Headline Feb 03, 2016/ ''' !YAHOO YO YEARNLAND '''

''' !YAHOO YO YEARNLAND '''

WHEN MARISSA MAYER was young, she wanted to become a neurosurgeon. Instead she went into the technology business.

And was called to perform a different sort of life-saving operation, when she was hired to revive Yahoo, an ailing Internet firm, in 2012.

Her role as Yahoo's boss has come with plentiful pay and plenty of setbacks, the latest of which occurred in on last October 20th when the firm reported quarterly profits below the analysts expectations.

Ms Mayer's  three-year-long  effort to save Yahoo has not resulted in the recovery many had been hoping for. 

When she was hired away from Google, where she had been an engineer and an early employee, she enjoyed cooing press reports. To welcome their new leader  Yahoo employees reportedly made ''Hope'' posters, bearing Ms Mayer's face.

Yahoo was once an a huge Internet company,  but lost out to more innovative rivals, and churned through four chief executives in three years preceding Ms Mayer's arrival, demoralising employees and investors. Perhaps, expectations were too high for the young, ambitious, media hungry new boss.

Yahoo's share price has more than doubled since she took over, but that has mostly to do with the firm's stake in the Chinese Internet company Alibaba, which it bought for mere  $1 billion in 2005.

Investors have seen Yahoo as a way to gain exposure in Alibaba, which only went public last year. 

Yahoo sold part of its stake in 2014  and is spinning of the rest into a separate company. Ms Mayer is hoping to avoid taxes on the transaction, but recently America's tax authority has cast doubt on that possibility.

Whatever the outcome, Yahoo will soon be a shell of its current self. Today it has a market capitalization of $31 billion, but its core business is worth only about a tenth of that. Most of its market value stems from its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, a separate company.

Since Ms Mayer took the helm at Yahoo, revenues and profits have fallen. This year the company will probably make  $928 million in pre-tax earnings, down 45% since 2012 and the lowest figure in a decade, according to Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital an investment bank.

Ms Mayer has focused on making Yahoo's products snazzier and expanding into areas where it had been weak, like social networks and mobile advertising. 

She has spent around $2.2 billion on deals, buying Tumblr, a blogging platform, and BrightRoll, a video advertising firm. But Yahoo's share of online advertising spending has declined, while that of rivals like Google and Facebook has risen.

As the third largest web platform in America after Google and Facebook, Yahoo has plenty of scale, but it does not offer the same level of specific audience targeting that competitors do. In a recent survey by Ad Age and RBC that asked advertisers to rank online properties according to their return on investment.

Yahoo came in sixth after Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn. Some onlookers say it was a mistake to hire someone with no experience leading a company and without expertise in or appreciation for the advertising business. 

Recently the firm has experienced a high degree of turnover among top management and employees.

Yahoo's dim outlook is all the more striking when contrasted with that of AOL, which was sold to Verizon for a hefty, $4.4 billion in June. Like Ms Mayer, Tim Armstrong, AOL's boss once worked at Google, and both were intent on turning around former Internet behemoths that had fallen on difficult times.

But Mr. Armstrong was bolder in investing in growth areas, mainly distinctive content, video and technology that enables targeted advertising, says Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research.

When Yahoo stands on its own, without the cushion of savvy Chinese investment made by a predecessor, it could become a target for a larger companies.

Private-equity firms, attracted to Yahoo's $5.7billion of cash, could be suitors, as might telecoms or media businesses. Ms Mayer might welcome the opportunity for a graceful exit. In business, unlike surgery, you can leave before you are finished. 

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society:

''' A Portal To Somewhere '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline Feb 02, 2016/ ''' STUDENTS AND TESTS by *DESIRABLE DIFFICULTIES* '''

''' STUDENTS AND TESTS by 

*DESIRABLE DIFFICULTIES* '''

THE CONCEPT was conceived by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork, two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles-

And it is a beautiful and haunting way of understanding of how underdogs come to excel. Consider for example the following puzzle:

1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

What's your instinctive response?  I'm guessing that it is that the ball must cost 10 cents. Here's another question: 

2. If it takes 5 machines  5 minutes  to make 5 widgets, how long would it take  100  machines  to make  100 widgets?

The setup of the question tempts you to answer 100. But it's a trick. One hundred machines take exactly the same amount of time to make 100 widgets. The right answer is  5 minutes.

These puzzles are two of the three  questions that make up the world's shortest intelligence test* . 

*[Actually, there's even shorter test. One of the most brilliant modern psychologists was a man named Amos Tversky.

Tversky was so smart that his fellow psychologists devised the  ''Tversky Intelligence Test''.

The faster you realized  Tversky  was smarter than you, the smarter you were.]*

It's called the Cognitive Reflection Test {CRT}. It was invented by the Yale Professor Shane Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears  -to move past impulsive answers to deeper, analytic judgments.

Frederick argues that if you want a quick way to sort people according to their level of basic cognitive ability, his little test is almost as useful as tests that have hundreds of items and takes several hours to finish.

To prove his point, Frederick gave the  CRT to students at none American colleges, and the results track pretty closely with how students from those colleges would rank on more traditional intelligence tests.

Students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology  -perhaps the brainiest college in the world  -averaged  2.18 correct answers out of three.

Students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, another extraordinarily elite institution, averaged  1.51 right answers out of three.

Harvard students scored  1.43; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1.18; and the university of  Toledo  0.57.

The CRT is really hard. But here's the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise students scores on the test?  Make it just a little bit harder.

The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the  CRT   the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three.

That's pretty good, though it is well short of the  2.18   the MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read  -a  10 percent gray,  10-point italics Myriad Pro font -so that it looked barely legible:

The average score this time around?  2.45. Suddenly the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

That's strange, isn't it?  Normally we think that we are better at solving problems when they are presented clearly and simply. But here the opposite happened:

A  10 percent gray,  10-point italics Myriad Pro font makes reading really frustrating. You have to squint a little bit and maybe read the sentence twice, and you probably wonder halfway through who on earth thought it was a good idea to print out the test this way.

Suddenly you have to work to read the question.

Yet all that extra effort pays off. As Alter says, making the question ''disfluent''  causes people to  ''think more deeply about whatever they come across. They'll use more resources on it. They'll process more deeply or think more carefully about what's going on.

If they have to overcome a hurdle, they'll overcome it better when you force them to think a little harder.''

Alter and Oppenheimer made the CRT more difficult. But that  difficulty turned out to be desirable.

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Educational Operational Research'' continues. Thank You all for reading, learning and sharing. And see ya all on the following one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society :

''' Your Life Head Start '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline Feb 01, 2016/ ''' THE *MIND BODY* MURMURING '''

''' THE *MIND BODY* MURMURING ''''

CAT  - *clear air turbulence*   -is a very strange and a very dangerous weather phenomenon. No one understands it, as yet.

*It is the mother of all fears, if you are an aviator*.

It can pick an  airliner  with tons and tons of payload, and fling it into the air and induce an  unusual attitude and corresponding g-forces, that few survive to tell the  Accident or the Safety Board.

Just some days ago, my EVO , the  Wi-Fi  device, encountered CAT and went into an unusual attitude. It refused to connect! I logged a complaint, and ask for a signal trace?.............

LIFE  -is just too busy an affair. It is too rushed, and just too damned complicated to do everything yourself. Not only do the students have to hold down their educational responsibilities, but there's all the squiring-

All the shopping, all the family events, all the reading, all the !WOW! responsibilities, and the extra that the students have to factor into every day just to sit down with your latest:

iPod/ BalckBerry/ iPhone/ Samsung/ Skype/Sky+addition to understand how these darned things work. So getting organized in your daily life is one hell of a good idea! 

Just as getting completely, politically correct is a great and correct outfit.

IN LIGHT OF NEW EVIDENCE -that happy people don't live longer than their grumpy peers, one might be tempted to drop the pursuit altogether.

A recent study published in the  Lancet  followed nearly 720,000 middle-aged women for several years and reported that while those who were happier tended to be healthier, they had an edge when it came to longevity.

[Similarly, while unhappiness may be side effect of illness, research shows that it is not alone capable of making you sick.] 

On the other hand, evidence shows that attitude can have meaningful  -and in some cases measurable   -effects on health, even if it can't outright extend one's life.

Here's the latest on mind-body connection:

Mood and Surgery

If a person is in a bad mood, their medical procedure may not go as smoothly, a December 2015 study showed.

In the study, the researchers looked at 230 people who underwent procedures in which a catheter was inserted into a blood vessel. Before the procedure, people filled out a questionnaire that asked them to rate various adjectives describing how they felt emotionally.

The study authors found that people with more negative feelings had a greater incidence of adverse events from the procedure, like slow heart rate or abnormal blood pressure. 

The research is early but it's not the first time scientists have seen physical changes from a negative mood.

Anger And Heart Attack Rise

A 2015 study found having an episode of intense anger was associated with an  8.5  times greater likelihood of a heart attack in the next two hours. 

Exactly how anger could contribute to a heart attack remains unknown, but the researchers speculate that stress triggers increased heart rate and blood pressure, blood vessel constriction and clotting, which raise risk.

Awe And Reduced Inflammation

Awe was found in a January 2015 study to reduce compounds that promote inflammation, which is linked to diseases ranging from  Type 2 diabetes to arthritis.

In the small study,  college students  filled out a questionnaires about how often they experienced certain emotions. They found that happy moods in general were associated with lower inflammation, but the students who experienced awe most often had especially lower levels.

Mindfulness And Body Fat

In an October 2015 study, people with mindful dispositions   -an ability to stay focused on the present moment - were found to have less body fat.

Men and women with lower levels of  mindfulness  had a 34% higher prevalence of obesity compared with people with high levels of mindfulness

Though it's only an association, researchers suggest people who are more aware may be more likely to eat healthier and exercise more.

Outlook And Alzheimer's Disease

The stereotypes a person holds about old age can affect how their brain ages, found a new Yale School of Public Health study.

Men and women who viewed aging negatively had a greater loss of hippocampus  volume and significantly higher scores of plaques   -both indicators  of  Alzheimer's disease .

The researchers say that it is for the first time this type of risk factor has been linked to that development of brain changes associated with Alzheimer's.

So, Storytelling on !WOW!  -the World Students Society   -both fiction, and nonfiction, for good and great,  will continue to define your mood, just as it will continue to define the world.

Managing new challenges and great opportunities, will usher in a new future of delight, beauty, and honours. Lets say, Cheerio,  to that!

With respectful dedication to all the Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society:

''' Health & Wisdom '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline Jan 31, 2016/ ''' FATHERHOOD -FIRESIDE- *FRAGRANCE '''

''' FATHERHOOD -FIRESIDE- *FRAGRANCE '''

ALL MALE STUDENTS or all male readers,  -will never truly know what life and love is  until they guide their children through their formative years.

*It is such a shame that the children never remember it*  Not quiet knowing what to think or do, I turn to a  philosophic sweep to understand this beauty.

There are a number of design glitches in the human frame : the precipitous decision to stand upright instead of trundling on all fours. is something the world still doesn't understand?

But perhaps the worst of all ergonomic glitches was that we were born not knowing how to blow our noses. I don't expect this worries you much because the you probably got nose-blowing covered.

But you weren't born like that. There was a time in your life when the contents of your nose ran free.

I'd forgotten about the magic of  nasal flubber  until my new two both got colds on Christmas Day and one grew a geological outcrop that resemble an inverted  Old Man of Hoy and the other had twin spigots of effluvia that trickled onto her extended tongue.

Neither had any idea of the concept of blowing but they did instantly glean that bogies were edible   -which is an interesting Darwinian footnote. We are obviously born with the pick and chew gene.

The sight of them, blocked and soggy, retained some permanent memories,  -reminding me of something I saw in Africa. 

I was covering the war in Darfur from a refugee camp on the border with Chad in an old tent that passed as Medicins Sans Frontieres waiting room packed with women and their desperately dying children. There was one mother who stood out as strikingly beautiful.  I mean really memorable-looking.  

A face that was strong and implacable   -huge eyes and cheek bones cast in toffee- coloured bronze, framed in a single bright shawl. I signed in Tom the photographer to take her picture. It was an easy opening spread. She regarded him and his camera with her obsidian eyes devoid of emotion, she was as beautifully inscrutable as a sphinx.

As he kept snapping, the child was wrapped in the folds of her shawl, making that soft mewing that is exhausted way of children who are losing the light. Shrivelled with dehydration and malnutrition, her nose was clotted with a huge soggy goitre of snot.

The mother never took her eyes of from Tom's lens, and slowly and deliberately lent down and gently put her mouth  over her child's little nose and sucked, then swallowed. It was properly shocking on so many levels.

First, of course, it was disgusting an act passively aimed at the gaze of strange men from a woman who had probably lost her husband, her family, who had nothing but this little scrap of life in a shawl.

Many of the women in this room had been raped. Her face was a terrible liability. The act was overtly sexual but repellent, but that's not the overriding image or the memory that I carry. It was a profound act of Love.

At the edge of coping, there was very little this woman could do for her child, she had nothing left to give.

No more milk, no more protection, no more security or hope. But she could clean it. And at the margin of life, when all the options are spent, what's important is the simple and practical.

And Love is like that Messy and basic and animal. It isn't romantic or subtle when it's all we have left.     

The first lesson of being a parent, of being a man, is that you have no idea of what love is, or like, or for. I don't know how many times this world love gets mentioned on daily basis. Quiet a lot, I suspect.

Love arrives with fatherhood. Up until then you have just been paddling in love. Nobody ever tell you this, nobody ever explains that you can't feel the bottom, that you drown in the stuff.

Other men never mention that love, which is remiss of us, and our dads never tell us.

You can write  ''Love You''   on a birthday card, whisper love you to a sleeping tousled head,  but to explain to adolescent, a teenager,   -that terrifyingly transcendent fundamental act of nature that is loving your children,     is too difficult and choking.     

But you should know, you should be aware, that you can't be prepared for it,  in fact nothing prepares you for it.

But you shouldn't be surprised. 

The funny and sad thing is that the time when it's easiest to say it, when there is the greatest paternal emotion, when it's most obvious and strong, you never remember.

Those first years when you can't blow your nose,  when your father picked you up and rocked you and watched you sleeplessly as you slept, are blank. 

Later, as you grow up, the relationship is muddied with practicality, with the resentment and the accidents,   -with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behaviour, tantrums and tiredness.

And that is what you know of your childhood.

You remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when you slept in an ocean of love and your father never forgets and it never goes away and it will come to you.

And you realise the greatest design fault of human beings is that they don't remember their childhood and can't recall their first words or first steps  -the first time they tasted chocolate or falling asleep on their father's shoulders in dark kitchens..

You need to know it's coming and you need to know it's already there.

With respectful dedication to all the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society:

''' A Tender Age  '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

Headline Jan 30, 2016/ ''' AT BEST : * AN XENOPHOBIC WORLD * ''''

''' AT BEST : 

* AN XENOPHOBIC WORLD * '''

WRITER JG BALLARD  -determinedly un-grand old man of English letters, wrote many masterpieces.

In his brilliant new autobiography, this is how he paints his understanding of the world in 1940s :  A vast cruelty lay over the world, and was all we knew,'' he writes of the war and its effect on him and his generation.

Ballard saw terrible things in China  -killings, bombings,  starvation  and suffered great deprivation himself. Since that time, what exactly has improved? 

This post too, has been researched in great and growing pain..............   

IN APRIL 2010, they were living in Perpignan, in the South of France, new parents of an eight-month old daughter.

They trod carefully in the neighbourhood, because Arab and black youth hung out there, revving their scooters, partying and swearing up a storm.

One night, after they had put the baby to sleep and were watching a movie, the youths started up.

Marc-Henri called down for them to be quiet. They got louder.Frustrated, he got pitcher of water and dumped it down on their heads.

All of a sudden, they had an angry mob at the door, trying to break in. Pieces of plaster broke off around the frame. As her hand fended off hands that stretched through the hole to try to open the door-

Myriam barricaded herself in the bathroom with their daughter and her mobile phone.

While calling for help, she heard she heard shouts that she would be raped and her husband killed. Alerted by police sirens, the youth ran off. But Marc-Henri and Myriam knew they had to move fast.

Soon after, Marc-Henri accepted a job as a mayor's communications director in Montfermeil. The post is part of Lemoine's plan to change Les Bosquets for the better.

''When we came here, people said we were going from the frying pan into the fire,'' says Myriam, now caring for the couple's second child. ''Tensions are high here, and my husband was attacked again a few weeks ago. But there's a real political will in Montfermeil. There's an effort to bring Muslims into the community at large.''  

The attempt also includes razing many of the tenements in Les Bosquets and La Forestiere, the housing project in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The plan is to replace them with low-rise social housing to instill a pride of place. A social centre now offers language programmes, and a new offers language programmes, and a new police station helps build helps trust between people and law enforcement.

As well, there is a team of three people working full-time with families, resolving conflicts when, for example, inhabitants are confronted by drug dealers in and around their housing.

''The overriding goals are to restore these populations' pride and dignity, and to draw and preserve this town's middle class,'' says Lemoine. ''We need positive ways to intervene and make this place a unified community.''

Abdel coca doesn't see much difference so far. 

''I grew up in this dirty place,'' says Coca, a tall, beefy unemployed 22  year-old from Turkey who lives with his parents and two younger siblings in a tiny apartment in Les Bosquests.  ''Look around, it's still dirty.''

Across the English Channel,  Mike Hardy, executive director of the Institute of Community Cohesion at the University of Coventry, speaks about the dreadful riots that took place in England last August.

''Martin Luther King said that riots give a voice to the voiceless,'' says Hardy. ''Being voiceless doesn't have to mean a lack of education or poverty. It just means you feel  that you aren't being heard.''

The past 18 months have brought huge changes: the Arab Spring, the spreading movement to Occupy Wall Street, and international uncertainty about how social policy is developing.

And, what bodes ill, says Hardy, is that many people still don't have jobs and must struggle to make ends meet.

In a world beset by  economic woes  and discontent, Hardy could be speaking about many paces in Europe   -the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Greece to name a few. 

But the fact is, twice so far in this century   -in 2007 and 2005  -it has been France where riots have erupted.

''We have to understand the tensions. We must work on knowing our communities and understanding them better,'' says Hardy.

We have to be a lot more transparent and open. And I think national authorities must be far less righteous and lot more humble.''

This sentiment is echoed by sociologist Didier Lapeyrommie. ''People are tired in general but in the suburbs, they are tired and closed off,'' he says.

''They want to be the masters of their own existence but they can't. This leads to a highly charged political climate,  complete with misunderstandings and pressures.

While the solution is probably political, I don't have much hope.'' 

With respectful dedication to the Leaders of Europe. See Ya all Your Excellencies on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and the Ecosystem 2011.

''' Taking On Challenges '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless