "Quick and Easy Divorce for $299" reveal how desperate for business they've become. Those teaser prices aren't a scam, says Randy Kessler, chair of the American Bar Association's family law section, but they usually apply only to parties who have already agreed on the terms and just need the lawyer to fill in the forms. It's clients who don't fall into that category who are likely to pay more. Of course, such come-ons are partly "just to get you in the door," warns Sari Friedman, a New York City matrimonial lawyer. The fine print, she says, will often reveal extra costs -- from initial court fees to eventual asset-divvying lawyer fees. A more realistic final price tag? Anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000, with hourly rates typically running from $150 to $1,000.
2. I get sued -- a lot.
San Diego resident Luwain Ng's 2008 divorce was tough, but it was nothing compared with the subsequent legal battle with her divorce lawyer, Patricia Gregory, who stole nearly $80,000 from Ng's trust account. (In January, Gregory pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to a year in jail; Ng says she has since recovered most of her money.) Ng isn't alone. Only personal injury and real estate lawyers get sued more than family law attorneys, a category that includes those who handle divorce and child custody cases, according to the American Bar Association. Indeed, lawsuits against family law attorneys more than doubled from 1995 to 2007, the ABA reports. One reason: In the past 20 years, the number of lawyers specializing in family law has increased. Plus, Kessler says, divorce situations can get pretty heated -- it's "the nature of their work." So while a lawyer who has been sued isn't necessarily bad, he suggests consumers check with their state's bar association before hiring a lawyer.
3. My lack of fiscal know-how will cost you.
Divorces often require complicated financial calculations, like projecting the long-term value of a 401(k). But finance isn't typically part of the law school curriculum. It's a huge problem, says Jeffrey Landers, a New York City financial adviser, "because outside of custody issues, divorce is mostly about financial matters." While many lawyers do tell clients to hire a financial professional, some don't -- and settlement mistakes can cost clients thousands of dollars. Still, the price of hiring a divorce finance pro can range from $4,000 to $25,000. And a forensic accountant -- who can identify and value assets -- generally charges at least $5,000, says Thomas Reck, an accountant and partner at WithumSmith & Brown in Paramus, N.J. That's why it's important for those going through divorce to do a cost-benefit analysis. Says Zachary Smith, president of Vox Law in Minneapolis: "People with fewer assets and little debt may not need to spend the money."
4. I make promises I can't keep.
Of course, it's unethical for lawyers to guarantee a certain settlement. Each state has its own rules of professional responsibility, and violating them can result in sanctions from the bar. But it still happens, because lawyers want to gain their clients' confidence, says Bari Weinberger, a matrimonial lawyer in Morris County, N.J. And by some estimates, up to 50 percent of all client complaints stem from a failure to meet their expectations. Even if a lawyer doesn't outright promise a specific outcome, strong hints can be detrimental to the client's wallet. When Minneapolis small-business owner Christine Clifford was in the midst of her second divorce, she says, her lawyer said things like "you have a very compelling case" and "a very good chance of getting a financial settlement." In the end, she ponied up $70,000 in attorney's fees and had nothing to show for it. (Her lawyer declined to comment.) It is appropriate for a lawyer to express the possibility of success, says Weinberger, but "if anyone guarantees you anything, run."
5. I've only handled a couple of divorce cases. Ever.
A lot of lawyers are general practitioners, handling everything from personal injury to estates to divorce.
But a general practitioner may handle only a few divorce cases in his or her entire career. "Law is very vast with a lot of nuances," says Friedman, the New York lawyer. "You need a lawyer who knows the law and has seen a lot of these nuances." One place to find them: the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers' website, aaml.org.
Lawyers in the association are required to spend at least 75 percent of their time on matrimonial law issues and have at least 10 years' experience in the subject (or with five years' experience, to spend at least 90 percent of their time on such cases). Matrimonial lawyers say clients benefit from their expertise. "You go to a cardiologist for your heart problems," says Weinberger.
6. Prepare for plummeting income.
During Amy Zellmer's marriage, her husband had the "big job" that paid for their household expenses, while she cultivated her Minneapolis photography business. When the couple divorced, Zellmer fell into dire financial straits. "I had to drain my IRA account just to stay afloat," she says. And hers isn't an uncommon story: Households with children in which the parents divorce and remain divorced for at least six years face a 40 to 45 percent average drop in family income, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Divorcing or separating mothers are also nearly three times as likely as married mothers to end up in poverty, according to a 2011 study by the Family Research Council.
7. Go cry somewhere else.
The financial strain of a divorce pales in comparison with the emotional toll. Twenty-eight percent of people age 40 and up experience depression following their divorce, while 63 percent of women and 44 percent of men have high levels of stress, according to an AARP study. Elizabeth Lombardo, a psychologist and the author of A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness, says it's an emotional roller coaster: "At first, you may be excited, but then there are a lot of negative emotions and consequences that can adversely affect all aspects of your life." But a lawyer's isn't the ideal shoulder to cry on. "They may let you vent," says therapist Sharon Gilchrest O'Neill, author of A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage, but they aren't trained to offer support.
8. You may not even need me.
Facing her third divorce, dating-site founder LaVonya Reeves decided to skip the lawyer. And she didn't regret it:
"It saved me a ton of money," she says. Amicably divorcing duos like Reeves and her ex -- who have no children, shared assets or debts, and who are able to support themselves without each other's help -- can skip attorneys' fees and opt for mediation or self-representation, pros say. The National Conflict Resolution Center estimates that divorce mediation costs $2,000 to $5,000 a couple, a fraction of the price of litigation. But while lawyers are optional, using one is like having an insurance policy against mistakes, says the ABA's Kessler. Kathy Minella, a family law attorney in San Diego, says there's a middle road: Spouses can try settling as much as possible between themselves and through mediation before they begin paying their lawyers.
9. I don't have time for you.
Many divorce attorneys have yet to recover their prerecession support staff, so they're handling many of the office duties themselves. "You can wait for days to get a call back," says Erica Manfred, author of He's History, You're Not. Not only did the ranks of the legal profession diminish by 4 percent from 2007 to 2011, but hiring is still sluggish, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And lawyers may soon have even less time for each client, because some experts expect the divorce rate to spike in the near future. If the economy continues to rebound, those who put their divorces on hold during the recession -- an estimated 38 percent of currently married Americans -- may now go through with them, says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project.
10. I'm dragging my feet.
There's a correlation between having an attorney and having a long legal battle. Divorces in which both parties have a lawyer take nearly four months longer than when both don't have legal counsel, according to a 2010 study by Marquette University Law School. One possible reason: Those most likely to hire counsel have "complicating factors such as higher husband income, longer marriage and minor children," according to the study. But the researchers also concluded that "it is possible that lawyers deliberately extend the process so as to collect higher fees." Ann Bradley, author of Divorce: The Real Truth and Hidden Dangers, goes a step further: "Some lawyers add fuel to the emotional drama to keep you fighting." Kessler disputes the idea that lawyers drag out divorces to extend fees.
It's their job, he says, to be thorough -- to avoid mistakes. And that takes time.
_____________________________________
Source:
- SMARTMONEY MAGAZINE (click)
- 10 THINGS
- JUNE 18, 2012
Our heart-to-heart on why it costs so much and takes so long to get out of wedlock.
(1) 10 Things What STAF, Inc.'s Professional Marriage Happiness Restorer™ Say
Before we go to the "lawyer details" - we give you first precious guidance to have, maintain & keep
the real "heavenly happiness" forever. It will give you a healthier, longer life - Less Suffering – More Life™
STAF, Inc.'s serious statement for your life happiness & lasting health:
YOU CAN KEEP YOUR ORIGINAL HAPPINESS
by Dr. Christian von Christophers, the leading Marriage Happiness Restorer™ - the STAF, Inc.'s lead author in developing the modern Restoring Any Marriage™ result-bringing technology
(1) A divorce lawyer is the
(a) #1 enemy of your marital happiness;
(b) #1 enemy of your possible children's health & life success;
(2) a divorce lawyer is like the devil - the devil thrives on your & family's failure, unhappiness & suffering
Question & Analysis by Dr. Christian:
Was your marriage done based on the traditional manner = (1) you two met, (2) you started dating, (3) you both fell in love, (4) someone proposed, (5) you started planning your wedding, (6) you got married on your wedding day.
Analysis:
This "getting-married-in-a-traditional-manner" took in most cases a few years.
The point is NOT how many years, months or weeks - the point is you went through these 5 steps.
That took effort, it most likely cost money (more or less).
This all proves: YOU TWO HAD AND HAVE T-R-U-E LOVE BETWEEN BOTH OF YOU in order to bother going true all these time & effort & money taking steps .
THE FACT IS: TRUE LOVE N E V E R DIES. NEVER. Most people do not really know this fact. Before any of us learns this scientific fact, we, without the proper knowledge, feel "my love towards my spouse is gone" - this belief is based on the atavistic, animal-like emotional effect that always steps in first in disappointments, arguments, tiredness, etc.
In our Radio Show DrDrCanYouHelpMe (see blog: Radio/TV Shows - link to the web) we have handled all these issues.
In a traditionally done marriage the biggest reason for a marriage failure is the lack of of time to communicate and be together. There are many other reasons.
The good news is that all those reasons will always disappear in a proper training for your Heavenly Marriage Happiness.
STAF, Inc. with its new counseling help and programs will be your life savior.
Work out your problems - they come to every couple.
You can avoid & get rid of them with STAF, Inc.'s help.
IT CAN BE DONE IN EVERY MARRIAGE DONE IN A TRADITIONAL MANNER.
Before going to the enemy of your life happiness, your divorce lawyer, contact & visit your real, true friend:
The STAF, Inc. organization's professional Marriage Happiness Restorer(TM) - he/she will give you a "new life" in your marriage, restore your heavenly happiness, save your family & save your possible children's future & success.
See in this same website, same blog "Services", there "Restoring Any Marriage" the 12 terrible, life-destroying facts coming to your children in any separation or divorce. Your children deserve life, not failure. You, your spouse & your whole family deserves happiness everyone wants. STAF, Inc.'s specialist can give these most precious results.
STAF, Inc. is working on a federal legislation to secure happier marriages.
Most couples have no idea what it means to be married - it takes skills, skills that must be learned.
YOU need to know how to work in your marriage to have it lasting forever.
Most couples split totally unnecessarily because no one has prepared them before hand to know what it takes to build a happy, heveanly marriage.
STAF, INC. will work on creating regulations that no one can get married (= to get a marriage licence) BEFORE THE COUPLE HAS TAKEN TRAINING HOW TO BUILD A SAFE MARRIAGE WITH HEAVENLY HAPPINESS.
This is not a private matters. It is a matter for our whole society. All broken marriage cause physical, mental, emotinal health challenges - they add in a huge manner to our health care costs. It makes the health care bill bigger for the whole nation and for every individual in our country, not only for the couple breaking their marriage.
Some states have already mini-training in the pre-marital matters - not enough. Some religious organizations do not marry anyone before the couple has taken a competent marriage training. If you have such a precious program available, take it with your partner before getting married.
Another important thing is that the pre-marital training has to also have enough basic training for caring for a baby - most couples have no real knowledge how to avoid serious mistakes in all these matters.
When most split with still (deep down) existing love feelings (that never die - the problems cover that wit negative feelings and that is then believed to have "no love anymore".
SUMMARY:
LEARN FIRST THE NECESSARY SKILLS - THEN GET MARRIED
IF YOU FAIL IN YOUR MARRIAGE,
STAF, INC. WILL HELP YOU AND RETURN THE HEAVENLY HAPPINESS
TO YOUR MARRIAGE & TO YOUR WHOLE FAMILY
Call 212-946-1234
__________________
NOW MEET THE #1 ENEMY OF YOUR HEAVENLY HAPPINESS
- THE DIVORCE LAWYER -
What The Divorce Lawyers Will Not Tell You
By CATEY HILL
1. You'll pay more than the advertised rate -- way more.
The U.S. divorce rate has nearly doubled since 1960, according to the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and the number of divorce lawyers has grown apace. Though divorce rates leveled off during the recession, competition among divorce lawyers has increased -- and billboards flashing "Quick and Easy Divorce for $299" reveal how desperate for business they've become. Those teaser prices aren't a scam, says Randy Kessler, chair of the American Bar Association's family law section, but they usually apply only to parties who have already agreed on the terms and just need the lawyer to fill in the forms. It's clients who don't fall into that category who are likely to pay more. Of course, such come-ons are partly "just to get you in the door," warns Sari Friedman, a New York City matrimonial lawyer. The fine print, she says, will often reveal extra costs -- from initial court fees to eventual asset-divvying lawyer fees. A more realistic final price tag? Anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000, with hourly rates typically running from $150 to $1,000.
2. I get sued -- a lot.
San Diego resident Luwain Ng's 2008 divorce was tough, but it was nothing compared with the subsequent legal battle with her divorce lawyer, Patricia Gregory, who stole nearly $80,000 from Ng's trust account. (In January, Gregory pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to a year in jail; Ng says she has since recovered most of her money.) Ng isn't alone. Only personal injury and real estate lawyers get sued more than family law attorneys, a category that includes those who handle divorce and child custody cases, according to the American Bar Association. Indeed, lawsuits against family law attorneys more than doubled from 1995 to 2007, the ABA reports. One reason: In the past 20 years, the number of lawyers specializing in family law has increased. Plus, Kessler says, divorce situations can get pretty heated -- it's "the nature of their work." So while a lawyer who has been sued isn't necessarily bad, he suggests consumers check with their state's bar association before hiring a lawyer.
3. My lack of fiscal know-how will cost you.
Divorces often require complicated financial calculations, like projecting the long-term value of a 401(k). But finance isn't typically part of the law school curriculum. It's a huge problem, says Jeffrey Landers, a New York City financial adviser, "because outside of custody issues, divorce is mostly about financial matters." While many lawyers do tell clients to hire a financial professional, some don't -- and settlement mistakes can cost clients thousands of dollars. Still, the price of hiring a divorce finance pro can range from $4,000 to $25,000. And a forensic accountant -- who can identify and value assets -- generally charges at least $5,000, says Thomas Reck, an accountant and partner at WithumSmith & Brown in Paramus, N.J. That's why it's important for those going through divorce to do a cost-benefit analysis. Says Zachary Smith, president of Vox Law in Minneapolis: "People with fewer assets and little debt may not need to spend the money."
4. I make promises I can't keep.
Of course, it's unethical for lawyers to guarantee a certain settlement. Each state has its own rules of professional responsibility, and violating them can result in sanctions from the bar. But it still happens, because lawyers want to gain their clients' confidence, says Bari Weinberger, a matrimonial lawyer in Morris County, N.J. And by some estimates, up to 50 percent of all client complaints stem from a failure to meet their expectations. Even if a lawyer doesn't outright promise a specific outcome, strong hints can be detrimental to the client's wallet. When Minneapolis small-business owner Christine Clifford was in the midst of her second divorce, she says, her lawyer said things like "you have a very compelling case" and "a very good chance of getting a financial settlement." In the end, she ponied up $70,000 in attorney's fees and had nothing to show for it. (Her lawyer declined to comment.) It is appropriate for a lawyer to express the possibility of success, says Weinberger, but "if anyone guarantees you anything, run."
5. I've only handled a couple of divorce cases. Ever.
A lot of lawyers are general practitioners, handling everything from personal injury to estates to divorce.
But a general practitioner may handle only a few divorce cases in his or her entire career. "Law is very vast with a lot of nuances," says Friedman, the New York lawyer. "You need a lawyer who knows the law and has seen a lot of these nuances." One place to find them: the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers' website, aaml.org.
Lawyers in the association are required to spend at least 75 percent of their time on matrimonial law issues and have at least 10 years' experience in the subject (or with five years' experience, to spend at least 90 percent of their time on such cases). Matrimonial lawyers say clients benefit from their expertise. "You go to a cardiologist for your heart problems," says Weinberger.
6. Prepare for plummeting income.
During Amy Zellmer's marriage, her husband had the "big job" that paid for their household expenses, while she cultivated her Minneapolis photography business. When the couple divorced, Zellmer fell into dire financial straits. "I had to drain my IRA account just to stay afloat," she says. And hers isn't an uncommon story: Households with children in which the parents divorce and remain divorced for at least six years face a 40 to 45 percent average drop in family income, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Divorcing or separating mothers are also nearly three times as likely as married mothers to end up in poverty, according to a 2011 study by the Family Research Council.
7. Go cry somewhere else.
The financial strain of a divorce pales in comparison with the emotional toll. Twenty-eight percent of people age 40 and up experience depression following their divorce, while 63 percent of women and 44 percent of men have high levels of stress, according to an AARP study. Elizabeth Lombardo, a psychologist and the author of A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness, says it's an emotional roller coaster: "At first, you may be excited, but then there are a lot of negative emotions and consequences that can adversely affect all aspects of your life." But a lawyer's isn't the ideal shoulder to cry on. "They may let you vent," says therapist Sharon Gilchrest O'Neill, author of A Short Guide to a Happy Marriage, but they aren't trained to offer support.
8. You may not even need me.
Facing her third divorce, dating-site founder LaVonya Reeves decided to skip the lawyer. And she didn't regret it:
"It saved me a ton of money," she says. Amicably divorcing duos like Reeves and her ex -- who have no children, shared assets or debts, and who are able to support themselves without each other's help -- can skip attorneys' fees and opt for mediation or self-representation, pros say. The National Conflict Resolution Center estimates that divorce mediation costs $2,000 to $5,000 a couple, a fraction of the price of litigation. But while lawyers are optional, using one is like having an insurance policy against mistakes, says the ABA's Kessler. Kathy Minella, a family law attorney in San Diego, says there's a middle road: Spouses can try settling as much as possible between themselves and through mediation before they begin paying their lawyers.
9. I don't have time for you.
Many divorce attorneys have yet to recover their prerecession support staff, so they're handling many of the office duties themselves. "You can wait for days to get a call back," says Erica Manfred, author of He's History, You're Not. Not only did the ranks of the legal profession diminish by 4 percent from 2007 to 2011, but hiring is still sluggish, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And lawyers may soon have even less time for each client, because some experts expect the divorce rate to spike in the near future. If the economy continues to rebound, those who put their divorces on hold during the recession -- an estimated 38 percent of currently married Americans -- may now go through with them, says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project.
10. I'm dragging my feet.
There's a correlation between having an attorney and having a long legal battle. Divorces in which both parties have a lawyer take nearly four months longer than when both don't have legal counsel, according to a 2010 study by Marquette University Law School. One possible reason: Those most likely to hire counsel have "complicating factors such as higher husband income, longer marriage and minor children," according to the study. But the researchers also concluded that "it is possible that lawyers deliberately extend the process so as to collect higher fees." Ann Bradley, author of Divorce: The Real Truth and Hidden Dangers, goes a step further: "Some lawyers add fuel to the emotional drama to keep you fighting." Kessler disputes the idea that lawyers drag out divorces to extend fees.
It's their job, he says, to be thorough -- to avoid mistakes. And that takes time.
_____________________________________
Jyly 1, 2012
The New York Times, Sunday Review, p. 1
For your personal use, only
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."
Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.'s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist's residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn't consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college - she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: "Everyone's too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.") What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality - driven, cranky, anxious and sad - turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school - it's something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d'être was obviated when "menu" buttons appeared on remotes, so it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I've insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was "too busy" to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I'm writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I've remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I'm finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do," wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes' "Eureka" in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren't responsible for more of the world's great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world's endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
(Anxiety welcomes submissions at [email protected].)
Tim Kreider is the author of "We Learn Nothing," a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, "The Pain - When Will It End?" has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
_______________________________________
The New York Times, Sunday Review, p. 1
For your personal use, only
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."
Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.'s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it's something we've chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist's residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn't consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college - she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: "Everyone's too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.") What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality - driven, cranky, anxious and sad - turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school - it's something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d'être was obviated when "menu" buttons appeared on remotes, so it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I've insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was "too busy" to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I'm writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I've remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I'm finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. "Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do," wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes' "Eureka" in the bath, Newton's apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren't responsible for more of the world's great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world's endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I've always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it's possible I'll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn't work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I'll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
(Anxiety welcomes submissions at [email protected].)
Tim Kreider is the author of "We Learn Nothing," a collection of essays and cartoons. His cartoon, "The Pain - When Will It End?" has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics.
_______________________________________
Source: The New York Times
July 8, 2012
Business section, p. 7
Preoccupations
This article is only for your personal use
Pedal to Work, and Smell the Roses
DAVID KEEGAN - As told to Patricia R. Olsen
STAF, Inc.'s comment, by Dr. Christian (Staf, Inc.'s CEO): This article is meant for you as an inspirational source. Start biking or walking to your workplace and to your supermarket, etc. You save money and you save your health, you pollute less and you help the planet. Use your car only for your family outings and use the public transportation (walk to your train or bus - you save in parking fees and improve your health). Another story is if you live in an area where the distances are much longer. Biking sure is good exercise- if you like it. Walking may be the most suitable for us humans as our exercise - and you may then smell even more roses.
Want a better health and a longer, suffer free life? Then: (1) Eat correctly, (2) sleep 7 - 8 hours every night (at least 6 - 7), (3) exercise = walk about one (1) hour minimum every day, (4) connect deeper & closer to your children, give more time daily to your family life, create more private time with your spouse (a weekly dinner date only the 2 of you and once each month an overnight trip with your spouse). Correct nutrition and all other necessary info you will learn from STAF, Inc.'s new, revolutionary Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutrition Program (see Home page). For walking use proper, steady, supporting shoes. Start with the above information and you will be motivated expand your physical & mental & family activities.
PEOPLE bike to work for various reasons. For some, it’s a way to help the environment. Others see it as a regular opportunity to exercise, or to save money. For avid cyclists, it’s a way to log in miles. All great reasons to commute by bike — but not the main reason I do it.
I appreciate how biking to work allows me to be outside for at least a small part of my day. I’m a senior program director at the Lasker Foundation, which supports medical research by educating people about its benefits and honoring excellence in science.
If I didn’t bike to work, I’d spend my weekdays almost entirely indoors — underground tunnel, subway car, eight hours under the fluorescent lights and then back home again. On the bike, I get trees, air and a great way to get to know city neighborhoods. Of course, I also get bad weather and city traffic. But it’s worth the trade-off. The weather’s not often inclement, and rain and snow have their charms.
I live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and work on 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, about eight miles away. It would take too long for me to walk, of course, but I find that the distance is perfect for commuting by bike. Over the years, I’ve lived in a few places in Brooklyn and Queens, and biking has almost always been quicker than taking public transportation.
I’ve been cycling to work since the late 1990s. I started when the city was doing some construction in the subways and rerouting passengers, which would have lengthened my commute considerably. I tried riding my sister-in-law’s bike to work one day and liked it, so I bought my own. Even though I hadn’t biked since I was a child, I got back into it right away.
At the time, there were few bicycles on the streets. Over time, I’ve noticed an increase in the number of bike commuters — and a skyrocketing in the last three to five years.
I’ve been at the Lasker Foundation for 14 years. When I began biking to work, my colleagues found me an amusing curiosity, but now hardly anyone notices. I keep my bike in a corner of my office on the 13th floor during the day, and most people don’t even see it.
My building has always allowed me to carry my bike in the freight elevator, and thanks to a 2009 New York law, other New York City bikers can use their buildings’ freight elevators, too. I have to take the bike down again before the last freight elevator run at 4:30 p.m., but that’s a small price to pay for not having to keep it outside all day. In late afternoon, I lock it to a light pole at the back of the building and return to the office until 5.
I bike during all four seasons. In summer, I wear shorts and a T-shirt and carry a messenger bag over my shoulder for my lunch and anything else I need. Once at the office, I change into business-casual clothes that I keep there. In winter, I wear layers and a thin hat under my helmet. A cold winter day can be the best time to be on a bicycle. When the air is clear, free of oppressive summer haze, the city can look beautiful.
Biking to work also comes in handy during the workday itself. I have a rack on the back of my bike that accommodates panniers that allow me to pick up groceries and do other errands on the way to or from work. I could get on and off the subway to do the same thing, but that would add a lot of time to the commute.
During work hours, a colleague will occasionally need to send or retrieve documents by messenger. If I have the time, I volunteer. Pedaling 30 blocks and back is a nice way to take a break from work — and to save the office a few bucks on messenger fees.
I’M sure that some people contemplating my mode of transportation might be afraid of Midtown traffic. I’m no hero; I don’t want to get hurt riding to work. It just takes time getting used to it. There’s a risk, but all travel has risks. They’re worth it to me.
If you love commuting to work by bicycle, you can even work it into business trips in some places. Occasionally, I travel to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., to research information in the archives. Last year, I learned that I could rent a bike at Union Station in Washington and pedal to the library. I gave it a shot, and after just a few minutes in city traffic, I reached a trail that runs through woods and parallels the Potomac River and then an old canal. It was about a 10-mile ride that took me out of the city. That made my day.
__________________________________
July 8, 2012
Business section, p. 7
Preoccupations
This article is only for your personal use
Pedal to Work, and Smell the Roses
DAVID KEEGAN - As told to Patricia R. Olsen
STAF, Inc.'s comment, by Dr. Christian (Staf, Inc.'s CEO): This article is meant for you as an inspirational source. Start biking or walking to your workplace and to your supermarket, etc. You save money and you save your health, you pollute less and you help the planet. Use your car only for your family outings and use the public transportation (walk to your train or bus - you save in parking fees and improve your health). Another story is if you live in an area where the distances are much longer. Biking sure is good exercise- if you like it. Walking may be the most suitable for us humans as our exercise - and you may then smell even more roses.
Want a better health and a longer, suffer free life? Then: (1) Eat correctly, (2) sleep 7 - 8 hours every night (at least 6 - 7), (3) exercise = walk about one (1) hour minimum every day, (4) connect deeper & closer to your children, give more time daily to your family life, create more private time with your spouse (a weekly dinner date only the 2 of you and once each month an overnight trip with your spouse). Correct nutrition and all other necessary info you will learn from STAF, Inc.'s new, revolutionary Healthy Lifestyle & Correct Nutrition Program (see Home page). For walking use proper, steady, supporting shoes. Start with the above information and you will be motivated expand your physical & mental & family activities.
PEOPLE bike to work for various reasons. For some, it’s a way to help the environment. Others see it as a regular opportunity to exercise, or to save money. For avid cyclists, it’s a way to log in miles. All great reasons to commute by bike — but not the main reason I do it.
I appreciate how biking to work allows me to be outside for at least a small part of my day. I’m a senior program director at the Lasker Foundation, which supports medical research by educating people about its benefits and honoring excellence in science.
If I didn’t bike to work, I’d spend my weekdays almost entirely indoors — underground tunnel, subway car, eight hours under the fluorescent lights and then back home again. On the bike, I get trees, air and a great way to get to know city neighborhoods. Of course, I also get bad weather and city traffic. But it’s worth the trade-off. The weather’s not often inclement, and rain and snow have their charms.
I live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and work on 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, about eight miles away. It would take too long for me to walk, of course, but I find that the distance is perfect for commuting by bike. Over the years, I’ve lived in a few places in Brooklyn and Queens, and biking has almost always been quicker than taking public transportation.
I’ve been cycling to work since the late 1990s. I started when the city was doing some construction in the subways and rerouting passengers, which would have lengthened my commute considerably. I tried riding my sister-in-law’s bike to work one day and liked it, so I bought my own. Even though I hadn’t biked since I was a child, I got back into it right away.
At the time, there were few bicycles on the streets. Over time, I’ve noticed an increase in the number of bike commuters — and a skyrocketing in the last three to five years.
I’ve been at the Lasker Foundation for 14 years. When I began biking to work, my colleagues found me an amusing curiosity, but now hardly anyone notices. I keep my bike in a corner of my office on the 13th floor during the day, and most people don’t even see it.
My building has always allowed me to carry my bike in the freight elevator, and thanks to a 2009 New York law, other New York City bikers can use their buildings’ freight elevators, too. I have to take the bike down again before the last freight elevator run at 4:30 p.m., but that’s a small price to pay for not having to keep it outside all day. In late afternoon, I lock it to a light pole at the back of the building and return to the office until 5.
I bike during all four seasons. In summer, I wear shorts and a T-shirt and carry a messenger bag over my shoulder for my lunch and anything else I need. Once at the office, I change into business-casual clothes that I keep there. In winter, I wear layers and a thin hat under my helmet. A cold winter day can be the best time to be on a bicycle. When the air is clear, free of oppressive summer haze, the city can look beautiful.
Biking to work also comes in handy during the workday itself. I have a rack on the back of my bike that accommodates panniers that allow me to pick up groceries and do other errands on the way to or from work. I could get on and off the subway to do the same thing, but that would add a lot of time to the commute.
During work hours, a colleague will occasionally need to send or retrieve documents by messenger. If I have the time, I volunteer. Pedaling 30 blocks and back is a nice way to take a break from work — and to save the office a few bucks on messenger fees.
I’M sure that some people contemplating my mode of transportation might be afraid of Midtown traffic. I’m no hero; I don’t want to get hurt riding to work. It just takes time getting used to it. There’s a risk, but all travel has risks. They’re worth it to me.
If you love commuting to work by bicycle, you can even work it into business trips in some places. Occasionally, I travel to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., to research information in the archives. Last year, I learned that I could rent a bike at Union Station in Washington and pedal to the library. I gave it a shot, and after just a few minutes in city traffic, I reached a trail that runs through woods and parallels the Potomac River and then an old canal. It was about a 10-mile ride that took me out of the city. That made my day.
__________________________________
This article is for your personal use, only
Source: The New York Times
July 8, 2012
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals
STAF, Inc.'s comment: This article shows the two important ground level reasons for Happiness: (1) a lasting, strong marriage, possible with children, and (2) a strong religious faith. In case you are interested in finding a good source for biblical guidance, our affiliate church for the internet generation, for the modern world, has a beautiful website www.gcg1org.weebly.com.
STAF, Inc. is the leading specialist in all life success & happiness topics. Our specialists, known internationally, will strengthen your marriage, your family happiness, and your children's safe & successful future. See tab: "services" and there "RAM- Restoring Any Marriage"™ and: apply the information.
Quotation "Knowledge is no power - only applied knowledge is power" (Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc. CEO)
WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives?
The answer might seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking. And it was the candidate Barack Obama in 2008 who infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.” Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?
Wrong. Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.
Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.
The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.
Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.
An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others. If they recognized the injustice in the world, they wouldn’t be so cheerful. In the words of Jaime Napier and John Jost, New York University psychologists, in the journal Psychological Science, “Liberals may be less happy than conservatives because they are less ideologically prepared to rationalize (or explain away) the degree of inequality in society.” The academic parlance for this is “system justification.”
The data show that conservatives do indeed see the free enterprise system in a sunnier light than liberals do, believing in each American’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement. Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.
So conservatives are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss, right? Not so fast, according to a study from the University of Florida psychologists Barry Schlenker and John Chambers and the University of Toronto psychologist Bonnie Le in the Journal of Research in Personality. These scholars note that liberals define fairness and an improved society in terms of greater economic equality. Liberals then condemn the happiness of conservatives, because conservatives are relatively untroubled by a problem that, it turns out, their political counterparts defined.
Imagine the opposite. Say liberals were the happy ones. Conservatives might charge that it is only because liberals are unperturbed by the social welfare state’s monstrous threat to economic liberty. Liberals would justifiably dismiss this argument as solipsistic and silly.
There is one other noteworthy political happiness gap that has gotten less scholarly attention than conservatives versus liberals: moderates versus extremists.
Political moderates must be happier than extremists, it always seemed to me. After all, extremists actually advertise their misery with strident bumper stickers that say things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!”
But it turns out that’s wrong. People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).
What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.
Whatever the explanation, the implications are striking. The Occupy Wall Street protesters may have looked like a miserable mess. In truth, they were probably happier than the moderates making fun of them from the offices above. And none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity. Which some moderately liberal readers of this newspaper might find quite depressing.
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Road to Freedom” and “Gross National Happiness.”
___________________________
Source: The New York Times
July 8, 2012
By ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals
STAF, Inc.'s comment: This article shows the two important ground level reasons for Happiness: (1) a lasting, strong marriage, possible with children, and (2) a strong religious faith. In case you are interested in finding a good source for biblical guidance, our affiliate church for the internet generation, for the modern world, has a beautiful website www.gcg1org.weebly.com.
STAF, Inc. is the leading specialist in all life success & happiness topics. Our specialists, known internationally, will strengthen your marriage, your family happiness, and your children's safe & successful future. See tab: "services" and there "RAM- Restoring Any Marriage"™ and: apply the information.
Quotation "Knowledge is no power - only applied knowledge is power" (Dr. Christian, STAF, Inc. CEO)
WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives?
The answer might seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking. And it was the candidate Barack Obama in 2008 who infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.” Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?
Wrong. Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.
Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.
The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.
Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.
An explanation for the happiness gap more congenial to liberals is that conservatives are simply inattentive to the misery of others. If they recognized the injustice in the world, they wouldn’t be so cheerful. In the words of Jaime Napier and John Jost, New York University psychologists, in the journal Psychological Science, “Liberals may be less happy than conservatives because they are less ideologically prepared to rationalize (or explain away) the degree of inequality in society.” The academic parlance for this is “system justification.”
The data show that conservatives do indeed see the free enterprise system in a sunnier light than liberals do, believing in each American’s ability to get ahead on the basis of achievement. Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.
So conservatives are ignorant, and ignorance is bliss, right? Not so fast, according to a study from the University of Florida psychologists Barry Schlenker and John Chambers and the University of Toronto psychologist Bonnie Le in the Journal of Research in Personality. These scholars note that liberals define fairness and an improved society in terms of greater economic equality. Liberals then condemn the happiness of conservatives, because conservatives are relatively untroubled by a problem that, it turns out, their political counterparts defined.
Imagine the opposite. Say liberals were the happy ones. Conservatives might charge that it is only because liberals are unperturbed by the social welfare state’s monstrous threat to economic liberty. Liberals would justifiably dismiss this argument as solipsistic and silly.
There is one other noteworthy political happiness gap that has gotten less scholarly attention than conservatives versus liberals: moderates versus extremists.
Political moderates must be happier than extremists, it always seemed to me. After all, extremists actually advertise their misery with strident bumper stickers that say things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention!”
But it turns out that’s wrong. People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either “extremely conservative” (48 percent very happy) or “extremely liberal” (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center “moderate” (26 percent).
What explains this odd pattern? One possibility is that extremists have the whole world figured out, and sorted into good guys and bad guys. They have the security of knowing what’s wrong, and whom to fight. They are the happy warriors.
Whatever the explanation, the implications are striking. The Occupy Wall Street protesters may have looked like a miserable mess. In truth, they were probably happier than the moderates making fun of them from the offices above. And none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers, many of whom cling to guns and faith with great tenacity. Which some moderately liberal readers of this newspaper might find quite depressing.
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Road to Freedom” and “Gross National Happiness.”
___________________________
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Many a proud parent has deemed their child bright, advanced and more intelligent than his or her peers. But how can parents tell the difference between their kid being smart or gifted?
According to child psychologist Stephanie Meyer, giftedness and intelligence are innate. "Parents will describe their child from the beginning, the very first moments of life, as just being super alert," she tells Away We Grow host Diane Mizota. "Parents will often come in describing their child as having an extraordinary memory advance mathematical ability, sense of humor--just extraordinary sense of humor in a two-year-old--advanced storytelling abilities. They will often describe their child as having advanced vocabulary skills and the ability to articulate their feelings and ideas in ways that seem far beyond their age-mates."
Related: 5 kids smarter than Albert Einstein
Is your child gifted? Giftedness is assessed via an IQ test, the most common being the Wechsler system on intelligence tests. Children who score higher than 130 on the test are considered gifted. But in addition to pure numbers, parents need to look at a wide range of their child's behaviors and development patterns. Says Meyer: "Kids who are highly gifted often are very, very curious. They may not be great sleepers early on. A lot of them were colicky to begin with. The whole idea of being an infant wasn't a great fit."
She adds that many kids who are highly intelligent also have sensory processing differences. "In order to take information in heightened, rapid, different ways, their sensory system is on high," explains Meyer. "A lot of times you see highly gifted kids putting their hands over their ears or not really enjoying being in crowds."
Related: Can everyone's kid really be gifted?
Gifted children may also have a higher activity level and difficulty getting along with kids their age. "These children often will connect more easily with older children, adults, the elderly, and then very young children," she says "They're a little more advanced and they're a little more behind so they may lag behind a little in the social, emotional sphere and the self-care sphereum*) but then their vocabulary is beyond sometimes where their peers are and their interests can be different than their peers." This inability to connect well with friends could signal other behavioral problems.
Meyer recommends that parents seek out professional consultation with experts so that mom and dad "are not the ones stuck with the guess work and so that they can just enjoy their child. Such a big part of what I hope comes out of this process is that the child is able to embrace all parts of him or herself and that parents are able to embrace all parts of their child."
*) sphere(um) A round solid figure, or its surface, with every point on its surface equidistant from its center
An object having this shape; a ball or globe. Synonyms: orb - globe - field - area - realm - domain - circle
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Click: German Bin Divers Get Connected to Wage War on Food Waste
German bin-divers get connected to wage war on food waste
BERLIN (Reuters) - Just past midnight behind a Berlin supermarket, two youngsters with torches strapped to their woollen hats sift through rubbish bins for food that is still edible, load their bikes with bread, vegetables and chocolate Santas and cycle off into the darkness.
It is not poverty that inspires a growing number of young Germans like 21-year-old student Benjamin Schmitt to forage for food in the garbage, but anger at loss and waste which the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates at one-third of all food produced worldwide, every year, valued at about $1 trillion.
In environmentally aware, cost-conscious Germany, "foodsharing" is the latest fad, using the Internet to share food recovered from supermarket bins while it is still in good condition.
"Dumpster-diving" for society's cast-offs is a fast-growing phenomenon among sub-cultures in Europe and the United States and "freegans" - vegans who do not believe in paying for food - have long been sifting through supermarket wheelie bins.
But the "foodsharing" movement that has sprung up in cities like Cologne and Berlin brings efficiency and technical skills to the table in ways that make it uniquely German.
More than 8,200 people across Germany have registered to share food on the www.foodsharing.de website in just seven weeks of existence, said Berlin organiser Raphael Fellmer.
The website - which has an appropriately recycled-paper look - advises people where there are "baskets" and what is in them: organic sausages in Cologne or spaghetti and Darjeeling tea in Chemnitz. Members can log in or use a Smartphone app to see the address of nearby baskets or a pick-up time and place. They can then rate the transaction like ordinary online retailers.
For people who cannot afford the Internet, Fellmer has set up the first of what he hopes will be many "hot spots" where food can be picked up anonymously: a fridge at a covered market in Berlin's Kreuzberg, where anyone can help themselves to food.
"I've come for some bread rolls, just a couple," said Frank, an unemployed 47-year-old, who was alerted to the location of a hoard of fresh bread on the website and called at Fellmer's house.
Opening his rucksack, he helped himself from a bag of rolls that had been on sale at a nearby bakery till 7 p.m. the previous evening.
TASTE THE WASTE
Throwing away food is a rich country phenomenon but a poor country's problem.
Camelia Bucatariu, a policy expert on food waste at the FAO in Rome, said North American and European consumers waste 95-115 kg of food per capita a year, compared to just 6-11 kg in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia. As economies develop, the level of food waste grows, said Bucatariu, who is Romanian.
The foodsharers' argument that the tonnes of food wasted in Germany could feed people in poor countries is not as simplistic as it sounds: less waste means less drain on resources in the producer countries and less upward pressure on prices, she said.
"It is not only wasting an apple, but wasting the resources embedded in that apple which may be produced outside of Europe," Bucatariu told Reuters. As well as economic damage there is the cost to the environment of using energy to grow food that ends up in a landfill site, emitting greenhouse gases like methane.
The FAO is studying how to change such behaviour and whether changes are needed to legislation on the retailers' "date marks" differentiating "Best By" from "Use By" - the latter being the date when food may start to become a biological hazard.
Fellmer is on a three-year-old "money strike": he does not earn or spend a euro and he, his wife and child eat only food that has been rescued from the bins.
A rangy 29-year-old in a baggy blue jumper with spiky blond hair and a pointed beard, he is already something of a German media phenomenon. On a recent visit, a TV documentary crew and a reporter from a local daily were crowded into his one-room flat.
He plonks on the table a packet of ginger biscuits for Christmas - from a batch of hundreds fished out of bins nearby - bearing a "use by" date which is still a month away. They taste fine, as do some red and gold-wrapped chocolate Santas.
The "use by" dates infuriate the foodsharers, many of whom were first inspired by the 2011 film "Taste the Waste" by their guru Valentin Thurm.
It documents waste ranging from farmers discarding tomatoes that are not red enough to bakeries burning the excess bread they made to keep the shelves looking full until closing time.
Fellmer's friend Schmitt was brought up in a "very food-conscious vegetarian household". His mother is a food chemist who advises him on hygienic ways to eat and share food from plastic sacks that he admits are sometimes "mushy" under your fingers in the dark.
Like Fellmer, he lives not in east Berlin, with its history of squats and communes, but in the leafy western suburb of Dahlem where he bin-dives under the noses of the German capital's most affluent residents.
Foodsharing appeals to the "hipster" culture of Berlin with its tradition of anti-establishment protest, Schmitt said.
The German crowdsourcing techniques could turn out to be "best practice" for reducing waste in other countries too, said the FAO's Bucatariu.
"Solutions may vary according to the culture, the context and to what access to food there is," she said. "But each and every one of us can do something."
(Additional reporting by Fabrizio Bensch; Editing by Gareth Jones and Sonya Hepinstall)
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___________________________________________________________________
German bin-divers get connected to wage war on food waste
BERLIN (Reuters) - Just past midnight behind a Berlin supermarket, two youngsters with torches strapped to their woollen hats sift through rubbish bins for food that is still edible, load their bikes with bread, vegetables and chocolate Santas and cycle off into the darkness.
It is not poverty that inspires a growing number of young Germans like 21-year-old student Benjamin Schmitt to forage for food in the garbage, but anger at loss and waste which the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates at one-third of all food produced worldwide, every year, valued at about $1 trillion.
In environmentally aware, cost-conscious Germany, "foodsharing" is the latest fad, using the Internet to share food recovered from supermarket bins while it is still in good condition.
"Dumpster-diving" for society's cast-offs is a fast-growing phenomenon among sub-cultures in Europe and the United States and "freegans" - vegans who do not believe in paying for food - have long been sifting through supermarket wheelie bins.
But the "foodsharing" movement that has sprung up in cities like Cologne and Berlin brings efficiency and technical skills to the table in ways that make it uniquely German.
More than 8,200 people across Germany have registered to share food on the www.foodsharing.de website in just seven weeks of existence, said Berlin organiser Raphael Fellmer.
The website - which has an appropriately recycled-paper look - advises people where there are "baskets" and what is in them: organic sausages in Cologne or spaghetti and Darjeeling tea in Chemnitz. Members can log in or use a Smartphone app to see the address of nearby baskets or a pick-up time and place. They can then rate the transaction like ordinary online retailers.
For people who cannot afford the Internet, Fellmer has set up the first of what he hopes will be many "hot spots" where food can be picked up anonymously: a fridge at a covered market in Berlin's Kreuzberg, where anyone can help themselves to food.
"I've come for some bread rolls, just a couple," said Frank, an unemployed 47-year-old, who was alerted to the location of a hoard of fresh bread on the website and called at Fellmer's house.
Opening his rucksack, he helped himself from a bag of rolls that had been on sale at a nearby bakery till 7 p.m. the previous evening.
TASTE THE WASTE
Throwing away food is a rich country phenomenon but a poor country's problem.
Camelia Bucatariu, a policy expert on food waste at the FAO in Rome, said North American and European consumers waste 95-115 kg of food per capita a year, compared to just 6-11 kg in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia. As economies develop, the level of food waste grows, said Bucatariu, who is Romanian.
The foodsharers' argument that the tonnes of food wasted in Germany could feed people in poor countries is not as simplistic as it sounds: less waste means less drain on resources in the producer countries and less upward pressure on prices, she said.
"It is not only wasting an apple, but wasting the resources embedded in that apple which may be produced outside of Europe," Bucatariu told Reuters. As well as economic damage there is the cost to the environment of using energy to grow food that ends up in a landfill site, emitting greenhouse gases like methane.
The FAO is studying how to change such behaviour and whether changes are needed to legislation on the retailers' "date marks" differentiating "Best By" from "Use By" - the latter being the date when food may start to become a biological hazard.
Fellmer is on a three-year-old "money strike": he does not earn or spend a euro and he, his wife and child eat only food that has been rescued from the bins.
A rangy 29-year-old in a baggy blue jumper with spiky blond hair and a pointed beard, he is already something of a German media phenomenon. On a recent visit, a TV documentary crew and a reporter from a local daily were crowded into his one-room flat.
He plonks on the table a packet of ginger biscuits for Christmas - from a batch of hundreds fished out of bins nearby - bearing a "use by" date which is still a month away. They taste fine, as do some red and gold-wrapped chocolate Santas.
The "use by" dates infuriate the foodsharers, many of whom were first inspired by the 2011 film "Taste the Waste" by their guru Valentin Thurm.
It documents waste ranging from farmers discarding tomatoes that are not red enough to bakeries burning the excess bread they made to keep the shelves looking full until closing time.
Fellmer's friend Schmitt was brought up in a "very food-conscious vegetarian household". His mother is a food chemist who advises him on hygienic ways to eat and share food from plastic sacks that he admits are sometimes "mushy" under your fingers in the dark.
Like Fellmer, he lives not in east Berlin, with its history of squats and communes, but in the leafy western suburb of Dahlem where he bin-dives under the noses of the German capital's most affluent residents.
Foodsharing appeals to the "hipster" culture of Berlin with its tradition of anti-establishment protest, Schmitt said.
The German crowdsourcing techniques could turn out to be "best practice" for reducing waste in other countries too, said the FAO's Bucatariu.
"Solutions may vary according to the culture, the context and to what access to food there is," she said. "But each and every one of us can do something."
(Additional reporting by Fabrizio Bensch; Editing by Gareth Jones and Sonya Hepinstall)
CHECK OUT THESE STORIES TOO
- Growing appetite to cut back on food wastage
- Festival banquets challenge to food waste campaign
- Pioneering Finns share leftovers to cut waste
- U.N. offers banquet of blemished food to highlight waste
- Germany cocoa in high global demand
- China sees anti-waste campaign
- Catholics shocked as pope resigns, but little emotion
Fellmer a supporter of the foodsharing movement …Reuters
Fellmer, a supporter of the foodsharing movement …Reuters
Fellmer a supporter of the foodsharing movement …Reuters
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More on Shine: German Grandmother Lives Money-Free and Has Never Been Happier
German Grandmother Lives Money-free and Has Never Been Happier
By Sarah B. Weir, Yahoo! blogger | Financially Fit – Mon, Jan 9, 2012 12:39 PM EST
Most of us could go a day without spending any cash. But a week? How about sixteen years? That's how long 69-year-old Heidemarie Schwermer, grandmother of three, has lived without money. Schwermer's odyssey is the subject of a documentary film, Living Without Money, by director Line Halvorsen, which is screening internationally and is also available on DVD.
Related link: Swap-o-Rama: Don't Buy if You Can Barter
In 1996, Schwermer, a former schoolteacher and psychotherapist, decided to try to live without money for a year as an experiment. As a child she had experienced deep deprivation as a refugee fleeing from Russian forces during World War II. Her family had escaped what was then East Prussia and ended up in Germany "penniless." She has always felt a sense of compassion and empathy for the homeless community in the city of Dortmund where she settled as an adult.
Two years before she began living completely without money, Schwermer had opened a swap shop where people could barter services and goods. It was such a success it gave her the confidence to take the leap of quitting her job, giving away all of her possessions except what could fit into a single suitcase and backpack, and moving out of her rental home. According to the Austrian Times,Schwermer says she "had become irritated by the greedy consumer society" she was witnessing.
She acknowledges that her friends were confused and her two grown daughters were initially shocked (she says they now accept her lifestyle). Schwermer lived nomadically, trading gardening, cleaning, and even therapy sessions for food and a place to sleep. She found it liberating: "Living without money gave me quality of life, inner wealth, and freedom."
Schwermer has written three books about her experiences. She says the first, "The Star Money Experiment" was quite successful and she passed out all the money she earned to people on the street, "in five mark coins," Germany's currency before the euro. She waived her advances on the other books and asked the publisher to give her royalties to charity.
Director Halvorsen told Yahoo! Shine, "Heidemarie's unique story made me want to create a film that challenges the viewer into questioning their own relationship to money and possessions." She explains, "The film does not teach you how to live without money, but is a portrait of a woman who has made a very courageous and inspiring choice."
Living without money in the United States
Schwermer's experiment is obviously extreme and Germany does have more of a social safety net than we do in the United States. But there are many ways to live with less money here. You can get everything from a bicycle to kid's clothing without spending a penny by logging on to websites such as Freecycle. Craigslist also has a section devoted to giveaways. Apartment swaps and couch surfing are ways to travel on the cheap. Yahoo's Conscious Consumer blog has many other ideas for getting free stuff easily.
Related links:
Suzie Orman Talks Money Saving Secrets
No Groceries for a year: How one family saved money, lost weight and lived well
6 Ways to Save Money at the Grocery Store
The Secrets of Eating Right and Living Longer
By SparkPeople.com | Healthy Living – 17 hours ago
By Antigone Arthur, for SparkPeople
Yes, it's possible to eat certain foods and boost your longevity. Often labeled "super foods," these foods have the ability to not only strengthen the immune system, but to also fight disease, and lower body fat and cholesterol.
All of these health benefits can help you live a longer, healthier, and happier life.
Some super foods contain substances called antioxidants and phytochemicals, which work together to fight disease and promote a long life.
A majority of these foods work best when they're combined with a well-balanced diet.
Common Super Foods For Boosting Longevity
Certain types of fish, particularly fatty cuts of fish, contain healthy fats that help lower cholesterol and prevent heart attacks. These foods may also reduce depression. Salmon, trout, and mackerel are among the top choices. These fish contain valuable omega-3 fatty acids.
Tomatoes are valuable because they contain lycopene, which helps fight free radicals. Free radicals can damage the skin and vital organs. Lycopene also helps stimulate the immune system; some studies show it might prevent the progression of certain degenerative diseases, and protect against prostate cancer.
When it comes to broccoli, your mother had it right. Broccoli could be considered the number one super food; many experts agree that if you can eat just one vegetable, these green guys are your best bet. Broccoli contains large amounts of vitamin C, calcium, and fiber, and can help prevent bone loss, fight disease, reduce your risk of heart disease, and even boost your immune system.
Garlic is a wonderful supplement that acts as a powerful anti-viral which can reduce your chances for catching colds and common infections. Garlic also has many natural anti-oxidant properties. Fresh garlic contains the most nutrients, although it's also available in capsule form. Spice up your favorite dish with some dried garlic for an extra boost.
Oats, like many other types of grain, are high in soluble and insoluble fiber, which help protect the body from colon cancer. This high-fiber cereal keeps you fuller longer, aiding in your weight loss efforts. Oats also help build strong bones.
Green tea helps stimulate your metabolism (a bonus for anyone trying to lose weight) but also helps prevent the oxidation of cells in the body. Green tea is also thought to be an immune system booster. It's rich in antioxidants and certain vitamins, including A, C and E. Replace your after-dinner coffee with this brew, and your body will thank you.
Yogurt contains "friendly" bacteria, which help maintain the intestines and keep the bowels regulated. It can also suppress yeast overgrowth in both men and women. High in calcium, yogurt is also believed to act as a natural appetite suppressant. Soy yogurts contain these same live cultures, so don't let a dairy-free diet stop you from getting these essential nutrients.
Related links:
Over 100 Super Foods for a Super You
Shopping Cart Essentials
Grocery Store Steals and Tips
_______________________________________________________________________
By SparkPeople.com | Healthy Living – 17 hours ago
By Antigone Arthur, for SparkPeople
Yes, it's possible to eat certain foods and boost your longevity. Often labeled "super foods," these foods have the ability to not only strengthen the immune system, but to also fight disease, and lower body fat and cholesterol.
All of these health benefits can help you live a longer, healthier, and happier life.
Some super foods contain substances called antioxidants and phytochemicals, which work together to fight disease and promote a long life.
A majority of these foods work best when they're combined with a well-balanced diet.
Common Super Foods For Boosting Longevity
Certain types of fish, particularly fatty cuts of fish, contain healthy fats that help lower cholesterol and prevent heart attacks. These foods may also reduce depression. Salmon, trout, and mackerel are among the top choices. These fish contain valuable omega-3 fatty acids.
Tomatoes are valuable because they contain lycopene, which helps fight free radicals. Free radicals can damage the skin and vital organs. Lycopene also helps stimulate the immune system; some studies show it might prevent the progression of certain degenerative diseases, and protect against prostate cancer.
When it comes to broccoli, your mother had it right. Broccoli could be considered the number one super food; many experts agree that if you can eat just one vegetable, these green guys are your best bet. Broccoli contains large amounts of vitamin C, calcium, and fiber, and can help prevent bone loss, fight disease, reduce your risk of heart disease, and even boost your immune system.
Garlic is a wonderful supplement that acts as a powerful anti-viral which can reduce your chances for catching colds and common infections. Garlic also has many natural anti-oxidant properties. Fresh garlic contains the most nutrients, although it's also available in capsule form. Spice up your favorite dish with some dried garlic for an extra boost.
Oats, like many other types of grain, are high in soluble and insoluble fiber, which help protect the body from colon cancer. This high-fiber cereal keeps you fuller longer, aiding in your weight loss efforts. Oats also help build strong bones.
Green tea helps stimulate your metabolism (a bonus for anyone trying to lose weight) but also helps prevent the oxidation of cells in the body. Green tea is also thought to be an immune system booster. It's rich in antioxidants and certain vitamins, including A, C and E. Replace your after-dinner coffee with this brew, and your body will thank you.
Yogurt contains "friendly" bacteria, which help maintain the intestines and keep the bowels regulated. It can also suppress yeast overgrowth in both men and women. High in calcium, yogurt is also believed to act as a natural appetite suppressant. Soy yogurts contain these same live cultures, so don't let a dairy-free diet stop you from getting these essential nutrients.
Related links:
Over 100 Super Foods for a Super You
Shopping Cart Essentials
Grocery Store Steals and Tips
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