Lube Stickers - Better TV Might Improve Kids' Behavior

Source - http://health.yahoo.net
By - DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - Imagination Print

Lube Stickers

Teaching parents to switch channels from violent shows to educational TV can improve preschoolers' behavior, even without getting them to watch less, a study found.

The results were modest and faded over time, but may hold promise for finding ways to help young children avoid aggressive, violent behavior, the study authors and other doctors said.

"It's not just about turning off the television. It's about changing the channel. What children watch is as important as how much they watch," said lead author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and researcher at Seattle Children's Research Institute.

The research was to be published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics.

The study involved 565 Seattle parents, who periodically filled out TV-watching diaries and questionnaires measuring their child's behavior.

Half were coached for six months on getting their 3-to-5-year-old kids to watch shows like "Sesame Street" and "Dora the Explorer" rather than more violent programs like "Power Rangers." The results were compared with kids whose parents who got advice on healthy eating instead.

At six months, children in both groups showed improved behavior, but there was a little bit more improvement in the group that was coached on their TV watching.

By one year, there was no meaningful difference between the two groups overall. Low-income boys appeared to get the most short-term benefit.

"That's important because they are at the greatest risk, both for being perpetrators of aggression in real life, but also being victims of aggression," Christakis said.

The study has some flaws. The parents weren't told the purpose of the study, but the authors concede they probably figured it out and that might have affected the results.

Before the study, the children averaged about 1½ hours of TV, video and computer game watching a day, with violent content making up about a quarter of that time. By the end of the study, that increased by up to 10 minutes. Those in the TV coaching group increased their time with positive shows; the healthy eating group watched more violent TV.

Nancy Jensen, who took part with her now 6-year-old daughter, said the study was a wake-up call.

"I didn't realize how much Elizabeth was watching and how much she was watching on her own," she said.

Jensen said her daughter's behavior improved after making changes, and she continues to control what Elizabeth and her 2-year-old brother, Joe, watch. She also decided to replace most of Elizabeth's TV time with games, art and outdoor fun.

During a recent visit to their Seattle home, the children seemed more interested in playing with blocks and running around outside than watching TV.

Another researcher who was not involved in this study but also focuses his work on kids and television commended Christakis for taking a look at the influence of positive TV programs, instead of focusing on the impact of violent TV.

"I think it's fabulous that people are looking on the positive side. Because no one's going to stop watching TV, we have to have viable alternatives for kids," said Dr. Michael Rich, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston.

Lube Stickers - The Word to Watch Out for on Fast Food Menus? Fresh

Source - http://shine.yahoo.com
By - Lylah M. Alphonse
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - Imagination Print

Lube Stickers

Just a few years ago, seeing the word "fresh" on a restaurant menu was a clue about the quality of ingredients. But now? Thanks to the fast-food industry, the word is mostly just a marketing term, and "fresh" doesn't mean much any more.

Related: The 5 Worst 'Healthy' Fast-Food Meals for Kids

"I think it's meaningless, almost, now," Mark Crumpacker, the chief marketing officer of Chipotle, told Slate. "I don't think there are any rules around 'fresh.' You can just say it with impunity. And I think lots of people do."

Consumers tend to assume that "fresh" also means "unprocessed" and "healthy," and restaurants are happy to play to that perception. McDonald's, for example, markets its salads as "Yummy, fresh, freedom in a bowl," but add a little protein and dressing and suddenly one crispy chicken salad (450 calories, 21 grams of fat) is about the same as a double cheeseburger (440 calories, 23 grams of fat). National chains tout their freshly made pizzas without focusing on how the ingredients are shipped to every outlet in a freezer truck. And while Chipotle's super-fresh food may be chock full of integrity, its burritos aren't very different, nutritionally, than Taco Bell's.

PHOTOS: Over the Top Fast Food Creations

"Fresh is a magic word in restaurant marketing today," says Aaron Allen of Global Restaurant Consulting. "It conjures the most positive associations for consumers. Americans are not yet ready to eat 'healthy,' but they will eat foods that are perceived as 'healthful.' Foods that are fresh are implied to be more healthful."

But the appropriation of the word "fresh" isn't new -- it's a trend that restaurant insiders identified years ago.

"Americans adore all things fresh: fresh beginnings, fresh outlooks and now, more than ever, fresh foods," Sara Wilson wrote at Entrepreneur in 2006. "Better-educated consumers are searching for fresh, unprocessed, healthy foods - and this dietary change is fueling what we predict will be the next big trend in franchising: fresh-food franchises."

The prediction was on target. A National Restaurant Association survey of 1,800 chefs found that on-site gardens, locally grown produce, and locally sourced meats and seafoods are three of the top 10 menu trends for 2013 and, for many diners, "local" is another way to say "fresh."

"Fresh" also crops up in descriptions of how food is prepared, where it's sourced, how long it's been sitting on a counter. It's become a kind of code for "superior," and that can refer to the menu item, the company that's selling it, or even the person who is buying it.

"In most ways, fresh has nothing to do with food at all," writes S.T. VanAirsdale at Slate. "It's become a convolution, tied up with manufactured images of authenticity, transparency, and even morality-the fleeting ecstasy of doing what consumers are persuaded to believe is the good, right thing."

Lube Stickers - How Facebook Briefly Killed The Internet

Source - http://mashable.com/
By - Christina Warren
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers

Lube Stickers

For a few minutes this evening, Facebook was redirecting users visiting dozens of websites — including Mashable — to cryptic error pages.

The reaction online was pretty much what you'd expect, with — as the The Next Web noted — hashtags like "Facebookmageddon" and "Facebocalypse" common amongst Twitter users.

So what happened, exactly? There was an issue with the Facebook Connect API that caused users on sites that use that API to redirect users to Facebook error page.

For example, if you were visiting Mashable and logged into our site using your Facebook account (and you were also signed into Facebook), you were automatically redirected to a page that looked like this:

Exiting the page or attempting to re-access the original site would lead to another redirect.

Sites such as The Huffington Post, Kayak, Hulu, The Daily Dot, Pinterest and hundreds of others were all impacted. The bug lasted less than 10 minutes.

In a statement, Facebook told Mashable: "For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites. The issue was quickly resolved and Login with Facebook is now working as usual."

The bug may have been brief, but it has highlighted just how many important websites use Facebook Connect for user authentication. Over the span of just a few years, Facebook logins have become so pervasive that they are nearly second nature. It also shows that if Facebook has an issue, it can affect more than just its site — it can also impact the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of sites that integrate with Facebook's APIs.

What's interesting is that a user didn't even need to be performing the action for the error — and hijacking — to occur. Instead, simply being logged into both places (and having the accounts linked) was enough to force users off of a third-party website and onto Facebook's error page.

Lube Stickers - Ribbon Makes It Easier to Buy and Sell Items on Facebook and Twitter

Source - http://mashable.com/
By - Seth Fiegerman
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers

Lube Stickers

Several startups have launched in the past year with the goal of helping businesses and individual sellers process payments on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now, one startup is going a step further by creating the first streamlined solution for payments across these and other social platforms.

Ribbon, a payments service, came out of stealth in November and unveiled a tool that lets sellers create a special link to a one-page checkout that can be copy and pasted directly into the Twitter news feed. Any Twitter user interested in purchasing the item can preview a description and video of it in the tweet and then click on the link to make the purchase. Ribbon handles the rest, including processing the payment for the seller and e-mailing a receipt to the customer.

On Tuesday, Ribbon introduced a similar option for processing payments in the Facebook news feed. As with the Twitter option, sellers just paste the Ribbon link into a Facebook post and it will direct customers straight to the checkout page where they can purchase the item with one click The startup plans to roll out this feature for YouTube next and hopes to expand it to other social networks like Pinterest in the future. 

The big selling point for Ribbon's service is that sellers can copy and paste the same link into posts on any of these social networks and it will automatically customize the checkout experience.

"The idea is to make buying and selling frictionless so that it happens on whatever platform the user is already on, rather than pushing him somewhere else and losing him," Hany Rashwan, Ribbon's co-founder and CEO, told Mashable. "All you do as a seller is just copy and paste."

Since the service launched publicly last year, Hany says it has attracted sellers ranging from musicians selling songs and tickets to Etsy and Craigslist users selling physical goods. While Hany says his company isn't directly competing against these websites, he admits that part of the goal of Ribbon is to "cut your middle man out and sell directly to your fans and followers through your own channels."

Ribbon, as it exists today, is a bit different than the original plan Hany had for the company. When Hany was first accepted into the AngelPad startup accelerator program in the fall of 2011, the goal was to build a "simpler version of Shopify," an ecommerce platform that lets users create their own online stores. After a few months, though, Hany and his team shifted to focus on the problem that others like Soldsie and Chirpify have attempted to solve: how to monetize your following on various websites. As Hany puts it, "The problem is I've cultivated an online following on Twitter, or on my own website, but I'm not empowered to monetize my own users."

Ribbon announced this week that it has raised a $1.6 million seed round led by Draper Associates to solve that problem. This is on top of the $120,000 that Ribbon raised through AngelPad. 

The startup generates revenue by taking a 5% cut of every purchase and charging a $0.30 fee per transaction.

Lube Stickers - Astronauts Will Watch the Super Bowl from Space

Source - http://mashable.com/
By - Tariq Malik
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers

Lube Stickers

Six astronauts living in space may not have gravity, fresh food or a shower, but there is one Earth necessity they won't miss Sunday: They're going to watch the Super Bowl.

NASA's Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston will beam the Super Bowl XLVII showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens live to the International Space Station so its astronaut crew can watch the big game along with every other football fan on Earth.

"Yes they are going to watch it this weekend," NASA spokesman Josh Byerly told SPACE.com in an email. Byerly said Mission Control made a special point on Friday (Feb. 1) of asking the station astronauts if they wanted to catch the game.

"And they said they definitely wanted to see it," Byerly said.

The space station is currently home to two American astronauts (commander Kevin Ford and flight engineer Tom Marshburn), Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Russian cosmonauts Evgeny Tarelkin, Oleg Novitskiy and Roman Romanenko. Together they make up the station's Expedition 34 team. 

Whether the space station crew will throw a traditional Super Bowl party, hold a zero-gravity football game, or just float around with the game on in the background is unknown. But the International Space Station, is just about the same size (tip to tip) as the football field the 49ers and Ravens will play on in New Orleans during Sunday's game.

Space travel seems to be taking a spotlight in the Super Bowl this year.

Car manufacturer Kia will debut its new "Space Babies" TV commercial for the Kia Sorento, in which a father tells his son that all babies (even animal tots) actually come from the alien planet Babylandia, and launch on epic space mission in order to reach their parents on Earth.

Just after the Super Bowl, the AXE personal care products company is expected to unveil the first winner of its AXE Apollo Space Academy contest to launch 22 people on private trips to space. The contest was announced in January, with AXE teaming up with XCOR Aerospace — builder of the private suborbital space plane Lynx — and cosmic tourism firm Space Expedition Curacao to offer the trips.

The other 21 winners from the AXE Apollo Space Academy are slated to be selected after a final competition — the AXE Global Space Camp — to be held in Orlando, Fla. The winners will then be launched into space, one at a time, once XCOR's Lynx space plane begins operational flights with Space Expedition Curacao, contest organizers said.

The contest is open to both men and women in more than 60 countries. Entrants must sign up at the AXE Apollo Space Academy website (AXEApollo.com) and write about why they should fly in space. Website visitors will then vote on the entries. The deadline to enter is Feb. 3 (Super Bowl Sunday).

Photo via iStockphoto, Scibak and CBS Sports. Composite by Mashable/Charlie White

• How to See a Cosmic Bunny and Dove in Night Sky
• Space Babies Blast Off in Super Bowl Ad (Video)
• Secret Space Plane Revealed in Flight: Amateur Video
• Wow! NASA Photos Capture Dazzling Nighttime Rocket Launch

Lube Stickers - Identity of Famous 19th-Century Brain Discovered

Source - http://news.yahoo.com/
By - Tia Ghose
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers

Lube Stickers

The identity of a mysterious patient who helped scientists pinpoint the brain region responsible for language has been discovered, researchers report.

The new finding, detailed in the January issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, identifies the famous patient as Monsieur Louis Leborgne, a French craftsman who battled epilepsy his entire life.

Wordless patient

In 1840, a wordless patient was admitted to the Bicêtre Hospital outside Paris for  aphasia, or an inability to speak. He was essentially just kept there, slowly deteriorating. It wasn't until 1861 that the man, who came to be known as Monsieur Leborgne, or "Tan," for his only spoken word, came to the famous physician Paul Broca's ward at the hospital.

Shortly after the meeting, Leborgne died, and Broca performed his autopsy. During the autopsy, Broca found a lesion in a region of the brain tucked back and up behind the eyes. 

Paradigm shift

After doing a detailed examination, Broca concluded that Tan's aphasia was caused by damage to this region, and that the particular brain region controlled speech. That region of the brain was later renamed Broca's area in honor of the doctor.

At the time, scientists were debating whether specific areas of the brain performed specific functions, or whether it was an undifferentiated lump that did one task, like the liver, said Marjorie Lorch, a neurolinguist at Birkbeck, University of London, who was not involved in the study.

"Tan was the first patient whose case proved that damage to a specific part of the brain causes specific speech disorders," said study author Cezary Domanski, a medical historian at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland.

Life reconstructed

Yet Tan's identity remained shrouded in mystery. Most historians believed he was a poor, illiterate laborer, while others said he had gone mad from syphilis and that madness could explain his inability to speak. To discover just who he was, Domanski began to retrace the man's history.

"It was a challenge, for 150 years no one could even determine the name of the man —the same man whose brain is exhibited in a museum and shown in many books," Domanski wrote in an email.

But looking through the old medical records, he finally uncovered a death certificate for Louis Victor Leborgne, who was born in 1809 in Moret, France.

Domanski then used archival records to discover that Louis Leborgne was one of seven children of a teacher (his father) and his wife, and that his siblings were educated. He moved to Paris as a child.

Leborgne had apparently suffered epilepsy from childhood. But despite his seizures, he grew up to be a craftsman and a church keeper, and worked there until he was 30 years old, when he lost the ability to speak and was taken to the hospital. Epilepsy likely caused the damage that took away Leborgne's power of speech.

In the hospital, his condition worsened and he eventually became paralyzed and bedridden, and underwent surgery for gangrene. He was dying when Broca first encountered him.

The new discovery gives a very human identity to one of the medical textbooks' most famous cases, Lorch told LiveScience.

"Language, because it was viewed at that time in Europe as a God-given ability in humans, it was considered part of the soul and therefore not material," Lorch said. "This case was the case that really established the whole area of research on functional organization of the brain."

Lube Stickers - World unemployment figures set to rise in 2013, claims UN labour agency

Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk
By - Press Release
Category - Lube Stickers
Posted By - http://tinyurl.com/LubeStickers

Lube Stickers

A record 202 million people could be unemployed across the world in 2013, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said on Tuesday.

Five years on from the onset of the financial crisis, unemployment is on the rise again as economies around the world lose jobs and the fragile recovery is threatened by "incoherent monetary policy" in the US and Europe, said the ILO.

According to United Nation's agency's latest report, Global Employment Trends 2013, 6% of the world's workforce were without a job in 2012. The number of jobless people around the world rose by 4m in 2012 to 197m. Young people were the worst affected: nearly 13% of those under 24 were unemployed. Some 35% of all young unemployed people have been out of work for six months or longer in advanced economies, up from 28.5% in 2007.

"This is a massive waste of the lives of young people and their talents and extraordinarily damaging to the people themselves and their societies even if stability were not to be affected," said ILO chief Guy Ryder.

The situation is being exacerbated by "incoherent monetary policy," in the world's largest economies (the G20), said the ILO. "In comparison with the crisis years of 2008 and 2009, the stance of monetary and fiscal policies in G20 countries has lost coherence, thereby increasing uncertainty and limiting policy effectiveness to support the recovery," said the report.

The global economy is expected to show a modest gain in 2013, with output up 3.6% compared to 3.3% in 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. But this fragile recovery is threatened by political uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic that threatens recovery worldwide, said the ILO.

In the US, the recovery is being challenged by negotiations over the debt ceiling, and spending cuts associated with the fiscal cliff. In Europe, a modest recovery is dependent on the ability of political leaders to "establish credible policies to promote fiscal integration of Euro-area economies".

"Incoherence between monetary and fiscal policies adopted in different countries and a piecemeal approach to financial sector and sovereign debt problems, in particular in the euro area, have led to uncertainty weighing on the global outlook," said the report.

"Investment has not yet recovered to pre-crisis levels in many countries. The indecision of policymakers in several countries has led to uncertainty about future conditions, and reinforced corporate tendencies to increase cash holdings or pay dividends rather than expand capacity and hire new workers."

The world's advanced economies were the epicenter for the financial crisis and have been the hardest hit, accounting for half of the total increase in unemployment of 28 million since the onset of the crisis.

But developing economies are now being hit by the double dip in some of the world's advanced economies, said the ILO. Advanced economies lost another 1m jobs in 2012, while 3m were lost in other regions, especially hard hit were east Asia, south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.