No excuses please…
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The Cuckoo Clock.” From the movie, The Third Man.
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Public health experts have called for a ban on smoking in cars with children, free school meals for under 16s and chlamydia tests for all new students.
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Are your friends making you fat?
Dr Nicholas Christakis, a professor from Harvard, examined the power of social networks to influence our behaviour, and suggests that our actions are only partly determined by our own free will. Some of Dr Christakis’s theories seem obvious – the chances of becoming obese because we hang around with obese friends who like eating cake – but some are more surprising, including his findings that we may become obese just by knowing someone who knows someone who is fat. Read more here.
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Quote:
“If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticise it”. ~Author Unknown
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Snow – the great icebreaker
Helping each other still comes as naturally to the British as humour, buying birdseed or digging allotments, but snow melts us; that ice turns out to be the icebreaker that shows on the whole people love to help each other and are doing so most of the time, a point that goes almost unnoticed in our pessimistic account of society.
http://bit.ly/7B9uRR.
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30 ways to a better life
Business dragons, fitness trainers, psychologists, philosophers, style consultants, sex experts… Thirty gurus present bright ideas to help you make the most of 2010 http://bit.ly/8uz64n.
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And we wonder why…
It’s National Chip Week between 15 and 21 February and we’re being encouraged to gorge ourselves on French fries. And we wonder why we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic…
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Being grumpy lets us think more clearly, according to Joe Forgas from the University of New South Wales. In contrast, those annoying happy types who tell us to cheer up tend to make more mistakes because they’ll believe anything they’re told.
Professor Forgas found those in a bad mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts of events than those in a good mood. A series of experiments also backed up his findings that the grumpier we are, the more likely we are to get problems sorted out and make less errors.
‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,’ says Professor Forgas in the Australian Science Journal.
A sad person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain ‘promotes information processing strategies’, he says.
His experiments included asking people to judge the truth of urban myths after putting them into good or bad moods through watching films. Those in a bad mood made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.
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What makes a good leader?
Flexibility is power – researchers in cybernetics have found that the most powerful person in any group is invariably the most flexible. The individual who has the most ways of looking at things has the most choices, and hence the greatest possibility of controlling the outcome of any situation.
The best leaders are also confident. Leadership is just one of the many assets a successful manager must possess, but self-doubt makes managers more likely to be bullies. University of Southern California researchers found high rates of aggression in bosses who admitted to constantly worrying what others thought of them.
A manager also needs formal authority to be effective. For any quality initiative to take hold, management must be involved and act as a role model. This is an involvement that cannot be delegated. In some circumstances, leadership is not required. For example, self motivated groups may not require a single leader and may find leaders dominating. The fact that a leader is not always required proves that leadership is just an asset and is not essential.
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You are what you eat…
People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas. ~Author Unknown
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