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POPSThe language you speak affects your personality A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.
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POPS50 Funniest Short Job Descriptions Ever # Tell forty year-old men it’s okay to behave like fourteen year-old school girls: Printing Press Production Coordinator # Provide arcane information on a need-to-know basis: Chief Accountant # Shepherd clients through the process of setting their products on fire: Consumer Products Tester # Manage urban renewal and pest control: B-52 Bomber pilot # Persuade kids that it’s really fun being wet, cold and scared out of their minds: Sailing Instructor # Draw up plans for something that will not be built according to those plans: Civil Engineer, Transportation Design # Teach kids to be evil…or so they say: Video Game Creator # Ensure that stupid people stay in the gene pool: Lifeguard
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POPSThe way the brain buys Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all. They can’t shop. ergo we shop with our hearts..;-)
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POPSA feeling of being alive A new psychology study suggests that buying life experiences rather than material possessions leads to greater happiness for both the consumer and those around them
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POPSFacebook owns you. I think the said change of terms is a BIG issue. in the face of society of information and flow of availability, the act of facebook is unthinkable. They are providers (and earn much from that) and not owners of the information that flows through the system.
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POPSPaper Bags or Plastic Bags? Everything You Need to Know So, while it's good to have the alternative (and to recognize the innovation it represents), bioplastics aren't quite ready to save us from the paper or plastic debate. Paper bags or plastic bags: the conclusion Both paper and plastic bags require lots and lots of resources and energy, and proper recycling requires due diligence from both consumer and municipal waste collector or private recycling company, so there are a lot of variables that can lead to low recycling rates. Ultimately, neither paper nor plastic bags are the best choice; we think choosing reusable canvas bags instead is the way to go. From an energy standpoint, according to this Australian study, canvas bags are 14 times better than plastic bags and 39 times better than paper bags, assuming that canvas bags get a good workout and are used 500 times during their life cycle. Happy shopping!
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POPSWhat do you know? Not as much as you think "Our results indicate that if a comparison is made relative to an expert, consumers' beliefs regarding their knowledge are more consistent with their actual knowledge than if a comparison had been made relative to an average
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POPSNew games powered by brain waves In a report this week USA Today newspaper said game maker Uncle Milton plans to release a similar game this year. Called "Force Trainer" it is named after "The Force" powers of Yoda and Luke Skywalker in the popular Star Wars films. The game calls for players to lift a ball inside a transparent tube using their powers of concentration. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The Force," the daily quoted Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, as saying. "Force Trainer" also uses electroencephalography, or EEG, to measure electrical activity in the brain recorded on a headset containing sensors.
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POPSLost Fingers And Low Pay I've said it many times, the rich constantly exploit the poor, and fail to share even a meager portion of their wealth with them.
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POPSIt’s Time to Learn From Frogs It should be a wake-up call. There is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls. “This can influence brain development, sperm counts or susceptibility to cancer, even where the animal at birth seems perfectly normal.”
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POPSMourning a Way of Life Why “survival panic” is good. The greater opportunity of the downturn, Vaccaro said, is that it represents a chance to move away from “irrational” and “careless” consumerism toward “a more discerning consumer.”
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POPSThe science of shopping IT MAY have occurred to you, during the course of a dismal trawl round a supermarket indistinguishable from every other supermarket you have ever been into, to wonder why they are all the same. The answer is more sinister than depressing. It is not because the companies that operate them lack imagination. It is because they are all versed in the science of persuading people to buy things—a science that, thanks to technological advances, is beginning to unlock the innermost secrets of the consumer’s mind
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POPSDildos of Death? Fortunately, sex-toy retailers are taking things into their own hands. That sentence made me laugh out loud. :lol:
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POPS"Drug War" Does More Harm Than Marijuana Another essay from J.H.. More below: " and so are today's leaders (from the White House to nearly all local governments), who are keeping us mired in the longest, most costly, and most futile war in U.S. history: the drug war. As one adamant opponent of this ongoing madness put it, "I cannot help but wonder how many more lives, and how much more money, will be wasted before another Robert McNamara admits what is plain for all to see: the War on Drugs is a failure. Americans are paying too high a price in lives and liberty for a failing War on Drugs, about which our leaders have lost all sense of proportion." That was no ex-hippie stoner expressing himself through a haze of herbal smoke. It was America's "Uncle Walter," the journalistic icon Walter Cronkite, calling earlier this year for a new truthfulness and sanity in American drug policy.
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POPSIn defence of plastic "New plastics that change from liquid to solid on impact are finding applications in protective clothing and plastic products are being developed using the principles of nature - an area of research called biomimetics. So plastic can be valuable and can be used for functions where it needs to last for a considerable length of time. Concepts of green design should now be applied to all new plastics products so that disposable items, such as plastic packaging and throwaway consumer items, biodegrade and do not fill landfill sites or litter the landscape or seas"
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POPSTrust Your Gut: Too Much Thinking Leads To Bad Choices In the first study, participants rated Chinese ideograms for attractiveness. In a following study, participants were asked to judge paintings that were widely considered high- or low-quality. Subsequent groups of participants rated jellybeans and apartments. In all the studies, some participants were encouraged to deliberate and others to go with their gut. The more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became. For example, when participants rated apartments on just three primary characteristics (location, price, and size) deliberation proved useful. But when the decision became more complex (with nine characteristics) the participants who deliberated made worse decisions.
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POPSThe Big Question: Do electronic books threaten the future of traditional publishing? A tipping point for e-books could come when content starts to be made available on the next-generation of mobile phones. the author Toby Young says: "The great thing about electronic books is that in the long run they will benefit writers, creating an easier way to enable first-time authors to get their work in front of the public. That will be a revolutionary change." Is this the end of the book as we know it? Yes...
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POPSSurge in Food Nanotechnology Worries Consumers Davies quoted David Rejeski of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, who advocates a U.S. investment of $150 million a year in such research by 2010, to benefit from an industry that will involve “15 percent of globally manufactured goods, worth $2.6 trillion, by 2014.”