oh, larissa

In study after study of men and women who get paid more and promoted faster, the quality of “action orientation” stands out as the most observable and consistent behavior they demonstrate. They launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.

You can actually develop a “positive addiction” to endorphins and to the feeling of enhanced clarity, confidence and competence that they trigger. When you develop this “addiction,” almost without thinking you begin to organize your life in such a way that you are continually starting and completing ever more important tasks and projects. You actually become addicted to success and contribution.

You must think constantly about the rewards and benefits of being an action-oriented, fast-moving, focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets important jobs done quickly and on a consistent basis.

- Eat That Frog (via spaceships)

May 30, 2009, 11:35am

Catherine Rampell over at the NYT Economix blog, created this graph of the average time spent eating in various countries, measured against the country’s obesity rate. She noticed originally that the French seemed to have a low obesity rate, despite the fact that they spent a lot of time eating. I’ve always been a horrendously slow eater, but I actually think, for whatever reason, it’s been good for my health. Something about eating slow limits the amount of food you eat, and makes you savor what you do eat.

(via ninakix)

Americans can't answer rudimentary science questions

A national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences reveals that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test. (via:science)

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
• Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
• Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
• Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

via brocatus: via obsessivecompulsive

Brain Gain

Reporting & Essays/ The New Yorker

Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture.

“A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label”…

But it’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy. And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus. The experience that neuroenhancement offers is not, for the most part, about opening the doors of perception, or about breaking the bonds of the self, or about experiencing a surge of genius. It’s about squeezing out an extra few hours to finish those sales figures when you’d really rather collapse into bed; getting a B instead of a B-minus on the final exam in a lecture class where you spent half your time texting; cramming for the G.R.E.s at night, because the information-industry job you got after college turned out to be deadening. Neuroenhancers don’t offer freedom. Rather, they facilitate a pinched, unromantic, grindingly efficient form of productivity.

Read the complete article on The New Yorker (via roamin)

Interactive Map Showing Immigration Data Since 1880

Fantastic interactive app from the NY Times.  Slider to select time from 1880-2000 and menu for countries enable an exploration of demographic patterns.

The best countries for business, 2009

“Denmark, for a second straight year, takes the No. 1 spot. The U.S. is up two spots to No. 2, Canada is up four spots to No. 3, Singapore is up four to No. 4 and New Zealand is up seven to No. 5.

This is not a tally of economies with high gross domestic product growth, or low unemployment. The goal is to quantify for entrepreneurs and investors the often-qualified information about dynamic economies and what they would consider desirable conditions for business.

Personal freedoms play a big part - it’s hard to start a company or find talented employees under totalitarian regimes and military juntas. So we include measures of the right to participate in free and fair elections, freedom of expression and organization.

Taking care of investors, with laws assuring recourse for minority shareholders in cases of corporate misdeeds, is also important. As a barometer for corruption, Transparency International examines the number and frequency of incidents where corporate assets are misused for personal gain.”

E.U. rejects U.S. stimulus stance in favor of welfare spending

“Global efforts to limit the depth of the recession have been hampered by differences of emphasis between the United States and most European countries. While Washington wants greater stress on immediate measures to stimulate the economy, nations such as France seek a new regulatory architecture for financial institutions.

On Thursday, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, argued that talk of more stimulus spending from Europe was counterproductive. “Let’s not start discussing about a new plan,” he said, “before implementing the plan we have agreed.” He added: “The message we would send to our public is our plan is not enough. That’s not going to create confidence.”“

re: The acceptance of evolution

“In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.

In European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, more than 80 percent of adults surveyed said they accepted the concept of evolution.

The proportion of western European adults who believed the theory “absolutely false” ranged from 7 percent in Great Britain to 15 percent in the Netherlands.

The investigation also showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years.” (Jon D. Miller et al. 2006)

This video is an interesting, quick segment on an experiment done at Stanford called “The Marshmallow Experiment”…a very interesting study that has a whole lot of things to potentially teach us about how to help kids be successful later in life (the original study followed the kids taking the test for the next 18 years).

We have a culture now that says ‘Eat the Marshmallow!’

I highly recommend taking five minutes to check this one out, especially if you’re a parent (or ever want to be).

(via psychotherapy)

How Facebook brings out some of our most primative behaviours: The Economist

(via sabine)

“Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

The Mystery Suicides of Bridgend County

(via roamin)

Found it interesting that they mentioned Gilbert Grape syndrome and highlighted child wellness, especially in regards to social structure and education.

“There are many contexts in which the tragic deaths in Bridgend can be seen. The Gilbert Grape syndrome, as it could be called: the boredom, demoralization, and anhedonia of being inextricably stuck in some backwater place. As one Bridgend girl told the Telegraph, “Suicide is just what people do here because there is nothing else to do.” Another said, “I really do feel sometimes like I will never get out of here.”

In 2007, a unicef study of child well-being in 21 developed countries ranked Britain dead last. A key measure of a society’s health, the study maintains, is how it takes care of its children. Time magazine’s international edition ran a cover story about how the youth of Britain are “unhappy, unloved and out of control,” drinking more, doing more drugs, becoming sexually active in their early teens (many girls at 15 and younger), and exhibiting more antisocial behavior than ever before, due at least partly to parental neglect. In some cases, disaffection leads to violence: gang-related stabbings are alarmingly on the rise. “The British have a long propensity to recoil in horror from their children,” the story reports, and now they’re really scared of their young. Another study, by some Oxford social scientists, finds that the morale of school-age children throughout the U.K. is appallingly low. With parents failing to socialize their kids into adulthood, British youth, and other kids in the modern world, particularly in its marginalized sectors, are forming their own dysfunctional social groups. Children are less integrated, so they spend more time with their peers. “Add to the mix,” the Time story continues, “a class structure that impedes social mobility and an education system that rewards the advantaged, and some children are bound to be left in the cold.””