Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/166075442?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, November 24, 2011
Giving thanks helps your psychological outlook (AP)
WASHINGTON ? Count your blessings this Thanksgiving. It's good for you.
While it seems pretty obvious that gratitude is a positive emotion, psychologists for decades rarely delved into the science of giving thanks. But in the last several years they have, learning in many experiments that it is one of humanity's most powerful emotions. It makes you happier and can change your attitude about life, like an emotional reset button.
Especially in hard times, like these.
Beyond proving that being grateful helps you, psychologists also are trying to figure out the brain chemistry behind gratitude and the best ways of showing it.
"Oprah was right," said University of Miami psychology professor Michael McCullough, who has studied people who are asked to be regularly thankful. "When you are stopping and counting your blessings, you are sort of hijacking your emotional system."
And he means hijacking it from out of a funk into a good place. A very good place. Research by McCullough and others finds that giving thanks is a potent emotion that feeds on itself, almost the equivalent of being victorious. It could be called a vicious circle, but it's anything but vicious.
He said psychologists used to underestimate the strength of simple gratitude: "It does make people happier ... It's that incredible feeling."
One of the reasons why gratitude works so well is that it connects us with others, McCullough said. That's why when you give thanks it should be more heartfelt and personal instead of a terse thank you note for a gift or a hastily run-through grace before dinner, psychologists say.
Chicago area psychologist and self-help book author Maryann Troiani said she starts getting clients on gratitude gradually, sometimes just by limiting their complaints to two whines a session. Then she eventually gets them to log good things that happened to them in gratitude journals: "Gratitude really changes your attitude and your outlook on life."
Gratitude journals or diaries, in which people list weekly or nightly what they are thankful for, are becoming regular therapy tools.
And in those journals, it is important to focus more on the people you are grateful for, said Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis. Concentrate on what life would be without the good things ? especially people such as spouses ? in your life and how you are grateful they are there, he said.
Grateful people "feel more alert, alive, interested, enthusiastic. They also feel more connected to others," said Emmons, who has written two books on the science of gratitude and often studies the effects of those gratitude diaries.
"Gratitude also serves as a stress buffer," Emmons said in an e-mail interview. "Grateful people are less likely to experience envy, anger, resentment, regret and other unpleasant states that produce stress."
Scientists are not just looking at the emotions behind gratitude but the nuts-and-bolts physiology as well.
Preliminary theories look at the brain chemistry and hormones in the blood and neurotransmitters in the brain that are connected to feelings of gratitude, Emmons said. And the left prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is also associated with positive emotions like love and compassion, seems to be a key spot, especially in Buddhist monks, Emmons said.
However it works in the brain, Emmons said there is little doubt that it works.
Emmons, who has conducted several studies on people from ages 12 to 80, including those with neuromuscular disease, asked volunteers to keep daily or weekly gratitude diaries. Another group listed hassles, and others just recorded random events. He noticed a significant and consistent difference. About three-quarters of the people studied who regularly counted their blessings scored higher in happiness tests and some even showed improvements in amounts of sleep and exercise.
Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan studied different gratitude methods and found the biggest immediate improvement in happiness scores was among people who were given one week to write and deliver in person a letter of gratitude to someone who had been especially kind to them, but was never thanked. That emotional health boost was large, but it didn't last over the weeks and months to come.
Peterson also asked people to write down nightly three things that went well that day and why that went well. That took longer to show any difference in happiness scores over control groups, but after one month the results were significantly better and they stayed better through six months.
Peterson said it worked so well that he is adopted it in his daily life, writing from-the-heart thank you notes, logging his feelings of gratitude: "It was very beneficial for me. I was much more cheerful."
At the University of North Carolina, Sara Algoe studied the interaction between cancer patients and their support group, especially when acts of gratitude were made. Like Peterson, she saw the effects last well over a month and she saw the feedback cycle that McCullough described.
"It must be really powerful," Algoe said.
It has to be potent to combat gloom many may be feeling in such uncertain times.
There have been many Thanksgivings throughout history that might challenge society's ability to be grateful. The first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims came after about half of the Plymouth colony died in the first year. Thanksgiving became a national holiday in the United States when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it in 1863 during the Civil War, the deadliest war the country has ever known. And the holiday moved to the fourth Thursday in November during the tail end of the Great Depression.
Emmons actually encourages people to "think of your worst moments, your sorrows, your losses, your sadness and then remember that here you are, able to remember them. You got through the worst day of your life ... remember the bad things, then look to see where you are."
That grace amid difficulty motif may make this Thanksgiving especially meaningful, McCullough said.
"In order to be grateful for something, we have to remember that something good happened," Peterson said. "It's important to remind ourselves that the world doesn't always suck."
___
Online:
Robert Emmons: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons/PWT/index.cfm
National Association of School Psychologists' tips on fostering gratitude in children: http://bit.ly/rHlqCz
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Verlander wins AL MVP, 1st starter in 25 years
FILE - In this July 5, 2011 file photo, Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander works against the Los Angeles Angels during the first inning of a baseball game in Anaheim, Calif. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Gallardo, File)
FILE - In this July 5, 2011 file photo, Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander works against the Los Angeles Angels during the first inning of a baseball game in Anaheim, Calif. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Gallardo, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 13, 2011, file photo, Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander reacts after the final out in the sixth inning in Game 5 of baseball's American League championship series against the Texas Rangers in Detroit. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 13, 2011, file photo, Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander reacts after the final out in the sixth inning in Game 5 of baseball's American League championship series against the Texas Rangers in Detroit. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)
FILE - In this July 5, 2011 file photo, Detroit Tigers starting pitcher Justin Verlander works against the Los Angeles Angels during the first inning of a baseball game in Anaheim, Calif. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Alex Gallardo, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 12, 2011 file photo, Detroit Tigers' Justin Verlander smiles during a news conference before Game 4 of baseball's American League championship series against the Texas Rangers, in Detroit. Verlander won the American League MVP Award in voting announced Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. (AP Photo/Duane Burleson, File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Justin Verlander figured time had run out on his chance to become the first starting pitcher in a quarter-century to be voted Most Valuable Player.
Last Tuesday, he found out about 12:40 p.m. that he was a unanimous winner of the AL Cy Young Award. It was closing in on 1 p.m. Monday, and he still hadn't gotten word on the MVP.
"I had told myself that it wasn't going to happen," he said. "I figured somebody else got the call."
Not to worry, there was just a slight delay because Verlander didn't give the Baseball Writers' Association of America his telephone number, forcing the BBWAA to relay the news through Brian Britten, the Detroit Tigers' director of media relations.
Britten telephoned Verlander at 12:56 p.m., about one hour before the announcement.
"It was just a weight off my shoulders," Verlander said, "and pure elation, really."
After winning the AL's pitching triple crown by going 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and 250 strikeouts, Verlander received 13 of 28 first-place votes and 280 points. He became the first pitcher voted MVP since Oakland's Dennis Eckersley in 1992 and the first starting pitcher since Boston's Roger Clemens in 1986.
"Obviously pitchers are not just written off all of a sudden because they're pitchers," Verlander said.
Boston center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury was second with four firsts and 242 points, followed by Toronto right fielder Jose Bautista with five firsts and 231 points, Yankees center fielder Curtis Granderson with 215 and Detroit first baseman Miguel Cabrera with 193.
Recent history has been against pitchers. Since Eckersley's win, only once had a pitcher finished as high as second.
In 1999, Boston's Pedro Martinez was 13 points behind Texas catcher Ivan Rodriguez after going 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts. Martinez had eight first-place votes to seven for Rodriguez, but La Velle Neal of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and George King of the New York Post left Martinez off their ballots.
"Not even in my wildest dreams had I thought of this," Verlander said during a conference call from his home in Virginia. "I want to say this is a dream come true. I can't say that because my dream had already had come true ... to win a Cy Young. And the next dream is to win a World Series. This wasn't even on my radar until the talk started. And then all of a sudden it was a this-could-actually-happen type of thing."
Verlander had the most wins in the major leagues since Oakland's Bob Welch went 27-6 in 1990. Verlander pitched his second career no-hitter at Toronto on May 7. His season reopened debate over whether pitchers can be MVPs.
"I think that a starting pitcher has to do something special to be as valuable or more so than a position player," Verlander said. "Obviously, having the chance to play in 160-some games in the case of Miguel, they can obviously have a huge impact every day. That's why, I've talked about on my day, on a pitcher's day, the impact we have is tremendous on that game. So you have to have a great impact almost every time out to supersede (position players) and it happens on rare occasions, and I guess this year was one of those years."
Verlander, the 2006 AL Rookie of the Year, joined the Brooklyn Dodgers' Don Newcombe as the only players to win all three major awards in their careers.
"I think this set a precedent," Verlander said. "I'm happy that the voters acknowledged that, that we do have a major impact in this game and we can be extremely valuable to our team and its success."
Verlander appeared on only 27 ballots and was omitted by Jim Ingraham of The Herald-News in Ohio, who voted Bautista first. Sheldon Ocker of the Akron Beacon Journal voted Verlander eighth.
Ingraham doesn't think pitchers should be eligible.
"I'd wrestled with this for a long time. If I was ever going to vote for pitcher for MVP, it would be him this year," Ingraham said. "He hasn't appeared in 79 percent of their games, any starting pitcher really doesn't appear in 79 percent of his team's games in a year.
"Would you vote for an NFL quarterback for MVP if he only appeared in three of his team's 16 games, which would be 21 percent? So that's part of it. Another part of it is I think they're apples and oranges. The guys that are in there every day, there's a grind to a season that a starting pitcher doesn't, I don't think, experience the way the everyday position players do playing 150, 160 games."
Other pitchers to win MVP and Cy Young in the same year are Newcombe (1956), Los Angeles' Sandy Koufax (1963), St. Louis' Bob Gibson and Detroit's Denny McLain (1968), Oakland's Vida Blue (1971), Milwaukee's Rollie Fingers (1981) and Detroit's Willie Hernandez (1984).
Since Mickey Cochrane (1934), Hank Greenberg (1935, 1940) and Charley Gehringer (1937), all Tigers voted MVP have been pitchers, with Verlander joining Hal Newhouser (1944 and 1945), McLain and Hernandez.
"He deserved it," Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski said. "He should have won it, but I didn't know how voters would respond because the talk of some people not wanting to vote for a pitcher."
NOTES: While Verlander earned a $500,000 bonus for winning the Cy Young, he didn't have an MVP bonus provision. Tampa's Evan Longoria receives $25,000 for finishing 10th. ... The NL MVP winner will be announced Tuesday, with the Los Angeles Dodgers' Matt Kemp the favorite and Milwaukee's Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder also receiving attention.
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Darren Bent and Kasabian's Tom Meighan stage real-life football match with Xperia Play
Sony Ericsson has joined forced with Aston Villa's Darren Bent and rock band Kasabian to stage a slightly bizarre (and completely awesome) real-life soccer football match using Xperia Play handsets, location tracking technology and ten real live human beings. The five-a-side match saw England international Bent face off against Kasabian frontman Tom Meighan, with both controlling their teams from on high with specially modified Xperia Plays.
While you probably won't be able to command real, actual footballers using your Xperia Play anytime soon, SE is using this opportunity to remind everyone that Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 and FIFA 12 are both available (and optimized) for the device, with the latter being an Xperia Play exclusive until February 2012.
We've got video after the jump.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/iSGFVm0eqBQ/story01.htm
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Groupon's shares fall below IPO price
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Groupon Inc.'s stock fell below its initial public offering price for the first time as investors reassess the challenges facing the still-unprofitable online deals company in a shaky economy.
The shares plunged $2.79, or 14 percent, to $17.28 in early afternoon trading Wednesday, below Groupon's IPO price of $20, which was set less than three weeks ago. The rapid fall from Wall Street's graces occurred almost entirely this week. Groupon has shed one-third of its market value since the end of last week to wipe out nearly $6 billion in shareholder wealth.
Congress' inability to reach an agreement on how to reduce the U.S. deficit has raised the specter of automatic cuts and tax increases, which would increase the risk of the economy falling into another recession. That reduces Wall Street's appetite for risky investments such as Groupon, which is facing increasing competition in the rapidly growing niche of online advertising that it pioneered.
The decline also has been deepened by a skeptical class of investors, known as short sellers, who bet that certain stocks are going to slide. They do this by borrowing shares that they immediately sell, hoping they can repay the stock by buying at a cheaper price later.
Groupon gets local merchants to offer steep discounts to large clusters of consumers, a concept that turned it into one of the world's fastest growing companies. Founded in 2008, Groupon is on pace to generate more than $1.5 billion in revenue this year, primarily from the commissions it gets from deals sold. Google Inc., which runs the Internet's largest advertising network, had annual revenue of just $86 million at the same stage of its existence.
Unlike Google, though, Groupon has been amassing huge losses as it tries to expand and ward off threats from hordes of copycats. The competition includes Google and another Internet powerhouse, Amazon.com Inc., which is backing a startup deals company called LivingSocial.
Through the first nine months of this year, Groupon lost $308 million, partly because its payroll swelled to more than 10,400 employees to help persuade local merchants to offer deals. Groupon's losses and massive work force provide another stark contrast to how Google went about its business as it was starting out. After three years, Google eked out a $7 million profit and had fewer than 300 employees.
As it prepared its initial public offering of stock, Groupon tried to sugarcoat the losses by emphasizing an accounting approach that securities regulators eventually required the company to abandon.
Meanwhile, some merchants have become increasingly skeptical that partnering with Groupon and similar services is really a deal for them. Groupon takes up to half the price of the coupon, so if an Italian restaurant is offering $50 worth of food for $25, the merchant gets just $12.50. Merchants can make the money back if the coupon draws a customer who keeps returning and brings friends, but some businesses complain that bargain hunters rarely come back after scoring a cheap meal or massage. Other businesses, though, see Groupon as good marketing ? a way to reach troves of new, social media-savvy customers who share good deals with friends on Facebook and Twitter.
Despite the red flags hovering over the company, Groupon's rapid growth tantalized enough investors to turn its IPO into a success. After the IPO was priced at $20, the company's stock soared as high as $31.14 in its stock market debut on Nov. 4. All of those gains have evaporated in just 14 trading days.
What's happened to Groupon's stock serves as a cautionary tale to anyone thinking about investing in a hot company in its early stages on the market. The trading in stocks following an IPO is prone to wild swings that can upset portfolios ? and investors' stomachs.
Groupon isn't the only example of this volatility. For instance, Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc. went public in June at $16 per share and then saw its stock climb in its debut. The shares are now trading below $11. After online professional networking service LinkedIn Corp. priced its IPO at $45 in May, its shares soared above $100. The stock is now trading at about $65.
The phenomenon isn't limited to Internet companies. Automobile maker General Motors Co. emerged from bankruptcy protection with an IPO priced at $33 a year ago, and its stock price is now hovering at about $20.
Some IPOs maintain an upward trajectory. Google's stock has never come close to returning to its IPO price of $85 in 2004. A year after Google went public, its stock price stood at $280. On Wednesday, it was above $570.
Groupon, which is based in Chicago, declined to comment on the stock price drop. It is still in a federally mandated "quiet" period that surrounds IPOs.
___
AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in New York contributed to this report.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Hugh Grant confronts press at hacking hearing
LONDON?? British celebrity Hugh Grant and the parents of a murdered schoolgirl confronted their tabloid tormentors on Monday, testifying at a public inquiry into phone hacking and British newspaper standards.
For the first time, Grant implicated a newspaper not owned by Rupert Murdoch in the wrongdoing ? British tabloid The Mail on Sunday. He claimed his phone was hacked by the paper in 2007.
He also criticized The Daily Mail, the weekday sister of The Mail on Sunday, for its coverage of the recent announcement of the birth of his daughter, saying it had paid a former lover of the girl's mother $150,000 (125,000 GBP) to obtain private pictures of her.?
The inquiry, headed by senior judge Brian Leveson and due to last a year, will make recommendations that could have a lasting impact on the media industry, possibly leading to tighter rules or at least an overhaul of the current system of self-regulation.
Earlier on Monday, Sally and Bob Dowler, the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose phone was hacked by one of Murdoch's UK newspapers, spoke about the heartbreak caused by the hacking.
Mrs. Dowler recounted the false hope caused by hackers who had deleted the teenager's voicemail messages, giving the impression she was still alive and using her mobile phone.
She said: "At first we were able to leave messages and then her voicemail became full.. so I was used to hearing that. We'd gone ... to look at ... CCTV and I rang her phone and it clicked through on to her voicemail and I just jumped and said: 'She's picked up her voicemails Bob, she's alive'."
She also said she did not sleep for three nights after learning of the phone hacking in July.
Story: Phone-hacking scandal: James Murdoch insists he didn't mislead British lawmakersLast Wednesday, the lawyer representing 51 clients who say they have suffered at the hands of the press delivered a withering critique of newspapers which he said had resorted to unacceptable, "tawdry" tactics to find exclusives.
Three of those he represents say they believed papers' hounding had contributed to family members committing suicide or attempting to kill themselves.
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"When people talk of public interest in exposing the private lives of well-known people or those close to them, this is the real, brutally real impact which this kind of journalism has," lawyer David Sherborne said.
All were targeted to get stories to make money for the papers, he told the inquiry. "That's why it was done: to sell newspapers. Not to detect crime or to expose wrongdoing, not to protect society or for the public good."
Most of the focus of the inquiry so far has fallen on News International, the British arm of News Corp, whose lawyer has admitted that phone-hacking was widespread until 2007, when one reporter was jailed, and possibly beyond.
However, Sherborne has made it clear that it is all papers' activities that deserve to be scrutinized and reformed.
Video: Phone hacking scandal puts heat back on James Murdoch (on this page)Lawyers for Britain's major newspaper groups have already pleaded for the essence of that system to remain and said that the press actually needed more freedom to expose wrongdoing.
"I want this inquiry to mean something," Leveson said. "I am ... very concerned that it should not simply form a footnote in some professor of journalism's analysis of the history of the 21st century while it gathers dust."
Central to discussions will be what constitutes public interest, and whether paying for so-called "kiss and tell" stories about well-known figures private and sex lives could be justified.
Sherborne said the majority of Britons saw no reason for phone-hacking or similar "what is called news-gathering".
"What the public are interested in, in the first sense, sells more newspapers: celebrity gossip, generally tittle-tattle," he said. "What the public have a genuine interest in knowing about: drug trials, what goes on in Europe with the Central Bank and so on, mostly doesn't."
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45383308/ns/world_news-europe/
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4.74 ? Facebook Wins By Getting Us Closer Than Six Degrees
Facebook users are getting more connected to each other as the service grows older, according to a new study by the company's data team and the University of Milan. Instead of the traditional "six degrees of separation" that researchers have historically observed between all people in the world (and Kevin Bacon), the number of degrees has been dropping since 2008 on the site, from 5.28 then to 4.74 now. This isn't just an interesting factoid about the modern world, it highlights Facebook's long-term strategy, and its dominant market position in social networking. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed for years that his goal is to make the world more "open and connected." In practice, that's meant features across the site that do things like reveal what friends you have in common with any other user, and suggest that you become friends with people you've never met in person.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wGnlIOWy-JQ/
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