Quick Tip: Sound More Intelligent, Powerful, Polished, Articulate, and Confident

TO SOUND MORE INTELLIGENT:
Speak just a bit slower to allow yourself to select your most appropriate vocabulary and to give the impression of thoughtfulness.

TO SOUND MORE POWERFUL:
Use short, simple declarative sentences. You say what you mean and you mean what you say. Cut out any useless connectors, adjectives and adverbs, especially superlatives.

TO SOUND MORE POLISHED:
Never answer a question with a blunt ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Append a short phrase of clarification. For example, “No, I did not see it.” “Yes, I know Mary.”

TO SOUND MORE ARTICULATE:
Make a special effort to pronounce the final sound in a word and use its energy to carry over to the following word. Pay special attention to final ‘t’ and ‘ng.’

TO SOUND MORE CONFIDENT:
Carry your body up. Hold your head as if you had a crown on it. Don’t let your arms and legs have side to side motion when you move. Keep your elbows and knees close to the midline of your body.

Patricia Fripp is a keynote speaker, author and speech coach. Sign up for her FREE ezine http://www.fripp.com/speaking_newsletter.html

10 Reasons Why Men Prefer Bitchy Women

Here’s something to chew on. Author Sherry Argov outlines some ideas as to why some men prefer women with a mind of their own.

You’ve heard that nice guys finish last, but what about nice girls? In this excerpt from her book Why Men Marry Bitches, author Sherry Argov reveals why men actually prefer a confident, secure woman (Argov’s definition of the word bitch) to one who lets her man take the reins in a relationship. She surveyed real men, who spilled exactly what makes or breaks their opinion of the women they meet — and it turns out that having your own life, making your own plans and not letting him win all the time only makes you more attractive. So who says being a “bitch” is a bad thing? Not these guys! Here’s what they had to say:

1. “The worst thing a woman can do is see a guy every night of the week. That’s how she becomes his good-time girl on his ‘reserve list.’ What will happen is, the guy will start coming over at nine o’clock and then he’ll leave by ten-thirty. If he gets access or what he wants from her anytime he wants it, he won’t have to lift a finger to keep it going.”

2. “Men are competitive. When he buys a car that is a limited-edition model, he feels like he has something special. Guys in the street who race cars usually race for pink slips, because they want to win, conquer and take the other vehicle. That carries over to women. A woman who is easy won’t scratch his competitive itch. When she stops expressing her opinion and starts agreeing with everything he says, that’s usually when a man starts to feel bored.”

3. “A woman should never go looking for him or chase him down at three different places where he said he might be having a drink. If he says, ‘Either I’ll be at the Cheesecake Factory or some bar on 26th,’ don’t try to track him down. If you want to be his ’steady,’ let him come track you down.”

4. “My fiancée was the first woman to put me in my place. She constantly reminds me, ‘Hey, nobody’s forcing you to stay.’ If I tried to BS my way out of a situation, she’d say, ‘Let me save you the time and energy. Don’t give me that s**t, because I ain’t buying it.’ I know if she caught me cheating she’d smack me over the head with a frying pan. And I respect her more than any woman I’ve ever known.”

5. “If he can sum you up in one sentence, he’ll be bored.”

6. “Confidence is when you don’t try to interpret or overly process everything that you are observing out loud. It prevents the relationship from progressing on a normal course. For example, every time I gave this woman flowers, she would remind me that her ex stopped bringing her flowers. What she really wanted to ask was whether I’d keep doing it in the future. That made me feel like she didn’t really enjoy the flowers or appreciate the present moment with me.”

7. “A woman shouldn’t say, ‘You don’t call me enough,’ or, ‘You never tell me you love me.’ As a woman, your best asset is to be unpredictable. He should never be able to figure you out. When he can always predict what you are going to do next, you’ve lost him as a long-term partner. He’ll look for someone else whom he can’t understand or control.”

8. “If she feels strongly about something, she’ll have a backbone. This woman is the woman he respects. Not a ‘melba toast’ cracker that crumbles with very little pressure.”

9. “You have to seem like you aren’t giving yourself fully. ‘Here I am. Take me.’ Men want to be kept guessing. Think about it. When a guy picks out a movie, he wants to be on the edge of his seat from the very beginning. If someone doesn’t lose a limb or get shot and buildings aren’t blown up all within the first 20 minutes, he’ll think he got cheated out of 20 bucks.”

10. “A woman shouldn’t even crack a joke about marriage. I was on a second date with a girl, and we are both from Ireland. Back home we have a saying, ‘If you kiss me you are going to have to marry me.’ If you have the desire to get married, never let a man know that up front. If you do, it’s the same as handing him a manual and telling him exactly how to dangle a carrot and play on your weaknesses.”

From WHY MEN MARRY BITCHES by Sherry Argov. Copyright © 2006 by Sherry Argov.

Top 10 Ways To Impress Her Dad

My daughter is going to be dating in a few years. I dread the idea of some young guy looking at my daughter in a way that would force me to put the fear of god in him. Short of filling out an application and undergoing a formal FBI background check, here are some tips that every guy should take note of when meeting her dad for the first time.

10. Turn down the PDA.

Not your PDA, but your public displays of affection. Mom might want to see a certain level of intimacy, but at this stage, dad likely does not.

The key is to express your affection for his daughter with tact and subtlety. A reasonable rule of thumb: Keep whatever displays you show to small, quick gestures. Around the house put your modesty on display. Light hand-holding is acceptable, and if she’s eager to drape her arm around you, fine, don’t shirk from it, but keep things to a kiss on the cheek or a short rub on her shoulder.

9. Respect your roles.

Be casual and try to talk to him as another man, but maintain a respectful distance — don’t be too casual.

As a general — if unspoken — rule, men don’t open up to one another the way women might, so don’t be over-anxious to spread the good word about him, you or his daughter. If you allow your roles with respect to one another to develop organically, your relationship with him stands a much better chance of thriving down the road.

8. Find out his interests beforehand.

Don’t look for reasons to be a kiss-ass here; rather, seek interests around which the two of you can build conversation and common-interest bonds.

Don’t rely on male stereotypes –sports, cars, etc. — for conversation. Once you’ve learned about his interests, whether from your girl or directly from him, follow up on them in your next meeting by bringing a germane magazine article you’d read that you think he might find interesting.

7. Bring him a manly gift.

Cater this gift to his personality and deliver it with as much cool indifference as you can muster. Ideally this gift should be something the two of you can share in together, for example out on the porch or in an otherwise mellow moment.

You might consider beer (does he drink domestic, microbrews, imports?), wine (red or white?), smoked meats, or a sports DVD. Whatever the gift, keep it all cool: Taking this step features a harrowing precipice or two; the right gift gets you in. The wrong one — you’re an ass-kisser.

6. Ask him about himself.

Give the man a platform for the stories he loves to tell. Let the rest of the family roll their eyes at a narrative they’ve heard a hundred times. You’re a fresh audience — a storyteller’s delight.

As your base, go with something your girl has told you about before, but keep away from inappropriate content — i.e., the drunken college stories or bloody military tales. Rather, think sports, professional life or even pranks you’ve heard about. Back in the day, one thing never failed to get my future father-in-law chattering: having been drafted into the MLB.

5. Always be a gentleman.

Without making a spectacle, carry out the small details as though they’re part of your disposition: Exhibit the kinds of good manners that make up the unspoken male vernacular. Look Dad in the eye, shake his hand when you see him, and greet his wife according to what she gives you — i.e., handshake, hug.

4. Ask for his advice.

Appeal to his experience. Fathers — men in general — enjoy offering their advice or opinion, and provided you don’t overdo it, he’ll feel he still has some influence in his daughter’s life, albeit indirectly.

Keep your initial appeal somewhat impersonal. For example, general career advice or moderate family issues are reasonable starting points. But asking him for advice on what to do about an arrest warrant or genital warts? Don’t go there.

3. Be mature

Neither join him nor lead him in a descent into guy immaturity; we all may share certain frat-boy weaknesses, but this isn’t the time to remind anyone.

Your goal should be a flexible maturity; one that takes the quiet, dignified road with regard to farts, burps, “playful” disrespect to women, excessive interest in the game on TV, or any behavior that would in short mortify your own mother if she were around to witness it.

Although “be yourself” is the only reliable motto, if you’re a degenerate frat boy, you might want to suppress those impulses for the time being. The point is to win over dad without selling your soul, but you can do that without descending into a primal state.

2. Show some old-school values

This is fairly fundamental: Be a stand-up guy, not just because the alternative makes you look like a weasel, but because he’ll have no choice but to respect it. He can find plenty of weak reasons to dislike you, but not for being a stand-up guy. This one he has to give you.

If an issue needs to be addressed — anything from misunderstandings to missed appointments to owning up to the truth in whatever capacity, address it like a man. If you don’t know what this means, winning over your girlfriend’s father is the least of your worries.

1. Showcase your reliability

At some point, her dad has to let go of his little girl, and you want to be there when he does. Respond to that deep-seated paternal need to know he can depend on you to take care of her when he does let go.

So be on time to anything that concerns him; dinner at the folks’ house or dinner out, or any sort of get-together. Give the appearance of financial stability. Maintain the safety and reliability of your car. And be there — wherever “there” might be — when his daughter needs you.

Essential Manners for Men by Peter Post (Collins, 2003)

Secrets To Overcoming Negativity

Add to this environmental factor the bad news you are bombarded with daily from the TV, radio, and newspapers-the roller coaster stock market, the exhortations to work smarter, harder, and now, in the dot com economy faster. It is no wonder you are so stressed by negativity that you are tempted to join right in and declare that glass half empty

After all, it is much easier to be negative than positive, because so many people will support you! Very few people are willing to make the effort that it does, admittedly, take to turn around negative attitudes and environments. Some are just plain afraid of the change required. So what can you do?

AVOIDING NEGATIVITY. First, of course, you should turn off those sources of negativity you can control. If you want to see what people are talking about, but don’t want the daily dose of murder, mayhem, and disaster you get from the newspaper, limit your reading to the editorial pages of the Sunday paper. Don’t watch TV news, and listen to CDs instead of the radio. Reinforce positive conversations with family and friends by refusing to be drawn into negative ones.

Avoid negativity at work by cutting down on the time you spend with people who feed the naysayer in you. If the carpool starts your day with double doses of negativity, try pointing out the trend to the participants and asking for a change. If the status quo continues, go to work by yourself, or find a more positive group.

In the office, refuse to be drawn into negative water cooler talk. If you find it difficult to refrain from contributing to it, think of the “Thumper philosophy”: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. That is not naive drivel, that is stress-reducing wisdom.You will obviously find yourself in shorter negative conversations at first, and, hopefully, you will be creating opportunities to interject something positive by challenging some of the assertions. Ask, for example, “What’s so bad about that?” or “You know, I’ve found that so-and-so really has a lot to offer if you give him half a chance” or “Maybe if we tried Joe’s solution for a while, it will work better than what we’re doing now”

If you are the leader of a workgroup that likes to dwell on what is wrong, insist on identifying what is right whenever possible, truthful, and realistic.You’ll find that your people will follow your lead.

TURNING NEGATIVITY AROUND. Other thoughts to help reduce negativity include:

Deciding what is really important to you and keeping your sense of humor about the rest. Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the perennial best seller What Color is Your Parachute?, suggests writing your own eulogy to help determine what is important. Figuring out what you would like people to say about you after you are gone is quick and to the point!

Finding the courage to change. There are a million self help books-Bolles’ among them. Read a few, or write the ultimate “to do” list. For example, what are the 10 things you would do if you won the lottery?

Taking some time off. You may just not have the energy to turn negativity around because you are just plain tired. The work will wait for you. Take some time off to rejuvenate. Spend some time on a beach, in a beautiful city on a crosscountry trek, or doing something else you have always wanted to do. It could be that two weeks away are enough to make that attitude adjustment; it could also be that a longer sabbatical is what’s needed.

Volunteering. Working with nature, animals, or people less fortunate than you are will help you gain perspective and a renewed sense of hope.You can and do make a difference.

Finally, as a result of things like these, you may find that you are ready for a different work environment altogether-a new company a new job, or even a new career. You can (safely) consider these options with help from the Internet. For example, check out the Keirsey character and temperament sorters-two online personality quizzes (www keirsey com) to learn more about yourself. Or, look at www.monster.com, a nationwide database of job openings with articles about job changing and a cost of living calculator to use when considering relocating.And,you can always use the Web to explore other companies, industries, and even going into business for yourself.

ROBERTA BHASIN is author of Mastering Management-A Guide for Technical Professionals, published by Miller Freeman, Inc. She also conducts seminars and speaks on management for technical professionals.

Knocking Out Stress For A More Enjoyable Day

Readers Digest has a 37 tips on defusing stress. Some days it seems as if life throws you stress left, right, up, and down. It can drain your energy, destroy your good mood, and challenge your outlook. Those are the obvious mental repercussions. And yet stress can be relatively easy to manage. All it takes is a mental commitment to it — and an open mind. These proven approaches to stress management work. Give several a try.

Defuse Stress for a More Enjoyable Day

Can Gut Feelings Foretell The Future?

Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background.

He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button.

In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn’t for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman’s face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check.

But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future.

Such amazing studies - if verified - might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level, it may account for ‘gut feelings’ and instinct.

The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. “We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens,” says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam.

“We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.”

And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: “So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.

“In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.”

Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time - they can work either way, regardless.

Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage.

It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease.

It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ’something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.

One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center.

She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences.

But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.

If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens.

The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty. All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?

And it wasn’t just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains ‘destined’ to crash carried far fewer people than they did normally.

Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found exactly the same bizarre effect.

If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of all. And again, that’s just what you see.

When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn’t long before the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the accident.

Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of a ‘morbid expectation of an accident’.

“I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery,” he said.

“The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months, if one has the guts to admit it, had been one of morbid expectation of an accident. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen.”

All of these stories suggest that we can pick up premonitions of events that are yet to be.

Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them.

In technical parlance it is known as ‘presentiment’ because emotional feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or information.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future.

Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future.

These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings - and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future - could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers.

It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.

He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current across the surface of the skin.

This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It’s the electrical equivalent of a wince.

Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer.

And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to ‘wince’ a few seconds before they actually saw the image.

And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow.

So impressive were Radin’s results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin’s machine and shown the emotionally charged images.

“It’s spooky,” he says “I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn’t be able to do that.”

Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin’s experiment and improve on it. And they got similar results.

It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those terrified of animals, moments before they were shown the creatures.

The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally millions to one against.

Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the future just as easily as we dip into memories of our past.

He’s in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the past, present and future as ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’.

To prove Einstein’s point, Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin’s experiments.

These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do certain tasks or experience specific emotions.

Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20 volunteers.

And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis. Bierman emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future rather than specific ‘visions’.

It’s clear, though, that if ordinary people can receive feelings from the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of things yet to be.

It’s also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment.

After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not across great distances?It’s a concept that ties the mind in knots, unless you’re a physicist.

“I believe that we can ’sense’ the future,” says the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson.

“We just haven’t yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.

“People have had so called ‘paranormal’ or ‘transcendental’ experiences along these lines. Bierman’s work is another piece of the jigsaw. The fact that we don’t understand something does not mean that it doesn’t happen.’

If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn’t that mean we can change the future and render the ‘prediction’ obsolete?

Or perhaps we were meant to receive the premonition and act upon it? Such paradoxes could go on for ever, providing a rich seam of material for films such as Minority Report - based on a short story of the same name - in which a special police department is able to foresee and prevent crimes before they have even taken place.

Could such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The emerging view, Bierman explains, is that ‘the future has implications for the past’.

“This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That’s up to the philosophers. I’m far too shallow a person to worry about that.”

The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can’t rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.

One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in 1966 when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144 people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24 people had received premonitions of the tragedy.

One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly before she was taken to school: “I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”

So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree.

Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions.

“I think we’re doing it all the time,” she says. “We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.”

So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”

Source: The Daily Mail

The Intelligent Design of Consciousness

“We are sprits in physical form” — a simple, dramatically powerful statement in one of Dr. Andrew Weil’s best-sellers on nutrition. He offered no elaboration; but none is needed. Because he’s absolutely right.

The spiritual is a new frontier of human experience. Polls show us increasingly to be “more spiritual than religious” with more of us having the mystical sense of something larger — the sense that consciousness is not confined to our brains.

That human minds can communicate directly with one another, independent of distance, is undeniable. For thousands of years, people have had sudden, accurate sensations of events in the lives of loved ones and friends. There have been numerous experiments in which people prayed for hospital patients in distant cities — without their knowledge — producing distinct improvements in the patients’ conditions and, in some cases, generating cures.

I have sensed events in the lives of loved ones and no doubt you have as well. There is a fantastic corollary to this in physics. It’s known as quantum entanglement, the most stunning event in nature, where, if two particles are related and the nature of one is changed, the other changes instantly, no matter how far away.

Thought occurs in the firing of particles across the brain’s synaptic gaps, at least 100 trillion of them. Could it be that the similarity of synapse configurations in the brains of relatives means that firing in one brain sets off firing in another?

Declares Cambridge physicist Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate: “The arguments against ESP are not well founded.” He speaks of “mental perturbations” of the “background energy state,” possibly giving rise to thought transfers. We are immersed in this background state. We ourselves are electromagnetic, atomic and, likely, quantum energy.

All life, in fact, can be seen as energy fields. The background energy was created, like everything else, by the Big Bang. To those religious, this was not, of course, an unintended event. And so to us spiritual.

The universe, despite its immensity, is assembled with astonishing precision. Vast forces are calibrated, in some cases, to trillionths of degrees, such as the energy density of space, which enables matter to form stars.

Scientist-author Timothy Ferris writes that the four fundamental forces — gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces — are arrayed in stupendous ratios.

If gravity were a stick, it would be about an inch long. The strong nuclear force, as a stick, would be far longer than the radius of the universe. Are we to believe that this gargantuan ratio — necessary for life as we know it — came about randomly?

Examining such data, Steven Weinberg, Nobel physicist and uncompromising atheist, stunningly concludes: “The universe was fine-tuned for life.”

This breathtaking precision of the universe forces one to conclude that it was a conscious act. Creation was a decision of a Super-Consciousness or of a Supreme Creative Force, which some, obviously, call God.

All of those titles mean the same thing: Consciousness brought forth the physical world. Consciousness brought forth and is all awareness, all thought, all sensation, inherent in all of life, pervading the universe.

This inspires physicist Amit Goswami to the profound insight that, “We don’t have consciousness. It has us.” Thus, the brain can be seen as not only the generator of our own consciousness but as an interface for a universal consciousness that we are all part of. Our minds exist both in and outside of our heads.

Psychiatrist Jeffery Schwartz of UCLA, analyzing PET scans, discovers that “the conscious mind differs from the brain and cannot be solely explained by the matter of the brain.”

Vastly more exciting and wondrous is overwhelming evidence that our consciousness survives physical death. Appearances and interventions of spirits simply seem certain.

Images of departed loved ones, voices, other sounds, manipulation of electrical devices, and movement of objects are all too common. I have personally experienced all of those phenomena — with the exception of images — multiple times.

I have no doubt that spirits are present in our lives and they reveal consciousness to be transcendent.

Crazy? As the great quantum theorist Niels Bohr once said of some wild notions about the universe by a fellow physicist, “The problem is they’re not crazy enough.”

Source: Hank Baughman - Pittsburgh Live

The Case Of The Fossilized Barbie Doll Head

The following letter is a great example of how to handle a delicate but difficult situation. It’s laced with humor, compassion and genuine interest as demonstrated in the effort it took to craft such a great response. Something to keep in mind the next time your challenged to respond in a difficult situation.

The back story involves a man in Vermont who digs up items from his backyard and then promptly sends these items to the Smithsonian Institute for consideration. He carefully labels them with scientific names, insisting they are rare archaeological finds.

The following is the actual letter returned in response:

Smithsonian Institute
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078

Dear Mr. Williams:

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled “93211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post…Hominid skull.”

We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago.

Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety that one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be “Malibu Barbie.”

It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings.

However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:

1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.

2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-homonids.

3. The dentition pattern evident on the skull is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time.

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us say that:

a. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.

b. Clams don’t have teeth.

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating’s notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record.

To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name Australopithecus spiff-arino.

Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn’t really sound like it might be Latin.

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a Hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.

You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your Newport back yard.

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation’s capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it.

We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive crescent wrench.

Yours in Science,

Harvey Rowe
Chief Curator- Antiquities

How Daydreaming Improves Your Thinking

Our minds may wander during boring tasks because daydreaming is actually the brain’s normal state, rather than a pointless distraction, according to a new U.S. study.

The researchers, reporting their findings today in the U.S. journal, Science, found that daydreaming could be the result of the brain mulling over important - but not immediately relevant - issues when the external environment ceases to pose interesting and engaging problems.

“For the most part psychologists have sort of assumed that we spend most of our time engaged in goal-directed thought and that, every so often, we have blips of irrelevant thoughts that pop up on the radar,” said lead author Malia Mason of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“It could very well be the case, however, that most of the time we are engaged in less directed, unintended thought and that this state is routinely interrupted by periods of goal-directed thought.”

Daydreaming or mind-wandering - familiar to one and all - is more precisely defined as a state of mind where thoughts that are experienced by an individual are unrelated to what is going on in the environment around them, according to Mason. When wandering, the brain flits from one thought to the next, generating images, voices, thoughts and feelings.

“This type of [wandering] thought can be fanciful and it can be problematic and distracting, but usually it’s quite practical, for example, most people spend the time thinking about what they need to do in the impending future,” said Mason.

When deciding how best to encourage daydreaming in order to study it, the researchers recognized that our minds often wander while we are engaged in familiar tasks, such as making a tuna fish sandwich, because we don’t need to concentrate on it. They trained study subjects to become proficient on certain tasks so that their minds would be able to wander when they performed them, but would have to concentrate when given something new.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to learn what parts of their brains were active during both goal-oriented thought and daydreaming. In the fMRI images, the seat of daydreams appeared to be the ‘default network’ a region of the brain that remains active when we rest or are not engaged in a focused task, but switches off when we need to concentrate.

The default network is a collection of regions from the medial frontal and medial parietal regions of the brain. The frontal lobes are involved in functions including impulse control, judgment, language, memory, motor function, problem solving, sexual behavior, socialization and spontaneity. The parietal lobe plays an important part in processing sensory information.

Previous studies have shown that brain damage to parts the default network is associated with a “mental emptiness” and an absence of spontaneous speech and thought.

According to Mason, the most important question is why our brains evolved to wander at all. His team suggests that perhaps it keeps our brains aroused during mundane tasks, or simply that our brains may wander because they can.

“In a sense these thoughts reflect an amazing capacity on our part to multi-task,” said Mason. “It is as if we have a sense of how much [attention] we have ‘left over’ and allocate these resources to working out some problem or anticipating what we have to do in the near future.”

By Hillary Jones
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com

Women Prefer Men Desired By Others

Just having a few women smile at a man in public is enough to make other women consider him much more desirable, according to researchers.

British psychologists, led by Benedict Jones of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, have discovered that, when sizing up a man, a woman takes her cues from other women around him. The more females she sees smiling at a man, the likelier she is to consider the guy a good catch.

The ‘copycat reflex’ is the result of Darwinian pressures, according to experts on evolution. If a female faces lots of potential mates but has difficulties in choosing the best one, or if to do so would cost too much time or energy, she can help herself by taking a steer from how rival females behave.

The research team, which reports their results tomorrow in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, recruited 28 female volunteers averaging about 24 years old. The volunteers looked at photographs of four young men wearing neutral expressions and looking directly at the camera. The men were shown in pairs, and the women were asked to choose the more attractive man, and assign him a score on an eight-point scale.

The same faces were then shown individually to the volunteers, each male face flanked by a female face shown in profile. The female either looked neutrally at the man or smiled at him. The volunteers then took another look at the paired faces, and were asked to give another attractiveness rating.

Where the female faces wore neutral expressions, many of the volunteers revised sharply downward their initial grading of the man, by more than 10 per cent on average. But they sharply revised upwards their grading - finding the man more attractive by an average of at least 15 per cent - if the woman looking at him had a smile on her face.

The reverse was true for men: 28 young male volunteers took part in the same experiment, and their rating of the likability of the male faces plummeted if the man in the picture was being smiled at by a woman. But if the woman had a neutral look, the likability rating improved.

The findings tell us a lot about how sexual competition affects our views, the study said. ‘Desired’ men are more attractive to women but pose more of a threat to other males.

Among females in other species, “mate choice copying” has already been spotted among guppies, Japanese quail and zebra finches, but this is the first time the phenomenon has been confirmed among humans.

Agençe France-Presse

Get Married If You Want To Live Longer

I know a lot of married guys that might disagree with this, but researchers say if you’re single, you will probably die earlier than your married friends.

“The risks of being never married … rival the risks of having increased blood pressure or high cholesterol,” said Robert Kaplan of the University of California at Los Angeles, who led the study.

Kaplan and co-author Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego assessed the poor heath risks singles face. The findings were based on two sets of data: the 1989 U.S. National Health Interview Survey in and the 1997 U.S. national death index.

The study - to be published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in September, suggests singles face higher risks of dying: five times more likely to die of infectious diseases; twice as likely to die in accidents, homicides, or suicides; and a 38 per cent more likely to die of heart disease.

Other socio-economic factors attributed to the statistics include social isolation and a lack of support from children and other relatives, Kaplan said.

“Accumulated evidence suggests that social isolation increases the risk of premature death. Marriage is a rough proxy for social connectedness,” Kaplan told CBS television.

Of the 67,000 adult Americans surveyed in 1989, half were married and one-fifth were never married. By 1997, old age and poor health prevailed as the main causes of death.

But the trend of marriage and longevity emerged as a significant factor for living a long life. When the researchers excluded the age and health factor, those had never been married were 58 per cent more likely to have died.

And they found bachelors aged between 19 and 44, exhibited the highest risk of dying.

But the researchers also pointed out that the tendency for single people to engage in unsafe-sex may also increase mortality factors such as HIV infection.

But the researchers failed to factor in sexual preference or cohabitation status in the study, according to WebMD, an online health care information portal. It neglected the high number of deaths caused by AIDS that occurred during the eight-year period, it added.

The researchers found that other than risky sexual behaviors, singles tend to drink less and exercise more.