Happy only by watching TV maybe?=
Unhappy People Watch Lots More TVBy Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
Unhappy people glue themselves to the television 30 percent more than happy people.
The finding, announced on Thursday, comes from a survey of nearly 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006 as part of the General Social Survey.
While happy people reported watching an average of 19 hours of television per week, unhappy people reported 25 hours a week. The results held even after taking into account education, income, age and marital status.
In addition, happy individuals were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read a newspaper more often than their less-chipper counterparts.
The researchers are not sure, though, whether unhappiness leads to more television-watching or more viewing leads to unhappiness.
In fact, people say they like watching television: Past research has shown that when people watch television they enjoy it. In these studies, participants reported that on a scale from 0 (dislike) to 10 (greatly enjoy), TV-watching was nearly an 8.
But perhaps the high from watching television doesn't last.
"These conflicting data suggest that TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise," said researcher John Robinson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park.
In this scenario, even the happiest campers could turn into Debbie-downers if they continue to stare at the boob-tube. The researchers suggest that over time, television-viewing could push out other activities that do have more lasting benefits. Exercise and sex come to mind, as do parties and other forms of socialization known to have psychological benefits.
Or, maybe television is simply a refuge for people who are already unhappy.
"TV is not judgmental nor difficult, so people with few social skills or resources for other activities can engage in it," Robinson and UM colleague Steven Martin write in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.
They add, "Furthermore, chronic unhappiness can be socially and personally debilitating and can interfere with work and most social and personal activities, but even the unhappiest people can click a remote and be passively entertained by a TV."
The researchers say follow-up studies are needed to tease out the relationship between television and happiness.
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google [creative labs places emphasis on consumers needs]by Simon Canning
THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.
Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.
Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.
"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.
"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."
He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.
He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.
But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.
"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.
At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."
The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.
"It's an interesting question," Smith says.
"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.
"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organization that has always done that and been very successful at it.
"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."
Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.
Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.
Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.
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Woman Addicted to Surgery Injects Oil Into Her FaceHang Mioku, who had her first plastic surgery at the age of 28, is a cosmetic surgery addict who has let her obsession with surgeries ruin her life.
After her first plastic surgery, her addiction led her to Japan where she received additional operations on her face, which eventually became enlarged and deformed.
Eventually the surgeons she was visiting told her that they would no longer perform operations on her and suggested she seek help for her addiction.
Upon, returning home to Korea, Mioku was so deformed that her own family could no longer recognize her.
After searching for someone who would perform more surgeries on here, she found a local Korean doctor who provided her with silicone, which she would self inject into her face with a needle.
Mioku was so addicted to plastic surgery, she would even inject cooking oil into her face when the silicone supply ran out.
Recently, Mioku was featured on a Korean TV show for her addiction and deformities. Many viewers sent in money to help her get additional surgeries to help reduce the size of her face.
Having seen the error in her decisions, Mioku only wishes she could go back and have her original face back.
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Public release date: 17-Nov-2008
Contact: Dr. Mark Huebener - mark@neuro.mpg.de - Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Forgotten but not gone -- how the brain takes care of thingsThanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new? Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten. (Nature, November 12, 2008).
While an insect still flings itself against the window-pane after dozens of unsuccessful attempts to gain its freedom, our brain is able to learn very complex associations and sequences of movement. This not only helps us to avoid accidents like walking into glass doors, but also enables us to acquire such diverse skills as riding a bicycle, skiing, speaking different languages or playing an instrument. Although a young brain learns more easily, we retain our ability to learn up to an advanced age. For a long time, scientists have been trying to ascertain exactly what happens in the brain while we learn or forget.
Flexible connections
To learn something, in other words, to successfully process new information, nerve cells make new connections with each other. When faced with an unprecedented piece of information, for which no processing pathway yet exists, filigree appendages begin to grow from the activated nerve cell towards its neighbors. Whenever a special point of contact, called synapse, forms at the end of the appendage, information can be transferred from one cell to the next - and new information is learned. Once the contact breaks down, we forget what we have learned.
The subtle difference between learning and relearning
Although learning and memory were recently shown to be linked to the changes in brain structure mentioned above, many questions still remain unanswered. What happens, for example, when the brain learns something, forgets it after a while and then has to learn it again later? By way of example, we know from experience that, once we have learned to ride a bicycle, we can easily pick it up again, even if we haven't practiced for years. In other cases too, "relearning" tends to be easier than starting "from scratch". Does this subtle difference also have its origins in the structure of the nerve cells?
Cell appendages abide the saying "a bird in the hand …"
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now managed to show that there are indeed considerable differences in the number of new cell contacts made - depending on whether a piece of information is new or is being learned second time around. Nerve cells that process visual information, for instance, produced a considerably higher number of new cell contacts if the flow of information from their "own" eye was temporarily blocked. After approximately five days, the nerve cells had rearranged themselves so as to receive and process information from the other eye - the brain had resigned itself to having only one eye at its disposal. Once information flowed freely again from the eye that had been temporarily closed, the nerve cells resumed their original function and now more or less ignored signals from the alternative eye.
"What surprised us most, however, was that the majority of the appendages which developed in response to the information blockade, continued to exist, despite the fact that the blockade was abolished ", project leader Mark Hübener explains. Everything seems to point to the fact that synapses are only disabled, but not physically removed. "Since an experience that has been made may occur again at a later point in time, the brain apparently opts to save a few appendages for a rainy day", Hübener continues. And true enough, when the same eye was later inactivated again, the nerve cells reorganized themselves much more quickly - because they could make use of the appendages that had stayed in place.
[Store room for future learning: nerve cells retain many of their newly created connections and if necessary, inactivate only transmission of the information. This makes relearning easier.]
Useful reactivation
Many of the appendages that develop between nerve cells are thus maintained and facilitate later relearning. This insight is crucial to our understanding of the fundamental processes of learning and memory. And so, even after many years of abstinence, it should be no great problem if we want to have a go at skiing again this winter.
Original work:
Sonja B. Hofer, Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel, Tobias Bonhoeffer, Mark Hübener
Experience leaves a lasting structural trace in cortical circuits.
Nature, November 12, 2008
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mothers force to make grim decision which child lives or dies [poverty](CNN) -- Some mothers choose what their children will eat. Others choose which children will eat and which will die.
A food riot erupts in Haiti. Food scarcity is now hitting more affluent countries, experts say.
A Haitian boy begs for food. One child dies from hunger every six seconds, an aid agency says.
Those mothers forced to make the grim life-or-death choices are the impoverished women Patricia Wolff, executive director of Meds & Food for Kids, encounters during her frequent trips to Haiti.
Wolff says Haitians are so desperate for food that many mothers wait to name their newborns because so many infants die of malnourishment. Other Haitian mothers keep their children alive by parceling out food to them, but some make an excruciating choice when their food rationing fails, she says.
"It's horrible. They have to choose among their children," says Wolff, whose nonprofit group was formed to fight childhood malnutrition. "They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go."
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies." Four decades later, King's wish remains unfulfilled. The global food market's shelves are getting bare, hunger activists say -- and it will get worse.
Food riots erupted across the globe this year in countries such as Egypt and India. Food pantries in the United States also warned that they were running out of food because of unprecedented demand. The news from the World Food Programme is even grimmer: A child dies of hunger every six seconds, and hunger now kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
As World Hunger Relief Week is marked, more people are asking: Why are so many people starving and what, if anything, can be done to eradicate hunger?
The end of food?
Wolff thinks hunger can be conquered. Her group produces "Medika Mamba," energy dense, peanut butter food that's designed to ensure Haitian children survive childhood. Medika Mamba is easy to make, store, preserve and distribute, she says.
"It just takes the will to do it," she says of eliminating hunger. "Look at what we did for Wall Street. We didn't have enough money for infrastructure, schools, but all of a sudden, we had all of this money for Wall Street."
Raj Patel, author of "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System," says the right to food should be seen as a human right. But, he says, powerful corporate food distributors control too much of the world's food supply to ensure a robust global food supply.
Patel says "2008 was a record year in terms of harvest. There's more food per person in 2008 than there's ever been in history. The problem is not food, but how we distribute it."
Other causes for the rise in global hunger have been documented. They include:
• Surging oil costs have made it more expensive to harvest, fertilize, store and deliver food.
• The rise in droughts and hurricanes worldwide has wiped out crops and made farming more difficult.
• The world is running out of the raw materials -- water, oil, good farmland -- needed to keep the food system intact.
"A lot of people have begun to understand at various levels that the food system, as it is, can't go on," says Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Food."
Every time an American bites down on a steak or hamburger, they're contributing to global hunger, Roberts says. As other countries become more affluent, they're copying our meat-heavy diet. The problem: It takes so much grain and other resources to produce meat, he says.
"If the rest of the world were to eat like we do, the planet would collapse," Roberts says. "There's been this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world won't eat meat like we do. That doesn't go over well in countries like China."
Fixing our food system would be similar to weaning ourselves of our addiction to oil, Roberts says. It's going to require innovation, heavy business involvement and changes in public policy.
People are going to have to find ways to grow food with less fertilizer and water, and use less energy to store and transport food, he says.
Much of this innovation will have to be driven not just by activist and aid workers, but by savvy business people, he says.
"It's going to have to be profitable or the market won't be interested in it," Roberts says. "And if the market isn't interested in it, it's not going to happen."
In the meantime, Wolff offers some of her own solutions. She says the practice of big foreign aid agencies shipping in food to poor countries like Haiti needs to be modified. Food has become too expensive to produce, ship and store, she says.
"You can't count on big aid agencies showing up to save everybody," she says. "Not everybody can do it, and when they do it, it's not soon enough and not long enough."
She suggests that more groups teach local farmers in poor places how to produce their own crops. In Haiti, for example, her group employs 22 Haitians who make Medika Mamba and teaches other farmers how to grow crops for the mixture.
"Instead of throwing fish in the crowd, we should be teaching people how to fish," she says.
Until that day takes place, Wolff, who is a pediatrician in St. Louis, Missouri, will continue to make her trips to Haiti, where mothers are forced to make their grim choices.
"It's the most difficult thing I've ever done," she says. "You realize how absolutely blessed you are by the fate of your soul coming down the chute in the United States of America," she says. "You wonder: Why did this happen to me and not to them?'
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Primary Physicians in the US would love to change their profession too overwhelmed with the red tape from insurance companies and government agenciesBy Val Willingham - CNN Medical Producer
(CNN) -- Nearly half the respondents in a survey of U.S. primary care physicians said that they would seriously consider getting out of the medical business within the next three years if they had an alternative.
Experts say if many physicians stop practicing, it could be devastating to the health care industry.
Experts say if many physicians stop practicing, it could be devastating to the health care industry.
The survey, released this week by the Physicians' Foundation, which promotes better doctor-patient relationships, sought to find the reasons for an identified exodus among family doctors and internists, widely known as the backbone of the health industry.
A U.S. shortage of 35,000 to 40,000 primary care physicians by 2025 was predicted at last week's American Medical Association annual meeting.
In the survey, the foundation sent questionnaires to more than 270,000 primary care doctors and more than 50,000 specialists nationwide.
Of the 12,000 respondents, 49 percent said they'd consider leaving medicine. Many said they are overwhelmed with their practices, not because they have too many patients, but because there's too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.
And if that many physicians stopped practicing, that could be devastating to the health care industry. Video Dr. Gupta: Watch more on the looming doctor dearth »
"We couldn't survive that," says Dr. Walker Ray, vice president of the Physicians Foundation. "We are only producing in this country a thousand to two thousand primary doctors to replace them. Medical students are not choosing primary care."
Dr. Alan Pocinki has been practicing medicine for 17 years. He began his career around the same time insurance companies were turning to the PPO and HMO models. So he was a little shocked when he began spending more time on paperwork than patients and found he was running a small business, instead of a practice. He says it's frustrating.
"I had no business training, as far as how to run a business, or how to evaluate different plans," Pocinki says. "It was a whole brave new world and I had to sort of learn on the fly."
To manage their daily work schedules, many survey respondents reported making changes. With lower reimbursement from insurance companies and the cost of malpractice insurance skyrocketing, these health professionals say it's not worth running a practice and are changing careers. Others say they're going into so-called boutique medicine, in which they charge patients a yearly fee up front and don't take insurance.
And some like Pocinki are limiting the type of insurance they'll take and the number of patients on Medicare and Medicaid. According to the foundation's report, over a third of those surveyed have closed their practices to Medicaid patients and 12 percent have closed their practices to Medicare patients That can leave a lot of patients looking for a doctor.
And as Ray mentioned, med school students are shying away from family medicine. In a survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September, only 2 percent of current medical students plan to take up primary care. That's because these students are wary of the same complaints that are causing existing doctors to flee primary care: hectic clinics, burdensome paperwork and systems that do a poor job of managing patients with chronic illness.
So what to do? Physicians don't have a lot of answers. But doctors say it's time to make some changes, not only in the health care field but also with the insurance industry. And they're looking to the new administration for guidance.
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One of President-elect Barack Obama's health care promises is to provide a primary care physician for every American. But some health experts, including Pocinki, are skeptical.
"People who have insurance can't find a doctor, so suddenly we are going to give insurance to a whole bunch of people who haven't had it, without increasing the number of physicians?" he says. "It's going to be a problem."
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Woman wakes up during surgeryBy Ninemsn Staff
A Northern Territory woman has endured a nightmare operation at Alice Springs Hospital after she became conscious during stomach surgery but remained paralyzed by the unaesthetic.
Rebecca Jones, 24, told the Northern Territory News she could feel every cut of the surgeon's knife during the operation last month but was unable to scream for help as the anaesthesia had paralysed her.
Ms Jones, who was being operated on for gallstones, said she could not open her eyes but could hear and feel everything.
"I thought the doctors had woken me up because the surgery was over — I quickly realized that was not the case," she was quoted by the Northern Territory News as saying.
Ms Jones realized her predicament when she took a breath and found she couldn’t move, but eventually moved her hand to get the attention of surgery staff — to no avail.
"(Someone) said, 'she's just moved her hand' but they kept going," she said.
The hospital's general manager Vicki Taylor admitted to the NT News that Ms Jones had been awake during the operation but denied medical staff knew of her pain.
Ms Jones is now considering legal action against the hospital.
THESE ARTICLES ARE NOT IN ANYWAY WRITTEN BY ME...
