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Awkward Silences: 4 Seconds Is All It Takes to Feel Rejected

It's the pause that doesn't refresh, the awkward moment that you relive over and over and over after you've realized that once again, you've put your foot in it.
New research from Holland suggests that good conversational flow has a powerful effect on people's feelings of self-esteem and belonging, and that even brief — just four seconds long — silences during a conversation are enough to, as Tom Jacobs puts it in Miller-McCune:


Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/30/awkward-silences-4-seconds-is-all-it-takes-to-feel-rejected/#ixzz19hrmrdla

Why gratitude isn’t for wimps

UC DAVIS (US) — A research team studying the positive effects of daily gratitude says it can change people’s lives—but it takes mental toughness and discipline.
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“Gratitude is literally one of the few things that can measurably change people’s lives,” Robert Emmons writes in his book Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. The book outlines 10 strategies for cultivating a feeling of thanksgiving throughout the year.

Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, are gathering a large body of novel scientific data on the nature of gratitude, its causes, and its potential consequences for human health and well-being.

“Scientists are latecomers to the concept of gratitude,” Emmons says. “Religions and philosophies have long embraced gratitude as an indispensable manifestation of virtue, and an integral component of health, wholeness, and well-being.”

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“Far from being a warm, fuzzy sentiment, gratitude is morally and intellectually demanding,” he says. “It requires contemplation, reflection, and discipline. It can be hard and painful work.”

Here are Emmons’ evidence-based prescriptions for becoming more grateful:link

Nintendo: Children Under 6 Shouldn't Play 3-D Games On 3DS

I find Nintendo's concerns hard to believe...
UvealBlues

TOKYO—Nintendo Co. has issued a warning that children under the age of 6 shouldn't play three-dimensional games on its soon-to-be-released hand-held game machine, as looking at 3-D images for a long period of time can have a harmful effect on the growth of young children's eyes.

Long Finger Linked to Cancer Risk, Study Finds and Acupuncture as a treatment for Amblyopia

A new study found that men whose index finger is longer than their ring finger are at lower risk to develop prostate cancer, according to the British Journal of Cancer. 

While the above is interesting, I found the article below when it came out last month fascinating
Uvealblues

Lazy Eye: Chinese acupuncture offers a promising treatment for amblyopia, or "lazy eye," in older children, according to a study in Archives of Ophthalmology

There are some more interesting studies at the WSJ link at the top..
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Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills

Parents, the next time you fret that your child is wasting too much time playing video games, consider new research suggesting that video gaming may have real-world benefits for your child's developing brain.
Daphne Bavelier is professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. She studies young people playing action video games. Having now conducted more than 20 studies on the topic, Bavelier says, "It turns out that action video games are far from mindless.
Her studies show that video gamers show improved skills in vision, attention and certain aspects of cognition. And these skills are not just gaming skills, but real-world skills. They perform better than non-gamers on certain tests of attention, speed, accuracy, vision and multitasking, says Bavelier.

A Plan to Make Homelessness History

This is a story about a plan to end chronic homelessness in the United States. It’s not an indeterminate “war on homelessness,” but a methodical approach to do away with a major social problem. 
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Against this backdrop, the 100,000 Homes Campaign has set the goal of placing 100,000 chronically homeless people — pinpointing those who face the greatest risk of dying on the streets —  into permanent supportive housing by July 2013. It’s the human welfare equivalent of NASA’s race to put a man on the moon. Whether the goal is achieved or not, the campaign is shifting the way cities address a problem that has often been seen as more of a nuisance than a public health emergency.
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Street to Home’s outreach used that index to prioritize the homeless around Times Square, and they managed to get every person they met — except one holdout known as “Heavy” — into housing. “We learned that the only way to get chronically homeless people into housing was to go out and beg them to let us help them,” explained Haggerty. Along the way, Common Ground developed the strategy that is now at the heart of the campaign: hit the streets and get to know the most vulnerable people, keep talking with them until they agree to enter housing (without pre-conditions), and then blanket them with supports to keep them there and help rebuild their lives.
Another thing that Common Ground discovered was that the homeless were an amalgam of many subgroups. They have now surveyed almost 14,000 chronically homeless people and found that roughly 20 percent are veterans, 10 percent are over the age of 60, 4 percent have H.I.V. or AIDS, 47 percent have a mental illness and 5 percent remain homeless because they can’t find housing with their pets.
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You might imagine that it would be hard to get people to show up in the pre-dawn hours, venture into alleyways, and ask strangers personal questions about their health. Just the opposite. In Phoenix, 175 people turned out; in San Diego, 250; in Omaha, 75; and in Chicago over 150, including Mayor Daley. In Phoenix, after the surveys were complete, organizers asked volunteers if they would like to contribute money — at $1,000 a shot — to assist homeless people with furniture and move-in expenses. In 10 minutes, they raised $50,000. “This wasn’t a room of philanthropists,” Kanis added. “It was just volunteers. But you had people saying, ‘I’ll take the guy in the wheelchair.’ ‘We’ll take the two veterans.’ There was probably a five minute standing ovation.”
The other linchpin of the campaign is encouraging city partners — who participate in weekly webinars and monthly innovation sessions — to teach one another how to get around bottlenecks in government systems.

Breakthrough in TB Diagnostics

A rapid genetic test for tuberculosis could have a huge impact on global health.
The test directly detects genetic sequences associated with TB and drug-resistant TB. Although researchers have known about these sequences since the mid-1990s, incorporating the molecular technologies needed to detect them into tests for the developing world has been impractical until recently, says David Persing, the chief medical and technology officer at Cepheid, the California-based company that manufactures the test. 

Behind Census Figures Showing Boom in Nevada, a Story of Bust

HENDERSON, Nev. — By any measure, it should have been a cause for celebration in a place that surely needs one. The Census Bureau reported that Nevada grew by 35 percent over the last decade, making it the fastest-growing state in the nation.
Instead, it was another reminder of how bad things have become here, and how exhausting a decade this state has endured. This was the boom capital of the country — which explains the census report — until the economy collapsed in 2007. People started moving out, chasing jobs or escaping a house market with the highest foreclosure rate in the country. Unemployment here is now 14.3 percent, the highest in the country.
“People come for the good jobs and the good life, and if that’s no longer here, they are gone,” said David F. Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“People are just moving out.

How to Channel Your Inner Oprah

Oprah is a full package of good ideals, strength over adversity, and imperfections turned into benefits. If you'd like to channel your inner Oprah, here are some suggestions.

Five Years In, Gauging Impact of Gates Grants

SEATTLE — Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.

No idea was too radical, he said, and what he called the Grand Challenges in Global Health would pursue paths that the National Institutes of Health and other grant makers could not.
About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.
 
Now the five years are up, and the foundation recently brought all the scientists to Seattle to assess the results and decide who will get further funding.

In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were naïve when we began.”

African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
Organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank say the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.
But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations. 

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The breathtaking scope of some deals galvanizes opponents. In Madagascar, a deal that would have handed over almost half the country’s arable land to a South Korean conglomerate helped crystallize opposition to an already unpopular president and contributed to his overthrow in 2009. 
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Sekou Traoré, 69, a village elder, was dumbfoun

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ded when government officials said last year that Libya now controlled his land and began measuring the fields. He had always considered it his own, passed down from grandfather to father to son.
“All we want before they break our houses and take our fields is for them to show us the new houses where we will live, and the new fields where we will work,” he said at the rally last month.
“We are all so afraid,” he said of the village’s 2,229 residents. “We will be the victims of this situation, we are sure of that.”

The Gifts of Hope

All of the charities that Nicholas Kristof lists here are wonderful. I have supported Partners in Health for many years. The biography of the founder of this startup, Paul Farmer, is a fascinating read. It is called  Mountains beyond Montains.
Uvealblues

So by all means, buy your kids a $30 beehive (or an $850 camel) for a needy family through Heifer International, or write a check to the International Rescue Committee for its terrific work in Congo — but my focus today is groups that never make the spotlight:

Phys Ed: The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast

A recent study by scientists in Australia found that after only three days, an extremely high-fat, high-calorie diet can lead to increased blood sugar and insulin resistance, potentially increasing the risk for Type 2 diabetes. Waistlines also can expand at this time of year, prompting self-recrimination and unrealistic New Year’s resolutions.

But a new study published in The Journal of Physiology suggests a more reliable and far simpler response. Run or bicycle before breakfast. Exercising in the morning, before eating, the study results show, seems to significantly lessen the ill effects of holiday Bacchanalias.

Home Labs on the Rise for the Fun of Science

Some people who set up home laboratories are serious hobbyists in search of better tools; others are home-schooling parents equipping their children; and others are just curious.

Word Lens iPhone App Offers Real-Time Trans

A new iPhone app known as Word Lens will translate Spanish or English phrasesinstantly on the screen when you point your device's camera lens at the foreign language words.

It is currently the number nine app in Apple's top 10 free apps. Word Lens, from San Francisco-based Quest Visual, is free to download and includes two free features - reverse words and erase words. The Spanish to English function or English to Spanish feature, however, currently cost $4.99 each to download as part of a 50 percent off sale that ends December 31.

Think more, eat less

A new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, published in Science, shows that when you imagine eating a certain food, it reduces your actual consumption of that food. The discovery changes the decades-old assumption that thinking about something desirable increases cravings for it and its consumption.

Drawing on research that shows that perception and mental imagery engages neural machinery in a similar fashion and similarly affect emotions, response tendencies and skilled motor behavior, researchers tested the effects of repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food on its actual consumption.

They found that simply imagining the consumption of a food decreases ones appetite for it.
A new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, published in Science, shows that when you imagine eating a certain food, it reduces your actual consumption of that food. The discovery changes the decades-old assumption that thinking about something desirable increases cravings for it and its consumption.

Drawing on research that shows that perception and mental imagery engages neural machinery in a similar fashion and similarly affect emotions, response tendencies and skilled motor behavior, researchers tested the effects of repeatedly imagining the consumption of a food on its actual consumption.

They found that simply imagining the consumption of a food decreases ones appetite for it.

Kung Fu for Philosophers

In a 2005 news report about the Shaolin Temple, the Buddhist monastery in China well-known for its martial arts, a monk addressed a common misunderstanding: “Many people have a misconception that martial arts is about fighting and killing,” the monk was quoted as saying, “It is actually about improving your wisdom and intelligence.”[1]
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This broad understanding of kung fu is a key (though by no means the only key) through which we can begin to understand traditional Chinese philosophy and the places in which it meets and departs from philosophical traditions of the West. As many scholars have pointed out, the predominant orientation of traditional Chinese philosophy is the concern about how to live one’s life, rather than finding out the truth about reality.

Mountain Gorilla Makes a Comeback

The number of mountain gorillas at a crucial site in Central Africa has grown by more than 25 percent since 2003, reflecting a significant recovery for the highly endangered species, researchers reported in a new census this week.

Social Science Palooza

David Brooks has an interesting summary of recent social psychology research in his latest column..
such as more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them...
Uvealblues

In this column, I’m going to try to summarize as many of these studies as space allows. No single study is dispositive, but I hope these summaries can spark some conversations: