Hillary's health issues

Here is a video record of health correpondents dealing with Hillary Clinton' s condition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcGZpA5RsVo

Some misconceptions about science and health human beings have sustained so far: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/02/science/misconceptions-week.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

10 Steps To Conquering Information Overload

We’ve all heard the phrase “information overload.” It reminds us of tweets, texts, emails, the endless stream of interesting articles on Facebook, those viral videos we can’t help but click on, the numerous phone photos and videos we take, Secret posts, fleeting Snapchat photos and more. But actually the cognitive flood can be even simpler than that, says Daniel Levitin, McGill University psychology professor and author of “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.” “In 1976, there were 9,000 products in the average grocery store, and now it’s ballooned to 40,000 products. And yet most of us can get almost all our shopping done in just 150 items, so you’re having to ignore tens of thousands of times every time you go shopping,” he says. By one calculation, he says, we’ve created more information in the last 10 years than in all of human history before that. “I’ve read estimates there were 30 exabytes of information 10 years ago and today, there’s 300 exabytes of information,” he says. All of this is more information than the brain is configured to handle. The conscious mind can pay attention to three, maybe four, things at once. “If you get much beyond that, you begin to exercise poorer judgment, you lose track of things and you lose your focus,” he says. Considering that Americans took in five times as much information every day in 2011 as they did in 1986, we have to make a conscious effort to beat back the flood. Here are Levitin’s top 10 tips for thinking straight, overcoming procrastination and putting in less time but getting more done. Daniel Levitin (ArsenioCoroa) Daniel Levitin (ArsenioCoroa) 1. Do a brain dump. Get things out of your head. Getting Things Done productivity guru David Allen recommends what he calls “clearing the mind.” This means creating a big list of everything floating around your head. Also, immediately write down any thought that interrupts your work flow. “Writing [these thoughts] down gets them out of your head, clearing your brain that is interfering with being able to focus on what you want to focus on,” he says in the book. It also gives permission to your mind to “relax its neural circuits so that we can focus on something else.” Once on paper, prioritize the items into these buckets: things to do today, things to delegate, things to do this week, and things to drop. Allen calls these categories: do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it. If you find an item that just keeps lingering on your list, it may be ill-defined — not actionable. For instance, you may write “decide whether or not to get a new car this year.” That would be better broken down into subtasks such as, find out what your car is worth on Kelley Blue Book, ask the car mechanic how much it would cost to keep your current car on the road, etc. The Forbes eBook To Succeed In A Brutal Job Market Don’t let a rotten economy spoil your goals. Use the career and money advice in The Millennial Game Plan to get and stay ahead for good. 2. Follow the two-minute rule. If you have a lot of little tasks, designate 45 minutes or an hour every day to plow through any items that will take you two minutes or less, like emails, phone calls, tidying up, checking your financial accounts, etc. If you’re not sure how long tasks take you, follow these time-tracking techniques from the most successful people. 3. Clump together similar tasks. If you have several bills, pay them all at once. If you’re going to clean the house, don’t get distracted by reorganizing your closet. Completing each task once you begin it is another way of being efficient with your mental resources — it forces you to keep attention on one item for a span of time. “This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy,” writes Levitin. 4. Don’t multitask. Multitasking “costs” you by forcing you to decide whether to answer or ignore a text, how you should respond, how you should file this email, whether you should stick with what you’re working on or attend to the interruption. All those little decisions “spend” oxygenated glucose, the very fuel you need to focus on a task. Switching between tasks will actually make you feel exhausted, disoriented and anxious, writes Levitin. In contrast, “once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.” Multitasking trips us up in other ways. Stanford neuroscientist Russ Poldrack found that, for students who study and watch TV simultaneously, information that should go into the part of the brain for facts and storage may end up in the area for learning new procedures and new skills. If you find it especially hard to disengage, try adopting this one habit. 5. Limit the distractions of email. “Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance,” writes Levitin. Glenn Wilson of Gresham College in London found that having an unread email in your inbox while you’re trying to complete a task can chop 10 points off your effective IQ. Wilson even showed that multitasking is even more of a detriment to memory and our ability to concentrate than smoking pot is. Since having emails come in every few minutes is so bad for your decision-making skills and impairs judgment, Levitin recommends tricking your brain into staying on track. For instance, set aside two or three times of day for email. Turn off notifications so you’re not constantly being interrupted. “Many people have their e-mail programs set to put through arriving e-mails automatically or to check every five minutes. Think about that: If you’re checking e-mail every five minutes, you’re checking it 200 times during the workday,” writes Levitin. (If you find it hard to avoid email in the morning when your energy is highest, try these tips.) 6. “Eat the frog” first thing in the morning. We start each day with our energy for that day. As the day goes on, every decision, whether trivial or momentous, consumes a bit of our glucose. Questions like “Should I use a blue or green pen?” draws from the same energy store as “I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer. Should I opt for radiation or surgery?” “Important decisions should be made at the beginning of the day, when gumption and glucose is highest,” says Levitin, adding that Oscar-winning producer Jake Eberts used to have a dictum: “Eat the frog.” “If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of the day goes better,” says Levitin. “So, whatever is the most unpleasant thing to do, do it first in the morning.” Set aside that time with all distractions turned off, and adopt the mindset that that task is the most important thing you could be doing at that time. 7. Spend only as much time on decisions, tasks and activities as they are worth. If you want to organize bills and receipts, there’s no need to go to the stationery store, color code files and spend the next six weekends organizing papers — unless you need to access these files all the time. “If you’re talking about organizing five-year-old bills and receipts, just throw them in a box and when you need something, look for it,” says Levitin. Find out more about why it’s so crucial to conserve your decision-making energy. 8. Take breaks. “People who take a 15-minute break every couple of hours are much more efficient in the long run,” says Levitin, adding that it gives the brain a chance to hit the reset button in a part of the brain called the insula. “So taking a break, taking a nap, taking a walk around the block, listening to music — these activities, although most bosses would think that they’re a waste of time, in fact, they’re a big adjunct to productivity and creativity.” On average, a 15-minute nap can increase your effective IQ by 10 points, he says, though there are individual differences. For most people, however, an hour or two is too long. 9. Let yourself daydream. The brain operates in two oppositional modes: “one is when you’re directing the thoughts, and the other is when the thoughts take over and run themselves,” says Levitin. Directing mode is the one that allows us to get our work done, whether we’re an office worker, chef or tile layer, but our minds can’t stay in one gear all day long. In daydreaming mode, says Levitin, “one thought melds into another and they’re not particularly related.” This daydreaming mode acts as a neural reset button and replenishes some of the glucose you use up in staying on a task. It also has the great benefit of fostering creativity. “The thoughts meander from one to another, creating links between things we might not have seen as linked before, and from that may come the solutions to problems,” says Levitin. Down time is one of seven types of experiences your brain needs during the day. 10. Push down authority. “Managers tends to think the workers below them as just doing the work for the paycheck,” says Levitin. “But most workers report they love their jobs, even in jobs where you wouldn’t think that’s possible, like working in city sewer systems, having to shovel manure out of the stable, or people doing heavy labor with jackhammers — things that might sound unpleasant.” For that reason, most workers like at least some autonomy — and that’s great for managers who may be suffering from information overload, because they can then push down authority and empower people under them to exercise their good judgment. For instance, General Stanley McChrystal told Levitin about how soldiers used to call him from Iraq in the middle of the night and say, “‘We’ve been watching this building and we think it might have some munitions in it. We’d like your permission to bomb it.’ He’d say, ‘There’s nothing you can tell me on the phone at 2am in five minutes that’s going to make me more expert than you already are. You’ve been watching this building for six weeks. If you think we should bomb it, you should bomb it.’” Laura Shin is the author of the Forbes eBook, The Millennial Game Plan: Career And Money Secrets For Today's World. Available for Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Nook and Vook.

Tabloid journalism or tabloidism (sensational, inflammatory words and the history of tabloid journalism)

    This article casts a light upon how yellow press has gained territory over quality press.  This topic belongs to one of the units appearing on the book "Proficiency Expert" (Unit 4: Information). However, it doesn't mean that other students won't be able to read and analyse this piece thoroughly. Link: http://voiceseducation.org/content/sensationalism-inflammatory-words-and-history-tabloid-journalism.

animal sounds

I am attaching a link which deal with the topic we have been discussing in class. It is just an insight of the most frequent verbs used to describe animal sounds: ONe correction of the editor : a link whioch deals with ..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_sounds

mobile phone bans 'improve school exams results' (Are mobiles educationally disruptive?)

Mobile phone bans 'improve school exam results'

Banning mobile phones from schools has the effect of giving pupils an extra week's education over the course of an academic year, researchers say.

The study, published by the London School of Economics, looked at schools in four English cities and found test scores increased by more than 6% in those which banned phones.

Low-achieving and low-income students improved the most, researchers claim.

More than 90% of British teenagers own a mobile phone.

Report authors Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy say despite the benefits of new mobile technology phones cause distractions, reduce productivity and are detrimental to learning.

'Reduce inequality'

"We found that not only did student achievement improve, but also that low-achieving and low income students gained the most," the economists said.

"We found the impact of banning phones for these students was equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days."

The report surveyed the test scores of secondary schools in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester before and after phone bans were introduced.

Muck-up day meaning

"Muck-up day" is the name given to a tradition within secondary schools where graduating final-year students are involved with pranks and other activities on their last official day of school.

Adult piano lessons: Never too late to learn?

When Clemency Burton-Hill returned to piano lessons as an adult, she found herself in good company. Grown-ups everywhere are learning the instrument to relieve stress, focus their minds – and for the sheer joy it brings.

They say that youth is wasted on the young, but it’s nothing compared to piano lessons.

When I look back at my younger self and remember how I battled against learning the instrument and how quickly I gave it up, I’m gnawed at by rage. Why, why didn’t I practise when I had the chance? And why do I find myself in my thirties, suffering the mortification of learning the piano again, the indignity of being rubbish at something my eight-year-old self could do, the sheer misery of the difference between how I want something to sound and what actually happens when I play?

The only consolation I can take from this is that I’m not alone. I often hear from listeners on my BBC Radio 3 Breakfast show who say they’re revisiting in adulthood the instruments they gave up as children, and it’s invariably the keyboard to which they return. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger recently wrote a beautiful book – Play It Again: An Amateur against the Impossible – that explores the year he spent learning Chopin’s No Ballade 1, aged 56. And he was just one of the many high-profile amateur pianists, including actor Simon Russell Beale and the former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, who were persuaded to tackle Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) live onstage at a concert in London last year.

Gluttons for punishment?

So what’s behind this trend, I wonder? Why are so many otherwise sane adults submitting themselves to the strictures of daily scales and arpeggios and asking the terrifying question of whether an adult brain is still plastic enough to learn – and memorise – some of the most complex music ever written?

“It’s an overriding passion, not just for the music [but] for the challenge,” reckons Lucy Parham, the leading concert pianist who taught Rusbridger his Chopin. “And the challenge is constant: there’s always a harder piece, you can always take it to the next level, you’re never finished. But there’s also the fact that the piano is your friend; it’s always there. That gathers more significance as you get older: what you can express through it, in a personal language, becomes incredibly important.”

This is certainly true for British actor and director Samuel West, who tells me he recently bought himself a “proper” piano again, and has started practising daily for the first time in 30 years. “As an adult you’re much more knowledgeable about your own moods, so it becomes much more possible to use music as a way to express yourself,” he says. ”"If I have a little piece I can play, I can listen to myself better, I can express myself better. That’s entirely a function of being older, and that’s a joy.”

West, also an amateur cellist, had nurtured a desire to master the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations for as long as he could remember. “It was something I felt I really ought to know. It’s simple, but it’s difficult and complex enough to keep me going until I die. Consider Glenn Gould: he rarely ever recorded the same piece twice, but he famously re-recorded the Goldberg Variations when he was older, despite having had huge acclaim when he was twenty-three. He didn’t feel he’d said enough.”

West would be the first to admit he is no Glenn Gould. Didn’t he find the learning process maddening, given how out of practise he was? “The fascinating thing is how much my hands remembered,” he says. “When you’re small you learn faster, your hands are more adept, it’s just much, much easier; as an adult, the fear that getting back to any kind of match fitness will take forever is a bit depressing. But it’s worth it: I got myself a piece I’d wanted to learn and I taught it to myself and that was really satisfying. Even if my fingering was rubbish.’

Keys to happiness

An easy reward for the amateur pianist lies in the fact that, unlike a violin or cello, the keyboard is percussive. While the instrument certainly has its challenges – around 88 of the damned things – at least when you strike a key, you know what note will sound. “With the piano you can play small things beautifully because you don’t have the tuning challenge,” Parham points out. “That makes it slightly more doable, and intellectually, people like it very much. When you learn as a child you do it because, say, your mum makes you go to piano lessons. But when you make the conscious decision to learn as an adult you’re paying with your hard-earned cash and time.”

Then there is what Parham calls “the de-stressing element”. She cites one of her students, a banker, who travels constantly for his job but is learning a fiendishly difficult Schubert sonata. “Instead of reading endless emails on the plane, he’s downloaded the score onto his iPad and he studies that,” she says. “He loves it.” Gripped as we are by the supposed wonders of daily ‘mindfulness’ meditation – apparently even Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic is a fan – it’s intriguing that Rusbridger describes practising the piano in similar terms. On the mornings he plays before heading into the office, he notices an increased zing and focus for the rest of the day. “With other people it’s yoga or a run or a burst in the gym,” he writes. “Twenty minutes on the piano has the same effect for me. Once it’s in the bank I’m ready for more or less anything the day can throw at me. Without it, things are harder.”

This perceived magical effect is grounded in hard science. Ray Dolan, one of the many neuroscientists Rusbridger talked to in an attempt to understand what was happening to his brain during his Chopin year, explains that whenever Rusbridger plays the piano, his brain is liberated from the “explicit… over-representational mind” of his day job. That has advantages not just for his brain but for his body. He goes through the piano days calmer; everything benefits.

But perhaps above all else, there is the sheer joy of playing. My decision to get back to the piano was inspired in part by the lovely things that happened whenever I walked past one of the pianos that street artist Luke Jerram placed all over New York as part of his project Play Me, I’m Yours, launched in London in 2009 and so popular it was subsequently rolled out it in cities all over the globe. “The piano is such a great communal thing, such a great bringer together of people, even if you can only play the simplest thing,” Parham says. “It makes me sad that more people don’t get back to it as adults for the simple fear of not being good enough. They’d never think that about sport: people pick up a tennis racket or kick a football about even though they know they’re no Andy Murray or David Beckham. I’d like to start a campaign: just do it!”

why does music evoke memories? CAE/CPE COURSES

Why does music evoke memories?

Songs from the past can stir powerful emotions and transport us back in time. Tiffany Jenkins explores what happens in our brains when music carries us away.

Rhythm Is a Dancer’ is the song that does it for me.

It’s a tune by the German Eurodance group Snap!, that was played a lot one summer as I travelled across Europe. I hear just one refrain from it – “It's a soul companion/ You can feel it everywhere” – and the late nights and sandy beaches come immediately to mind. But were I deliberately to try and remember something particular from that holiday, without the music, I would recall nothing as immediate or emotional. This is an experience shared by everyone: hear a piece of music from decades later and you are transported back to that particular moment, like stepping into a time machine. You can feel everything as if you were actually there. The relationship between music and memory is powerful, and new research is hoping to discover how these memories work for therapeutic effect. It is already used to help dementia patients, the elderly, and for those suffering from depression.

Music has been an important mnemonic device for thousands of years. David C Rubin is a specialist in autobiographical memory and oral traditions and in his ground-breaking book Memory in Oral Traditions he explains how epic stories like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down verbally using poetic devices. Before the narratives could be written down, they were chanted or sung. Oral tradition depended on memory.

The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory and they take in a great deal of information every minute. Retrieving it is not always easy. It doesn’t simply come when you ask it to. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme and sometimes alliteration which helps to unlock that information with cues. It is the structure of the song that helps us to remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke.

The technique remains important today. Neuroscientists have analysed the brain mechanisms related to memory, finding that words set to music are the easiest to remember. Just think of one of the first songs you could well have sung: “A,B,C,D,E,F,G, come along and sing with me.” Text learnt to music is better remembered when it is heard as a song rather than speech. Try and remember anything set to a tune and your powers of recall will be stronger: “Now I’ve sung my ABC.”

All in the mind

There is a link then between music and memory, but why, when we hear a particular song, do we feel strong emotions rather than just being able to recite the lyrics? If I listen to Rhythm Is a Dancer, I recall the amazing feeling of travelling without my parents for the first time and all the fun I had as much as the  lines of the song, which I might add wasn’t one I cared for particularly − the lyrics are banal or just plain bad. "I'm as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer" was described by one critic as the ‘worst lyric of all time’ and yet it evokes profound feelings.

There are different kinds of memory, including explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is a deliberate, conscious retrieval of the past, often posed by questions like: where was I that summer? Who was I travelling with? Implicit memory is more a reactive, unintentional form of memory.

“A large part of memory takes place in the unconscious mind” Robert Snyder, a composer and chair of the sound programme at the Art Institute of Chicago, tells me. “There are aspects of memory that are remembered implicity, that is, outside of consciousness”. What’s more, he says, “implicit memory systems involve different parts of the brain than explicit memory systems”. It is the explicit memory systems that are damaged by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Implicit systems are robust in comparison. Snyder explains that “things that can affect us from outside of consciousness are often regarded as powerful”. In other words, implicit memory is emotional as well as durable.

Notably, memories stimulated by music often come from particular times in our lives. Classic hits take us back to our teenage years and our twenties, much more than songs of later years. Psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’. It may work this way because this is an especially important and exciting time in our lives, when we are experience things for the first time and when we become independent. Everything is new and meaningful. Later, life becomes a bit of a blur. Music evokes emotion, but the sound and feeling of it, while important ,don’t necessary define your feelings. A sad song could be associated with a happy time, a happy one with a sad one.

Soundtracks of our lives

It's often pop music that evokes memories from this time in our lives. Why? Well, for a start this music played in the background, whether we selected it or not. There is always something on the radio, in bars, clubs and bedrooms that is contemporary and is almost accidentally attached to a particular time. Pop music is also of the moment. Listen to popular music from the 1960s and 1970s, for example, and you think you know what that time sounded like. There is something more abstract about, say, western classical music, which has become more detached from its original time and may be harder to place.

Cretien van Campen, author of The Proust Effect: The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories researches the ways different senses act like the madeleine for the French author Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time when a bite of the sweet cake takes him back to his childhood with all its smells, colours and feelings. Much of Campen’s work studies the brain, but he makes an important observation about what happens outside of our heads. “Smell differs in that it is a personal memory, whereas there is something very social in our experience of music,” he points out. “Music memories are often shared with peers.” We listen, together. At a party, it is something that we hear whilst dancing or chatting to a friend. We go to concerts or gigs with one another. And it is because music is there as part of lives spent with others – often significant others – that helps make it especially meaningful. Indeed it is often played at or composed for significant occasions, like funerals or weddings, where we witness major life events. 

People who have suffered traumatic brain injuries will often have problems with memory. Music can help bring back some of those special moments of their lives that they have forgotten. Those suffering from dementia can trigger vivid memories by listening to music they heard when they were young. Campen also highlights its uses for those with depression. It can assist people to recall difficult parts of their lives that were not necessarily as bad as they had thought. “People who are depressed often feel as if there is a blanket over their lives”. Hearing music, and remembering various experiences, “can help them remember the more complex experiences.” It’s not that these are always positive, he notes, “but they may be more rounded.” Music cannot cure, but perhaps it can help heal.

Campen is optimistic about the future work: “People worry a lot today about forgetting and the problems with memory. But the beauty is today we are beginning to help with remembering.”  

For many, that will be music to their ears.

Consumption and Consumerism

An insight to the issue of compulsive buying disorder or better known as "shopaholic" from a global point of view: http://www.globalissues.org/print/issue/235

Pros and Cons of Merit Pay for Teachers (Debate) (CPE - CAE)

Here you are a brief article that deals with the issue of paying teachers according to their result in class: http://k6educators.about.com/od/assessmentandtesting/a/meritypay.htm

school start time

This is a very nice topic to debate in class: Should school start times suit students or viceversa? This issue is being dealt with in the U.S.A. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/08/28/education-school-start-times-your-say/14757747/.

Awkward Social Situation

A very funny webpage related to the topic we are dealing with this week: "Dramatic Events" (CAE and CPE classes). Visit this site, it well worths reading: http://www.buzzfeed.com/samjparker/9-awkward-life-moments-we-need-rules-for

HIGH TECH: CRIME OF THE FUTURE

NASA breach update: Stolen laptop had data on 10,000 users

Breached unencrypted laptop puts personal data of NASA employees and contractors at risk, spokesman says
Computerworld - Personally identifiable information of "at least" 10,000 NASA employees and contractors remains at risk of compromise following last month's theft of an agency laptop, a spokesman told Computerworld via email Thursday.

Agency employees had been told of the October 31 theft of a laptop containing the personal data from a locked car in an email message Tuesday from Richard Keegan Jr., associate deputy administrator at NASA.

In the email, Keegan told employees that the stolen laptop contained sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) on a large number of NASA employees, contractors and others. Unspecified NASA documents were also stolen from the car, he added.

"Although the laptop was password protected, it did not have whole disk encryption software, which means the information on the laptop could be accessible to unauthorized individuals," Keegan warned employees in the email.
Responding to questions from Computerworld today, NASA spokesman Allard Beutel acknowledged that agency waited nearly two weeks to publicly disclose the breach. He said that in the interim, NASA was working with law enforcement personnel to recover the laptop, and was working to determine exactly whose personal data was stored on it.

"NASA immediately began working with local law enforcement after the laptop was stolen, with the goal of recovering the computer and protecting the sensitive data," Beutel said in the agency's first public update since disclosing the theft to employees. "At the same time, NASA IT specialists and security officials began performing an exhaustive automated and manual analysis of the data to make sure everyone with information on the stolen laptop is notified."

The agency is currently in the process of notifying the victims of the breach, Beutel added.

The theft prompted questions about why personal data is stored on a laptop and why it wasn't encrypted.

The incident prompted an immediate agency-wide initiative to implement full disk encryption on all NASA laptops by Dec. 21, starting with those carried by teleworking employees.

Beutel said the laptop was stolen from a teleworking employee whose job responsibilities included reviewing personally identifiable information.

NASA does have rules stating that all individual files with PII should be encrypted, Beutel said.

However, he added, "The stolen computer was password protected, but some of the specific files were not encrypted as required by NASA policy. The hard drive also had not yet received the whole disk encryption software as part of the ongoing agency-wide effort."

Until all agency laptops are fully encrypted, NASA telecommuters must use encrypted loaner systems, Beutel said.

"Employees are being directed to review the information contained on their computers to ensure all sensitive information is appropriately encrypted at the file level, and to purge all unneeded sensitive files," he said.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233701/NASA_breach_update_Stolen_laptop_had_data_on_10_000_users?taxonomyId=82

Collective vs. Individualistic Societies ( Article from NY times)

This article corresponds to the topic of collectiveness on pages 122-123 (Unit 10) CAE-CPE

DAVID BROOKS    THE NEW YORK TIMES Collective vs. individualistic societies
August 14, 2008
CHENGDU, China
The world can be divided in many ways – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.
This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.
These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They're both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.
You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies – such as the United States or Britain – on one end, and the most collectivist societies – such as China or Japan – on the other.
The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.
Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you'd want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.
Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.
But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.
The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China's assertion that development doesn't come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.
The ceremony drew from China's long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one – drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We've seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present – a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China's miraculous growth.
If Asia's success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the Cold War), then it's unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.
For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on Earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.
Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.
The rise of China isn't only an economic event. It's a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American dream.
It's certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.

what is stress?

What is stress?

Stress is simply a fact of nature -- forces from the inside or outside world affecting the individual. The individual responds to stress in ways that affect the individual as well as their environment. Because of the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a negative experience, but from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, negative, or positive experience.

In general, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the physical environment, including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you're confronted with on a daily basis. Internal factors determine your body's ability to respond to, and deal with, the external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors which influence your ability to handle stress include your nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of sleep and rest you get.

Stress has driven evolutionary change (the development and natural selection of species over time). Thus, the species that adapted best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe.

  

Source: http://www.medicinenet.com/stress/article.htm#What_is_stress   

Silent movies. Modern Times by Charles Chaplin

Gross Domestic Product

More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product

Gross domestic product (GDP) refers to the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period. GDP per capita is often considered an indicator of a country's standard of living;^[2][3] GDP per capita is not a measure of personal income. See Standard of living and GDP.
It is not to be confused with Gross National Product (GNP) which allocates production based on ownership. Gross domestic product is related to national accounts, a subject in macroeconomics.

Components of GDP by expenditure

Components of U.S. GDP

GDP (Y) is a sum of Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Spending (G) and Net Exports (X – M).

Y = C + I + G + (X − M)

Here is a description of each GDP component:

• C (consumption) is normally the largest GDP component in the economy, consisting of private (household final consumption expenditure) in the economy. These personal expenditures fall under one of the following categories: durable goods, non-durable goods, and services. Examples include food, rent, jewelry, gasoline, and medical expenses but does not include the purchase of new housing.
• I (investment) includes, for instance, business investment in equipment, but does not include exchanges of existing assets. Examples include construction of a new mine, purchase of software, or purchase of machinery and equipment for a factory. Spending by households (not government) on new houses is also included in Investment. In contrast to its colloquial meaning, 'Investment' in GDP does not mean purchases of financial products. Buying financial products is classed as 'saving', as opposed to investment. This avoids double-counting: if one buys shares in a company, and the company uses the money received to buy plant, equipment, etc., the amount will be counted toward GDP when the company spends the money on those things; to also count it when one gives it to the company would be to count two times an amount that only corresponds to one group of products. Buying bonds or stocks is a swapping of deeds, a transfer of claims on future production, not directly an expenditure on products.
• G (government spending) is the sum of government expenditures on final goods and services. It includes salaries of public servants, purchase of weapons for the military, and any investment expenditure by a government. It does not include any transfer payments, such as social security or unemployment benefits.
• X (exports) represents gross exports. GDP captures the amount a country produces, including goods and services produced for other nations' consumption, therefore exports are added.
• M (imports) represents gross imports. Imports are subtracted since imported goods will be included in the terms G, I, or C, and must be deducted to avoid counting foreign supply as domestic.

A fully equivalent definition is that GDP (Y) is the sum of final consumption expenditure (FCE), gross capital formation (GCF), and net exports (X – M).

Y = FCE + GCF+ (X − M)

FCE can then be further broken down by three sectors (households, governments and non-profit institutions serving households) and GCF by five sectors (non-financial corporations, financial corporations, households, governments and non-profit institutions serving households). The advantage of this second definition is that expenditure is systematically broken down, firstly, by type of final use (final consumption or capital formation) and, secondly, by sectors making the expenditure, whereas the first definition partly follows a mixed delimitation concept by type of final use and sector.
Note that C, G, and I are expenditures on final goods and services; expenditures on intermediate goods and services do not count. (Intermediate goods and services are those used by businesses to produce other goods and services within the accounting year.^[7] )
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is responsible for calculating the national accounts in the United States, "In general, the source data for the expenditures components are considered more reliable than those for the income components [see income method, below]."^[8]

Where to keep your money

Where to keep your money

Most of us have heard stories about people keeping their money under the floorboards or in their mattress but this isn’t usually the best way to look after money. We need money to live our lives so it is important that we keep it somewhere that we can get hold of it but we also need to make sure it is safe.

People have worried about keeping their money safe throughout history. Rather than leaving it at home, the ancient Egyptians used to keep their gold in temples because they believed it would be safer. The temples were big, sturdy buildings that were never left unattended and they were also sacred, which meant it was less likely someone would steal from them.

Today, most of us choose to keep our money in banks or building societies. While we don’t see these as sacred they do have qualities similar to the ancient temples. Set up specifically to manage money, banks and building societies are considered safe places that are capable of keeping our money secure for us until we need it.  

What is the difference between 

a bank and a building society?

Banks
Banks are companies. They are usually listed on the stock market. This means that people and organisations can buy shares in banks. The shareholders own the banks but they don’t necessarily have accounts with them or use any of the other services that banks offer. Instead, the shares they have in banks are an investment. If the bank is successful financially, they will benefit from this success because the bank will pay them a dividend, which is a share of the earnings made by the company. So there is pressure on banks – and all other listed companies - to make money for their shareholders. If they don’t, their shareholders are likely to invest their money elsewhere.

Building societies
Building societies don’t have shareholders so they aren’t under the same pressure to make lots of money to pass on to them. Instead, building societies are mutual institutions. This means that most of the people who use their services are members of the building society who can vote on decisions that affect the society.

Building societies were first formed in the 18th century to help people save up to buy land so that they could build their own houses. They also lent money to people to help them buy their land sooner.  Later they began to accept savings deposits from people who did not necessarily want to buy houses. 

This all changed in the 1980s when the Government made some changes. It allowed banks to start lending mortgages and building societies to offer banking services.  Building societies were also able to demutualise if their members agreed, which meant they could change from building societies to banks. Many chose to do this and a number of the banks on our high streets today started off life as building societies.

The history of money (brief) for CPE-CAE's students

The history of money

As we have seen, money is basically a method of exchange, and coins and notes are just items of exchange. Tiny tools, axes and knives were used as items of exchange in China in the 10th century BC. Coins have been found in Lydia, now Turkey, dating from the 6th century BC. These quickly spread throughout the trading world as convenient items for barter and exchange.

Early coins were actually made of silver and copper and the metals were worth the value of the coin. In Athens in the 6th century BC there were silver coins and in China in the 4th century, copper coins were used.

These valuable coins had their disadvantages as people kept filing the sides for the precious metals!  To stop people doing this, governments used debased metals. Milled edges were introduced in Europe in the 17th century for the same reason, to stop people taking bits off the edge of the coin.

Paper money was introduced in China in the 9th century but didn't appear in Europe until the 16th century.

Paper money was issued as a promise note against deposits of gold, silver or money held in the bank.

If you look at a British bank note today, you'll see it still says:

I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds.

http://www.moneymatterstome.co.uk/1-What-Money-Is-and-Money-Exchange/Sub1/HistoryOfMoney.htm