Obesity-cancer connection ?

According to a new poll of more than 2,000 adults for the American Cancer Society, just 8% were aware of the link between being overweight and cancer risk, but 65% knew the correct number of judges on 'American Idol' show.

Being overweight or obese can cause several different types of cancer, including breast cancer, aggressive prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, and endometrial, kidney, pancreas and esophagus cancer, as well as certain lymphomas, experts say.

Cost of War

This web site has the running total of the U.S. taxpayer cost of the Iraq War.

Americans have a short fuse

While people in other countries are relaxing, calm, everyone takes their time, a recent pull found Americans are become more impatient while waiting to be served. US is a nation that gets antsy after 5 minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes max in a line. It seems people don't get better with age - the survey found older people to be more impatient than younger people. And if you ask the typical person 'do you feel more time-poor or money-poor?', the answer almost always is time-poor.

Nation’s youngest children are glued to the tube

80% children younger than 6 watch TV, play video games or use the computer on a typical day. They average about 2 hours of screen time, compared with 48 minutes when they are being read to, the Kaiser Family Foundation concludes in a recent study. The study also show 1/3 of the nation’s youngest children — babies through age 6 — live in homes where the television is on almost all the time,

Allstate says Sioux Falls is safest driving city

Researchers with Allstate Insurance Co. says Sioux Falls is safest driving city. Factors likely to have helped push Sioux Falls to the top spot include streets that are laid out logical and strong traffic enforcement. Allstate Insurance Co. found that each motorist in this growing city in southeast South Dakota has on average one accident every 14.3 years - 30% better than the national rate of one every 10 years.
Motorists in Newark, N.J., were most at risk, according to the study, averaging an accident once every 5 years. Washington, D.C., was second-to-last at 5.1 years.

Reasons for raises

What's the determining factor in granting salary increases? A recent study shows that managers and workers disagree on the answers.
48% of managers believed "employees who do a better job get paid more", but only 31% of non-managers thought so;

46% of managers agreed "my last raise was based on performance", 71% of non-managers disagreed.

Source: 'Transforming pay plans", a Hudson survey of 10,000 employees, Mar. 20-26, 2006.

The most popular baby names for 2005

Here is the list of top 5 most popular baby names for 2005, released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration -

Top 5 boy names:

1. Jacob

2. Michael

3. Joshua

4. Matthew

5. Ethan

Top 5 girl names:

1. Emily

2. Emma

3. Madison

4. Abigail

5. Olivia

Emily and Jacob are the most popular baby names for the seventh year in a row. Also, Jacob and Joshua are the most popular twin’s names.

Working moms healthier, thinner than stay at homes

Women who juggle career and family tend to be thinner and healthier as they approach midlife than long-term stay-at-home moms, a new study suggests - fewer than 23% of women in stable relationships who had raised children and held outside jobs for many years were obese at age 53, compared to 38% of women who were described as long-term married homemakers. In addition, full-time homemakers reported the most poor health, followed by single mothers and the childless.

Researcher believe “being able to participate fully in society, both in and outside the home, is important for health.”

The findings also suggested that the stresses associated with holding down a job while raising small children take their toll on women’s health, especially when children were younger than 6; but it began improving afterward.

Style that hurt

According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society, 80% of women surveyed report having foot pain; 74% of them wear heels.

Web surfing is addictive

Although many employees fear that web surfing on the job could put their jobs at risk, a survey found that still 61% of people using the internet at work admitted to visiting non-work-related sites. Workers spent an average of 12.8 hours online each week, with 24% of that time devoted to non-work sites. 50% of the people surveyed said they would rather give up their morning coffee than their ability to access the internet for personal use.

We all lie, all the time

Why people lie ?

To look good both to ourselves and others, experts say. We want to be agreeable, to make the social situation smoother or easier, and to avoid insulting others through disagreement or discord.

According to a recent study published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, 60% of people had lied at least once during the 10-minute casual conversation, saying an average of 2.92 inaccurate things. As if people almost "lie reflexively" researcher say, "they don't think about it as part of their normal social discourse."

Other finding from this and other researches: men lie no more than women, but they tend to lie to make themselves look better, while women are more likely to lie to make the other person feel better. Extroverts tend to lie more than introverts.

Numeric life is a better life

People who are good with numbers make better decision-makers. That is according to a research which found the less numerate students were more likely to be influenced by so-called ‘framing effects’.

For example, less numerate students tended to rate a student’s exam performance as better if they were told she had answered 74% of items correctly in her exam, than if they were told she had answered 26% incorrectly. By contrast, more numerate students were less affected by the way such information was presented.

In another experiment, students were given the chance to win cash if they picked a red bean from a jar. Less numerate students were more likely than numerate students (33% vs. 5%) to choose to take their chances with a jar that had 9 red beans out of 100, than with a jar that had 1 red bean among 10, probably because they were swayed by the sight of more red beans in the first case, even though the odds were poorer.

The differences in performance between the more and less numerate students couldn’t be explained by differences in their general intelligence, which was also measured.

“We believe that low-numeracy decision makers are left with information that is less complete and less understood, lacking the complexity and richness available to the more numerate”, the researchers concluded.

Moms at work

After adding up all the different jobs moms do, if paid, stay at home moms would earn $134,121 annually (up from 2005's salary of $131,471) according to Salary.com.

Job titles stay at home moms are: housekeeper, day care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, CEO, psychologist and teacher.

A survey by the professional women's networking organization WorldWit found that 69% would rather work for a mother than a non-mother, and only 2% prefer a non-mother. They say mothers have patience, listening skills, time management and prioritizing skills, and understand when others encounter family demands.

Women are from Venus, men are from ...

According to results of the new ELLE/MSNBC.com Sex and Love Survey, although men and women start with the same level of sexual satisfaction when they begin a relationship, after just a few years, almost twice as many guys as women reported being very dissatisfied (24% vs. 13%) with their bedroom activities. Men were more likely to report less sexual frequency -73% of men said there was more sex in the early days, compared with 65% of women.

Experts say men have a greater preference for different partners and variety; when not satisfied, they become less content, both physically and emotionally, than they were in the early days.

It's written all over his face

Just by looking at men's face, women can predict if a men likes children or not - with 70% accuracy. Evolution has apparently programmed women to recognize men who might be interested in propagating the species by raising a family.

What is the Sturgeon's law ?

Sturgeon's law - 90% of everything is crud. Sturgeon's law is an observation that once humans are exposed to excellence, mere average desirability is disappointing.

It can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, blogs, are crap.

Sturgeon's Law may be regarded as an instance of the Pareto principle.

Top 5 U.S. Trade Partners

Canada is the United States largest trade partner. In 2005, more than 85% of the good Canada exported came to US, worth $499 billion. Below are the rest of top 5 U.S. trade partners:

No. 2 - Mexico ($290 billion)

No. 3 - China ($285 billion)

No. 4 - Japan ($193 billion)

No. 5 - Germany ($119 billion)

Can you locate Paris ?

63% portion of Americans ages 18 to 24 who could not locate Iraq on a world map, according to a survey. 50% portion who could not find New York State.

So next time when you ask a young person in US:

'Can you locate Paris' ?

The answer might be:

'I think She is in, like, Malibu right now'.

Top 5 paper-recycling countries

For every 1,000 Americans, 160 tons of paper are recycled each year. That's about 320 pounds per person. When it comes to recycling paper, the United States ranks 7th in the word. Here are the countries that recycle the most paper per 1,000 of their citizens each year:

No.1 - Sweden (186 tons)

No.2 - Austria (186 tons)

No.3 - Switzerland (179 tons)

No.4 - Germany (176 tons)

No.5 - Netherlands (162 tons)

Pareto principle

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population.

The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, such as:

Work - 20% of your efforts produce 80% of the results.
People - 20% of the people you know (friends, colleagues, family) provide you with 80%
of nurturing support and satisfaction.
Business - 80% of the sales are made by 20% of the sales team.
Focus - 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your success.

Women dig guys with creativity

Women love men's artsy side. A 2005 study put this well-known fact down to numbers - it found that artists and poets had had a total of 4 - 10 sexual partners, while people with less creative jobs had 3. According to the study’s author, Daniel Nettle, Ph.D., a psychology lecturer at Newcastle University, creative people tend to be charismatic and their artistic pursuits are particularly interesting to others. The study also found that the number of sexual partners an artsy type had increased when he spent more time on creative, right-brained pursuits.

How the other sex experiences an orgasm ?

Please check this site to get answers by the number - just for fun, and let me know what do you think of it.

The top 10 most spoken languages in the world

1. Chinese (Mandarin)= 1,000,000,000 +
2. English = 508,000,000
3. Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu)= 497,000,000
4. Spanish = 392,000,000
5. Russian = 277,000,000
6. Arabic = 246,000,000
7. Bengali = 211,000,000
8. Portuguese = 191,000,000
9. Malay-Indonesian = 159,000,000
10. French = 129,000,000
Source link

Brits are healthier than Americans

Most of us don't expect the health of middle-aged people in UK and US to be too different, but a recent research found that the English are a lot healthier than the Americans.

Despite the fact that the United States spends more on medical care per capita than the United Kingdom ($5,274 vs. $2,164), at 12.5%, diabetes prevalence was 200% higher in the United States and hypertension was about 10% points higher. Heart disease was also 50% higher among Americans, while the rates of stroke, lung disease, and cancer were higher as well.

Researcher believe they "should look for explanation to the circumstances in which people live and work."

Working hours for pregnant women

Pregnant women shouldn't work more than 24 hours per week in a high-stress job, according to a Dutch research. Their study shows pregnant women who work more than 32 hours a week in a high stress job are more likely to have babies who cry excessively, children with low birthweight and are more at risk for the dangerous pregnancy condition called pre-eclampsia.

A credit card nation

Last year in US, credit card companies spent $6 billion dollars to promote their credit cards services, a 16% increase from the previous year. Each month, an average adult received 6 unsolicited credit card application forms, and 0.3% of people do apply for them.

Heard from CBSnews, April 30th, 2006.